Terra, Magical Adept Commander Deck Guide

Terra, Magical Adept | Illustration by Clare Wong

Tom Bombadil is still an excellent 5-color saga commander. But now it’s got a little bit of competition in Terra, Magical Adept/Esper Terra, one of my favorite video game characters. While Tom Bombadil excels at creating value after sagas end, Terra enjoys them while they’re sitting on the battlefield, and the two WUBRG cards make a good pair.

Today, we’re taking a look at a new commander from the Final Fantasy Standard set that can make sagas trigger most of their chapters at once, which generates immense value. The deck is an enchantress build, and I’ll include many sagas and new summons from Final Fantasy as well.

Let’s see what makes this deck tick.

The Deck

Terra, Herald of Hope | Illustration by Marta Nael

This deck is very casual, firmly in Bracket 2. There are no tutors or Game Changers, and no optimized combos. It’s actually a value midrange deck that’s fun to play, but it’s not optimized or very competitive.

I’m also making a conscious effort not to include very expensive cards or Commander staples. For example, Rhystic Study is an EDH enchantment staple that would fit this deck well, but it’s also a $60-80 card. Replenish would be awesome, but it’s a $100+ Reserved List card.

The Commander: Terra, Magical Adept / Esper Terra

Terra is the main protagonist of Final Fantasy VI. She’s a hybrid between a human and an Esper (a being of high magical power, not the MTG color combination). Over the course of the game, she learns about her origin, her powers, and her place in this world torn between an Esper vs. human war.

The MTG Terra from the Standard set, Terra, Magical Adept, is a 4/2 creature that mills some cards and recovers an enchantment milled this way. Later, you can pay and transform it to Esper Terra, a powerful saga. For three turns while it’s transformed, your commander creates a copy of an enchantment with haste until the end of turn. The fourth chapter is where the magic happens, and you’ll generate 10 mana while you flip it back to Terra, Magical Adept. Also, Esper Terra makes this a 5-color commander in terms of color identity.

There’s a lot going on, so let’s break it down into a small pieces:

This is a 5-color enchantress Commander deck. The main appeal is that you’ll flip it into Esper Terra and make copies of enchantments. You want to copy sagas, since your commander can fire off multiple chapters at once, since you choose how many lore counters to place.

Creatures

The main reason to play creatures is because they fix your mana (Faeburrow Elder, Birds of Paradise), or they’re enchantress creatures (Sythis, Harvest's Hand, Setessan Champion). You want some of them, but not many, or you risk diluting your enchantment deck, so they are few and far between.

Some cards like Narci, Fable Singer and Tom Bombadil trigger whenever you sacrifice an enchantment (sagas, mainly). Sheoldred serves as board control, and it can turn into a powerful saga. Yuna, Hope of Spira boosts your enchantments while it gives you a little reanimate effect.

Interaction

This deck is slow and operates at sorcery speed. But the main interaction comes from the sagas and summon creatures themselves. Cards like Summon: Bahamut and Summon: Yojimbo exile nonland permanents, while cards like Elspeth Conquers Death and The Eldest Reborn continue to offer card advantage and ways to deal with problematic creatures.

Summon: Primal Odin is targeted creature removal. Heroic Intervention is a way to survive wraths or win combats, and Clash of the Eikons is a fight spell that lets you also manipulate saga chapters.

Sweepers

There aren’t that many sweepers other than what your enchantments offer. That said, there’s a Toxic Deluge to deal with a problematic board filled with tokens or creatures in general. Extinguish All Hope and Cacophony Unleashed are nice asymmetric sweepers you can use, especially when your commander is in saga form.

Summon Sagas

Here I want to highlight summons sagas specifically. Consider Esper Terra’s abilities: They were made to work with summons. This deck runs 10+ summon cards across all colors with different abilities. Some of them, like Summon: Fenrir and Summon: G.F. Ifrit, are solid cards to have around, especially early in the game where you’re filtering through your deck.

Summon: Knights of Round and Summon: Primal Odin bring the heavy fire, and they can even be win conditions. When you copy a summon, you have to decide whether you place all three lore counters to extract maximum value from the card or place just one or two counters and leave it alive to attack (two counters on Primal Odin is ideal). Those summons that have more than three chapters are no brainers: Just extract maximum value.

Sagas

Now let’s take a look at the regular, non-summon sagas. With Esper Terra, you can go through all the three chapters of a regular saga. That’s excellent with slow sagas like The Eldest Reborn and Elspeth Conquers Death to give you the three chapters and the last powerful reward right away, or The Bath Song which grants you a flow of cards.

Powerful sagas like Birth of the Imperium and In the Darkness Bind Them are armies in a can, and they’re extra powerful with this commander’s copy ability.

Cards like Tom Bombadil and Satsuki, the Living Lore further contribute to the saga synergies. Don’t be afraid to plow through your deck and discard the most expensive sagas because there are many ways to bring them back in this deck. 

The Mana Base

Here’s where a 5c deck usually gets ugly. It’s complicated to cast your spells on curve, but fortunately this commander is green and red, and a good chunk of this deck’s fixing is base green anyway.

Cards like Chromatic Lantern, Dryad of the Ilysian Grove, and Leyline of the Guildpact turns your lands into 5-color lands right away. Fellwar Stone and Exotic Orchard help too.

The ramp is composed of cards that fetch forests, like Farseek or Three Visits, and you also have ramp in the form of enchantments like Fertile Ground and Sanctum Weaver. 

