Quick Commander Deck Tech: Astrid Peth

Spoilers for the Doctor Who decks are being revealed right now, and while looking through the cards I saw that Astrid Peth is getting a card. This gave me an idea that ended up changing in some ways. What I originally wanted to build was a Kylie Minogue deck with Astrid and Cammy from Street Fighter (Minogue played her in the movie) but I found out that Cammy was not one of the Street Fighters that got cards a while back so that idea got scrapped. Fortunately though, Astrid Peth is a very interesting card to build around.

Let’s go over her, two mana 2/2 human, good so far. When she enters the battlefield or attacks, make a food. Interesting so far. When you sacrifice a food OR clue, she explores. VERY interesting. If this was a green and white card we could do all kinds of silly food things, but staying in mono white keeps us fairly restricted, so how do we make this powerful?

So lets try and make some foods. The new Eldraine set and the Lord of the Rings set both added new food synergy cards so the selection is not as anemic as it was a few years ago. Since she makes a food as she enters the battlefield, we can flicker her! Conjurer's Closet is an old favorite of mine, Restoration Angel and Ephemerate are also good routes to go for this theme, combine these effects with other enter the battlefield effects for big value and free food!

We can sacrifice these foods one at a time to get individual triggers to get some card advantage OR we could sacrifice them all at once with Krark-Clan Ironworks and get value and mana! Even if there’s nothing to do with it, we are throwing cards in the graveyard and lands to our hand! With all these things in the graveyard we could bring back an old standard favorite of Angel of Glory’s Rise. If we are throwing non-lands into the graveyard we could make them humans and do a human based reanimator strategy.

There’s also the line of text on Astrid about clues. Clues are interesting in white. Investigate has a few good value cards for this effect, such as Search the Premises, Thorough Investigation, and Tamiyo’s Journal. These are all excellent ways to make a bunch of clues to draw more cards. Also, not clue cards but an honorable mention to the cards Michiko’s Reign of Truth and All that Glitters for turning white creatures into giant killing machines.

Astrid is a strange card, she has all the synergies of a card that I would expect to be blue, or even green, but as a mono white card it is an interesting card to build around and I am looking forward to building around her, in an ideal world I would get Kylie Minogue to sign my copy when it comes out.