Bria, Riptide Rogue Commander Deck Guide

Last updated on September 25, 2024

Bria, Riptide Rogue | Illustration by Borja Pindado

I’ve been waiting for an otter commander. There are a few in Bloomburrow, but I’ve been itching to rebuild my Izzet tokens deck helmed by Ovika, Enigma Goliath, and now’s my chance for something otterly different.

Bria, Riptide Rogue continues the inexplicable trend of Izzet () mages surfing on rivers (see Kaza, Roil Chaser), but in all other ways, it’s a nice, straightforward Izzet commander looking to have some fun. Just like I am. Another of this otter‘s oddities is that you can only find Bria in the Bloomburrow Starter Kits, rather than Play Boosters, Collector boosters, or the BLC Commander precons.

Let’s see what we've got!

The Deck

Veyran, Voice of Duality | Illustration by Mathias Kollros

The Commander: Bria, Riptide Rogue

The set's preview in the months before it was released and one of the strongest cards in Bloomburrow, Bria, Riptide Rogue does something new, granting prowess to everyone, like an Oprah meme. Prowess buffs creatures until the end of turn when you cast a noncreature spell, so the obvious build here is a tokens commander to maximize the number of creatures along with the number of spells.

Its ability to grant unblockable to a creature for each spell cast incentivizes you to do the classic strategy with token generators like Young Pyromancer, which is to play as many 1-mana cantrips as possible to maximize the speed at which you make tokens, and now with Bria, maximize the number of them that can be unblockable.

The trouble with all such decks is balancing the number of cheap card draw spells and the number of more powerful utility cards. Should you run counterspells, protection, bounce, removal? Because this is such a commander-focused Bria deck, I’ve got a specific answer for that.

Creatures & Planeswalkers

As you’d expect, there are a lot of token makers. You don’t have every possible spell-based token maker in the Izzet color identity, but there’s a good critical mass.

Young Pyromancer and Third Path Iconoclast are reliable and cheap. Chrome Host Seedshark, Saheeli, Sublime Artificer, and Poppet Stitcher / Poppet Factory are next on the curve. Flipping to Poppet Factory is a nice way to buff your tokens. It strips flying from your drakes, but sometimes toggling that by flipping the Factory is a good thing.

Talrand, Sky Summoner and Murmuring Mystic come in at 4, and Deekah, Fractal Theorist and Ovika, Enigma Goliath round out the top end. I’ve tried out Nadir Kraken, The Locust God, and other token makers, but I think triggers off spells are the most reliable space for this deck.

You have a few other utility creatures that you could swap out for a few more tokens, specifically magecraft value engines Archmage Emeritus and Storm-Kiln Artist. Veyran, Voice of Duality doubles all these triggers and can really break open the game, especially because it interacts with Bria and your commander proxy, Balmor, Battlemage Captain.

Hydroelectric Specimen / Hydroelectric Laboratory and Pinnacle Monk / Mystic Peak are nice value MDFCs.

I messed around with Zephyr Singer, as I think giving all the tokens flying is amazing, but convoke strategies are tough in this deck, since you don’t have room to run a lot of things to untap your creatures after that.

Spells

The bulk of your spells are 1-mana draw spells, including the usual suspects like Consider, ones with added utility like Shadow Rift, and cards like Disrupt that at best can counter something awesome or at worst can target your own spell and revert to a basic cantrip.

Your bigger draw spells are all still cheap, like Shared Discovery, or have reducible costs, like Treasure Cruise and Dig Through Time.

You can, of course, add more traditional interaction like Fierce Guardianship, but I hate having a hand full of unplayable reactive spells when I need to start getting offensive in a deck like this, which is why I’m focused on interaction that serves dual purposes, like Three Steps Ahead and Mystic Reflection.

I’ve also come to terms with board wipes and tokens decks. I don’t think you can pack enough countermagic to stop all the board wipes. How many games of Commander have you played where there are three or four board wipes cast between turns 3 and 7? And tapping out to throw down counterspells to save the table weakens you too much.

That’s also why I don’t have a pile of Lightning Greaves-style cards. I need my commander and/or a token maker to live through a board wipe and I can rebuild from there. All that’s to say that phasing is the name of the game for me.

If you’ve played Slip Out the Back in Standard, you know that the core mode is phasing out an opponent’s blocker to swing in for lethal. These phasing spells can protect you when you need it and get rid of something attacking you, or attacking or blocking for an opponent as you see fit.

I’m packing the Slip, plus a few other phasing cards; Change of Plans might have slipped through your radar with all the cards printed since 2020.

My first build of this maximized convoke spells, including one of my pet cards for tokens decks: Meeting of Minds. It’s a little too cute and doesn’t help you when you can’t keep a token maker on the battlefield, so most convoke spells are gone.

A special shout-out to Crowd's Favor, which is kind of a secret removal spell that can just get you over the line with Bria’s granting of unblockability. Also shout-out to another pet card of mine: the Invasion of Segovia / Caetus, Sea Tyrant of Segovia battle. It’s easy to flip with all the tokens, and giving everything convoke if you flip it is totally busted.

Of course, you want to run some MDFCs, and Sink into Stupor / Soporific Springs feels useful in a spells-matter deck like this.

