Delney, Streetwise Lookout Commander Deck Guide

Last updated on March 19, 2024

Delney, Streetwise Lookout | Illustration by Jack Hughes

Without a doubt, Delney, Streetwise Lookout is one of the most exciting Commander cards from the Murders at Karlov Manor MTG set. Triggered abilities are incredibly common in Magic and getting to double up on them is an extremely powerful effect. For example, Elesh Norn, Mother of Machines became an instant hit like other Panharmonicon variants.

But Delney offers us an intriguing question: If we limit ourselves to creatures with power 2 or less, can we still make a solid deck? Well, that’s what I’m here to find out. I’ve built a sweet deck to make use of Delney and I’m going to share it with you today.

Let’s dive right in!

The Deck

Reverent Hoplite | Illustration by Sidharth Chaturvedi

The Commander: Delney, Streetwise Lookout

The first thing I did was search Scryfall for all creatures in the white color identity with a triggered ability and power 2 or less. Scrawling through this list of nearly 800 cards, I found one key theme: Lifegain! Gaining life is one of the most popular strategies in Magic. It’s rarely been good as a competitive strategy, but all the attempts to make it happen have resulted in a critical mass of solid cards to build a sweet Commander deck with.

In particular, the form of life gain we have abundant access to are Soul Sisters. These cheap creatures gain us 1 life whenever a creature enters the battlefield (usually under our control, but some count our opponents’ boards too). Even after cutting some of the weaker variants, we still have eight of these creatures in the deck and Delney doubles all their triggers. Getting twice as many lifegain triggers in turn gives us additional triggers of anything that triggers whenever you gain life, generating a wave of value we can ride to victory.

On top of the lifegain shenanigans, white has access to a variety of nice utility creatures that we can utilize to accelerate our mana, draw more cards, remove annoying permanents, and more. Most of all, we’ll exploit creatures that create tokens to generate a wide board and win with powerful finishers like Archangel of Thune.

The Soul Sisters

Eight Soul Sisters form the heart of this deck. We have Soul Warden and Soul's Attendant, the very creatures we got the name Soul Sisters from. We also picked up Lunarch Veteran to round out the 1-mana spells.

Next, we have five 2-drops. While some of these are simple, like Impassioned Orator and Auriok Champion, the 2-mana slot allows for some more interesting variants. Suture Priest punishes opposing token decks while benefiting ours. Daxos, Blessed by the Sun works as a Soul Sister and gives us a little insurance against board wipes.

The final and best Soul Sister in the deck comes from Jumpstart 2022: Distinguished Conjurer. It’s not just a Soul Sister, but also a way to flicker our creatures for extra value. Many of our deck’s triggered abilities happen when creatures enter the battlefield, so a premium flicker effect that already functions within the deck’s themes makes this the best Soul Sister we could add.

Token Generators

Token generators are the next key to this deck. If we have a couple of Soul Sisters on the battlefield, effects that create a bunch of creature tokens can result in dozens of lifegain triggers with Delney in play. We have a couple of simple ones such as Sanguine Evangelist (which has three different triggers to double), but the deck’s biggest payoffs are Reverent Hoplite and Evangel of Heliod.

Both come down and make tokens based on our devotion to white; as a mono-white deck built around creatures, it’s often high. Delney doubles the triggers of both cards, making them perfect for this deck. If you control a Soul Warden and Delney, then playing a Reverent Hoplite results in creating six 1/1s and 14 total lifegain triggers. That scenario isn’t particularly farfetched, and it only gets more ridiculous the more permanents you have in play.

There's one particularly powerful token maker I hadn’t even seen before building this deck: Darksteel Splicer. This card represents four creatures in your average EDH game, or seven if you control Delney. The deck has a couple of other Phyrexian creatures in Blade Splicer, Suture Priest and Elesh Norn, Mother of Machines, so we might get extra triggers in some games.

Utility and Removal

Just running out our creatures will burn through our resources in a flash, so we have several draw spells to keep the gas flowing. Skullclamp is an obvious inclusion with so many small tokens. Skullclamp is one of the most broken cards ever printed and one of the best artifacts for EDH, letting us convert 1/1s into 2 extra cards.

We also get a few triggered abilities for Delney to double, such as Inspiring Overseer, Esper Sentinel, and Archivist of Oghma. Most of our creatures are pretty small, which makes Recruiter of the Guard a fantastic card. We can use it to tutor up multiple creatures at once, thanks to Delney, Elesh Norn, and Panharmonicon. Militia Bugler is a must given our deck’s focus on creatures with power 2 or less.

Removing problematic permanents is essential in EDH; luckily, white excels at this. Swords to Plowshares and Generous Gift are nice, efficient spells that answer whatever we need to. Board wipes are necessary too, but we can’t play many staples since we’re a creature-centric deck. We can play a few that conveniently avoid our creatures. The Battle of Bywater, Dusk / Dawn, and Austere Command miss most of our creatures..

Reanimation and Flickering

Because board wipes are so prevalent in Commander, we need some protective options. The best ways we have of doing that would be to flicker all our creatures or reanimate them.

First, we have a few very nice reanimation spells. Case of the Uneaten Feast is like having an additional Soul Warden that lets us cast any and all of our creatures from the graveyard. We can evoke Reveillark to reanimate two of our small creatures or we can leave it in play as wrath insurance to snag some creatures. A few other ways to protect our board state include Court of Ardenvale giving incremental advantage and Ascend from Avernus mass-reanimating our board in one go.

