K4m4r0 The Birth of Meletis should be about as good as Wall of Omens. IMHO it is very good, let's you keep more hands. Also, do you happen to flood the board with creatures a lot? If so I'd cut the terrible Sacred Rites for a Conclave Tribunal. This one is good removal, at sometimes 1 mana and let's you use your mana in a stall, or use your mana on creatures.

VERY much meta depended on your meta though.

HobbyGamer007 I'm a bit torn about Sacred Rites, it won me several games already, but it is also somehow situational. Same for The Birth of Meletis, it is vulnerable to removal, on the other hand it may bait a removal spell and therefor protects better spells. I think it needs more testint and I'm also curious about your guys feedback!

Great deck, it looks fun to play. I also play with Arcades as my defender commander but i also run Chulane, Teller of Tales in the deck to allow me to draw 2 cards every time i play a defender and also to ramp a little by playing extra land.

Unha110w3d thank you for your suggestion, Chulane, Teller of Tales seems like a great card to run and if I get my hands on one I'll test it :)

I have an Arcades deck that I love, here’s a combo that I have in it that I think works quite well: Axebane Guardian, Doorkeeper, High Alert. If you have a total of 5 defenders or more, you get infinite mana, and can mill your opponents infinitely too. Pretty fun.

thank you for this deck! I'm loving it with the fast mana base and sol ring added in. Would you mind adding a section for substitutions i.e. if i were to spend the money to upgrade to the better artifacts, which cards would you remove? also, is there a place for OG duals in this deck? if so, which would you replace? New to MTG and loving this deck but not sure which cards are best to substitute out... Thanks a million!

Omniscience_is_life thank's for the suggestion. I intentionally left any infinite comboc out of the deck, since I don't like them anymore. Also I'd rather win with aggro rather than mill, but this is just my opinion :)

TrollDecksOnly thank you for the kind words! This is also one of my absolute favorite decks. For the OG duals I would remove one of each basic, since you can also fetch/tutor them. I personally would only add artifacts like Mox Diamond or Chrome Mox. Mana Vault for example won't do much to help cast your commander earlier, so I'd probably let them out. To make space I would remove something from the "Counter" section (maybe Render Silent and the like).

Using a Feature Token on this deck, ty for continuing to update it and give feedback on changes and suggestions.

KongMing thank you very much, this means a lot to me. This deck wouldn't be that good without all of your guys/gals input! Unfortunately the last sets didn't have anything useful for us.

Yeah, I promised my wife that our Magic budget would go towards costuming instead for a year, starting last month. So I haven't been paying attention too much to new releases.

Still super excited for the Zendikar release, I started playing during the original Zendikar block, and I really love the plane. I'm hyped for the D&D material they'll put out for it, too. It's such a great adventure setting.

So I was thinking, there's gotta be something in the new sets that could still work for you. Maybe there's some mutate creatures you could use for utility? The big drawback is they are sorcery speed and you don't get to draw a card for them. On the other hand, they can give your creatures more abilities, and you get to pick which creature's stat block you want to use (in case you want to keep the power 0). They will also combo with Chulane even when mutated, if you put him in the deck.

Gemrazer is one idea, you can give your Wall of Omens reach and trample while also naturalizing something.

Parcelbeast is a pretty good one with a cheap mutate cost that allows you to make use of extra mana and an untapped/vigilance creature on someone else's end step.

Sawtusk Demolisher is sorcery-speed, but it gives you the option of removing lands and planeswalkers if you need to! It can't compare to the cost and speed of Path, Swords, or Rapid Hybridization, but it can give Arcades trample while also removing an otherwise-evasive nuisance.

Those are the best ones I can find of the mutate variety - there are more like Sea-Dasher Octopus, but I think you would have a hard time finding something to remove for it from your deck in its current form.

Just remember we are low cmc so things that are 3 or less really is what we are looking for. Alot of great cards are over the cmc hence why we don't use them.

Beginner here!

Want to make an Arcades-Deck and found this one.

It looks awesome, but I wonder, how vulnurable is it to creature removal. There is only one "backup" in the form of High Alert, if Arcades is not on the field.

Is this enough?

From what I noticed you will have no issue. Your commander is not a threat unless everyone knows what you are about to do. Also we have a ton of counterspells that will stop anything happening to our commander. We have put a lot of thought and some great minds into this build trust me you'll win a decent amount. :) I've won every time I play at my LGS this deck is feared in my area lol

This sounds nice!

Thank you!

We just recently started with Commander and my friends already hate me for my Gavi deck.

What I like about this deck, it’s really low budget.

Thank for sharing your knowledge.

KongMing I really like Zendikar, also! Hopefully there will be some cool and fluff(-ish) cards in it. While I really love the mutate mechanic, I just think this is not the deck for it. Those cards are really nice, especially Sea-Dasher Octopus, but I think they would water the deck down and you might run low on "denfender draws". If you put them in a deck please tell us the outcome!

bl4ckb0l7 everything what THCue said. I was never in need for High Alert and also have a very high win rate. My group always rolls their eyes when I bring Arcades to the table.

Build a wall they said, it will be fun, they said - Walter Ulbricht

Spell Pierce could be replaced by Fierce Guardianship if you have it.

I return and i'm surprised you removed slaughter the strong in my experience it's betters than Wave of Reckoning.

I hope we will get more walls the year especially legendary ones, an alternative bant commander (like a massive legendary wall) that we could switch with arcades would be so sweet ! It's a shame the only legendary wall is not on Bant colors...

Welcone back Eloniel! While I think that Fierce Guardianship is a really strong card, I think it is too situational and requires your commander out to be free, otherwise it is very expensive cmc wise. And with Spell Pierce I'm also able to counter something early in the game.

My oponents always had their key creatures out after resolving Slaughter the Strong. I don't think that it wouldn't fit, but it's just not for my group, where Wave of Reckoning performs much better.

I totally agree with you on the legendary wall. With every new set announced, I hope for cool new toys for our deck!

With that said K4m4r0 I do believe swapping Swan Song for Fierce Guardianship is a much better option. 1 huge thing about our deck. Lets keep them with one less blocker for us to swing in.

1. We get our commander out ASAP hence free counter we like counters.

Then again this is just a counterspell and we are talkin 1 mana vs no mana lol hard to decide tbh

This really is a very tough choice, also very situational.

Hmm, I think Fierce Guardianship might be slightly better than Swan Song, simply because we want to play the commander ASAP, but if we tap out playing him, we have 0 mana left for protection. If we don't need to worry about the commander getting countered it is a very strong option, even better than Force of Will, which would be a slam dunk, iff we had the amount of blue cards to support it, which I don't think is the case.

This is a very good argument.