Tivit, Seller of Secrets Commander Deck Guide

Last updated on February 15, 2024

Tivit, Seller of Secrets | Illustration by Chris Rahn

Esper is one of my favorite color combinations in Magic. It’s the perfect color combination for unparalleled control elements. The best permission, the best card draw, and all the best removal in the game are within this shard. That doesn’t mean Esper must be a hard, controlling color shard without any unique expression.

Today, I’m taking a look at a Tivit, Seller of Secrets Commander deck that leans away from Esper Control for a more midrange strategy focused on flickering Tivit and other legendary creatures to overwhelm your opponents with value!

The Deck

Rosie Cotton of South Lane | Illustration by Claudiu-Antoniu Magherusan

You’re looking to grind your opponents out with this Esper midrange deck. Since all your creatures have powerful ETBs, they’re mostly two-for-ones that give you an edge over opponents. It’s hard to effectively remove creatures like Agent of Treachery or Gonti, Lord of Luxury since you’ve already gotten the value you wanted.

You’ll milk even more value from these cards with tons of cards to flicker them for extra triggers or ways to double their triggers when they come into play. Many flicker spells are instants that double as protection for your important pieces, since flickering a spell creates a new instance of the permanent that’s no longer targeted by Doom Blade or whatever your opponent wants to throw at you.

All this gets backed up by that suite of fantastic cards I mentioned. You have a bundle of interactive spells to slow your opponents down and protect your important pieces. The countermagic is especially useful at stopping opposing combos and protecting your creatures from board wipes, while the creature interaction prevents your opponents from resolving their threats. You’ve even got a couple of spells that deal with any permanent.

Once you hit the late game, you’ll have amassed enough power that it’s hard for your opponents to contend with you. It’s hard to keep up with a player when every spell they play has an effect and makes a body. If creature beatdowns aren’t enough to let you take the game, you have a few infinite combos to secure the win.

The Commander

Tivit, Seller of Secrets leads your blink deck as a solid blink target itself. You get a bunch of Treasure and Clue tokens. You’re not running the infamous Time Sieve combo since you’re going for a more casual deck, but Tivit’s free enabling of that combo brought it fame as a commander.

You should be interested in the velocity you get from Tivit. Getting ten tokens in a combination of Treasures and Clue provides huge bursts of mana and card draw, and that’s assuming you flicker it the turn you play it, not considering what you get with attack triggers. The earlier you play Tivit, the more likely you’ll want to vote for some Treasures to accelerate out your hand, but in the late game, all those Clue tokens draw an incredible number of cards, especially since you have some ways to generate infinite mana and infinite flickers.

Flicker Effects

Flicker or blink effects let you exile your creatures and return them to the battlefield for extra ETB triggers, but double as protective spells that save your creatures from targeted removal.

Ephemerate is the best rate flicker spell in the game. One mana gets you two flickers: one when you cast it, and another on your next upkeep. That represents ten extra tokens from Tivit for one more, two more permanents off Agent of Treachery, and so on.

Essence Flux only gets you a single flicker for one mana, but it’s still an efficient rate. Most of your interactive spells cost one mana, so it’s hard for your opponents to know what an untapped land represents. It also works with one of your combos. Cloudshift gets all the same value.

Ghostly Flicker and Eerie Interlude are both expensive, but worth the cost. Ghostly Flicker gets two ETBs and serves as a vital piece of another of your combos, while Eerie Interlude gets all your triggers again and protects your creatures from board wipes.

Displacer Kitten is one of the best blink cards printed recently. Imagine how much better cards like Swords to Plowshares and An Offer You Can't Refuse get when you staple on your best ETB ability. It’s also another vital combo piece, though this goes infinite with the kitchen sink.

Deadeye Navigator is rarely more than a combo piece, and it’s no different here. You can do combos, but it’s a fine protective element. This card is just another broken flicker piece you get to abuse since you’re in blue.

Thassa, Deep-Dwelling, Soulherder, and Teleportation Circle offer steady blink value on your end step, with the former also becoming a solid, indestructible threat later in the game.

Oji, the Exquisite Blade offers a fine ETB and a solid flicker effect. It’s pretty easy to double spell between all your mana production and the cheap spells. Since Oji can flicker itself, it’s a great enabler and payoff.

Abdel Adrian, Gorion's Ward offers a bunch of value. It can protect your board, double up all your triggers with some flickers, provide you with tokens, and function as a combo piece.

Trigger Doubling

If those aren’t enough ways to retrigger your ETB creatures, you have a few ways to double up the triggers when those creatures enter the battlefield.

No flicker deck is complete without Panharmonicon doubling up the ETB triggers, but there have been a few more effects since then.

Elesh Norn, Mother of Machines doesn’t just double up on your triggers; it stops your opponents dead in the water. There are tons of powerful enters the battlefield effects in Magic, including some removal options, like Oblivion Ring effects, that stop working with this in play.

