Orvar, the All-Form is such a cool Commander that it’s surprising it took us this long to write an article about it!
Before choosing a bunch of awesome permanents to copy, we first wanted to see what our support would look like. It turns out that there are plenty of great cheap spells that target a variety of permanent types. Some of these can target any permanent, but most of them target creatures, artifacts, and lands, so we will be focusing only on these three card types.
Then there are several more excellent spells that target only creatures. Most of these are cantrips or can get repeated uses, which will provide amazing value once Orvar is in play. The cheap protection and blink effects also make it much easier for us to untap with Orvar and start doing our thing, while also being great with our enters the battlefield creatures.
There are also some additional ways to target our lands that can get extra value:
Okay, so we’ve found a ton of ways to target our own stuff on the cheap and gain an advantage. Well, what do we actually want to copy? That’s the easy part! There are obviously a ton of great creatures with enters the battlefield effects, but we’ve identified some of our favorites to copy with Orvar here:
There are several more creatures that we are strongly considering and might end up making the cut. Part of trimming this to size will just come down to personal preference and style.
Of course, we need to include some sweet artifacts that we can copy as well. Here’s our list of favorites – notable shoutouts to Panharmonicon and Powerstone Shard for being awesome. It might be worth including Trophy Mage and a few more 3-cost artifacts to fill out that package.
One of the beautiful things about playing mono colored Commander decks is that you can just run a ton of basic lands (and then of course take advantage of cards like Caged Sun and Extraplanar Lens). But there are some utility lands that are just too good with Orvar not to mention here.
If you’re interested in getting started playing Orvar in EDH and want to get in at a low cost, check out this custom budget Orvar EDH deck that we built and have available for sale:
That’s all for this deck! Creating the card list for this deck has been one of our most fun brewing experiences in quite some time, so we are really looking forward to tuning this down to the perfect 100 cards! Then we just need to figure out a cool way to represent all of our Orvar tokens…