Unique Builds w/ Popular Commanders | 743

Greetings, humans. You have entered the Command Zone, your destination for all aspects of Elder Dragon Highlander. Enjoy your stay. Hello and welcome back to another episode of the Command Zone podcast. I'm your host, Rachel Weeks. And today joining me is a very special guest, it's Reggie the Arcade. Hey everybody, you can find me online at Reggie the Arcade pretty much anywhere you can find magic content. I'm so happy to be here, Rachel. If you haven't seen Reggie the Arcade on Instagram or TikTok or YouTube, you're out there doing shorts and sketches and rap battling commanders. Oh yeah. It's very fun, you've got to go check it out if you haven't thrown a follow. Please do so. Thanks for coming on and talking about Magic Cars with me today. We've got some very exciting stuff to talk about. Oh yeah, we have a really, really cool topic, one that I feel very passionate about, so I'm excited to get into it. I'm stoked. So today we are talking about the commanders that you have seen the most, the top 100, the most popular commanders in Commander, but we're going to tell you how to build them in a completely new way. So these are not the commanders that you've seen before, you can squint and find something a little cool, a little special underneath. And let's jump right into it with this first one, which I think is a very cool commander. And this version of the deck is in my plate group and it's awesome. Really? Okay, awesome. Yeah, let's jump into it with the commander. We have Aragorn the Uniter. This is a four color commander from Lord of the Rings. He has red, green, white, blue, legendary creature, human noble. He's a five, five, and he has four awesome abilities. Whenever you cast a white spell, make a one, one, white, human creature token. Whenever you cast a blue spell, scry two, whenever you cast a red spell, Aragorn deals three damage to target opponent. And whenever you cast a green spell, target creature gets plus four, plus four until end of turn. So Aragorn is most seen as like a multi color matters commander. You can cast charms and things like that to leverage his ability and get the most value per spell cast. Right. So every, every spell in your deck is going to have as many colors in it as possible. Unless, of course, you follow this slight twist on Aragorn and make it a mono blue Aragorn. And I know you're looking at Aragorn's abilities and you're like, wait, the blue one's like kind of the worst. Mono blue Aragorn. So I get an Aragorn that only scries to. That doesn't sound very good. Four mana, five of that scries to. Well, blue is actually very good at color hacking, which is an old ability. They don't really, they don't really put this on cards anymore, but essentially it's cards like mind bend, which is a single blue for an instant. It says, change the text of target permanent by replacing all instances of one color word with another or one basic land type with another. Interesting. So you use this effect on your Aragorn and you change, let's say, the white ability to say blue spell instead of white spell. Now, whenever you cast a blue spell, you'll make a one one and you'll scry off each Aragorn trigger. Absolutely. Cool. And there's a ton of different color hacking effects. There's cards like ultra reality, which is essentially mind bend, but it has flashback. There's cards like Wimba Volrath, which is essentially mind bend, but it has buyback. Oh yeah. So you can change effectively all of the colors on Aragorn to say blue and storm off with blue spells dealing lightning bolts, making tokens and scrying and buffing Aragorn. Okay. This is really cool. And what I actually just noticed about some of these effects is that some of them are actually permanent. I think Wimba Volrath is one that says until end of turn, but if I'm not mistaken, mind bend and ultra reality, they just work. Oh, they lock it in. They lock it in. Let's just change. She's like, all right, now I'm blue for all of these abilities. So yeah. That's cool. So you can build this sort of super Aragorn and you don't have to have this crazy mana base that can support all the multi colored spells. You just build mono blue and you can use these like weird hacking effects like mind bend to like change the text on Valakit, the molten pinnacle, make it care about islands. There's all sorts of weird tricks that you can do with these effects. Also, we, if we're doing a color painting deck, we have to of course mention painter's servant. This is formally banned in commander no longer. It's a two main artifact creature. Scarecrow, it's a 1-3. It says as it enters, choose a color. All cards that aren't on the battlefield, spells and permanents are the chosen color in addition to their other colors. Oh, I see. So once we've got the color changing effects on Aragorn, we can drop in painter's servant and we can call blue and make everything in our deck blue. Or I guess we could call red. So that's probably what I would do with painter's servant is I would build my entire deck mono blue and you play painter's servant and paint everything red. So now you don't have to change the red ability on Aragorn with your like hacking effects. You can change the other ones and just now all your spells are blue and red. Awesome. Pretty fun. So you get both those abilities for all your blue spells. This is a really weird way to build this deck. It is probably less powerful than the default way to build Aragorn. But I've seen it to do some great effect in my playgroup. My buddy Dan Fenton has this deck. But also you saw a video on this kind of Aragorn recently as well. Yes, Keeping it Casual on YouTube has a very, very cool deck with this style. He's made a great video about it. You should check it out where he kind of gets into the weeds of all the mechanics of playing this deck as well. I think you should check it out. Yeah, we'll put a link in the show notes to Keeping it Casual's video. And when you have all of these kinds of effects that target things that change things, I wanted to start including some of these copy effects that blue has as well. Specifically one I really like which is Vesuvan Duplimans. Oh yeah, you should read this guy. It is a weird one. It's 3 in a blue for an enchantment. Whenever you cast a spell that targets only a single artifact or a creature you control, create a token. Create a token that's a copy of that artifact or creature except it's not legendary. We can make multiple Aragorns with Vesuvan Duplimans. That's awesome. When you copy your Aragorn, he starts fresh. He doesn't have the same color hacking that you would have done on the first one. But it turns all of your Wim of Volras, all of your mind bends into another Aragorn which is extremely powerful. Yeah, we get to a point where we can start cascading value. And once you get like, if you have painter's servant and of a Vesuvan Duplimansy in play and you have three Aragorns or something crazy, you can really start getting a lot of value out of these little cantrip effects. I mean, you could copy your painter's servant, change every spell to be every color and then go nuts. That is really cool. Paint with all the colors of the wind here. The more we're talking about this, I think I might have to build this deck. So there's more enhancers that we built into the deck that can do the same sort of thing. Very, very notorious, doubler roaming throne. Oh yeah. And then double your Aragorn triggers that way. And then Orvar the All Form is kind of a Vesuvan Duplimansy except it's legendary and you can't make non-legendary copies with it. Right. So you can't copy your Aragorn a whole bunch of times, but what I do like about Orvar in a deck like this is it turns your Wim of Volrath into ramp. You can copy your lands. You could copy other value permanence on the battlefield. You could copy your Vesuvan Duplimansy. You have two Duplimansys and now you're going nuts. