RoboCop Commander Deck · 100 Proxy Cards · MTG EDH · Dead or Alive, You're Coming With Me

A fully custom RoboCop Magic proxy Commander deck, ready to play straight out of the envelope: 100 proxy cards with original artworks, built around a murdered police officer, the company that rebuilt him as a product, and the four rules printed inside his head. Single commander: RoboCop, Officer Alex Murphy.

Why mono-white? Because white is the colour of rules, and this is the one story where the rules are the antagonist as often as they are the hero. The Directives are white. The police union is white. Omni Consumer Products — which owns the police department, the hospital, the prison and eventually the city — is also white, and it is the villain. There is no black in a deck that contains a crime lord, because Clarence Boddicker is not the problem: the problem is the man in the boardroom who hired him and filed it correctly. This is the first mono-white set in the whole line, a colour identity none of the first forty-one decks ever used.

Targeted power level: Bracket 4 — cheap taxes that stack, an equipment package that turns one connection into four triggers, a hidden permanent that answers the best thing on the table at the moment of your choosing, and two all-custom combos.

Deck Strategy

The whole deck is one sentence: put the rules on the table, make everybody else pay them, and keep one rule face down for the turn it matters.

The Prime Directives are the original mechanic: four legendary enchantments that tax an opponent action instead of a card type. Directive 1 — Serve the Public Trust ({1}{W}) makes every creature that attacks you cost its controller 1 life and hands you a Clearance token, and draws you a card whenever you turn a Directive face up. Directive 2 — Protect the Innocent ({1}{W}) drains 2 life off any opponent who targets one of your creatures and lets you put a +1/+1 counter on it. Directive 3 — Uphold the Law ({2}{W}) makes an opponent sacrifice a permanent unless they pay {3} the moment they cast their second spell in a turn, and you gain 2 life each time it happens. They are cheap, they stack, and RoboCop gets +1/+1 for each Directive you control — plus, while you control one, {2}{W} stops a creature attacking or blocking until your next turn.

Directive 4 — Classified is the card the deck is built around, and there is nothing else like it in the line. You may cast it face down for {2} as a colourless enchantment with no abilities, and turn it face up any time you could cast an instant by paying {3}{W}. Face down it does nothing and tells your opponents nothing: it is a permanent on the battlefield whose text the table cannot read. When it turns face up it exiles target nonland permanent an opponent controls for as long as Directive 4 remains on the battlefield, and its controller cannot cast spells with the same name while it stays exiled. The whole tension of the deck is deciding when to reveal it.

• Clearance — the token economy underneath everything. A Clearance is a colourless artifact with "{T}, Sacrifice this artifact: Add {W}", and you get them for being attacked (Directive 1), for arrests and raids (Cocaine Factory Raid, Thank You For Your Cooperation), for evidence (Evidence Locker exiles a dead opponent creature and pays you a token for it), for board seats and for groundbreakings. It is how a mono-white deck casts two things in a turn.
• The boardroom — the villains are your employer and they are better cards than the street is. Dick Jones, Senior Vice President makes your Directives impossible for opponents to destroy or exile and burns anybody who steals a permanent or wins a vote for 3. Bob Morton tutors an artifact creature onto the battlefield and draws two when he dies. The Old Man, Chairman destroys the biggest creature an opponent controls on arrival and strips a creature of all abilities for {2}{W}. ED-209 is a 7/5 trample that deals 6 damage on entry and cannot attack or block at all unless you control a Directive.
• The street — Clarence Boddicker with menace and a discard trigger, Emil Antonowsky exploding into a one-sided sweep when he dies, Leon Nash, Joe Cox, twelve-year-old Hob, and Cain, the Nuke Dealer, who comes back as the 7/7 trampling RoboCain token if you keep paying {4} for him.
• The hardware — Auto 9 (+3/+0 and a 1-damage burst trigger on every combat damage instance), the Thigh Holster (all your Equipment gain equip {1}), Titanium Laminated Armour, the Cobra Assault Cannon, the Data Spike (steal and cast a card out of a player's hand on connection) and the Directive Override Panel, which turns a face-down permanent face up for {2} at sorcery speed.
• Removal that reads like procedure — You're Under Arrest exiles an attacker or blocker, Product Recall bounces any permanent and makes them discard, Nice Shooting, Son destroys a creature a Directive triggered on this turn, Boardroom Vote is a will-of-the-council exile, and Restructuring destroys all creatures except Cyborgs and creatures holding a Directive-granted ability — which is to say, yours.
• Two combos, both entirely custom. Directive 4 + Directive 1 — Serve the Public Trust: Serve the Public Trust draws you a card every time a Directive is turned face up, so the reveal that exiles the best permanent on the table also refills your hand and, with the Clearance engine already running, pays for the {3}{W} that flipped it — one well-timed reveal is a removal spell, a card and a board. Auto 9 + Officer Anne Lewis: Lewis gives equipped creatures double strike, and Auto 9 fires 1 damage at any target on every combat damage instance, so a single equipped attacker turns into first-strike damage, regular damage and a separate burst trigger for each — the deck's only burn, stapled to a 2-mana Equipment.

Thirty-five lands, and they are locations rather than a mana base: Detroit Metro West Precinct, OCP Tower, the Abandoned Steel Mill, the Delta City Construction Site, the Boardroom on the sixtieth floor, the Basement Workshop, the Gas Station on Route 12, the Toxic Waste Dump, the Murphy House, the Nuke Lab, the Media Break Studio, the Car Park at Night, the Assembly Line, the Records Archive, the Rooftop Firing Range, Old Detroit Downtown, the Precinct Locker Room, the Courthouse Steps, the Demolition Zone and the Chair in the Basement, plus fifteen Plains. Four tokens — Officer, Clearance, RoboCain and Prisoner — come in the box.

Average mana value 2.86, built to have the taxes online by turn three and the reveal in hand by turn five.