Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 — Le Gommage

Commanded by Maelle, Peintre de l'Expédition, this Esper (white/blue/black) 100-Card Commander Deck is about an execution timetable published a year in advance. Once a year the Paintress paints a number on a monolith, and everyone of that age comes apart into petals wherever they stand. Last year it was 34. This year it is 33. Lumière sends an expedition across the sea every year to stop her; sixty-six have gone, and this is the sixty-seventh.

• Le Gommage: at the beginning of your upkeep the Paintress paints a number, and every creature with that mana value is exiled from every battlefield, yours included. The number starts at 8, it is public, and it goes down by one each turn. Once it has passed a value, that value is safe for the rest of the game, so a five-drop held one turn longer can never be erased. The deck plays its curve backwards on purpose, and Maelle's Repaint raises your own creatures above the number with age counters.
• Pictos: eleven Equipment teach. Keep one on the same creature through three of your upkeeps and it is Mastered: every creature you control has its ability for the rest of the game, and the stone comes off. Equipment has no mana value the Paintress can name, so what survives the year is not the people but the lessons.
• Two combos: The Whole Year in One Night — Clea, Monoco and The Blank Canvas walk the number down to zero in a single turn and return every creature Le Gommage ever took, under your control. What One Learns, All Know — a Mastered Picto: Cheating Death with Verso and Sciel is a free, unbounded drain.

Why Esper

White is the institution that has organised its own decimation: the expedition office, the roster of thirty-three names, the memorial wall, a civic duty to die on schedule, administered politely. Blue is the fact that the Continent is a picture, and that a mana value is a number somebody wrote down and can rewrite. Black is the price of keeping the picture — a family that painted a world and then went to war inside it. Six cards carry Le Gommage word for word, including Lumière, the Last City, a land, because the city lives underneath the number.

A complete 100-card Commander deck plus 4 tokens, tuned for Bracket 4, available as a digital print-yourself edition or a printed physical deck, and offered in 10 languages.