10 Oathbreaker decks to try out the format!

With countless cards with unique abilities and mechanics, Magic offers a variety of formats for players to experiment and enjoy. And the newest of these formats to be official is Oathbreaker.

Oathbreaker is a relatively new format, founded in 2019 and quickly gaining popularity among Magic players. It is played with a deck of 60 cards, one of which is chosen as the "Oathbreaker" and the other as the "Signature Spell".

Oathbreaker is a planeswalker that sets the colors of your deck and can be played like any other card in your hand. Signature Spell is an instant or sorcery that must also be in your deck's colors and can be cast whenever your Oathbreaker is on the battlefield.

With careful choice of their Oathbreaker and Signature Spell, players can create powerful, custom decks that challenge their opponents and provide a fun and engaging experience. If you need further details, just click here.

And that's what we'll talk about today, that we'll be listing the best Oathbreaker and Signature Spell duos, ready to be played!

This one tries to be a really cool two-piece combo, but ends up getting a little lost along the way. The idea is to use Coalition Victory so that once we have all five different land types, along with creatures that together add up to all five colors, we automatically win the game.

Thus, we have to deal with a huge field build to try to win, and of course, if in response to Coalition Victory any of our lands or creatures are destroyed so that we can't fulfill the spell's conditions, everything it's gone and we lost the combo.

It's really fun, you can build a strong deck with it, but it's not as decisive as others on this list.

Here we have a very cool synergy, which generates great recursion for your Signature Spell. With Saheeli, Sublime Artificer we don't have to worry about artifacts on the battlefield, as this wonderful Planeswalker can generate tokens and more 1/1 Servant tokens every time an instant or sorcery spell is cast.

So, to improve things, we've inserted the Thoughtcast spell next to her in the command zone, which allows you to draw two cards. Having that ability to refill your hand whenever possible helps the red and more aggressive side of the deck a lot, but best of all is the Affinity for Artifacts present in Thoughtcast, capable of reducing its cost, even the 2 mana tax the card gains each time it is cast.

This, along with the effect of creating an artifact creature for every instant or sorcery you cast, which also relates to your Signature Spell, can do increasing maintenance to the price of your Thoughtcast. And if everything is done right, you can draw two cards for the price of two or even one mana per turn. It really is a convenient interaction!

Ral, Storm Conduit is a great card for decks capable of copying many spells, including, I use it a lot in my Kalamax, the Stormsire Commander. Fury Storm works on Planeswalker as a 2-piece combo, which can lead to victory once it's in play.

However, Fury Storm needs a target to copy, i.e. an instant or sorcery from any player on the stack. The great thing is that whenever it is copied, Fury Storm can give new targets for each time its commander, or Oathbreaker, was cast. And thus, it can target the original Fury Storm, which will copy itself, targeting the original spell again, which will create a loop responsible for progressively dripping damage on the opponent.

The fact that it's "not really a two-piece combo", that it's circumvented by just removing the Planeswalker, and that it relies on enough mana to cast a spell that Fury Storm can copy or wait for an opponent to cast make this duo is not the best on the list, but even so, it is quite capable of creating an aggressive game state and bringing many victories.

This one is a very consistent little Combo deck. Tyvar, Jubilant Brawler allows creatures to activate abilities as if they have haste. So, the player with it starts to turn into a matter of lining up the right cards with your combo. For this, we have Green Sun's Zenith, one of the best creature tutors available, right in our command zone, as a Signature Spell.

Another acceptable idea in this deck is to use Buried Alive to play creatures to your graveyard and combo only with Necrotic Ooze. Other ways to end games with ca ombo are the famous Quillspike with Devoted Druid for high amounts of damage.

The charm of Tyvar, Jubilant Brawler is precisely in finding the best paths for different combos thanks to the tutor who comes with it, making it a super fun deck capable of a lot of damage.

Here's a really cool combo to play in other formats, but it gets even worse to deal with in Oathbreaker. Every player's dream with a Narset, Parter of Veils is to hit a Wheel of Fortune style effect, or as we usually call it in general: “Wheels”. Unfortunately, many of these effects are in red, but for blue, we can rely on Windfall.

The big kick of using a Wheel effect with Narset, Parter of Veils in play comes from her passive ability. Thanks to the heavy block of having access to only one draw per turn, using Windfall can make your opponents simply discard all cards in their hand and replace themselves with just one, while you will draw five, six or even seven.

This beautiful interaction doesn't win on-spot, but it generates a visible discrepancy between players. It puts opponents far back in the game while boosting you and, thanks to how Oathbreaker is played, it can be re-cast whenever one or more opponents manage to somehow recover the hand that was lost.

One of the most powerful Planeswalkers Magic has ever been graced with, Wrenn and Six is capable of a variety of juggling and mischief with lands. Being almost a Crucible of Worlds that gains loyalty, the card can do a multitude of things.

Devastating Dreams then works as a Reset button. Whenever the game is too complicated, it is possible to use the cheap spell to clear the opposing creatures and lands, with Wrenn and Six coming soon after to return the sacrificed lands and leave you ahead in the game.

The break in symmetry brought by the duo is very valuable, which can guarantee you a huge lead.