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You know, just having like a bunch of one mana copy effects in your deck at instant speed, I think Orvar is worth the include just for the fun wacky things that you can make happen. Yeah, more fun wacky things that we can include in this deck is Irma, Part-Time Mutant, which I think can kind of serve a very similar purpose to Orvar. Irma is a three mana one-one and the beginning of combat on your turn, Irma becomes a copy of up to one target creature control except her name is Irma, Part-Time Mutant, and she has this ability and puts a counter on herself. So she's a non-legendary clone effectively. You play her before Aragorn. The turn that Aragorn comes in, you pay no more mana, you can have a second Aragorn. And if you want, if you have Orvar in Blades, you can become a second Orvar and we can do these same like snowballing tricks that we've been talking about. Yeah, she's a very tidy little engine that can keep on switching from one combat to another, which I like. Yeah, I mean, there's some, this is the kind of deck that you can do really weird, really creative stuff with. So you sit down with an Aragorn deck that everybody sort of knows how it plays and you're like psych all islands. Yeah, which is awesome. And get to have these weird tricks up your sleeve that makes your Orvar much more unique and much more special is the wrong word, but like exciting for your opponents to play against. I think a lot of people when we're sitting down at a table is as commander players, we're trying to entertain, we're trying to surprise. I think all of us are googling like unique cards, commander decks. And this is a great way to sort of squint and see another deck inside the Aragorn package. It's very different. It's very unique. And I think it'll be a lot of fun to play. Once you've got set up with this very weird, very unique Aragorn deck and all your stuff is blue or all your stuff is red, you're going to need ways to trigger Aragorn over and over and over again. And so we put some little cheap blue spells that you can consider. One of them is Shrieking Drake. Classic. Yeah, one mana, one one flyer and when you play him, he bounces himself back to hand or no, any creature you control back to hand. Yeah, but himself. Yeah, but himself. He's Shrieking when we need him out of there. Shrieking Drake is just a blue spell you can cast over and over and over again. Trigger, once you have Aragorn hacked, once you have it hacked a little bit, Shrieking Drake just lives in your hand and lets you trigger your commander multiple times in a turn. Very cool. And is a fun little card to sneak into your deck. The other ones I wanted to include here are more targeted effects. They go well with the Vizu and Duplimancy and the Orvar. It's Shadow Rift, Leap. These like one mana spells that target a creature and draw you a card are going to feel really good and really flexible, I think. I like Shadow Rift and Leap for the evasion that they give to. One thing that's easy to miss is that Aragorn has this huge pump ability on it. Plus four, plus four. Once you get to a point where you're like chaining together these little cantrip spells, he'll be a, you know, 15-15 or just enormous. You drop a Shadow Rift, he's unblockable now and you slam the door shut on the game item nowhere, which is really, really cool. Monoblue, Voltron, Spellslinger, pretty fun. I really like this version of Aragorn. You should check it out. Especially if you're into a deck that is a little bit more challenging to build and to play. I imagine this one is going to be a bit of a headache in the coolest way. Absolutely. So we've got a lot of really cool decks that we're going to be talking about in this episode. We're talking about, again, very popular commanders that you can build in a new, exciting way that your PlayGrip or your LGS hasn't seen before. So if you want to pick up any of the cards that we are talking about in today's episode, you can support the show by using our affiliate link at cardkingdom.com. Card Kingdom is where we get all of the cards that we need for our decks. And I really like shopping there because when I build, I tend to build an entire deck all at once. 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If you liked that round table discussion, we do that for every episode of extra turns and it is exclusively available to patrons at certain tiers. So if you haven't checked out our Patreon, do that. We really appreciate it. Plus, we shout out one lucky patron every single podcast episode. And this one is dedicated to... Sideshot! Sideshot! You rock. You're awesome, Sideshot. All right, let's keep moving with one of the most popular commanders of all time. If not the most, is he number one? I think he's number one. I think he's number one and he better be the Urr Dragon. Oh yeah, this one has been a boogeyman. It has been one of the most popular commanders pretty much since he was printed. And he is normally a dragon type of deck. He says it everywhere on the card. Dragons cost one less to cast. For those who haven't met the Urr Dragon, let's read him. I have a hard press to believe you haven't, but it's four and Wooberg, nine mana altogether. Luckily, you don't really have to cast him because he is Eminence. As long as the Urr Dragon is in the command zone or on the battlefield, other dragons spells you cast cost one less to cast. Flying and then whenever one of our dragons you control attack, draw that many cards, then you may put a permanent card from your hand onto the battle field. Oh yeah, big dragons cost less nine mana commander. Yeah, he kind of tells the same story with every Urr Dragon deck you see. They're all playing big haymaker dragons. They cost a little less with Urr Dragon. I don't know if I actually ever see him cast, but I mean, when he is cast, he cheats on more dragons and then that's kind of the deck. It's usually in a desperation mode where you're like, I guess I'm casting the Urr Dragon because there's been two board wipes. But I'll cast the Urr Dragon and draw two cards and we're off to the races. So he's a very scary commander, obviously he's focused on dragons, but there was a very cool Urr Dragon deck in the office that I wanted to mention that is a typo typo commander. So this is an archetype that's existed for years, but essentially it is using changelings. So cards that have all the creature types, including dragon. And other like typo lord effects all in the same deck. So stuff like they cares about merfolk, for example, or illusions. And you can take all of the most powerful ones, shove them into one deck and have them buff your changelings. That is awesome. Okay, I like this a lot, especially because like changelings, they're all creature types, which means that a lot of these become very efficiently costed. Yes. Because the Urr Dragon reduces their cost by one. Absolutely. I mean, if we think about like the most popular changeling effects like Realmwalker that lets you play a certain type off the top or the Torian Maulers, that kind of thing. Yeah. All of those turn earlier, even better. And you don't have to focus on basically any ramp because you have the Urr Dragon in your command zone. Wow. Okay. So you can do this really high density of shapeshifters or of lords. And it gives you this like really synergistic, really sort of bombastic type of deck. So I wanted to highlight a couple of changeling cards, especially the ones that are from Lorwen Eclipse. Lorwen Eclipse because there's some cool new ones. Yeah, they give us a lot of really awesome changeling type of cards. Okay. I can read this first one. Yeah, get in there. Spring leaf parade. It is X green green for an enchantment. Whenever this enchantment enters, create X11 colorless shapeshifter creature tokens with changeling and then creature tokens you