I used to hate blue — still do, in fact.
When I first started playing Magic: The Gathering in the early 2000s, I preferred grindy, creature-focused green to blue’s manipulative playstyle. My default was green or green-white, sometimes dabbling in green-black to reanimate creatures from my graveyard or green-red when I was feeling amped.
Yet here we are, and my latest Commander deck is a spell-slinging blue-red.
One of my favorite ways to play Magic these days is to treat a preconstructed Commander deck like a LEGO set I have no intention of building correctly. I rip it open and promptly strip the whole thing down for spare parts. With MagicCon Las Vegas 2026 around the corner, I finally decided to build something I’d been putting off for a long time: a Vivi Ornitier Commander deck.
I was lucky enough to pull him on a sleepy weekend afternoon late last summer from a single Final Fantasy Play Booster I grabbed randomly on the way home from the grocery store — back when he was still worth twice as much.
Vivi isn’t legal in Standard following a November 2025 ban, so Commander is really the only place to build around him. Over on EDHREC, he’s the 14th most popular Commander. For good reason, too. Vivi turns a pile of cheap instants and sorceries into something explosive. So when I popped into that same store during Secrets of Strixhaven prerelease, I grabbed the Prismari Artistry and tore it apart.
The landbase makes it incredibly easy to use this deck as a starting point for any Izzet (blue-red) deck. Part of what I don’t like about the deck, however, is that it kind of tries to do too much: to sling spells both big and small while generating tokens along the way. It’s functional and exciting right out of the box, but it feels unfocused. Vivi wants you to cast a lot of smaller spells so he grows stronger while generating more mana to cast even more spells, all the while peppering your opponents with potshots of damage.
Rootha, Mastering the Moment, as the default Commander in Prismari Artistry, wants you to cast a huge spell so you can create a big elemental creature token with haste to attack right away. Cards like Rionya, Fire Dancer also lean into this token strategy, but she favors spell quantity over quality — perfect for Vivi. The alternate Commander — Muddle, the Ever-Changing — also copies one of your creatures every time you cast an instant or sorcery with myriad, a fun and destabilizing maneuver at tables of four.
Harmonic Prodigy is a huge boon as a 1/3 wizard that only costs two with prowess (so he gets a nice buff for every cast) and best of all, he doubles up all wizard triggers, including Vivi’s. Veyran, Voice of Duality, is the card that had my jaw on the floor, though. Its magecraft gives it +1/+1 until end of turn every time you cast or copy a spell. With both in play, Vivi’s core engine goes at triple speed. Archmage Emeritus also has a magecraft ability that sets up a nice draw engine, vital when you’re churning out cheap spells.
For spells, Mana Geyser adds one red mana for every tapped land opponents control. In later rounds of four-player Commander, that can translate to a truly explosive turn. Expressive Iteration is a really solid way to manipulate the flow of your draws. Arcane Denial feels like one of the most useful counterspells for this strategy. And Chaos Warp? Who doesn’t love a fun bit of chaos?
In the end, about a third of my final deck still comes from Prismari Artistry: all the best spells and the wizards who can leverage them to spiral things out of control.
As I started digging through my old collection for upgrades, I found myself staring at a pile of blue and red cards I’d owned for years but never really looked at. Not seriously, anyway. Building Vivi forced me to actually pay attention. I found a lot of delightful weird cards this way, like Scrivener, a grumpy-looking “townsfolk” creature that returns an instant or sorcery from the graveyard. I got overexcited and wound up with about 160 cards in the deck this way. But I whittled it down over time.
When it was finally complete, I sorted the deck by price, just out of curiosity. Pyroblast was among the top, a deeply weird red card that punishes opponents playing blue. Incredible vibes — and somehow my copy is the first printing from 1995’s Ice Age? Who knew. I didn’t. Aura Thief is another standout. It’s a card from 1999’s Urza’s Destiny set. He’s a jacked-looking snake man who’s apparently just an illusion. But when he dies, he gives you control of all enchantments on the board. I also slipped in a TMNT copy of Underworld Breach, because that art is rad and the card is so good it’s on the Game Changers list. There’s also a Thrum of the Vestige, a cool Final Fantasy reprint of Lightning Bolt, an essential one-mana damage-dealer for a deck like this.
I have a few weird flourishes like Aura Thief in the deck, but the main strategy involves casting a lot of cheap but useful instants and sorceries. Most of the creatures help out with casting costs or copying spells, all of it feeding back into that spellcasting loop. And because Vivi is the engine behind it all, I have a few tasteful options to protect him both permanently and on the fly as needed.
At first, I named the deck Black Mage’s Waltz, a nod to the explosive trio of villains from Final Fantasy 9 that Vivi faced off against. But as I refined the deck, I couldn’t help but think of that epic cinematic moment from FF9 when a massive Black Waltz is barreling toward Vivi. The little guy doesn’t run. He just raises his hands and charges a burst of fire magic.
That’s what Vivi is really about, bits of incremental progress that build up to great strength. The Vivi Ornitier card doesn’t win games by casting the biggest spells. He wins them by earning the experience to grow powerful enough that the size of the spell doesn’t even matter anymore.
So far, the deck feels fun and fast, but is lacking in win conditions. Take a look at the deck over on Moxfield, and let me know in the comments what I’m missing.