Teferi's Protection is a popular Commander card to protect against board wipes but this deck can do better. Given our multitude of enters the battlefield triggers, flickering our creatures so that they reenter in our end step dodges removal and retriggers everything we have in play. To do this, we have Eerie Interlude and Lae'zel's Acrobatics. These can also be used proactively to get a flurry of triggers to end the game.

The Mana Base

The mana in this deck is really easy. Being mono-color, we can just run a bunch of Plains. Emeria, the Sky Ruin rewards us for not running too many other utility lands, so we only want the best options. Eiganjo Castle offers Delney a little bit of protection, should it come up. Castle Ardenvale can create tokens each turn while Windbrisk Heights is always a good option to get a free spell. Finally, Nykthos, Shrine to Nyx is a huge bonus for any mono-colored permanent deck. It’s not difficult to imagine Nykthos tapping for 5, 6, or even as much as 10 mana, allowing us to make multiple plays in a turn with ease.

Our curve is relatively low (we have 29 creatures that cost 3 mana or less), so mana acceleration isn’t as necessary as in most Commander decks. There are some cards that we’d be dumb not to run. Sol Ring of course, but Arcane Signet pulls its weight, even in mono-color decks. We could run colorless rocks like Mind Stone or Thought Vessel in this slot, but I value having the white mana to make multiple 1- and 2-mana plays. Pearl Medallion and Oketra's Monument make our expensive spells cheap, with Monument doubling as another token generator. Finally, Smothering Tithe isn't a card I like personally, but it’s a Commander staple for a reason.

White also has access to a few nice cards that get us extra Plains. Knight of the White Orchid and Oreskos Explorer work with Delney if you can get them set up correctly. Solemn Simulacrum is more often seen in multicolor decks, but the sad robot fits into this deck perfectly with two powerful triggered abilities to double.

The Strategy

This deck's strategy should be self-explanatory. We want to cast Delney as early as possible since they really open up the rest of the deck’s possibilities. While vulnerable to removal, the low casting cost lets us recast them easily. We can even let Delney go to the graveyard and reanimate them later. Beyond our commander, we want to advance our board as much as possible, gaining life incidentally as we go, then closing out a game with one of our kill conditions. Our primary finishers are Angel of Destiny, Archangel of Thune, and Baldin, Century Herdmaster.

Even without our kill conditions, we can overwhelm an opponent or two through sheer board presence. This deck has very little in the way of cards that buff our board because growing our creatures stops Delney from doubling their triggers. I felt that the best way to use this kind of effect would be if it was a large enough bonus to kill in one go. I opted against Moonshaker Cavalry, but I could very easily see this coming into the list to supplement our other finishers.

Combos and Interactions

This deck’s combos and interactions should be self-explanatory. We want to gain life and we have a bunch of cards that either trigger when we gain life or care about us having a high life total. A big one for this would be Heliod, Sun-Crowned, who lets us pile a ton of +1/+1 counters onto our creatures.

Above, I described a sequence where casting Reverent Hoplite with Delney and Soul Warden on the board creates six tokens and gains 14 life. Let’s add Heliod into the mix. Our devotion is now 4, so the Hoplite creates eight tokens, giving us 18 total lifegain triggers and triggering Heliod 18 times. That’s absurd for so few cards getting played. Imagine how it ends up working when our board is full of multiple Soul Sisters and other cards that may trigger off it.

I spoke about this a little already, but we have two mass-flicker spells along with Ascend from Avernus to reanimate multiple creatures at once. This is a key interaction for the deck because multiple creatures entering the battlefield simultaneously see each other entering. For example, if you flicker Soul Warden and Soul's Attendant with Eerie Interlude, then they both trigger from seeing the other one entering, gaining you 2 life.

Let’s say you have five of them and you flicker all of them. Each one sees four other creatures entering, for a total of 20 life. Even if you flicker Delney along with them, Delney will return to the battlefield at the same time, so all the triggers get doubled. This interaction may be powerful enough to warrant adding more cards that do it, such as Semester's End or Ghostway.

Rule 0 Violations Check

I’m not a fan of needing to discuss Rule 0, so I don’t tend to build my decks with infinite combos involved (note, I don’t tend to, but it has been known to happen). I don’t believe this deck has any infinites, but there is a simple combo you could add if you were so inclined.

Heliod, Sun-Crowned famously goes infinite with Walking Ballista. You give the Ballista lifelink, then every time you remove a counter to deal a point of damage, Heliod puts it back again, letting you deal infinite damage. This combo was dominant in Modern prior to the release of Modern Horizons 2 and still pops up from time to time. Here, we could assemble the combo with not just the strongest option in Ballista, but we could even throw in the more cumbersome Triskelion.

Budget Options

Considering this deck is mono-color and most of its key cards are commons and uncommons, this is already a very budget-friendly deck. I've included a couple of high value cards, such as Smothering Tithe and Archangel of Thune, but none of these are necessary for the deck to function. Cleric Class could be a solid substitute for Archangel of Thune. Monologue Tax provides a cheaper source of Treasure.

Other Builds

This is a tricky question to answer. There are nearly 800 creatures and counting within mono-white that Delney works with. Some are obviously terrible and unplayable, but there are plenty of options there to work with. Did you have any other ideas to pair with this Commander? Let us know!

Commanding Conclusion

Soul's Attendant | Illustration by Steve Prescott

I hope you enjoyed this overview of this sweet Commander. I love doing triggered ability shenanigans, as my signature Prime Speaker Vannifar deck shows. Are you playing with Delney? Let us know on our socials.

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Until next time, take care of yourselves!