control have tap, add one mana of any color. So this is like a ramp spell and it also makes a bunch of the things that you care about. Like it just makes X elves or dragons or wolves or whatever you want them to be. Yeah. That's awesome. I mean, this card is just great. And it's especially good in a deck like this that takes advantage of as many changeling bodies as possible. Yeah. So even though it's not reduced by the Ur Dragon itself, it gives you a ton of bodies that honestly let you like cast the Ur Dragon. I was going to say like in the early turns, it can be like a ramp spell. It can be an explosive vegetation or something like that. But then also later on in the game, you can dump five or six into this and be like, I guess I'm not only making five of a thing to trigger my permanence on the board, but yeah, all right, next turn Ur Dragon is coming in. What are you going to do about it? Because here's the thing. Like if you have three dragons on the battlefield with Ur Dragon, you like have three dragons, you play Ur Dragon, you attack, you draw three cards. That's fine. But changelings are so much cheaper and easier to go wide with. Exactly. So cards like Spring Leaf Burried, if you can get the Ur Dragon in play and attack with ten, eight, like a bunch of little changeling tokens that makes this draw ability on Ur Dragon even more powerful. Right. Oh, you're seeing so many cards. That would be so scary to sit down across genuinely. I did want to mention Mutable Explorer. I think this card is great in this deck. It's two and a green for a creature. Shapeshifter with changeling. When it enters, create a tapped Mutavault token. It's a one-one. So this card costs two mana in this deck. So it's a two-mana Shapeshifter that makes another Shapeshifter body. That's a land. Oh, wow. That's cool. It's going to be great in any sort of type of strategy, but in this one in particular, it coming down on turn two is pretty wild. Yeah. It's like a little ramp and growth. I think one thing I like about Spring Leaf Burried and Mutable Explorer, that people have been appreciating a lot in recent years, the fact that you don't have to shuffle as well. It's like, hey, I ramp, I get another, I hit my land drop, and then I play this thing, and I don't have to pick up my deck every two seconds whenever you're trying to fix your mana or just get more lands into play. That's cool. Fear Dog Core is another one I wanted to mention. This is the three-mana Kindred Artifact Shapeshifter. It's a three-mana rock with changeling. So in this deck, it is an Arcane Signet. It's two mana. It taps for all the colors. And you can pay four to turn it into a changeling body or an attacking body anyway. Yeah. But this is, so it's a non-creature thing that can help trigger any of your lords. So it just sort of makes all of your ramp work really well with all of your actual plan for the deck. It's a lot of overlap. Very cool. That's really awesome, actually. I don't think I've ever seen this card before. Also from Laura, when it clips. Awesome. And when it comes down to two mana, it's even better. I was going to say, at minimum, it's just a second Arcane Signet in your five-color deck. Love that. Slam it. All right, let's move on to the next category that makes these decks really, really fun. And this is the type of lords that work really well with all your changelings. Yeah, and this one's kind of just flavored to taste, right? Play the best ones or play your favorite ones. They all have a home in here, right? This is where slivers tend to really shine. You don't have to play all this sliver payoffs, but you can play some really powerful enablers like mana-weft sliver that just gives all of your slivers or all of your changelings, in this case, tap add one mana of any color. Nice. And then you can play mana dork because it taps all on its own that enhances all of your changeling bodies that come down really fast with your dragon. The next one is Risen Reef. This one was a house in the elemental deck, probably as good if not better here. Whenever this creature or another elemental you control, enter as you look at the top card of your library. If it's a land, put it onto the battlefield tapped. If it's not, you can put that card into your hand. Everything's a coiling oracle. I'm going to say this is actually kind of nuts because you can't lose here, right? Oh, yeah. Either you flip a land into play off the top or you just draw a card. Every single time you play a changeling. Oh, yeah. That means, and all of them are cheaper, so you can change together a bunch of changelings to just draw a ton of cards or put a bunch of lands into play, depending on how lucky you are. Another card that's great with changelings, of course, is Voyage, Jaws of the Conclave. This one's so scary. This card is petrifying on its own, even in a deck that's just full of elves. Elves are also scary. This is two and Naya, five-man altogether, Revigilance, Trample, Ward 3, Y. Whenever we attack with X plus 1 plus encounters on each creature you control, where X is the number of elves you control and draw a card for each wolf you control. Oh my goodness. This is such a nasty little curve. Imagine like you curve like spring leaf parade into this thing and you attack and you put a million counters on everything and then draw 10 cards. Oh, yeah. It is nasty. I mean, that's what I mean about this deck is you get to start looking at these cards that you love from other type of strategies and just start mushing them together. And they work. And they work. And they look like I'm at home and I'm waiting for a great time. Because you're playing all these weird little guys. Yeah, wow. Yeah, Voyage really, that card's really good in this deck. I wanted to mention one more in this sort of type of card section with Exterminate. Exterminate. To and a Blackberry Sorcery with a Replicate, tap an untapped Adalic you control and destroy target creature. It's controller loses three life. You have so many Daleks. Yeah, you have a bunch of Daleks. You can tap down all your change links and then blow up like three or four creatures for three mana. Yeah, and drain them for some amount. Like three life is the controller loses three. Oh my gosh. So if it's like kill four of your things, you lose 12. So that can just end someone's entire game. Ouch, talk about Exterminate. Like this card is only going to show up in a Doctor Who situation, but it's really fun to get to play when you mix it in with all of your favorite type of cards. Okay, so the next category we have is ways to win the game in a deck like this. You got to close things out. Yeah. You replace all your dragons with weird little guys. You got to win the game. And and Voya as great as it is, it's only one card in your deck. So we need other ways to kind of present a bunch of damage so that we can close the game out. I like this first one. Yeah. Sylvia Brightspear, two and a white for a two to human knight. She has partner. I don't think that part matters. She has double strike and dragons. Your team controls have double strike. So you have a bunch of dragons too in this deck. All your change links happen to also be dragons. Yeah, Sylvia goes to get Corvath, which gives your knights flying in haste, I believe. So you can have Sylvia go. The problem with Corvath is it's six mana. So it's very, very expensive. But having those two obviously together is a very powerful buff for all of your change links. That's a good question. So Corvath is a dragon, right? So who cost to win less? That's true. Five mana. That's not bad. Not so bad. Or you can just play two mana for Cloud Shredder Sliver that is the same thing. Probably a little bit better. Gives your sliver creatures a flying and haste. Doesn't search for Sylvia though. Yeah, flying and haste on all your change links is pretty awesome though. I like this next one. I've been playing it