16 July 2024 - by Stephen Tavener
Another day, another Secret Lair; and this one brings us the Poker Faces cards. With these, it is finally possible to create a true textless tribal EDH deck. I've seen a few builds with Omnath, Locus of Creation at the head, but these require either padding out the deck with extra land or bending the definition of textless. I reckon there's a better way to go: Codie, Vociferous Codex. Why, you ask? I'll tell you...
Codie lets us play all five colours. At the time of writing, there are no textless commanders that let us play all of the textless cards; the best we can do is Omnath, Locus of Creation. Unfortunately, Omnath doesn't allow us to play black, which excludes (again at time of writing) no less than 28 of the available textless cards. That's a lot of filler!
Once in play, Codie taps for WUBRG; only 17 of the 63 cards in the deck require 2 mana of the same colour*, so that's 46 playable cards as soon as we hit 4 lands; this compensates for the general lack of fixing and other ramp in the deck. *4 of these are creatures, and can't be played with Codie in play anyhow.
Codie's ability gives us a cascade-like effect whenever we cast an instant or sorcery:
When you next cast a spell this turn, exile cards from the top of your library until you exile an instant or sorcery card with lesser mana value.
Until end of turn, you may cast that card without paying its mana cost.
Put each other card exiled this way on the bottom of your library in a random order.
The deck contains 17 Sorceries and a stonking 33 instants; that's a lot of value.
The deck itself is textless. Codie is a book. Books are full of text. What if that were all the missing text from the cards? I've knocked together a physical Codie, with all of the missing text inside. Apart from being a cool prop on the table, it allows me and my opponents to easily see what the cards actually do. Excuse the poor craftsmanship!
Codie has another ability: You can't cast permanent spells.
There are only 13 permanent spells in the deck (all creatures)
but fortunately the deck is packed with removal spells. If there's a critter you feel worth casting, you can always kill Codie off.
He'll be back soon enough.
I confess, the deck is a bit lacking in this department, but with a deck full of iconic interaction spells, at least you can be table police until an opportinity comes along.