Veyran, Voice of Duality Commander Deck Guide

Last updated on August 14, 2023

Veyran, Voice of Duality | Illustration by Mathias Kollros

The red-blue color pair has had two big factions built around it: Ravnica’s Izzet Guild, and Strixhaven’s Prismari. The Izzet takes a mad-scientist approach to expressing this portion of the color pie by taking blue’s desire for intellect and advancement and supercharging it with red’s reckless abandon.

But the Prismari took a different approach. The Prismari college of Strixhaven teaches its students to be wild and passionate, putting red’s flair for the dramatic front and center, enhanced by a level of precision capable only from blue’s slice of the color pie. It’s about being flashy and passionate, which is what I have for you today with this Veyran, Voice of Duality EDH deck.

The Deck

City of Brass | Illustration by Mark Tedin

This is a spellslinger deck through and through. You generate value by casting as many instants and sorceries as possible, getting a bunch of triggers from your cards that care about that, and getting further value from Veyran’s second ability.

This deck also has a strong token subtheme, with those being your most valuable triggers to double. The onslaught of tokens let you bury your opponents beneath that value you generate, like a crowd of backup dancers enhancing Veyran’s performance.

The Commander

Veyran, Voice of Duality sits in the spotlight for this deck. The efreet wizard strikes a harmonious balance between red and blue. The magecraft ability captures red’s fiery, aggressive impulses but also makes Veyran an imposing threat by itself. It only takes a few spells for it to become a massive attacker, and a few instants make it into a surprisingly powerful blocker.

It’s the second ability you're really interested in maximizing. The second ability captures blue’s eye for detail and precision, causing any ability triggered by casting instants and sorceries to go off a second time. This includes Veyran’s own magecraft ability, effectively giving it +2/+2 for each instant and sorcery cast.

It’s also fundamental to this deck’s power. You've got tons of cards that trigger off casting instants and sorceries. Doubling these triggers provides an insane amount of value. Veyran’s strength comes from generating incidental value for your board.

You’d play these abilities anyway, Veyran just passively makes them twice as good. This both makes it a powerful addition to the command zone as well as an unnecessary piece, letting this deck work just fine without its commander in case it dies too often or gets locked away behind something like Imprisoned In The Moon or Drannith Magistrate.

Token Support

Let’s start by reviewing your token generators.

Young Pyromancer is a classic spellslinger card that produces a ton of tokens, with or without Veyran in play.

Third Path Iconoclast joins the shaman in the 2-drop slot, producing an army of artifact tokens. It’s worth noting that the Iconoclast’s ability triggers off any noncreature spell you cast, but Veyran only doubles the ability when triggered by an instant or sorcery.

Poppet Stitcher makes larger but more fragile tokens. The real value of this card comes from transforming it into the Poppet Factory, turning all your measly 1/1s into massive 3/3 brawlers. Most of your tokens don’t have abilities anyway, and the ones that do still benefit from the buffed stats.

Murmuring Mystic and Talrand, Sky Summoner both make tokens at the 4-drop slot. These are a little more expensive but make up for it by generating flying tokens instead of grounded ones. While these tokens lose flying with Poppet Factory in play, they still get a significant stat boost.

You've also got Deekah, Fractal Theorist as your last token generator. It can make your largest tokens since it scales off mana value instead of making tokens of a set size. It works really well with Poppet Factory, which makes the 0/0 Fractals 3/3s with +1/+1 counters. Its second ability can also sneak through some damage to assassinate a planeswalker or finish a player.

Special Effects (Explosions) Team

You don’t just rely on your tokens to deal 120 damage. You’ve also got some burn cards to help whittle your opponents down before combat.

Firebrand Archer is a generally strong burn creature that ticks away at your opponents with every noncreature spell you cast. Like the Third Path Iconoclast, Veyran only doubles triggers caused by instants and sorceries.

Thermo-Alchemist incinerates away your opponents, spell after spell. It’s worth noting that what Veyran doubles is the untap ability, so you’ll have to tap Thermo-Alchemist between the triggers for full value.

Electrostatic Field joins the explosions team as another burn piece that defends you as it zaps the opponents with a brilliant laser show.

Pink Horror provides a powerful burn effect but gives you the option to direct it toward your opponents’ creatures or planeswalkers as well as their faces. It also dies into two smaller versions of itself, making it a hard-to-remove threat.

Production Team

These cards sit in the background, helping your performers put on a show by supporting them.