a lot in my elemental decks. We have Champion of the Path, four mana for a four or three as an additional cost to cast this spell. You have to behold an elemental and exile it, but you can behold a change link. It says whenever another elemental you control enters, it deals damage to each opponent equal to its power. And then when it leaves the battlefield, you get the card that it exiled back. Champion of the Path is a very tight little package in the sect, only four mana. And it is a house. It just blasts everyone for damage every single time you play a change link. And it makes it a lot of elementals in the sect. So efficient four mana for this ability. And you can like exile a token on the battlefield. So Champion of the Path is very cool way to close out this game for very efficient. Finally, you are playing a dragon deck. You've got to play the most powerful dragon payoff there is. In my opinion, it's dragon tempest. One in a red for an enchantment. Whenever a creature you control with flying enters, it gains haste until end of turn. And whenever a dragon you control enters, it deals x damage to any target where x is the number of dragons you control. Oh, that's awesome. This is any target, so we can also pick off problematic creatures on the battlefield or... I'm a planeswalker, I don't know. Yeah, I mean, dragon tempest is just so cheap. Two mana to give some amount of things haste. Less of your deck is going to have flying if you're not as dedicated to dragons. But this gives your commander haste and you're so much better at going wide. Because you have all these like little guys. So the dragon tempest can be dealing a lot more damage a lot faster. I mean something like spring leaf parade after a dragon tempest. Oh no. They all trigger. So it's like let's say x is four, they all enter and deal four damage. Four instances of four damage. Oh yeah. And that's assuming you don't have any other changelings on the battlefield. Yeah, 16 damage. I don't know where right after your dragon tempest comes down. I like this. It's a great card that you probably see in a normal or dragon deck already, but it has a great home here too. Yeah, typo typo is a cool strategy. It's very customizable. It's very fun and can do some weird wacky stuff where you're like introducing my pirate elementals. So depending on what halves of the deck you put together. It's a fun build for a dragon. We have one dragon commander and that deserves another. We're going to talk about, she's probably the second most popular dragon commander I would think. I would say so. It's Miram sentinel worm. Yeah, so Miram sentinel worm in case you are not familiar is Sixmana and Nya for six six with flying and war two. Teamer. Oh, sorry. Teamer, yes. Green, blue, red and flying and war two. Why? Whenever another non-token dragon enters under your control, you can create a copy of that except it is not legendary if that dragon is legendary. Why? Yeah, why? So many wise. So many wise. So many wise, why is there an ETB and not a cast? So many wise. But what that does mean is that she's very powerful. Yeah. So Miram also is normally a dragon deck. Of course, her ability works best with dragons. You play dragon, you get a second dragon. So all of the best dragons that you can think of have really powerful ETB. So having two of it makes Miram very, very scary once it hits the battlefield. But you know who's the most powerful dragon I know? Miram sentinel worm. Miram, yeah. Miram also makes very sick clone scamander. Oh, because if we have one Miram and we play a clone afterwards, you'll get two clones of Miram. Oh, yeah. Which is terrifying. Okay. So she works really, really well with non-legendary clone effects like spark double. If you play a Miram, you follow it up with spark double. Spark double enters as a copy of Miram, triggers the original Miram, gives you a token copy of Miram. Now the next clone you cast or that enters anyway, sees three Mirams. So you'll get three copies of the next thing. If it's a clone, you'll get, oh, okay, okay, yeah. It gets really bad really fast. She's not even bad with like non-legendary clones, which is wild. Because you get to keep one. Because you still get to keep one and now you have a non-legendary Miram that you can keep cloning. That's pretty good. Okay, awesome. So we're making Miram as a clone deck. How many Mirams can we put onto the battlefield? I like this. Okay, so I mean the best non-legendary clone is spark double. And then we also have chameleon master of disguise. This is a new one and a little bit more inexpensive than the other ones because it's from Spider-Man. I'm calling Spider-Man, yeah, nice. But essentially it is another clone and the chameleon just keeps his name. Oh, okay, cool. So it works the same way that we wanted to. Actually, if we have a non-legendary chameleon. Yes, so you have a chameleon and a non-legendary chameleon and then a Miram. But they're all Mirams, but they're not. But they're not because it says a different name. Look at that. So gosh, the imposter works the same way. Yeah, and this one you can also bounce back to your hand to keep on using if it happens to be the only clone you draw for some reason. One that I love is Deceptive Frostkite. It's blue blue for a 1-1 flying and you can have it enter the battlefield as a copy of any creature you control with power for a grader, except it's a dragon and it is in other types and has flying. It's a little two mana of fantastical image. A dragtasmal image, there's nothing. Although it sounds like a fun night. Deceptive Frostkite is actually really, really neat in this deck because you can, if you play a clone and your opponent has the coolest card on the battlefield. Deceptive Frostkite enters and if Miram's on the battlefield, you get two copies of that thing because it's a dragon in addition to its other types. So if they have a Blight Stilk Colossus, we get two dragon flying Blight Stilk Colossuses? I think we're winning that game. So that is the power of Clone Dex. A lot of people say that Clone Dex tend to balance the table and be like, oh, my power level matches your power level, but the Clone Dex power level matches the most powerful deck at the table. So it actually sort of imbalances things in a way where you're like, I get to play whatever the most powerful deck is. Now there's two broken decks at the table. Great, and if you're behind, sorry. So that is why this is so good, is you have a really powerful clone engine in the command zone, but she's expensive and if you don't have her down, you still have lots of other good stuff to do as long as your opponents are participating. Okay, so I mean, pretty sick. The strategy does make a whole bunch of dragons. Oh yeah, it's still a dragon deck, it's just a specific dragon. Yeah, we're making the same dragon over and over again, so we can play dragon tempests. Yeah, absolutely, get your dragon tempests back in here. Okay, cool. I mean, this is really cool and you can also include other cards in it that are just good with clones if you want to build around it. You know, like a bio-visionary or something like that if you're an alternate wincon gamer. I like that a lot, cool. Obviously this deck does hinge a lot on Mirim being in play, so you should run a lot of protection and ramp so that you can get out Mirim fast and keep Mirim in play. Yeah, this one's a really fun version of Mirim, it's still very powerful, still very scary, but is a slightly different brew. If you're not into all the other dragons, although I don't know why you wouldn't be. They're dry, they're really cool. Alright, we've talked about three decks, but we have lots more for you. Cool, fresh ideas, ways to twist the most popular commanders in our format. If you have a cool twist on a popular commander, put it in the comments below. We'd love to see your deck building ideas, but for now we're going to