Preamble
Squee, the Immortal is a goofy goblin cursed with immortality. Much like the child in Guin’s short story "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas," Squee will be put through untold misery for the sake of our fun and games.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 2-3 cost reducers out so you can cast Squee for 1 or hopefully zero mana. Then you want a sacrifice outlet so you can send Squee to the graveyard to recast him. Finally you want one or more payoffs for repeating this loop. This may sound like a lot of different pieces, 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 have tried to tune it to bracket 4. It can frequently win around turn 5 if things go just 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.
Next, let’s go through the categories of cards that compose this deck.
Card breakdown
Sacrifice Outlets
The sac outlets are what make this deck hum! We really want a sacrifice outlet in your opening hand, but we also very rarely want a second outlet once we have our first. There are currently 11 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. Additionally cards such as Mirage Mirror and Molten Echoes can be used to sacrifice Squee through the legend rule and also provide a ton of interesting utility and texture when playing the deck.Cost Reducers
The cost reducers in this deck allow us to cheaply recast Squee or even go mana positive if we’re getting particularly spicy. Most of these cards can provide generic mana advantage as well, which is why our generic mana advantage package is so slim. 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 much more valuable to the gameplan.Payoffs Death/ETB
The best and simplest payoffs to this loop of sacrificing and resummoning Squee are direct damage to our opponents in the form of cards like Impact Tremors. Secondarily, 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 can become card draw engines when combined with our commander. I’ll also mention that this deck takes advantage of discard effects well since discarding an extra sacrifice outlet is often correct if we already have one in play and there are several cards that don’t mind being in the graveyard (such as Drownyard Temple and Molten Gatekeeper).Interaction
This deck is relatively light on dedicated interaction since it requires so many moving parts to get its own engines running. That said, it has some cute tricks such as using threaten effects (such as Kari Zev’s Expertise) to steal a creature and then sacrifice it to one of our many outlets before the end of the turn. The artifact destruction in the deck also pairs nicely with the Liquimetal Torque to remove mostly any permanent in a pinch. Finally, I want to highlight Audacious Swap which functions as decent interaction, or you can use it on your own permanents to get yourself ahead. Frequently, I’d sacrifice Squee to the casualty cost and target two of my own tokens to get ahead. Finally, Mogg Salvage is particularly nice with the card draw package since you can discard it on the rare occasion you can’t cast it for free.Mana Advantage
This is a tight package and keeps on shrinking. As much as possible, I’m favoring mana advantage in the form of the cost reducers discussed above. Additionally 2 mana ramp is generally awkward in this deck since so much of our curve is focused on 3 mana spells. Liquimetal Torque only barely makes the cut because it makes so much of our interaction more flexible.Lands
In general, I’m prioritizing lands that produce red mana as this deck frequently needs lots of red to keep recasting Squee when you have a noninfinite loop going. I also appreciate the lands that can sacrifice creatures (such as High Market), create creature tokens to trigger impact tremor style effects (such as Kher Keep), or allow us to discard cards (such as Geier Reach Sanitarium). The card Path of Ancestry may be a suboptimal choice given its primary utility of color fixing is irrelevant here, but it will typically let us scry one each turn given our density of goblins and general plan or recasting our commander as much as possible. Right now I’m at 38 lands and I would sooner add then subtract lands. 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 hand.Molten Echoes
I want to take a moment to explain why Molten Echoes is sneakily one of the best cards in the deck. Here is a non-exhaustive list:Fail Cases
This deck struggles if someone 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 a free 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 swinging in to whoever has locked Squee down with an army of tokens.Final Thoughts
My first commander deck was a mono-red 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 the board to death. Games tended to either end quickly, or Purphoros would be removed early and I would be left watching the other players do their thing while hoping I hit my land drops.This deck is in many ways a retooling of that build but built in reverse. Purphoros had the pinging effect in the command zone and the creatures in the 99. Squee has the pinging effects in the 99 and the creatures in the command zone. This had ripple effects that made the deck lean more into infinite combos and traded the 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 1 or 2 mana is enough because of the sheer impact you get from each cast. It ends up playing like a hybrid aristocrats, storm, and/or combo deck depending on how the game plays out.
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