Gandalf the White works great in this deck because most of your ETB effects come from legendary creatures. Playing those creatures with flash provides this deck with unbelievable options. It’s hard to attack into open mana when it could represent any creature.

I’m including Ratadrabik of Urborg here. Ratadrabik is another element that makes it hard for your opponents to interact with your board. What will they do? Kill your Gandalf the White to give you a second copy? It also works marvelously with Blade of Selves.

Blade of Selves lets you get a bunch of extra triggers. Yes, most of the creatures in the deck are legendary creatures that die to the legend rule. But you’ll lose them at the end of combat anyway, so getting ten extra tokens from Tivit or two more cards from Gonti, Lord of Luxury is still good. Plus, making a bunch of tokens legend rule themselves works incredibly well with Ratadrabik.

ETB Creatures

Most of the creatures in this deck have powerful ETB abilities, but I want to take a moment to highlight the best of them.

Loran of the Third Path gives you a lovely Reclamation Sage that draws extra cards. It’s great to disrupt early mana rocks or stop players from abusing powerful late-game plays like Bolas's Citadel or Portal to Phyrexia.

Plenty of your creatures let you kill your opponents. Bone Shredder is a super-efficient if narrow, option. Ertai Resurrected doubles as creature removal and countermagic, and Solitude is a theoretically free option that you can easily keep in play with your blink spells.

Another great way to get extra flicker value is with card draw. Fblthp, the Lost and Spirited Companion give you raw card draw. Gonti, Lord of Luxury is one of my favorite card designs, and it lets you play with your opponents' spells. Atris, Oracle of Half-Truths gives you a mini Fact or Fiction on repeat to churn through your deck.

Interactive Spells

Efficiency is the name of the game for your interaction. You want to play creatures most turns, so having your mana be cheap so you can represent abundant interaction with one or two mana is important.

White’s got some of the best interaction. You have Swords to Plowshares, Path to Exile, March of Otherworldly Light, and Anguished Unmaking, among other removal spells to keep your opponents in check.

Protect your board from board wipes and keep your opponents from combo'ing off with a suite of countermagic. Counterspell is the classic, but Dovin's Veto gives your opponents no room to respond. Delay and Arcane Denial are efficient and great at winning counterwars, as are Swan Song and An Offer You Can't Refuse.

The Mana Base

You’re rocking a pretty simple mana base with this deck. There’s some early acceleration with all the on-color Talismans paired with other solid 2-mana rocks like Fellwar Stone and Thought Vessel.

Having this early acceleration is important, especially on turn two. Many of your most impactful cards cost four mana, so you want to get to four mana as quickly as possible to deploy threats like Panharmonicon, Gonti, Lord of Luxury, and Oji, the Exquisite Blade.

Beyond the mana rocks, you have a clean mana base that focuses on fixing your 3-color mana base so you can curve out properly.

The Strategy

Echoing what I said before, you want to curve out properly. Hands that let you accelerate on turn two are pretty strong, especially since your commander costs six mana. You want to play Tivit as quickly as possible to help get the game rolling. Since it’s such a powerful engine, it’s often worth waiting until you have seven or eight mana to hold up a bit of countermagic to protect it. If Tivit is countered, it’s hard to cast again. It’s a bit easier to recast if Tivit is killed since you’ll get a few Treasure tokens to help pay the commander tax.

You always want value off your cards. The best way to maximize value is to ensure you have something to flicker with your various engines. Cards like Teleportation Circle and especially Displacer Kitten are magnets for removal because of the value they provide. Try to play them in a turn you can protect them or at least flicker something so you’re not blown out by a removal spell.

Protecting those value engines is the best use of your countermagic. Stopping your opponents from resolving a Lightning Bolt on the Kitten or a Reclamation Sage that’ll take out your Teleportation Circle is a pretty high priority.

You’re planning to grind your opponents out with this deck. That’s why so many of your creatures destroy their permanents or draw you cards. Once you get your engine with Tivit rolling, it’s even harder to keep up. This deck always has access to plenty of cards and mana thanks to its commander. Once you get to the end of the game, you’ll have more resources than your opponents to win with. If that fails, there are always infinite combos.

Combos and Interactions

All your combos focus on infinite flickering and generating infinite mana. They require a couple of pieces to get going and are less consistent than the Time Sieve combo to keep things a little more casual.

The first combo is a Commander classic, using Deadeye Navigator and Peregrine Drake to generate infinite mana. You need the Navigator in play and the Drake in your hand, and Navigator can’t be soulbonded with anything.

Play the Drake. It will come into play, and you’ll soulbond it with the Navigator, then the Peregrine Drake trigger untaps five lands. Tap all five to float mana, including at least , then use Navigator’s ability to flicker the Drake infinitely, generating three mana for each loop to go infinite.