take a quick break to hear from our sponsors. We'll be right back. See you in a bit. Academics and aficionados of Prince Mari. It is I, Sanar, unfinished genius! Admittedly much of my work is in progress, but now I've got a wild idea that's fully formed. I'm starting a business. Soon Sanar sculptures and sundries will take the world by storm thanks to Shopify. At first I was nervous about getting started, despite my genius, I didn't feel at all prepared. After all, I'm an artist, not a salesman, but Shopify supplied me with expertise on everything from managing inventory to international shipping. Plus their marketing sorcery helped me whip up an email and social media campaign in an instant. It was like I had a whole team of silver quill verbal mantles writing my emails while a band of Prince Mari market majors designed my storefront using Shopify's ready-made templates. Now I'm free to focus my genius on my true calling, making paradise-less treasures of artistic mastery. It will not actually, Princess. I've got to turn a profit somehow. It's time to turn those what-ifs into... With Shopify today. Sign up for your $1 per month trial today at Shopify.com slash TCZ. Go to Shopify.com slash TCZ. That's Shopify.com slash TCZ. Good morning. Josh! Josh, you see what happens? Yeah, about the one ring. No, something else. The union stuff? No. The Pinkertons? Dude, that was years ago. You got to check Reddit. When magic news breaks, Reddit is the first place players go to talk about it. It's one of the biggest online magic communities out there, full of real players sharing their love of the game, or sometimes other feelings about the game. My go-to subreddit is r slash magic TCG. You get reactions to big announcements, theories about lore, and tips on everything from strategy to navigating live events. But it'll also just browse r slash gaming to check out new trailers, reviews, rumors, you name it. Plus, there are subreddits for every genre, niche, or magic format out there. So whatever you like to play, there's a community where you'll fit right in. Hey, did you guys see what happened? Yeah, the Star Wars Hall of Stamp? No, no, no. There's something else. What? Yeah. Alright, I gotta download this app. One of the best parts of magic is sharing your excitement with the gathering. And Reddit is where players gather first to react, geek out, and share ideas. Whether you're gushing over new cards at r slash magic TCG, speculating on lore at r slash mtg-vorthos, or checking out trailers at r slash gaming, Reddit is the hub where everyone can find their interests and their people. Download the Reddit app and dive into r slash magic TCG for the latest gaming updates. Download the Reddit app today. This message is sponsored by Raycon. What's up? It's me, JackedRabbit, out here in the forest getting my pump on. Now I'm big for a buddy, honey, but trust me, there are things in these woods even more ravenous than I am. And frankly, I'd rather look like a snack than be one, weak. That's why I always wear my Raycon essential open-ear buds on leg day, which is every day. Their open-ear design gives me crystal clear audio, while still letting me hear what's going on around me. So I can jam my workout hip hop. Then if a predator sneaks up mid-squat, I'll pivot to a regular hop and bounce out of there. Raycons are lightweight and adjustable, so they fit perfectly over my big ol' floppy ears and never fall out, even when I'm tapping down to attack or new push-ups. Plus, they're so high quality, it's no wonder they've got over 3 million customers. Why, that's almost as many rabbit buddies as I'll make when I'm done getting carrot cake dump. Thanks to Raycons, I can focus on getting swole without accidentally becoming part of a food chain combo. The essential open-ear buds are the perfect addition to your everyday routine. Go to buyraycon.com slash command open to get 15% off. Again, that's buyraycon.com slash command open. Thanks, Raycon, for sponsoring. At John Lewis Money, we know your home is more than an address. It's the sunlight pouring in. Well, sometimes, the coffee on tap and the best spot on the sofa. It's why our home insurance is thoughtfully designed with three levels of flexible cover for the home you've created. Because when you notice the details, you notice the difference. Search John Lewis Money. Terms and exclusions apply. John Lewis Finance Limited is authorized for insurance distribution and credit-broking by the Financial Conduct Authority. In the race to scale with AI, you need data infrastructure that can match your pace. EverPeer's data storage platform brings all your data into one hub. No silos, no scrambling, just instant access to tame your data chaos. And with EverPeer Storage as a service subscription, your storage and security upgrade automatically with zero downtime. Your infrastructure stays current, so your business never slows down. Visit everpeerdata.com to learn more today. With EverPeer, you're not just in the race, you're built to win it. You know what my favorite thing is about Architect? How easy it is to build decks. When I'm brewing for game nights, my first draft comes together super fast, because I can drag and drop cards straight from EDH Rec or Skyfall. And Architect even sorts them into categories like ramp or card draw automatically, but I can always add new ones or move things around based on my strategy. It's quick, intuitive, and it just makes deckbuilding fun. Architect is the best place to browse, brew, and play test Commander Decks. Just go to architect.com slash command zone to get started. That's A-R-C-H-I-D-E-K-T dot com slash command zone. Welcome back, everybody. We are talking about popular commanders you know and love in new, fresh ways. And I'm very excited about this next one, because it's a commander that I've always loved from a safe distance. It's super powerful, and I'm really excited to see it in this weird lens. We're talking about Hensie Toolbox Torre. For those unfamiliar with Hensie, he is in Jund, and he is a 3-3 Devil Rogue. He says, each creature spell you cast with mana value 4 or greater has blitz. The blitz cost is equal to its mana cost, and he also reduces the cost of blitz by 1 for each time that you have cast your commander from the command zone. It's like an engine all by himself, right? He kind of says, play big creatures. I'll help you cheat them into play. For those of you that don't know what blitz does, it has the creature enter with haste, but you have to sacrifice it at the end step. Right. This is a very interesting one, because it's usually built with big, powerful creatures that have dies triggers. But I wanted to look at it and be like, what about the powerful cards that have activated abilities? And we're less worried about the sacrificing and drawing, and more worried about the activated abilities, or the haste of it all. So I was like, what about something like Tree of Perdition? Oh, because here, Tree of Perdition, oh man, that's so fast. It never taps, but it comes down. You pay three mana, you tap it, you swap somebody's life total. Sure, you sacrifice your Tree of Perdition, but you didn't get to activate it. And that never happens. That's so sick. Okay, so Hensie giving the Tree of Perdition haste makes a huge difference, because normally you play this card and it never makes it a turn cycle, right? Everyone's like, well, I don't want to be the one to get 13, so remove it. Get aggro. I mean, another card that's in this similar vein is Heartless Heated Sugoo. Arguably even scarier, because this one can come down the turn after Hensie comes down as well. So out of nowhere, it's turned four or five, and everyone's life totals are getting halved. Come on. That's awesome. So there's lots of activated abilities in these colors that are very powerful. They kind of go in all different directions, like Perdition and Heated Sugoo are