octavia the living thesis

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Why strixhaven’s octavia, living thesis is my new favorite ‘magic: the gathering’ card.

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Octavia, Living Thesis

Strixhaven is shaping up to be a fantastic set bursting with powerful combos and brilliant flavor. With so many cards to sift through, picking out any particular favorites is going to be a tough job. With that said, I do think this one Legendary Octopus is up there as one of my favorite Magic cards of all time.

Found in the Strixhaven Commander pre-constructed deck Prismari Performance, Octavia, Living Thesis is an 8/8 Octopus that costs eight generic and two blue. It costs eight less if you have at least eight instants or sorceries in your graveyard, and whenever you cast or copy an instant or sorcery spell, a creature you control has its base power and toughness become 8/8 until the end of the turn. To top it all off, it features the new evergreen keyword Ward, which counters any spell targeting it unless its caster pays an extra eight generic mana (think of it like a softer Hexproof).

Now, don't get me wrong, Octavia looks like an incredibly powerful card. It isn't too difficult to dump enough instants and sorceries into your graveyard to make it only cost two blue mana, and being able to turn your other creatures into 8/8s so easily is wild. But that isn't why I love this card so much.

I love it because it's a perfect meeting of flavor and design. The more you look at the card, the more you notice how married the two components. This Octopus card:

-         Has eight syllables in its name.

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-         Has eight vowels in its name.

-         Has eight lines of text in its text box.

-         Has eight '8' digits (one in the mana cost, four in the text box, two in the power/toughness box, and one more in the card number in the bottom left).

It could’ve been so easy for this to just be a kind of boring Octopus legendary. One that’s neat in the deck it comes with, but otherwise is a bit meh. Instead, it’s stuffed full of meta-references to an extent that almost feels like this could have been a silver-bordered Un- set card... except it isn’t. It’s clever, funny, and has had me looking over it trying to find more secrets longer than any other card I’ve seen yet. I wouldn’t be surprised if there was more here that we just haven’t noticed, and that’s why I love this card so much.

We're still waiting to see what the last three remaining Commander decks feature (I'm particularly excited to see the Silverquill deck), but I don't think anything is going to top Octavia for me this set. It's so silly, yet so on-brand for Strixhaven, and I love it deeply.

Strixhaven: School of Mages is launching on April 23. Octavia is included in the Prismari Performance pre-constructed deck launching the same day.

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Octavia, Living Thesis {8} {U} {U}

Legendary Creature — Elemental Octopus

This spell costs {8} less to cast if you have eight or more instant and/or sorcery cards in your graveyard.

Magecraft — Whenever you cast or copy an instant or sorcery spell, target creature has base power and toughness 8/8 until end of turn.

Illustrated by Simon Dominic

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Notes and Rules Information for Octavia, Living Thesis :

• Each magecraft ability has a different effect, although they all have the same trigger condition, whenever you cast or copy an instant or sorcery spell. (2021-04-16)
• For example, if you control Archmage Emeritus and cast an instant or sorcery spell, Archmage Emeritus's magecraft ability will trigger and you will draw a card. (2021-04-16)
• If an effect creates a copy of an instant or sorcery spell, this will also cause the magecraft ability to trigger. (2021-04-16)
• If an effect creates multiple copies of an instant or sorcery spell, magecraft abilities trigger once for each copy created by the effect. (2021-04-16)
• Some effects instruct you to copy an instant or sorcery card in a zone other than the stack. These copies do not cause magecraft abilities to trigger. However, most effects that do this also allow you to cast the copy, and casting the copy will cause magecraft abilities to trigger. (2021-04-16)
• If a player casts a spell that targets multiple permanents their opponent controls with ward, each of those ward abilities will trigger. If that player doesn't pay for all of them, the spell will be countered. (2021-04-16)

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Octopus Commander - Octavia, Living Thesis

As soon as I saw [[Octavia, Living Thesis]] spoiled I knew I had to build a commander deck around it. I love sea creatures in magic which was my first commander deck ever, and the flavor is off the charts. I already had a [[Talrand]] deck built, so I decided to alter it a bit to fit our new Octopus commander.

Octavia loves 3 things: cheap, evasive creatures, filling the grave with instants and sorceries, and cantrips/draw spells.

For the ramp, there’s the standard mana rocks but also [[Dowsing Dagger]] and [[Sword of the Animist]]. Both are super easy to trigger with our 1 drops and help us cast tons of spells late game when pushing for game. Also the land count lists 31, but we are running 35 lands with 4 MDFC cards to increase our instant/sorcery count for Octavia.

Our mill package is important because it is essentially ramp to cast our commander. It consists of some creature based mill with [[Hedron Crab]] and [[Merfolk Secretkeeper]] so we can buff them later. Also [[Thought Scour]] and [[Mental Note]] serve as cantrips that also fill our grave in the early game. Cards like [[Fact or Fiction]] and [[Strategic Planning]] are good late and early game to fill our grave or get exactly what we need. And [[Careful Study]] as well as [[Frantic Study]] are both cantrips and let us selectively pitch spells to the grave.

Token generators like [[Talrand]] and [[Murmuring Mystic]] are in here to swarm the board with little evasive creatures. We’re also running some cheap flyers and unblockable creatures like [[Pteramander]] and [[Slitherblade]] to assure that our damage always gets through.

Does anyone else plan on building around this awesome octopus commander? What cards would you add to this deck? Any thoughts on my build is appreciated as always.

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