Tolabow, Loch Rascal Deck Tech

Tolabow, Loch Rascal | Art by Brian Valeza

A ton of announcements came out of MagicCon: Amsterdam, and one of the most exciting among them was the reveal of a follow up to Mystery Booster 2, Mystery Booster Commander Edition. With the announcement of the set came two preview cards: Joven and Chandler and Tolabow, Loch Rascal. Since Bloomburrow, Otters have been at the center of Spellslinger strategies, and Tolabow is another addition to the very long list of Otters that love instants and sorceries. I'm always on the lookout for a new Spellslinger commanders that can give me the Monastery Mentor experience I'm looking for, and Tolabow has broken into my top five! In this deck tech, I'm going to show off my build for this new and unruly Otter.

What Does Tolabow, Loch Rascal Do?

Editor's Note: Wizards of the Coast released a rules change for Tolobow. The otter now checks color identity, not just color, so cards like Ancient Grudge no longer can be included in a Tolabow deck. We will update this deck tech with a new list as soon as we are able. For more information on the rules change, click here.

Basics first: Tolabow, Loch Rascal is a 3/2 Otter for . Whenever you cast an instant or sorcery spell, you create a 1/1 Otter token with prowess. But that's not all! Tolabow also has rulebreaker, an ability that allows you to include instants and sorceries of one color outside of Tolabow's color identity and any basic lands in your deck if Tolabow is your commander.

Cards that allow a player to select an augmentation to their decks' color identity restrictions aren't unheard of, being featured on the likes of The Prismatic Piper and Clara Oswald. The rulebreaker ability is a little different, as it doesn't actually augment the commander's color identity and the additional color of instants and sorceries added to the deck are bound by color rather than color identity. That means if I choose red, I can play Ancient Grudge in my Tolabow deck, as the card's color (decided by its casting cost) is just red, even though the card's color identity is red and green. This also means that a Tolabow deck with red instants and sorceries can play any basic lands, but cannot include nonbasic lands, like Steam Vents.

Token-based spellslinger decks all follow a simple formula, and a lot of the variance from one commander to the next is which variable in the equation the commander represents. Tolabow is like Sokka, Tenacious Tactician or Elsha, Threefold Master, serving as their deck's primary token-generators. The 99 just has to worry about casting enough spells to amass loads of Otters, draw enough cards to sustain from turn to turn, and have a few cards that convert a bunch of prowess tokens into a lethal combat step.

My build of Tolabow is going to choose red as its secondary color, as it's the color with the best payoffs to bring to the table when building a Spellslinger deck that wants to go wide. I'd love to hear about directions that other colors could take this incredibly versatile commander in the comments!

Key Cards for Tolabow, Loch Rascal

Spellslinger decks are incredibly hungry for card draw. This deck plays a lot of cantrips, like Opt, Ponder, and Brainstorm. Those are great card-neutral ways to look at more cards, trigger Tolabow, and trigger prowess. However, hitting a pocket of lands when casting all these cantrips can render the deck totally inert for several turns. That's where more explosive card draw options come in.

This deck naturally makes a lot of creature tokens per turn cycle. Those tokens can be leveraged by Coastal Piracy effects, the best among them being Enduring Curiosity, that draw cards when those creatures connect in combat. Alternatively, Mister Fantastic, Reed Richards can draw a card each time a token enters. With Tolabow out, Reed Richards is nearly equivalent to an Archmage Emeritus, as the end result of casting an instant or sorcery will be drawing a card one way or another.

Harmonized Crescendo is a draw spell that has made it into nearly every Spellslinger deck I've built lately. It and other convoke spells are really good for setting up a winning turn or refueling before a board wipe resolves. It's important not to have too many spells like Harmonized Crescendo that require an established board to perform at their best, especially with this spell's dangerously low floor. This train of thought lead to the exclusion of Unexpected Assistance.

All of the card draw and selection this deck has access to has another really dramatic effect on deck construction: there aren't that many cards that serve as dedicated win conditions. Four is more than enough given the enormous amount of cards I expect to see in an average game.

Valley Floodcaller is a bomb in this Otters deck. First, it grants flash to all of the many, many noncreature spells in this deck. Then, it effectively doubles up on the Otter tokens' prowess triggers, giving them +1/+1 and untapping them whenever you cast a noncreature spell. It even effects the other main creature token this deck can produce, as Hermes, Overseer of Elpis adds a little redundancy to the commander's function and makes Bird tokens, which Valley Floodcaller also buffs!

Step Through ties these one-off utility creatures together, providing much-needed redundancy for some cards with hard to come by effects. Archmage Emeritus, Hermes, and most importantly Valley Floodcaller have few functional equivalents, making a tutor significantly better for overall consistency.