more in the burn game. But there's also a lot of creatures like Elvish Piper, that if you give them haste, it's just four mana put a huge thing into play. Yeah, that could be really cool. And there's a bunch of different kinds of Elvish Pipers that you can play around, the new Ovea that cheats stuff into play. Oh, yeah. So you could build it as a Piper deck. It gives you a triple too. Yeah, I like that. And be like, I'm guaranteed to cheat a big thing into play. I'm just going to pay four mana, and the big thing, like I draw a card for the Elvish Piper dying. Cool. Which is kind of cool, and they all tend to be exactly four mana, so it works with this mana value restriction on Hensie. Save a little mana, get some card advantage, and also just like kind of take the Hensie plan a turn or two faster. Like it's a while before you get to drop in like seven, eight mana haymakers in Hensie. Maybe you have to die a few times. With this plan, it all happens the turn after Hensie comes down. And it's a great curve, right? Hensie comes down on turn three, you play the Elvish Piper for three, and then you pay the green to activate it, have, you know, you're old drossy or whatever you want to cheat into play. On turn four, when the turn after Hensie comes down. Unless you've got a mana creature, and then turn three, gross. Yeah, oh, true. You can be your... You know, Manador on turn one, Hensie on turn two, and then this Elvish Piper... Piper cheat. Ulamog on turn four. Lovely. I mean, that's a sick hand, that's a sick hand. You hurt him here first. But it's definitely something that you can do. So I love this idea of just being like, okay, I'm using Hensie more for the haste than for the like cost reduction and the sacrifice ability. Because there's a lot of different ways to take advantage of haste in a multiplayer format, haste is just so powerful. And you can lean into the synergies that goes around powerful activated abilities. Like Agatha's Soul Cauldron that steals powerful activated abilities from the graveyard. Perfect, we just put it there. Yeah, once your things die, you can exile them with the Soul Cauldron, and then kind of give a Piper ability or some other activated ability to the creatures that are in play. Give them to Hensie. He's normally just sitting there. Now he's a Piper that you can use for the strategy too. Marvin murderous mimic. You can play before Hensie, and then you have two Pipers when you cheat the Piper into play. Love that. Or Hazel's Broodmaster. It exiles a creature from a graveyard and gives your foods that activated ability. It makes a food when it enters. So you can sort of store those activated abilities on food tokens as well. Also, the most famous activated ability combo piece is Necroticus. Which has all the activated abilities of everything in the graveyard. So in the late game, once you've got a big pile in there, you can drop a Necroticus. Maybe you have a Marvin as well, who will have all these abilities too. That's really, really sick. Cheating Necroticus into play and having it have all of the abilities of stuff in the graveyard is really sweet. You could build this like sort of weird plus and plus encounter combo style deck with it. And just using your commander as sort of a graveyard filling engine, a card selection engine, and a way to give all your stuff haste. Pretty sweet. Yeah, awesome. You can do some very cool stuff if you squint. And this next commander that we're going to talk about is a cool example as well. Yeah, we are playing Urok the Desecrated. He is a five mana, soul tie, black, green, blue, three, five, death touch, life link. And he says, if a permanent entering causes a triggered ability of a permanent you control to enter, that ability triggers an additional time. So he doubles all of your ETB triggers. You normally see Urok as like a kind of generic ETB value deck. You're playing creatures, you're blinking them, you're playing all the Panharmonicon effects. So you're just kind of going crazy with everything that enters the battlefield. Yeah, I've seen it as a landfall deck as well, just like really focusing on those powerful ETBs on your own side of the board. But something that's interesting about Yarek is it doubles anything entering that triggers something on your board. So you can take advantage of that in a couple of different ways. And I did want to mention like ETB effects and ETB synergies are more popular now than they've ever been. It feels like everything has an ETB. Everything cascades into another thing. So I really like your idea of taking advantage of other people's ETBs. Yes, the idea that I found was we build around a deck with minimal or zero ETB effects actually built into the deck with the intent to clone your opponent's ETB effects. So we are playing a whole bunch of clone effects and things like that in this deck so that when my opponents play the broken ETB cards, we get value off of them as well. Double the value because we have your arc and play. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, clone decks are always really fun to play, like we said, but having stuff like Auton Soldier that can clone your opponent's thing and then give it Myriad and you get everything twice is just like, why did I play this Muldrifter? Ah! Punishing them for their greed by having a ton of ETB effects ourselves. Yeah, Auton Soldier is a really, really great one. I put in a couple of really good clones in this deck, namely the ones that have Flash. I put Mocking, Doppelganger, and Malleable Imposter in this deck. Love that. Because there's just something really tidy and efficient about having effects on your opponent's turn. Like the second that they play the thing and the big scary happens, you can take advantage of it right away. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, cloning their stuff is really fun and means you're always playing something a little bit different depending on what decks you're playing against. And once you have a copy of their thing, you're like, well, I can just copy it as many times as I possibly can. I really like that you have some flexible clones in here, like Clever Impersonator to copy any of their weird ETBs. Like if they've got a powerful enchantment with an ETB, you can copy it with a Clever Impersonator and start taking advantage of those non-creature stuff as well. A couple of ones we put in here that can copy any permanent applied geometry. I guess it can copy any non-Aura permanent. Yep, careful. You can't have an aura with no target on it. And then we have Flash Photography. So if your opponents are doing broken things with lands or a field of dead or something like that, you can copy those as well and have a great time. Yeah. I mean, being able to copy one of their lands is pretty nasty. Flash Photography is a cool one and I think a lot of people missed it. Cool. I like this idea of sort of using your opponents' decks and doing it better. And Yorick's very good at that. So I was looking at other ways to put some ETBs in your decks so you're guaranteed that value, but also steal their stuff and get some value out of it as well. So like Gonti, Lord of Luxury. Classic card. Classic. He enters the battlefield and he looks at the top four cards of an opponent's library. So you get to cast it. So in this case, you look at the top four twice, get two different cards if you find ETBs and there you're doubling it. I just thought of another one that's a Gonti realm black cat from Spider-Man Set. Sure. It's the top nine cards and gets to steal two. So you look at the top 18 and then Gonti four cards on their decks seems pretty good. Yeah. I mean, I'm a big fan of Puppeteer Clicke as well. This is an oldie. I know. But it's good. Three black black for A3-2 with flying. When it enters, put target creature from an opponent's graveyard onto the battlefield under your control. It gains haste at the