You’ll need another flicker spell at this point, so you can soulbond Navigator with another creature, which you can then flicker infinitely.

Another combo uses Deadeye Navigator, Illusion of Choice, and Tivit, Seller of Secrets. You need Tivit to be soulbounded with Navigator and access to at least .

Cast Illusion of Choice, letting you choose how your opponents vote this turn. You can then flicker Tivit, letting you vote to make three Treasure tokens and two Clue tokens. You can then use two Treasures to keep flickering Tivit, generating infinite mana and Clue tokens to draw your deck.

Without the Illusion of Choice, this won’t go infinite because your opponents will elect to give you three Clues while you make two Treasures. This loop still produces infinite clues, and you can generate infinite life off this with Daxos, Blessed by the Sun or Elas il-Kor, Sadistic Pilgrim in play, and put infinite +1/+1 counters on all your creatures with Rosie Cotton of South Lane.

The next combo needs Archaeomancer, Ghostly Flicker, and Peregrine Drake to generate…you guessed it, infinite mana! You need Ghostly Flicker in hand, the two creatures in play, and at least five lands, including .

Cast Ghostly Flicker, targeting Archaeomancer and the Drake. They’ll both come into play. The Drake’s trigger untaps five lands, then Archaeomancer gets back Flicker. Tap your lands, then recast Ghostly Flicker and keep looping for infinite mana.

The final combo uses Displacer Kitten, Archaeomancer, Gilded Lotus, and either Essence Flux or Cloudshift. You need the creatures and the Lotus in play and the flicker spell in your hand.

Tap the Lotus for three mana of your blink spells color. You’ll cast the blink spell, targeting the Archaeomancer, which triggers the Displacer Kitten. The Kitten’s trigger targets the Lotus to flicker it, returning it to play untapped. Then, blink the Archaemoancer and get back your flicker spell. Rinse and repeat for more infinite mana. Once you’ve got infinite mana of the color of your flicker spell, you can use that to make infinite mana of the other colors.

Okay, that’s a lot of combos, but how are we winning with them? Well, that requires another piece. Once you’ve established these loops, you get to flicker any of your creatures infinitely.

Tivit, Seller of Secrets is a great choice. You’ll get infinite Clues to draw your deck, which lets you find something like Rosie Cotton of South Lane for infinite counters and damage, Gonti, Lord of Luxury to exile every card in your opponents’ decks, or my personal favorite: Agent of Treachery.

Agent isn’t legendary, but it’s the premiere blink target in the deck. You get to steal all your opponents’ permanents. The easiest win is to do this, then flicker something that lets you draw cards until you find Expropriate to take a few extra turns and finish everybody off without any ability to respond.

Rules 0 Violations Check

You have a bundle of combos here that not every casual table will enjoy playing with. They’re pretty easy to disrupt by design to keep things a bit friendlier, but you can always opt out of playing them if your opponents don’t like it. All those combo pieces are functional parts of the deck, even without going infinite.

Budget Options

Let’s address the mana base first. You can easily replace the fetches, shocks, and some of the more expensive lands, like Mana Confluence and City of Brass, with tap lands. It slows the deck a little, but most of the cost is in the mana base.

Solitude is great value but costs a ton since it sees so much Modern play. Cavalier of Dawn and Ravenous Chupacabra are fine alternatives.

Elesh Norn, Mother of Machines is a redundant Panharmonicon effect that could be another flicker spell if your budget requires it. Conjurer's Closet is a solid choice.

Expropriate is flavorful with Tivit since it makes people vote, but any other extra turn spell like Time Warp or Walk the Aeons can fill the same role.

Clever Concealment keeps the board safe from everything, including exile effects like Farewell, but white has some fine budget options like Make a Stand to take its place.

Other Builds

Another great path to take Tivit, Seller of Secrets is a more competitive midrange deck. You can exploit all the same interactive spells but shave away the flicker synergies with cards that work with Tivit’s ability to create vast sums of artifacts, like Urza, Lord High Artificer or Time Sieve. These changes give you a faster deck that’s less prone to disruption, one that challenges your opponents especially if they’re not running much interaction.

You could also lean hard into the politics and group hug idea presented with the will of the council mechanic. Cards like Plea for Power and Council's Judgment can spice up a game of Commander, making the table consider what the best option is going forward.

Commanding Conclusion

Atris, Oracle of Half-Truths | Illustration by Bastien L. Deharme

Tivit, Seller of Secrets is an interesting commander. It’s expensive but gives you more than enough value to compensate for its cost. Its color identity provides excellent tools to interact with your opponents, protecting important pieces while being highly disruptive.

These strengths come together in this deck, seeking to way outvalue your opponents with ETB abilities and endless blink tricks. What’s your favorite will of the council card? Do you play Esper as controlling colors or more midrange? Let me know in the comments or on the Draftsim Discord!

Stay healthy and keep your secrets close!