As is usually the case in Commander, there will be three opponents building boards with too many terrifying threats than any deck's suite of one for one removal could keep up with. Unfortunately, casting a symmetrical board wipe and halting Tolabow's progress towards developing a critical mass of Otter tokens would instantly tank the deck's chance to win. To cover for that, the mass removal I've included is as asymmetrical as possible. Perplexing Test can sweep up every nontoken creature at instant speed, hopefully leaving few blockers in play to stop the army of Otters from getting in for lethal damage. Disrupt Decorum forces opponents to tap all their creatures and send them towards other opponents, minimizing blockers and lowering life totals.

Calamity of Cinders is the sweeper I'm most skeptical of, purely because I'm greedy and can't bear to leave myself with only seven Otters. The fact that I could easily cast enough spells to allow the untapped Otters to survive a board wipe thanks to prowess keeps me from cutting it, though. I cannot say the same for Blasphemous Act, which really does not belong anywhere near Tolabow!

It isn't often I cover the mana base of a deck I write about these days, but this deck's lands are simply too bizarre not to give a closer look. As I went over earlier, Tolabow is restricted to basic lands that break the commander's mono-blue color identity. In draft, where Tolabow is intended to be played, this isn't a problem. In Commander, that is a huge issue! Command Tower doesn't even work, as it remains a mono-blue land regardless of any choices made with Tolabow's rulebreaker ability. I've included a lot of lands that tap for any color, like City of Brass and Mana Confluence, ways to fetch basic lands, like Fabled Passage and Prismatic Vista, alongside the seven fetch lands from Onslaught and Zendikar that can get either an Island or a Mountain. There's even a basic forest in the mix to support the flashback cost of Ancient Grudge, which is thankfully the only red card in the deck that requires an additional color of mana.

Winning the Game with Tolabow, Loch Rascal

This build of Tolabow, Loch Rascal is very aggressive, and looks to win the game through combat nearly 100% of the time. What sort of spells enable a board of many, many Otters to close a game? Mass pump spells, extra turns, and additional combats.

Haze of Rage and Tears of Rage are classic finishers that fit in perfectly here. Haze of Rage having both storm and buyback enables huge plays, especially when generating massive amounts of mana with Battle Hymn or Three Tree City. While Haze of Rage is one of the few storm cards that don't often care about this, Remand can be used instead of paying the buyback cost once, adding another spell to the storm count and drawing an extra card. Either of these two should result in an arbitrarily large number of Otters attacking for a nonsensical amount of damage.

Overpowering Attack and Temporal Trespass are perfect for combat steps where I'm just shy of enough to kill the whole table at once. Having either of them in hand means I can swing out at one player before taking the extra turn to eliminate the other two or vice versa. Temporal Trespass in particular is the only non-counterspell means through which a Fog effect can be bypassed as well!

Thunderclap Drake can be sacrificed to copy Tears of Rage, Overpowering Attack, or Temporal Trespass in a pinch! It's very difficult to imagine a scenario where two extra turns, two extra combats, or two mass pump spells aren't enough to close a game. If the game has gone long and Tolabow has been cast more than once, the opponents' prospects look even worse.

Past in Flames is here as insurance against scenarios where I've been forced to exhaust my hand's resources building a board of tokens and don't have any gas left in the tank to trigger prowess and grow my army of Otters when it comes time to close the game out. Flashing back an Overpowering Attack or Tears of Rage alone can secure a victory, and casting Battle Hym to fuel a huge Past in Flames turn is just pure cardboard dopamine. This recursion spell does compete with the deck's three delve cards, but with some careful resource management it works out just fine.

Tolabow, Loch Rascal Commander Deck List

Conclusion

I'd place my build of Tolabow, Loch Rascal in Bracket 2 (Core). There are zero game changers, the deck presents a win most often on turn eight or later, and the restrictive nature of Tolabow's rulebreaker ability cut the deck off from many of the most powerful cards in the Spellslinger archetype.

The only thing I'm wary of is how the copy spells, Thunderclap Drake and Expressive Iteration, could line up with Temporal Trespass. Ultimately, this is a topic that will have to be explored in pre-game discussions. If I were at a Bracket 2 table and someone won the game via copying a Temporal Trespass with enough creatures on board to produce a deterministic win, I wouldn't bat an eye. It really just comes down to a given playgroup's interpretation of "chaining extra turns." One extra turn spell being copied in a scenario that is nearly certain to end the game on the spot is substantially different in my view than a Narset, Enlightened Master or Urza, Lord High Artificer deck that is purpose built to take as many turns as possible with no end in sight.

The reactions online to Tolabow and the rulebreaker mechanic as a whole seem to be pretty mixed. However, I love this design! Cards with rulebreaker are definitely a treat that should be used sparingly, but the set of constraints it presents forced me to stretch my imagination in ways that I don't often have to when building Commander decks. Designing this deck's mana base was migraine-inducing! I ran test run after test run, iterating on the lands over and over again until it evolved into list that made it into this article.

Building a "red" deck that can't access any of my favorite red permanents felt so alien to me. I was constantly mentally reaching for tools that I simply couldn't access due to this commander's restrictions. The result was easily the most engaging Commander deck building experience I've had in a long time. I'm looking forward to doing the same other rulebreaker cards when the full set has been revealed.