beginning of your next end step. Exile it and it has persist. So if it dies, it comes back and it steals another thing. So in this case, you could take two creatures out of graveyards. Yeah. If you're lucky, you could hit a couple of ETBs off of it. But I do like this sort of focused energy of a Yarek deck where you're like, okay, yes, I can do all of the best ETB effects in Soltai. Or I could be like, I'm trying to do ETB effects that steal a thing or ETB effects that have a specific niche to them to make your Yarek deck look a little bit different than anybody else's. Yeah. And I like what you said about the flexibility of it too. I feel like a lot of Yurok decks, a lot of these ETB decks can feel very samey after a while. Like I win in the same ways with a gray merchant effect or something like that that I'm doubling. With this way, every single game is different, right? It depends on your pod and your playgroup and things like that. Yeah. The other thought I had, which is always one that's in the back of my mind because I've felt your grift deck, is ways to punish your opponents for ETBs. So we have a bunch of value off of them playing things that enter or just having a bunch of things enter. That triggers your group slug type effects. So Bloodseeker is whenever a creature and opponent controls enters, you may have that player lose one life. And it'll trigger twice for every single creature. So they lose two life. So anytime a creature enters under their control and if they're not playing a lot of creatures, you can give them creatures with cool stuff like slaughter specialist, which enters and each opponent creates a 1-1 white human creature token. In this case, they'd make two if you combine it with the Bloodseeker. I like this. They're losing two per, so they lose four life on ETB. Another way that we can get value off of our opponents creatures entering is Fairy Artisans. I think this card is really underrated. This is a very cool option with Yaruk. 2-2 flying. Whenever a non-token creature enters under an opponent's control, create a token that's a copy of that creature except it's an artifact. And then you exile all the tokens created by the Fairy Artisans. You won't get to keep both of the Fairy Artisan tokens because part of resolving the trigger is exiling the token that it makes. But you'll always get two of a thing if they have a creature ETBing, which I guess doubled with Yerak means that if they play a Moldrifter or something, you'll get four Moldrifter triggers. Rude. I like these effects that we're adding in because it means that your opponent has to kind of play along. Where it's like, oh, you don't want to play any ETB things. I'm going to give you ones. You're going to. Something's going to enter under your control. I know it. And you should talk about this next one because it's mean. This card used to be played a lot more. It's a little slow these days, but it's so sick with Yaruk. It's polluted bonds. Three black, black for an enchantment. Whenever a land enters the battlefield under an opponent's control, that player loses two life and you gain two life. It's not whenever a land plays a land is whenever a land enters. So you fetch land enjoyers using four life. Well, no, you lose eight. It's doubled with Yerak, right? So you lose four off of the first land. You crack the fetch and then you lose four more. You lose four more. Oh my God. Careful. Don't ramp. Don't ramp. Don't ramp. It's. Oh my goodness. This kind of like group slug effects being accelerated by Yaruk, I just think is really funny. And he's a totally different flavor. Nobody would expect if they're playing against your deck. There's some lighter versions of this on like a nightshade harvester that everybody, they lose one when a land enters and nightshade harvester gets countered. Of course that's double too. They lose two and you get two counters. One mean one that I thought of that I'm going to preface this once we read the card is two mana for confounding conundrum. When it enters the battlefield you draw a card. Two cards. Yeah. Oh, it's true. I was not even thinking about the first ability at all. But yes, it's better than a little can of you draw two. That's great. It also says whenever a land enters under an opponent's control, if that player had another land enter under their control this turn, they return a land they control to. It's owner's hand. Ouch. That ability will be doubled with your ox. Don't ramp. Speaking of fetch lands, if you crack a fetch land you'll have to bounce two lands back to your hand. It is gross. No one will like this. Don't ramp. It's pretty fun. These kind of weird punnagey effects I would never expect to see in a Yarek deck is very cool. You could also do some smaller effects that benefit from when your opponents do stuff like spectrum sentinels. Much cuter. This is one mana. It's one of our non-basically land enters the battlefield under an opponent's control. You gain one life, but you gain two. Yeah. Two life. So your life goes up, their life goes down. Weird Yarek slug deck. I wanted to talk a little bit about the fact that Yarek is, he represents kind of a style of commanders, which is just these like doubling. X-Harmonicon commanders, they've gotten really, really popular. They keep on printing more of them over the years. And I think a similar idea can be applied to commanders like Wolfgar of Icewind Dale, Felix Five Boots, and Ishin Two Heavens as one. You can build these decks to not have a ton of the thing that they want with the intent to either steal from your opponents or steal them and then give them those effects. We're talking a little bit about like an Ishin Thefts equipment deck or something like that. An equipment thing that's kind of fun and weird. Yeah. Yeah, it's a challenging thing to put together, but it's one of those extra hoops that can make playing commander really fun. I think if you're struggling to build a deck that is like at the power level of your table and you're like, I don't know how to power my stuff down, give yourself a higher hoop. And I think that's exactly what this theory is thinking about is being like, okay, what if I don't play the attack triggers, what if I find them or I manufacture them? Or I try and double your attack triggers by giving you attack triggers that punish you. You know, like squinting a little bit and trying not to go to the first thing you can do, but trying the second degree. And you get to feel a little bit more like, I did that. Yeah, it makes you feel so smart and you get to play a lot of silly cards too. And just kind of scratch that like brewing itch that a lot of people want from these powerful commanders, but they don't want to get stuck in the niche that the commander is in. Yeah, let's talk about this next one. One of my favorite commanders of all time. It's Winota, joiner of forces. She is too a red and white for a legendary creature, human warrior. Whenever a non-human creature, you control attacks. Look at the top six cards of your library. You may put a human creature from among them onto the battlefield, tapped and attacking. It gains indestructible until end of turn. Put the rest of the cards on the bottom of your library in a random order. Yeah, why does she give them indestructible? That's so nuts. Because you don't want them to die in combat. That's true. You don't know what you're going to get. They didn't sign up for this. She's going to protect them on the front lines. So Winota is a very classic commander. You want to play a lot of tiny non-human things and then flip into bigger human six-mana, seven-mana threats. And also stack pieces. Occasionally you'll see a lot in Winota decks. We thought of a very different way to take this commander. I love this idea. This was really fun. And it is Winota werewolves. Because they're humans on the front. And they're usually not humans on the back. So this