It’s time to put on makeup, light the lights, and have a good long look at this particularly fine example of a proxy Commander deck, where all the cards are reskinned as Muppets. Bertie, a public servant from Australia, “used to watch Muppet Treasure Island multiple times a week” and put the deck together, while making personalised EDH decks for his friends, to celebrate a lifelong love of the franchise and its characters.
This fan didn’t go in for half measures. Not only does every card in the deck, from the commander right down to the basic lands, feature the loveable puppets, they’ve even got Muppets sleeves and a Muppets playmat!
The Muppets deck itself is a five-colour legendary creatures deck, featuring Esika, God of the Tree and The Prismatic Bridge (aka Kermit, the Frog and The Rainbow Connection) as the commander. “I started thinking through what I loved about the Muppets, and it struck me that almost every Muppet movie is about how they’re all larger than life personalities, but Kermit manages to band them together,” Bertie explains. “So, a ‘legendary tribal’ deck seemed like the perfect fit.”
Proxying adds an extra challenge to the Commander deck building process – finding cards that work both mechanically and thematically. While some were easy choices – the boar Ragadragga slotted in as a great Miss Piggy, for instance – Bertie spent a long time finding the perfect picks for each character.
“I’m really satisfied with the final choices, and when I play the deck with people for the first time, I love seeing the laughs and/or groans whenever I play a new legend and they work out why I chose that character.”
Our personal favourite is Muppet creator Jim Henson himself. His creature? Kethis, the Hidden Hand.
Bertie says making MTG proxies with unusual themes is a good way to inject more self expression into the format while also being competitive.
“I love building weird off-the-wall decks, but sometimes, if you build a deck suboptimally for flavour or pizzaz, you turn up at a table and never get to have the magic moment where it shows off how cool it is.”
Proxying decks lets me express that creativity in an immediately visible and personal way, whilst still enjoying the strategic side of the game.”