It’s TwentyNine here! With Bracket 1 recently coming up in an episode of The Command Zone and EDHRECast, I felt like it was time to share a write up about 4 of my favorite decks, my four Bracket 1 mono letter decks. Not just mono color, mono letter. Mono letter all the way down to the basic lands!
The Beginning of a Good Bad Idea
When the bracket system was announced in February of 2025, I got to thinking about what a Bracket 1 deck would look like. Memes? Silliness? Something positively stupid to make me laugh? All of the above?
I was opening Jumpstart 2025 one day and I happened to catch the eye of Psemilla, Meletian Poet.
Look at him with that pan flute. Pan flutes are hard to play. It seemed like a fairly goofy card to turn into a commander. I got to thinking though, what if I made a card where every card in the deck started with the letter P? This guy seems silly enough to head that deck.
I got to searching Scryfall and it turned out that there’s a bunch of enchantments in white that start with the letter P. A side note, if you want to search for cards that begin with say the letter P, the Scryfall syntax is (name:/^P/). I wanted the deck to be a moderately functional commander deck in the same way that Taco Bell tacos are by definition, a taco. So I said to myself, well we need creatures, removal, lands, card draw, mana rocks, and some kind of gameplan (cast enchantments).
I started out by seeing if I could knock out removal and enchantments at the same time and it turns out you can knock out a few with Petrify, Pacifism, Pious Interdiction, Prayer of Binding, and Prison Term!
I was able to find some particularly fun white enchantments like Porphyry Nodes and Penance, the latter of which actually saved me in a pod with a mono black player. He couldn’t attack me because I just would prevent the damage from what he was attacking me with.
There’s even some SYNERGY in the deck with Phantom General and Paragon of New Dawns giving the Nymphs +1/+1!
Building the deck was fun. I got a good amount of interaction in the deck. The deck includes Play of the Game, which I think is a sneaky good board wipe. The true heater of a card was when a friend of mine found out about my silliness and sent me a Parallax Wave.
Not letting a good bad idea go to waste
After finishing the mono P deck, I said to myself, “Wait! This has been a great bad idea! What if I did all the possibly mono letters? Surely there’s enough cards of each letter to make a 100 card singleton deck!” After some research I settled on mono F, mono I, and mono M. I didn’t want to do mono S because I felt like it was too easy to do.
I did this project after the release of Tarkir: Dragonstorm, so my counts were slightly lower, but as of the release of Secrets of Strixhaven, for each letter there are this many cards that would be legal in the respective color’s commander deck that start with that letter:
As you can see, S outpaces all other letters by quite a bit, so I thought it would be too easy to make an actually decent deck. If you’re interested, here’s your list of possible commanders. Let me know what you came up with!
This left mono M, mono F, and mono I.
For mono M, there were 11 choices. I thought hard about going with Mannichi, the Fevered Dream for the goofs, but I ended up going with with Magda, the Hoardmaster for a theme of … crimes? Maybe? Honestly I should have gone with Marton Stromgald but oh well. Maybe I’ll change it some other time.
Removal wasn’t hard to come by in Mono M. Did you know that words molten and magma start with the letter M? That makes things a lot easier when looking for interaction/removal pieces. Finding things that commit crimes that weren’t just a damage spell was kind of a struggle. Did you know Mystic Compass is a crime if you target someone else’s land? Mage-Ring Responder’s a guy that’ll commit repeatable crimes(for 7 mana). Millstone? Crime!
Some interesting cards that I found while putting this together was Midnight Crusader Shuttle and Mudhole. I feel like I know at least a couple decks I wouldn’t mind casting Mudhole against.
Finding spells that targeted in red wasn’t really that hard because if you stick your hand in a pile of random red cards, you’ll pull out some cards that do direct damage to something.
For mono F, the commander choices were…lacking. My choices (at the time) were Fangorn, Tree Shepherd, Faceless One (technically), and Fynn the Fangbearer. Yeah. That’s it. So Treefolk Typal or Infect Typal. The number of treefolk that start with F (at the time) is a long list of Flowering Lumberknot and nobody else. Now there’s Ferrafor, Young Yew. Twice as many!
Fynn could bring a roster of Fang of Shigeki, Flesh Burrower, and Formless Genesis (kind of) as deathtouchers. I was feeling a little down on mono F until Cement said to me, “Isn’t there a Freyalise that can be a commander?” Enter Freyalise, Llanowar’s Fury! Freyalise did pretty generic things from the command zone which is kind of what mono F was doing, being pretty generically green. I changed out the commander to Flopsie, Bumi’s Buddy recently because +1/+1 counters are generically good.
Unfortunately, this deck ended up being one of the more boring of the decks that I created. There wasn’t quite as much to do here or quite as many interesting effects that I could find. For the 99 I tried to keep a decent mana curve. There’s not a lot of synergy or anything here but hey, it’s Bracket 1!
There’s a minor +1/+1 counters strategy in the deck, mostly because if you stick your hand in a pile of random green cards, you’ll pull out a minor +1/+1 counters strategy. Maybe in the future there will be a better F commander for this deck and I’ll come with with something less generically green.
The letter I had 5 choices for a mono I commander, but really actually 3. Ixidor, Reality Sculptor won’t work because if there’s not a lot of choices for mono I creatures, there’s even fewer that are face-down creatures. By rules of Commander, Imoen, Mystic Trickster could go with Inspiring Leader, but by my rules of this deck, Plains would be disallowed, so the mana base would be rough. Plus I didn’t want to deal with the initiative and Imoen doesn’t give initiative by itself. So that left, Inga Rune-Eyes, Ioreth of the Healing House and Iymrith, Desert Doom. I initially built the deck with Ioreth of the Healing House as the commander, but after consulting with others in the pod, I switched to Iymrith, Desert Doom. While I don’t love high mana cost commanders, Iymrith at least has protection built in. I just recently switched the commander to Irma, Part-Time Mutant, but I’m also not so sure about this one.
For the 99 of this deck, there were only 64 creatures at the time (up to 76 now!) so there wasn’t a ton of choice as to what to put in. That’s how you end up with Imagecrafter who is probably great in other decks. But it could turn off typal synergies for your opponent, so it’s probably not that bad of a creature. Right? It was pretty easy to put card draw in the deck, but mana rocks were a little bit tough to come by. At least you’ll have Ichor Elixir for all the times you’ll be rolling the planar die (which at Bracket 1 there’s a much higher chance of).
It wasn’t too hard to come up with card draw for this deck, mostly because if you stick your hand in a pile of blue cards, you’ll end up drawing more cards, and then more cards, and then you’ll deck yourself.
So what now?
If you’ve got an idea for a mono S deck, let me know. I’ve never really serious tried to do a mono W colorless deck. There’s 2 commanders you can pick, Weatherlight or Weatherlight Completed. However there’s only 96 playable cards that would be colorless and start with a W so you’d have to run extra wastes or rule 0 in some out of legality cards.
I haven’t gone back and really updated these decks much, short of changing out the mono F and mono I commanders recently. What would you change about these decks? Anything I missed that I absolutely should have included in the deck?
Check out my guide to an Adelbert Steiner deck here!