You’ve got Harmonic Prodigy, which is basically just a second copy of Veyran. Most of the creatures in the deck are shamans or wizards, including Veyran. This doesn’t double Veyran’s second ability or vice versa; the triggered abilities trigger three times for every instant or sorcery cast with each of these in play.

You’ve got to get these artists paid somehow, right? Storm-Kiln Artist takes your performances and turns them into cold, hard mana via Treasure generation. Every spell generating one Treasure is strong, but making two is a fantastic “discount” on your spells. It also grows really big quite fast.

Snapcaster Mage gives you an encore of whatever instant or sorcery your audience wants to see most, with the prime target usually being a piece of interaction.

Dualcaster Mage offers a more direct second round, copying a spell from the stack. You can copy instants and sorceries your opponent casts with this one, and it's pretty important to some combos we’ll look at later.

Balmor, Battlemage Captain turns your token forces into a powerful army. Both Veyran and Harmonic Prodigy get you an extra trigger of its ability, and it doesn’t take much for Balmor to spiral out of control.

You get a lot of flickering value out of Displacer Kitten, which we'll take a more in-depth look at in Combos and Interactions a bit further down. Let’s just say this Kitten is more than a mascot.

Archaeomancer and Ardent Elementalist both rejuvenate old performances by buying spells back from your graveyard and are integral to some of your combos.

Chandra, Torch of Defiance makes a delightful addition. It can come down and remove a threat but is better suited to provide card advantage or burn and increase your mana. Jumping from four mana to seven is a massive leap that this deck uses well.

If Veyran, Voice of Duality is the star of our show, then Niv-Mizzet, Parun is the director. Niv-Mizzet is the kind of card that warps a game around itself. It’s a card draw engine that can control your opponents' boards or act as the head of special effects, gunning them down, and it’s tricky to interact with Niv profitably. It can’t be countered and you get at least one trigger off most removal pointed at it. Have I mentioned both Veyran and Harmonic Prodigy double these triggers?

Personal Tutors

Sometimes you need a tutor when you go to college, and that’s okay. These cards are here to make sure you have the answers to ace whatever your opponents might throw your way.

Mystical Tutor is the quintessential instant and sorcery tutor, finding pretty much anything you need to destabilize your opponents.

Gamble is a risky option but it’s powerful, and discarding the card you’re looking for might not matter thanks to your recursion cards.

Spellseeker finds most of the instants and sorceries in the deck and can be flickered by your Displacer Kitten or some of the cards it finds. It hits everything from countermagic to artifact hate, even finishers like Crackle with Power.

Setting the Stage

You need to have a clean sound stage for your performers, and that’s what you get with your selection of card draw and cantrips.

Ponder and Preordain are some of the strongest top deck manipulation cards you can find. Casting either of these sets you up for a few turns of action.

Windfall is a powerful draw spell that gives you a peek at a ton of cards at once. Dumping your hand into the graveyard is useful with the recursion cards, and seeing so many fresh cards can set you up to win the game quickly. Windfall also goes particularly well with Narset, Parter of Veils, which provides solid backline support to fill your hand up while limiting your opponents' card draw potential.

Then you’ve got Expressive Iteration, which might be the most beautiful of all Magic cards. This is a brilliantly powerful cantrip that often lets you draw two cards, ensures you’ve got gas, lets you make land drops, and perfectly captures the essence of Prismari in both flavor, art, and mechanics.

Prismari Command is a flavor win with your commander and sets the stage so well. It can filter away excess lands or find you land drops, provide you with a bit of ramp to push you over the edge, and removes troublesome artifacts while sniping small creatures or weakened planeswalkers. This is an excellent Command because you’ll rarely have a dead mode.

Protecting the Performers

The performers are the heart and soul of the show, so you need to keep them safe behind a line of countermagic and other spells.

Counterspell is a classic, and it’s hard to beat this rate for a straight counter.

Delay is a funny little spell that basically gives your target spell suspend 3. This is fantastic against opposing counters and useful to put off an opponent’s threat for a few turns until you can find another answer. You could even Delay your own spell if your opponent tries to use some uncounterable spell to stop you.

Arcane Denial lets you trade your opponent’s threat for two random cards and replaces itself. Letting your opponents draw isn’t generally the best, but it’s effective when you need a counter. Better to let your opponent draw two than resolve a Craterhoof Behemoth.

Pyroblast pulls double duty as both countermagic and removal. It’s very narrow, but one mana is a small price to pay for winning a counter war or destroying a blue permanent, especially since this hits planeswalkers.