The Strategy

The main weakness of this deck is that it’s slow, even if you have perfect mana to start. Sagas are like heavy, slow cars that take a while to reach full speed. You’ll want to lead with dual lands that fix your mana for green and a mana rock or dork that helps to cast your commander. Faeburrow Elder and Sanctum Weaver can facilitate fast draws.

This is typically a midrange deck, and you can consistently play your commander on turns 2-3 (if the mana is not an impediment). However, you’re not defending well with a 4/2 in the early game, and things can get ugly. Cards like Azusa's Many Journeys and Summon: G.F. Ifrit help a lot early, and you want to start to deploy your 5-6 mana value sagas right away. If you can stick your enchantress cards, you’ll start to draw a lot of cards.

Late in the game, cards like Dance of the Manse, Summon: Bahamut, and Summon: Knights of Round can help you turn the tide. Unfortunately, cards like Back to Nature or Farewell exist, and to be stronger against those, you’d need more instant speed interaction, counterspells, or cards like Teferi's Protection.

Combos and Interactions

There’s not a lot of combos in this deck, but there’s neat interactions.

The main one is with Barbara Wright, a legend who gives all your sagas read ahead. You can trigger the last chapter of a saga you control right away, and that gets explosive with cards that care if your saga dies like Narci, Fable Singer or Tom Bombadil. Other cool interactions involve Estrid's Invocation, so you can copy a good saga and blink it on upkeep to do it again. Remember that sagas trigger at the start of your main phase, not on upkeep, so you don't have to worry about stacking triggers with Estrid's Invocation.

Besides being an enchantment, Fable of the Mirror-Breaker helps this deck so much by generating Treasure tokens, filtering your draws, and mainly copying your big summons like Summon: Knights of Round and Summon: Bahamut.

Yuna, Hope of Spira is a very interesting enchantment reanimator, especially in this deck that has mill, rummaging, and big enchantment cards.

Three Blind Mice creates copies of tokens on chapters II and III, and you can use it to add to Esper Terra’s copies. Or you can use Esper Terra to further make copies of Three Blind Mice, using the special “add three counters to the copy” ability. Things can get pretty messy on the battlefield.

Rule 0 Violations Check

There’s one combo involving Barbara Wright, Enduring Courage, and Terra, Magical Adept. Barbara Wright makes Esper Terra go through all the chapters with read ahead, which flips it and generates 10 mana. With a card that grants haste, like Enduring Courage in play, you can flip Terra, Magical Adept into Esper Terra again, netting 4 mana in the process, and going through all the chapters. There’s almost no way to tutor in this deck, so I prefer to call this a powerful interaction. Also, it’s not technically infinite because you’ll mill yourself to death without a way to profit from it (e.g. Thassa’s Oracle) or to reset your graveyard.

Budget Options

As much as I made an effort to make this list as budget as I could, some cards are pretty expensive, and the deck’s budget is in the $400-500 realm. Many of these new Final Fantasy cards are being hyped up, especially the mythic summon sagas, and some will hold value over the years as well. Cards like Summon: Bahamut, Summon: Knights of Round and Yuna, Hope of Spira are expensive FIN cards that are pretty integral to this strategy. In particular, the turn when you cast Yuna and Summon: Bahamut is in your deck, you know that things are going your way. Cards like Clive, Ifrit's Dominant or Summon: Anima can be interesting cheap replacements.

Regarding the mana base, the tri-lands are more on the expensive side, but you need to have a functional mana base. You can always replace rare dual or tri-lands with cheaper versions (Sandsteppe Citadel for Indatha Triome, for example).

Finally, cards like Sheoldred and Kiora Bests the Sea God are good to have in the deck, but you can think about enchantment-like cards that replace them as value engines. Maybe more enchantment-based removal, or a value engine like Virtue of Knowledge. 

Other Builds

Let’s highlight other builds that you can take advantage of with this commander:

• Food Chain and Underworld Breach are two good enchantments from cEDH that you can find with Terra, Magical Adept, if you want to lean into the competitive realm.
• Proliferate is very good when you’re playing sagas and payoffs when they die.
• Cards like Brilliant Restoration are awesome in a deck filled with sagas. You can devise an “enchantment reanimate plan.” Replenish is even better, it’s just a little bit more expensive on the $ side.
• You can lean heavily into the copy enchantment plan.
• Moonmist exists, so you can devise a plan around “transforming humans” at instant speed.
• You can focus on cards that cost 8 or greater. Think of cards that cost or that can be hard to cast to pair with Esper Terra’s final chapter. Cast Progenitus or activate Door to Nothingness, maybe?
• If Vorthos is your stuff, you can definitely try to build a deck around Terra just using Universes Beyond cards, or even just FFVI cards, or Final Fantasy cards in general. 

Commanding Conclusion

Tom Bombadil | Illustration by Dmitry Burmak

Terra is one of my favorite video game characters and I’m glad I could make an interesting deck around these abilities. Using more FF characters wouldn’t hurt, but for that, it’s probably better to rely on Terra, Herald of Hope from the Revival Trance precon. I’ve had a blast testing this deck, and I’m glad that this commander exists, and that it leads to many possible deck styles.

What do you think of Terra, Magical Adept? What’s your take on this novel commander? Let me know in the comments section below, or let’s discuss it over Draftsim Discord.

Thanks for reading guys, and stay safe out there!