Yes sir! When we use partner commanders like Jeska, Thrice Reborn and Tevesh Szat, Doom of Fools, we can tweak it with two signature spells, giving us even more options on how to play this format even better!

These two Oathbreakers can make a great Midrange. Probably, using these two partners with spells capable of adding a lot of value should be, for now, the strongest combination that doesn't aim to use combos for a quick victory.

In The Elderspell we find a way to deal with almost all the format's Oathbreakers, as it deals with destroying opposing Planeswalkers and adding counters to your own. Almost all is a great observation, after all, Shorikai Genesis Engine is a vehicle that can be your Oathbreaker. Jeska's Will also doesn't do bad and speeds up your game a lot when necessary, allowing you to exile the top very aggressively.

Even so, there are some combinations of Oathbreaker and Signature Spell that manage to go head-to-head with these two, but we are almost always talking about instant win or infinite combos, which is what we will see next in the deck.

This is the obligatory empty-your-deck-and-win combo, so present in eternal formats with cards like Thassa’s Oracle. Jace, Wielder of Mysteries is always a staple in this type of strategy, which aims to send the deck to the graveyard, to convert this situation into a victory through its ability.

Usually, getting to the self mill is a lengthy process that involves finding the right cards and hoping that some of the key cards don't get milled, so you can't use them.

Now, what if you could give this Jace a card that allows you to mill your entire deck at once, at minimal mana cost and in a way that it's always on hand? And this is how we reach Paradigm Shift.

With the chance to speed up your game infinitely and make it a two-piece combo, this spell has been debated whether it should be banned in the format since before Wizards' legalization. But, of course, it's not infallible.

Any well-aimed removal of Jace, Wielder of Mysteries is enough to completely reverse the result of the match. This, and other things, is what makes the combo not so threatening according to the format's committee, who always remind us that it is the entire deck that wins the game, and not just what we have in the command zones.

Still, a match being decided on just a single two-card iteration shows great value in strategy, and we can't pretend it doesn't exist.

Here we have a wonderful two-card combo, which is not only much more reliable than the two previously shown, but is also what was responsible for the increase in Chain of Smog's price tag.

The spell works by targeting a player and making them discard two cards from their hand. However, the targeted player can copy the spell and redirect to another. Until then, it looks fine. But what if the target player is you, and you keep endlessly copying the spell targeting yourself? Normally, it wouldn't do anything, but let's look at Professor Onyx's text?

"Whenever you cast or copy an instant or sorcery spell, each opponent loses 2 life, and you gain 2 life."

With that knowledge, everything makes more sense. Copying Chain of Smog over and over causes a strong life drain effect on the opponent, which can be repeated "infinitely". Even if Chain is stopped in the middle, maybe because some opponent waited for you to drain some other player first, you'll have a lot of life and cards in the graveyard, which black decks can always benefit from. Even the Madness ability can be used with discards!

If you don't want to use this card to make an infinite combo, Chain of Smog can still be used as an aggressive discard spell, perhaps paired with Tergrid, God of Fright.

Here we have the deck that, undoubtedly, is one of the most powerful that could be used in the format. On the one hand, his signature Spell is the powerful Flash, a card banned from Commander due to its great performance in cEDH, as it can pull off combos with Protean Hulk easily.

On the other hand, as Oathbreaker, we have Oko, Thief of Crowns, a Planeswalker banned in potentially every competitive format. Disabling creatures and artifacts, gaining life and filling the board with 3/3 Elks, Oko is a card to be feared and one that, inexplicably, is not banned in the format.

While the combo piece to use with Flash is not enough, your Oathbreaker will not only hold, but will also do much more than that, centering the game around himself.

And when the Protean Hulk arrives, which will allow the combo, you will instantly win with this strong deck.

Let's talk about See the Truth

See the Truth is a pretty interesting card from the Magic 2021 set. Under normal conditions, it lets you look at the top three cards of your library and select one for your hand, sending the other two back to the bottom of the deck.

However, it does have a special clause that takes effect if it's played from anywhere other than your hand, and that includes the Command Zone where it'll sit for the entire game. With that, instead of taking one and putting another two on the bottom, you draw all three cards.

The card is excellent and fits well in any generic situation like "I don't know what signature spell goes on my Oathbreaker that has blue" since it is an always accessible and recursive draw 3. But of course, it wouldn't be my article without me teaching you how to get the most out of the card.

Rowan, Scholar of Sparks is the card that has been paired the most with See the Truth. Its back side, Will, Scholar of Frost, is what lets you use the blue spell as a Signature Spell - however, it costs more mana and takes longer to be cast, while his sister costs only three mana.

The big draw of the two is their ability to lower the cost of instants and sorceries by 1, making your first cast of See the Truth cost just one blue mana. If we stop to think about it, then we have a blue one mana card that allows us to draw three cards, thus giving us something extremely close to an Ancestral Recall.

With this quick combination, it is possible to reproduce one of the strongest spells in the game, and give you a very expressive and visible card advantage.

One of the things I'm most excited about in all of this is the fact that I can finally make a fun deck with as many Ellywick Tumblestrum casts as I want. Formats like this, for playing with friends, involve a lot of freedom, and while it's fun to bring massive combos to the table that can handle everything at once, there's a lot of charm in being able to use our favorite planeswalkers in a new format.

Until the next article!