Ghostbusters Commander Deck · 100 Proxy Cards · MTG EDH · Who You Gonna Call

A fully custom Ghostbusters Magic proxy Commander deck, ready to play straight out of the envelope: 100 proxy cards with original artworks, built around four men who lost their university funding and started an undercapitalised business removing ghosts from buildings in Manhattan. This is a white-blue (Azorius) deck led by the partner commanders Peter Venkman, Doctor of Nothing Useful and Egon Spengler, Who Took the Reading.

Why Azorius? Blue is the science: the P.K.E. meter, the spectral analysis, a physicist writing down what a class-five full-roaming vapour is while it eats a room service trolley. White is everything institutional the story is actually about — the university that fires them, the licence they do not have, the city that will not listen, and the inspector from the Environmental Protection Agency, who is not wrong about the permit. No red, because nobody in this film wins a fight; they win by taking a reading, buying a bigger battery and filing the paperwork afterwards.

Targeted power level: Bracket 4 — sixteen pieces of unconditional-feeling exile, a compounding card-advantage engine, and one artifact the whole table is allowed to shoot at.

Deck Strategy

Trap is the original mechanic and the wording is short: exile target creature an opponent controls — it's captured. Sixteen cards in the deck do it, from Venkman's own {2}{W}, {T} activation to the Ghost Trap artifact, the Muon Trap Array, the Brass Orb's three seal counters, the Proton Pack (tap a creature down, pay {2}, and it is gone), and the Clients you sacrifice three at a time. Trapping is not destruction and it is not ordinary exile, because every captured card goes to the same place.

That place is The Containment Unit. Captured cards are exiled with it, and the deck's payoffs scale off how many are inside: your creatures get +1/+0 for every three cards exiled with it, it draws you a card for every four when you pay {4} and tap it, the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man costs {1} less for every three, and Gozer the Gozerian gets +1/+1 for each. It is genuine card advantage that compounds — and it is a single artifact with a target painted on it, because when The Containment Unit leaves the battlefield, every card exiled with it returns to the battlefield under its owner's control. The whole game is deciding how full you dare let it get. The Laser Containment Grid gives it hexproof and indestructible; Egon has hexproof himself while three or more cards are inside; and every capture drains each opponent for 1, gains you 1 and draws you a card off the two commanders.

• The inspector plays for you — Walter Peck, Environmental Protection, is not a villain card, he is a legal instrument: whenever an opponent casts an artifact or enchantment spell they lose 2 life unless they pay {2}, and for {3}{W} and a tap he destroys one and hands its controller a card for the trouble.
• The cast are small businessmen — Ray Stantz, Winston Zeddemore, Janine Melnitz on the front desk, Dana Barrett, Louis Tully the accountant, and the second generation: Phoebe, Trevor and Callie Spengler, Gary Grooberson and Podcast.
• The things in the building — Slimer, Gozer the Gozerian, Zuul the Gatekeeper, Vinz Clortho the Keymaster, the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man, Vigo the Carpathian, Garraka, Ivo Shandor and the Librarian.
• Interaction is Azorius and half of it captures — We Got One! exiles an attacker or blocker, Class Seven Event takes two creatures at once, Shut It Down destroys an artifact or enchantment and captures a small creature on the way, The Storage Facility Inspection counters an activated or triggered ability and captures, Don't Cross the Streams is the soft counter, and Who You Gonna Call? tutors a legendary creature of mana value 3 or less straight onto the battlefield with haste.
• Two combos. Ghost Trap + Slimer: Slimer returns from your graveyard to the battlefield whenever a card is captured, and his enter trigger taps a creature an opponent controls — meanwhile every capture also untaps Ghost Trap, so each trap you fire replays the reanimation and taps something else down for the crossing. Crossing the Streams + The Containment Unit: one instant exiles each creature that attacked this turn and captures all of them, drawing two if five or more went in. With ten or more cards inside, the Unit's +1/+0 per three, Gozer's +1/+1 per card and Total Protonic Reversal — which returns everything to the battlefield under your control with haste until the end step — turn that pile into the last attack of the game. It is the film's ending, mechanically: you deliberately do the one thing everybody told you never to do.

Thirty-five lands, and they are the addresses rather than a mana base: 55 Central Park West, Hook and Ladder Number 8, the New York Public Library, the twelfth floor of the Hotel Sedgewick, the containment basement, Columbia University, the Manhattan Museum of Art, the river of slime, Shandor's rooftop temple, the mayor's office, Tavern on the Green, Summerville, the Shandor mine and the first avenue subway tunnel. Four tokens — Spirit, Client, Treasure and Mini Stay Puft — come in the box. Average mana value 3.00, built to hold the table down and then hand it back all at once.