Hey guys, it’s David again back with another deck tech. This time I’m bringing one of Magic’s most hated tribes a whole new spin. Presenting a deck I like to call, Pseudo Slivers. Slivers get a lot of hate throughout the commander community. Their five color cards are always expensive on the wallet, leaving budget players unable to play the best version, and their innate ability to accidentally infinite combo out of nowhere makes them a menace amongst more casual playgroups. Pseudo Slivers is a deck that plays only 10 slivers in the 99 with Sliver Legion being our commander.
Now I know the first question on your mind. If you are playing 10 slivers, why on earth are you playing the legendary sliver that requires slivers on the battlefield? Let me explain. The power of Sliver Legion is that it makes your generally small sliver dudes into generally larger sliver dudes. But it never seems to take your slivers to a seriously threatening level unless you’ve already gone ahead and made infinite slivers, and at that point you win anyway. The goal of this deck is to take the multitude of other token generation spells throughout Magic and then all in one turn, cast Sliver Legion and turn all of our tokens into slivers resulting in an absolutely massive board. There are two halves to this goal, creating tokens and turning them into slivers. Let's talk about the second one first.
These seven cards are the way to turn our legion of tokens into a legion of sliver tokens. Hivestone is the most straightforward option just turning everything into explicitly Slivers. Arcane Adaptation, Conspiracy, and Xenograft all allow us to turn our army into any creature type we choose, and we choose Sliver everytime. Maskwood Nexus, Mirror Entity, and Mistform Wakecaster allow us to turn our creatures into every creature type, including Sliver. Mistform Wakecaster is the worst option among these because you often have to wait a turn to activate the effect and, if the other players know what to look for, there is no way it is lasting until your next turn. However, if we have enough mana, we can turn the Wakecaster into a Sliver and give it haste that way to turn everything into a Sliver. These cards are the backbone of the deck. Drawing any one of these seven cards with the mana to cast them and Sliver Legion will instantly win you the game nine times out of ten. But we need creatures on board and that’s where the rest of the deck comes into play.
These are my favorite picks from this category of cards, but there are many more in my final decklist. All of these cards have the express purpose of creating as many tokens as possible. Arachnogenesis protects us from an attack while putting precious tokens onto the battlefield in the process. Assemble the Legion and Scute Swarm don’t start out threatening, but given only a few turns will honestly take over the game on their own if they are allowed to stay on the board. Giving them a Sliver boost only helps with their lethality. Feed the Pack and Mycoloth both take our already established tokens and put production through the roof. You really only need either of these to trigger once to have more than enough power on board to kill everyone at the table in one attack. Krenko is simultaneously the best and worst token producer in the deck. There are no other goblins in the deck so Krenko’s production of tokens starts out agonizingly slow. Unless we have Maskwood Nexus, or Mirror Entity out on the board, in which case he is instantly the best card we have access to. Repeatedly doubling all of our tokens for free is something no other card can even get close to.
Making tokens is great, but what about making even more tokens. All of these cards do what Krenko does for us but they need other cards to actually make the tokens. If we don't manage to get to one of our ways to turn everything into Slivers, just overwhelming our opponents is still a gameplan that we can excecute quite effectively.
Realistically, we don’t actually need any other Slivers in the deck when the deck is working how it’s supposed to be. All you need is a lot of tokens, a way to turn them to Slivers, and the commander. But I’ve found that these guys still let you feel like you are playing Slivers and are useful when the deck is only doing one of those things. You still need to be able to turn all your guys into Slivers for these to have a really impactful effect, but at least we can edge against one of our downfalls this way. Cloudshredder Sliver, Galerider Sliver, and Virulent Sliver will often enough allow us to kill one or more players at the table even without the commander, a great option if it gets killed so many times that it is uncastable. Gemhide Sliver helps us round out the fact that we are still a five color deck and need fixing, while Homing Sliver can help us find the right Sliver for the job at hand. Spiteful Sliver is an excellent card that makes blocking really tricky for our opponents, and synergizes absolutely perfectly with Blasphemous Act in our board wipe suite. Speaking of…
These are my board wipes of choice. There are better board wipes out there but I think that these compliment the deck excellently. Firstly, Blasphemous Act. There is rarely a game where this won't cost you just a single red mana and if you have Spiteful Sliver out, it turns this card into a win condition. Ezuri’s Predation, Hour of Reckoning, and the ultimate on Elspeth Tirel let us kill our opponent’s creatures while keeping what really matters to us the most, tokens. It may leave a few creatures around for our opponents, but at that point we should be able to overwhelm them with sheer numbers.
That’s it for the juicy parts of the deck. Fill the rest of the deck with your choice of card draw spells, mana ramp, and some single target removal and you’re basically there. The last part to talk about is the land base. We are a five color deck which means your budget basically dictates exactly how reliable you can get, but here are some things to keep in mind that synergize with the deck
Starting off our deck specific land base is Sliver Hive, can’t leave the hive without it. Any Sliver deck wants this card and we are no different. Dryad Arbor is an interesting addition to this deck because it will turn into a Sliver along with our other cards and lands that add to our Sliver count is all we are looking for here. Castle Ardenvale and Kher Keep both put out tokens by paying some mana and tapping them down, perfect for turns where we don’t want to react to our opponents just yet. Field of the Dead and Khalni Garden both passively create tokens while we are playing other lands. Field of the Dead does this the most obviously and mileage will increase as you acquire fetch lands and more nonbasics. Khalni Garden works great with the more budget friendly bounce lands, although it is very slow, and is a great addition to the deck even as those phase out of your list for the better options. I highly recommend building your lands to budget and upgrading them as you see fit. With the plethora of ramp options modern Magic has available, you can get a good lineup of fixing from your spells and touch up the rest later with lands.
And that’s the deck everyone. The goal of Pseudo Slivers is to stall out the early to mid game by creating a wall of chump blockers and if opponents let their guard down, just run them over the old fashioned way. But if there are too many blockers or you aren’t getting your evasive Slivers, lining up a way to turn your creatures into Slivers along with even as little as 20 tokens with your commander will surely take out at least one person at the table almost accidentally. I didn’t outline every amazing card for each category above, just the ones I think are the most impactful when playing the deck. Feel free to change out my picks or come up with your own as new cards are released and new synergies are discovered. Nothing in this list is set in stone and that’s part of the fun. Below is my current deck list of Pseudo Slivers, but even mine changes on almost a weekly basis as I rotate through a cast of Slivers and token generators to change up the feel of the deck but keep the strategy intact.
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