Remand creates a nice tempo play that can destabilize an opponent before they win and has the potential to save one of your spells from an unfortunate situation on the stack. You can also cast a cheap spell and Remand it to recast and get multiple Veyran triggers.

Counterflux is a little costly but gives you the final say in what resolves on the stack. It also lets you shut down storm or another deck focused around copying a bunch of spells at once.

Overmaster is sort of a backward counterspell, ensuring that you get to resolve whatever game-ending card you're holding on to.

Expansion // Explosion and Reverberate are both super flexible spells. You can use them to copy an opponent’s removal or counterspell and turn it back on them, or you can double a valuable spell of yours. Explosion also gives this deck a source of late-game card draw and damage that can end a player if you find yourself with a bunch of excess mana in the later turns of the game.

Captivating the Audience

You're putting on a show you want your audience to pay attention to, so you've got some interactive spells to ensure they stay in their seats and nobody tries to outshine the actors on your stage.

Snap is free value that lets you deal with a problematic creature for a turn and is super useful in conjunction with all your countermagic. It’s super easy to bounce a creature and then hold up countermagic for when an opponent recasts it since Snap untaps your lands.

Chain of Vapor is similarly effective with your countermagic and has the benefit of answering multiple permanent types. This is best held to answer noncreature threats like Deafening Silence and Narset, Parter of Veils that could stop your value engines or combos.

Chaos Warp also helps to bring down those problematic permanents that Prismari struggles to answer, and it does so without giving your opponent a window to replay said threat.

Lightning Bolt and Chain Lightning are both efficient pieces of removal that let you answer small creatures and planeswalkers.

Crowning the captive audience cards is the all-powerful Crackle with Power, which is effective at removing numerous permanents or players from the table with sufficient mana.

The Mana Base

Your mana base has a solid foundation of lands that fix your mana pretty well. There’s nothing too fancy in the lands, just a focus on getting you your mana.

You’ve also got a pretty robust ramp package with a handful of mana rocks. Sol Ring is an EDH staple alongside Arcane Signet.

You’ve also got a handful of other 2-mana rocks in Mind Stone, Talisman of Creativity, Thought Vessel, and Fellwar Stone to help quickly accelerate you.

Gilded Lotus is a bit more expensive but wildly powerful. It’s important to some of the combos we’ll check out in just a minute. It also just provides a massive boost in mana. The fact that you can play it and still hold up countermagic off the three mana makes it quite strong.

The Strategy

This deck wants to do one thing: unleash a symphony of instants and sorceries to create a performance so grand your opponents will fall to their knees (and their life totals to 0) in awe. The main way to do this is to create a token army with your producers and double those tokens up with Veyran. You can then use a card like Balmor, Battlemage Captain to push them over the edge or whittle the opponent down with your burn creatures.

You can also play a long game. You can keep your opponents' on defense if your tokens can't attack their board states. Making two or three or four tokens a turn is a great deterrent to keep your opponents from attacking you. For these longer games you want to use your robust selection of countermagic and interaction to extend the game until you can comfortably win off one of your combo finishers.

Combos and Interactions

Most of this deck’s combos really care about flickering your creatures, and Displacer Kitten is an all-star here.

First let’s check out a combo that generates infinite mana with four pieces: Displacer Kitten, Gilded Lotus, either Archaeomancer or Ardent Elementalist, and Essence Flux.

1. Start with the Kitten, the Lotus, and one of your recursive creatures in play (we’ll use Archaeomancer for this example).
2. Tap Gilded Lotus for three blue mana and then use one of the blue mana to cast Essence Flux targeting Archaeomancer, which causes the Kitten to trigger.
3. Target Gilded Lotus with the Kitten trigger. This puts the Lotus into play untapped. Then Essence Flux flickers Archaeomancer. Because Essence Flux goes into the graveyard as it resolves, you can use the Archaeomancer’s ETB trigger to return the Essence Flux from your graveyard to your hand.
4. Repeat this loop to generate infinite blue mana by getting a net gain to each time you cast Flux. You can repeat the combo to generate infinite red mana once you have infinite blue mana.

This combo has a few ways to win. One of the big ones is just feeding all that mana into Crackle with Power and atomizing your table by quadrupling infinity. This loop also generates infinite spell cast triggers.

Depending on what you have in play this can result in: infinite damage to each opponent (via Firebrand Archer, Thermo-Alchemist, or Electrostatic Field); infinite Treasures (via Storm-Kiln Artist); or infinite tokens with your token generators.

