Anyway, this is a Commander deck I built!
Squee is a 2/1 legendary goblin which can be cast from the graveyard or from exile.
This deck’s goal is to get a couple cost reducers out so you can cast Squee for little to no mana. Then you want a sacrifice outlet so you can send Squee to the graveyard to recast him. Finally you want some payoffs for repeating this loop. This may sound like a lot of moving parts, but there is a lot of redundancy and overlap to make this dream into Squee’s living nightmare.
Since this deck often wins through an infinite combo, I've tried to tune it to bracket 4. It can frequently win around turn 5 if things go right, but its strength is in its resilience. As long as you’re still playing, you can keep casting Squee to make your opponents suffer.
Let’s break down and discuss the categories of cards in this deck!
Sacrifice Outlets
The sac outlets are what make this deck hum! Depending on how you count, there are currently about 10 free and repeatable sacrifice outlets in the deck and then 5-10 more cards that can incidentally kill Squee for advantage. The best of these are the ones that generate mana such as Phyrexian Alta and Skirk Prospector, since they effectively reduce Squee’s manacost by 1. I also want to shout out Mirage Mirror which can be used to sacrifice Squee through the legend rule and provides amazing utility and texture when playing.Cost Reducers
The cost reducers in this deck allow us to cheaply recast Squee or even go mana positive if we’re getting spicy. Most of these cards provide general mana advantage as well, which helps our overal gameplan. One thing to consider is that since Squee costs two red and one generic mana, the cards that effectively reduce a red mana, such as Relic of Legends, are more valuable to the gameplan.Payoffs Death/ETB
The best and simplest payoffs to our loop of sacrificing and resummoning Squee are direct damage to our opponents in the form of cards like Impact Tremors. Cards that bring a creature to the battlefield when completing this loop, such as Oketra’s Monument and Skyfire Phoenix, amply these damage dealing effects and can also effectively reduce Squee’s mana cost when paired with the correct sacrifice outlets!Card Advantage & Selection
Most of our card advantage suite is fairly standard for a mono-red deck with a few flairs such as Skullclamp and Tome of Legends which become repeatable card draw engines when combined with our commander. This deck also takes advantage of discard effects well since discarding an extra sacrifice outlet is often productive if we already have one on the battlefield. There are also several cards that don’t mind being in the graveyard, such as Drownyard Temple and Molten Gatekeeper.Interaction
This deck is relatively light on interaction since slots are tight to focus on getting our engines running. That said, it has some cute tricks such as using threaten effects like Vengeful Possession to steal a creature and then sacrificing the stolen creature to one of our sac outlets before we're supposed to return it. I also want to highlight Audacious Swap which functions as interaction or has a hidden second mode to use on your own permanents to get yourself ahead. Frequently, I’d sacrifice Squee to the casualty cost and target two of my own tokens. I'll also note that cards like Pashalik Mons let us ping down smaller creatures when going through our loop. Finally, Mogg Salvage is particularly nice with the card draw package since you can discard it on the rare occasion it isn't free to cast.Mana Advantage
I've kept a tight package of cards to accelerate our mana, but this portion of the deck is consistently canibalized to make room for more mana reducers. Additionally 2 mana ramp is generally awkward in this deck since so much of our curve is focused on 3 mana spells. Liquimetal Torque barely makes the cut because it makes our artifact removal more flexible. Finally, Impulsive Pilferer is a cute pickup since it synergizes with so much of our deck as a one mana goblin that wants to die.Lands
In general, I’m prioritizing lands that produce red mana as this deck frequently needs lots of red to keep recasting Squee. I also appreciate the lands that can sacrifice creatures (such as High Market), create creature tokens to trigger Impact Tremors (such as Kher Keep), or allow us to discard cards (such as Geier Reach Sanitarium). The card Path of Ancestry may be suboptimal, given it's a tapped land and the primary utility of color fixing is irrelevant in this deck, but it's cute and typically lets us scry each turn given the density of goblins and general plan or recasting Squee. Right now I’m at 38 lands and I would love to get that up to 40. One quirk of this deck is that you want to mulligan for your sacrifice outlets so it really stings when you need to mulligan because you don’t have enough lands in your oppening hand.Molten Echoes
I want to take a moment to explain why Molten Echoes is sneakily one of the best cards in the deck.Being able to respond to the trigger lets you double dip on most of our best cards like Relic of Legends, Phyrexian Alta, and so much more.
Imagine having Molten echoes in play and casting Goblin Matron, searching for Skirk Prospector and Impulsive Pilferer. You can then cast the Skirk Prospector and sacrifice your two Goblin Matrons, and your copy of Skirk Prospector to generate three red. You can then cast the Impulsive Pilferer sacrifice it and the copy for two more red mana and get two treasures. This is just one example, but also consider simply casting Siege-Gang Commander with Molten Ecoes out. In short, this card makes the whole deck sing!
Fail Cases
This deck struggles if an opponent is able to turn Squee into a non-creature through a card like Imprisoned in the Moon. If you suspect this may happen, the best way to get around it is to keep an instant speed sac outlet on the board before you cast Squee. When in doubt, Squee is usually safer in the graveyard than on the battlefield. That said, this deck can still do damage without Squee by casting a bunch of creatures into your pingers and attacking whoever has locked Squee down with an army of tokens.Final Thoughts
My first commander deck was a Purphoros, God of the Forge list I made around 2016. The plan was to play Purphoros on turn 3 or 4 and then follow it up with a lot of tokens to ping my opponents to death. The games I won tended to end quickly. If the games went long, it was because Purphoros was removed or countered and I would be left watching the other players do their thing. I think of Squee as a retooling of my old Purphoros deck built in reverse. The pinging effects were moved from the command zone to the 99 and Squee has replaced the density of creatures in Purphoros's deck. This had ripple effects that made the deck lean more into combos and traded a glass cannon for inevitability.When playing the deck, the most fun push and pull comes from figuring out if you should be digging to go infinite, or if getting Squee to cost one or two mana is enough because each cast deals 3+ damage to each opponent. It ends up playing like a hybrid aristocrats, storm, and combo deck. Overall it's a blast to play, goldfish, and tinker with and I hope you can see the vision!
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