I’ve decided to try to flex my storytelling and my deckbuilding muscles at the same time, and build a new Commander deck for myself (my first in over a decade, it’s not really been my format to date). I’m going to try to tell the story of the Back to the Future trilogy, using only existing cards. I’m intending to rename where necessary, and create a full set of printable proxies so I can play with the story version (I’ll need to trade for the actual versions of a few cards, having them all to hand so that people know it’s purely for aesthetics).

Choosing the colours

It’s pretty clear that Doc is predominantly Blue–he makes artifacts, he invents, he’s a scientist, he’s a time-traveller: all Blue traits.

Marty is a little bit harder to pin down, but I think given his desire to prove himself, and his inability to handle being called “chicken”, and the amount of fights he gets into, I’m gonna say he’s predominantly Red. I looked at commanders in Izzet (red/blue), and picked out Jhoira of the Ghitu as a potential time-oriented mechanic, and as a 2/2, it seemed easy to make this be something like “Doc and Marty, Time Travelers”. I’ve explored that colour combination a bit, and I think I can make it work.

The idea with this deck would be to have some of the high cost taken-an-extra-turn sorceries in that deck that could be Suspended. I’ve added about 30-40 cards to this deck so far, hoping to complete it soon enough.

However, I discovered that as I designed it there were a lot of moments from the movies I wanted to incorporate that couldn’t quite make it in easily in just Izzet, so I examined which other of the three colours I could to be able to include them. Black was out–there’s nothing really evil or dark about these movies or characters–so that left me with Green or White. Given the number of Humans in the movie, both of these were good choices, but with the overall sub-theme of Artifacts in White, I decided to search in Jeskai for commanders. There are only 50 total, and only four who have any kind of Artifacts connection.

I thought about having Inspirit be the DeLorean but it doesn’t make a ton of sense mechanically, so rejected that one. The Gnome Champion makes no sense whatsoever, but the other two had some possibilities. It then led me to search for any commanders who had an energy token in their oracle text, so I found Satya, Aetherflux Genius.

Satya works as a Marty and Doc card (Menace works if you think of it as “you need two creatures to block us because we also are two creatures”), and they definitely have Haste, given how they can arrive in the nick of time (although one could argue that Marty seems to get quite a bit of summoning sickness in the movies).

The tapped and attacking token? That’s Marty from another timeline come to help, or the DeLorean you hid in an abandoned mine for 70 years.

I’m thinking of the energy counters as “flux” in the Flux Capacitor sense of the word. Timestuff. Chono-mana. Ya know, flux.

I’m going to try to build this deck out also, and I’ll post some articles about card choices as I make them and test out the deck. My goal is to nail the feel of the movies, and also having a working Commander deck, without having to invent any new cards (but maybe rename a few existing ones like Satya here).