Enchantments & Artifacts

These Izzet enchantments are the greatest hits of each kind you may want: Shark Typhoon for extra tokens, Underworld Breach for the broken horror show it is, Impact Tremors as an alternative wincon, etc.

The artifacts are mana rocks plus Skullclamp, which you want to use before Bria buffs things beyond where you can kill them for cards!

The Mana Base

This deck has the typical mana rocks for these colors and a pretty typical lands sequence. You could add more expensive fetch lands and reduce some of the more expensive lands, but it feels fine. I have 27 lands plus six MDFCs, which is a little thin, so by all means buff it out a bit if you feel like you need to. But you need your cantrips to find creatures, so hoping they do double-duty to find lands as well has worked out well enough for me in playtesting.

The Strategy

I pretty much only want to cast Bria, Riptide Rogue to win.

This commander doesn’t do a tremendous lot out on the battlefield except to look scary and make your forces dangerous enough to wage decent but nonlethal attacks if you get it down as soon as possible.

But dropping Bria when you already have a field of flying sharks and goblins and Phyrexians, then slamming a cantrip or two can end the table. That’s the plan.

I also don’t want to waste a bunch of the limited interaction keeping Bria alive. It’s more important to keep the token makers alive as you build a board, so be judicious, hope your opponents forget about your commander, and let the bodies hit the floor, uh, battlefield.

Combos and Interactions

I purposefully avoided the The Locust God plus Sage of the Falls combo in building this so you wouldn’t have any Rule 0 issues.

The combos are pretty obvious from reading the cards, but this is probably the time to talk about Bria’s static prowess effect along with removal, bounce, and phasing.

Bria, Riptide Rogue grants your stuff prowess as long as it’s on the battlefield. The same is true for its “can’t be blocked” boon. All of that goes away when it’s gone… but that’s not the bad news you think, especially if you save it for a big turn when you have a lot of mana.

It’s time for an example, but for newer players or players who are used to MTG Arena telling them when they can do things, it would be good to brush up on priority and the stack before you read the example.

Let’s say I drop Bria with a board of tokens and a Talrand, Sky Summoner out.

My opponent wants to Doom Blade my Bria, the louse! Aha, but I retain priority after casting Bria, so I can immediately cast a sorcery like Preordain, which generates a prowess trigger on the stack for every creature I have and one unblockable Bria trigger. In response to the sorcery, they launch their Doom Blade.

I have 3 more mana up, like a boss, because this is my example and this is how I play this deck! I can cast three more instants before the Doom Blade kills Bria. I cast Consider, which generates a flood of triggers.

Another opponent wakes up from their phone and decides they need to do something about this. Even though the Doom Blade player tries to tell them about the stack, no one wants to hear a Magic player tell them about the stack, so they launch a Swords to Plowshares at Bria. The fourth player is just shaking their head and hoping I don’t attack them when all these triggers resolve. Maybe they’re also eating popcorn. I don’t know. What’s funnier?

I cast, say, Cerulean Wisps. Trigger-palooza. I look around, hunting for more instants, nay, asking them for more instants. “Are you not entertained?” I might say. This is called being an ass, and sometimes I think EDH was invented for such moments.

With my last mana, I cast Slip Out the Back on Bria. Trigger-nado.

I feel secure that I’ll be able to rescue Bria while unleashing this nuclear winter of triggers. But player four responds to the Slip with a Lightning Bolt of all things, shrugging and offering me the bag of popcorn as consolation.

I’m tapped out and Bria dies because none of its prowess triggers have resolved yet!

But all the triggers Bria put on the stack still resolve as we go down through it. If you’re counting, that’s four prowess triggers for each of my creatures and four total unblockability triggers. If the tokens I had out were a bunch of Talrand’s 2/2 Drakes, they’re all now 6/6s, four of which are unblockable.

And that’s why you don’t cast Bria until you can really do something and have a fist full of instants.

Budget Options

Aside from making the lands as good as you can afford, it’s really about a few expensive things, like Underworld Breach. Remove any of those pieces outside of your price range and grab another cantrip instant from this Scryfall list or some kind of counterspell if all of this makes you nervous.

Other Builds

I’m not sure how to build this deck differently, as you need creatures and spells, and tokens make the most sense. There are better options if you want a Voltron commander with prowess, like Shu Yun, the Silent Tempest.

Perhaps you can take a look at some of the different options in casual Talrand, Sky Summoner builds. I play that deck as a cantrip deck, but there are lots of folks who play it as a bounce house sort of deck or the better all-counterspells deck. You could do that with Bria, sure, but you run into the problem of not having a token maker in the command zone while deemphasizing card draw. In Izzet, that strategy is probably better with Ovika, Enigma Goliath.

Commanding Conclusion

Shark Typhoon | Illustration by Caio Monteiro

I’m looking forward to playing with this Bloomburrow commander as soon as I can replace my proxy Bria, Riptide Rogue. I think it’ll be a fun deck that’s relatively simple to work with if the rules of Magic don’t stress you out.

It's also a good deck to trot out for remediation, for maybe a newer player or a recalcitrant and unpleasant player in your group who has persistent issues with understanding priority and the stack. That’s pretty much the core of this deck’s wincon, so if that all needs hashing out, consider Bria “The More You Know” commander!

If you generate a different sort of build that I'm not thinking of right now, let me know in the comments or on Draftsim Discord.

Until next time, happy brewing, and, for some reason, surf’s up!