You can also draw your entire deck with Archmage Emeritus or Niv-Mizzet, Parun, but you'll need to make sure you use one of your bounce spells to return them to your hand so you don’t accidentally deck yourself.

You can establish this same loop with Ghostly Flicker instead of Essence Flux with two big differences. You need to use Ghostly Flicker to flicker an Island to generate the extra mana, while Gilded Lotus pays for the Flicker itself.

Archaeomancer and Ardent Elementalist also gives you an infinite turns combo. All you need is eight mana, both of the recursive creatures, Ghostly Flicker, and Time Warp. It’s quite simple:

1. Cast Time Warp and then target both creatures with Ghostly Flicker.
2. One trigger gets the Flicker back while the other gets Time Warp back, allowing you to take all the turns you please until you can finish the game.

There are also some combos with Dualcaster Mage. One is a two-card combo with Heat Shimmer:

1. Cast Heat Shimmer targeting any creature and then cast Dualcaster Mage with flash, using its ability to create a copy of Heat Shimmer targeting the Mage.
2. Heat Shimmer creates a token copy of Dualcaster Mage. Use that trigger to create another copy of Heat Shimmer.
3. This produces an infinite number of hasty 2/2s to overrun your opponents.

You can also go infinite using Baral's Expertise alongside Dualcaster Mage:

1. This combo starts the same way, by casting the Expertise with any targets.
2. Flash in the Dualcaster Mage and make a copy of Expertise. For the copy you need to make Dualcaster Mage one of the three targets.
3. The copy resolves its effects in order. Bounce the three targets including the Mage and then cast a spell from your hand with mana value of four or less.
4. Cast the Mage, which enters the battlefield and makes a copy of Baral's Expertise, again targeting the Mage and two other permanents. This lets you bounce all artifacts and creatures you don’t control while generating infinite copies.

It’s worth noting that the Dualcaster Mage combos create infinite copies, not infinite casts of the instants and sorceries they use. This means they only go infinite with cards that have magecraft and Ral, Storm Conduit, which effectively has magecraft.

You’ve also got Curiosity, which goes infinite with Niv-Mizzet, Parun. Enchant Niv and then draw a card whenever you get a trigger to deal damage, causing you to deal another damage, and so forth.

This combo works better in the late game so that you don’t have to worry about decking yourself, but you can also draw use this to draw your deck and then win with another combo.

Rule 0 Violations Check

There are a lot of infinite loops that some tables might not enjoy playing against and are worth bringing up.

That said, all the cards serve a purpose in the deck beyond just being combo pieces. If your table is against infinites or you don’t think it’s appropriate for the table, you can just not assemble the loops without any of your cards losing value.

Budget Options

This deck is a bit pricey, but there are definitely some cuts that could be made. Time Warp isn’t strictly needed in the deck. It provides you with an infinite combo, but you’ve got plenty of those laying around. You could play a cheaper extra turn spell like Alrund's Epiphany in its place, or just go for a different option.

Spellseeker and Snapcaster Mage are both incredibly valuable creatures that could be cut. Muddle the Mixture and Dizzy Spell let you find most of Spellseeker’s targets with their transmute ability. Snapcaster can be replaced with Flood of Recollection for a slightly more mana-intensive option.

Mystical Tutor can also be substituted with one of the transmute cards. Chain of Vapor is also a little pricey, but you can use something a little more expensive like Perilous Voyage for the same effect.

Other Builds

Veyran, Voice of Duality leaves you with plenty of room to explore other options as a value-oriented commander. You could lean far heavier into burn effects with cards like Guttersnipe and Fiery Emancipation to tear through your opponents’ life totals.

You could also focus on Veyran’s first ability to try and go for a Voltron strategy. Its power can spiral out of control and take out an unsuspecting opponent in a flurry of spells in combination with a few combat tricks.

Commanding Conclusion

Reflecting Pool | Illustration by Alayna Danner

The Prismari college of Strixhaven gave us an interesting take on the blue-red color pairing, one bursting with passion and artistic precision. This deck captures that idea by trying to generate a symphony all its own that builds to a delightful, combo-centric crescendo that ends the game. Veyran makes a fantastic commander for this deck by taking all of that value and elevating it to another level with its second ability.

What do you think of the deck? How would you have built Veyran? Let me know in the comments or over on the Draftsim Discord.

Happy spellslinging!