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The Thematic Core of the Deck: Secret Lair x Stranger Things Eleven, the Mage & Mike, the Dungeon MasterĮleven and Mike helm this deck primarily for the sake of flavor while granting access to five colors. These won’t seal the Upside Down for good, but they’ll at least give us a sense of satisfaction if our win-con doesn’t work out. Along the way, we have a few “sub-games” we can attempt to make work for fun: summoning Vecna via The Book of Vile Darkness turning Mind-Flayer, the Shadow into a creature and getting eleven cards in hand, so Eleven does the thing. Our win-condition is Maze’s End, which wants us to get ten gates into play, and we run a number of cards that help us find gates and synergize with them in other ways to turn these otherwise lackluster lands into an asset. Stranger Gates is a deck about solving mysteries and opening gates. Thanks to the Universes Beyond reprinting, the Secret Lair cards fit within the budget. At the time of writing, I’ve kept the estimated price under $80 at Card Kingdom, so that folks can build and play it without spending too much.

Everything I want in an EDH deck.įurthermore, because I conceived of this deck for an article and it’s not something pre-existing that I’m writing about, I’m going to try to keep it budget friendly. Problem solved: I’ve stumbled on a gates deck that thematically ties gates to the commander, and a guiding theme to constrain deck-building so I don’t get bored of the deck simply doing its thing and winning or not, and a win-condition that encourages play that assembles combinations of permanents over many turns, making this a deck that wants to play light-hearted, casual EDH. Secret Lair x Stranger Things’s partner mechanic, Friends Forever, enables players to partner Eleven, the Mage with Mike, the Dungeon Master, to build a five-color EDH deck. I needed to find a five-color commander, and few struck me as much more than placeholders, until I watched Stranger Things 4, and realized that so much of the plot revolved around the Big Bad Evil Guy (dubbed “Vecna” by the Hawkins kids) having to open a set number of gates from the Upside Down in order to “win the game.” Baldur’s Gate introduces Nine-Fingers Keene, a three-color commander that cares about having gates, but makes Maze’s End less viable. The banning of Golos, Tireless Pilgrim left Maze’s End gates decks without an obvious commander.

The conjunction of Stranger Things 4 and Commander Legends: Battle for Baldur’s Gate, however, gave me an idea: Gates. I’ve been fascinated by the strong “investigate” theme for quite some time, but never felt compelled to build a deck around it, when so many other options keep coming out.

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I have let it sit unopened on my desk since it arrived months ago, clueless as to whether or how to use the cards in decks. But, as my colleague Travis Norman has discussed, I cooled on it after the initial hype. Last October, when I saw that a Stranger Things Secret Lair was being released, I sprung for it.

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