is not something people see a lot because the day-bound, night-bound cycle mechanic is notoriously not well-loved. It's a nightmare! But Winota works really, really cool with this mechanic. So let's say that you have Winota in play and it's nighttime. So all of your werewolves are currently on their wolf night-bound side. When you attack with them, Winota sees a bunch of non-humans. When you flip through the deck with her trigger, you'll see humans on their front side. But they'll come in on their night-bound side. So it's a way to kind of mix and match the rules of magic. Play a bunch of werewolves. It's really sick. There is a problem. Winota's not green. Yeah! So there's 13 total werewolves in Winota's colors that use the day-bound, night-bound cycle specifically. And that's not a lot. Not to mention the fact that it is not super reliable or intuitive the day-night cycle. You can't always make it night when you want it to be not on your turn. The only exception to this is the Celestus, which is one card in your deck that you have to find every time. I didn't think of a solution that I think is really, really fun. And it's, we don't play Winota. New plan. New plan. We play Rocco, Kevoretic Caterer as the commander of this deck. Classic secret commander, commander. Yeah, so he is Naya, X, red, green, white, and he's a 3-1. Elf Druid, whenever he enters the battlefield, if you cast it, you may search your library for a creature card with mana value X or less, put it onto the battlefield, then shuffle. So yes, he's a great, great, secret commander, Dex, and he's in green! Hey! So now we can play all of the werewolves that are in these colors, all the great werewolves, and we have a way to reliably search for Winota every time. And you'll find that 7 mana Winota is just as good. Yeah, 4 mana Winota is very powerful. But you think about it, Winota is a top-end spell. It's good when you already have a ton of non-humans on the battlefield. So she's only really good once you've been doing some setup. So the 7 mana is just like, I'm going to slam Winota, and that's my haymaker at the end. Yeah. And I'm going to use ramp and werewolves in the early turn to set up and get ready for her arrival. Yeah, which is really, really fun. I love this deck. So let's talk about, now that we've kind of solved the problem, what are the best werewolves that we can run now? I like Ava Brook caretaker, 4-4 with Hexproof. And at the beginning of combat on your turn, you can put two counters on another creature you control. On her nightbound side, she is Hollow Hinge Huntmaster, 6-6 with Hexproof that gives all of your other permanents Hexproof as well, and then puts two counters on every creature on combat. This card is a hammer. Yeah. It is terrifying. It is like flipping it into play off of the Winota trigger would be terrifying. Because all of a sudden, now everything's Hexproof, and it comes in indestructible. So it's like, what do we do? I like Infestation Expert as well. It makes a bunch of nonhumans. For the turn that Winota comes down that you can swing with. And then Howlpack Piper is a piper that you can use for this werewolf deck. Whenever these big werewolves get stuck in your hand, Howlpack Piper will help you cheat them into play. And on the other side, she also fetches some creatures off the top. Seems good. I mean, that's definitely what the deck wants to do is snowball into these big beaters one after another after another. So you can do some cool stuff. You also get to play the classics Tobolars Huntmaster. I guess this isn't exactly a classic deck, but I really like this card. A Four Green Green. When it enters, it makes two wolves and has Daybound. So it's a six mana six sticks that enters and makes two nonhuman things. Seems very good with Winota. And the back side is a seven seven that makes wolves on ETB or attack. And he's also a fight machine. He makes your wolves fight stuff. He's like no fun. And then we also get to play the classic werewolf commander, which is Tovalar Dire Overlord, which is also a very reliable way to make a knight once you have a decent amount of wolves and werewolves on the battlefield. Notably, if you have a way to bounce your Rocco or if Rocco dies in combat, you can recast Rocco for three to go and find your Tovalar as well. Yeah, I would even say you could cast it, go find Tovalar first, and then you can pick it up and replay it to get your Winota later. You got lots of pieces. You got a toolboxy werewolf deck is so funny and strange. Yeah. Where you're like, this is my, you play Rocco and you're like, oh, what are you, like what's your secret thing? And you're like werewolves. Werewolves. My secret werewolves. Yeah. What? What's going on here? Once you see this mechanic in action, it is really, really cool. A really cool way to play werewolves. I will say the day-night cycle does not become any easier to track in this deck than it is normally. And it is your responsibility to keep track of all those triggers. No one's going to remember. There's too many things going on in a game of magic, especially these days. So make sure that you have a very clean and tidy way to track that. And also you're going to run a lot of protection and recursion in this deck because Winota and Tovalar are two of the best cards in the deck and they're not your commander. So if they go away, you're going to need ways to fetch them back out of the graveyard or protect them. The secret commander problem. Yeah. It's also, I found that day-night type of decks are great, are great ways to make sure that you're always paying attention. Yeah. If you find yourself sort of unplugging from games or getting distracted or just not like, not engaging with the game, this is one that forces you to like watch turns, see what's happening. Yeah, gotta work it. And stay engaged with the people as they're playing. So it forces you to be alert, which is fun. And one last thing I want to give is just leaving advice for this deck. So I have a friend that has a werewolf sideboard that he uses. He uses those placeholder tokens, the double-sided tokens that we get in packs occasionally and he'll have those in the sleeves and he'll have all of his werewolves in like penny sleeves or clear sleeves. That way during the game, whenever he sees the name on a card, he can just go to his werewolf sideboard, put it there, and he won't have to unsleeve and re-sleeve and unsleeve and re-sleeve every time the day-night cycle switches. Yeah, you also don't need to do the covert, like read the back under the table to like not give away what cards you're looking at. Okay, cool. Yeah, awesome, awesome, awesome. Yeah, really, really cool deck. Hope that you give it a chance because I like it a lot. Anytime you can play Winota that feels a little sillier and a little bit more fun makes me happy because I love that card. Up next, we're talking about an old classic. It's Kranko, my boss. Yeah, love Kranko to death and he is still so terrifying to this day. Oh yeah, two red red for a three-three goblin warrior. When he taps, he makes X11 red goblin creature tokens where X is the number of goblins you control, which is a lot. Yep, double the goblins. I've rap battled this guy by the way. Did you? Yeah, we'll put a link in the show notes to the Kranko rap battle. Yeah, he's the first one I ever rapped about and he deserves it. He's really, really sweet. He's the boss. He says everything that he wants on the card. Play a bunch of goblins, double my goblins. Make a lot more goblins. Yeah. Yeah, I mean Kranko is a classic goblins commander of course. When you see Kranko, you're like, this deck is full of goblins. It's going to win with goblin stuff. I got it. Sometimes it's even a combo deck where it's like a aristocrat. You want to tap Kranko a whole bunch of times and make infinite goblins, all that. But I saw this deck years ago. Like way before I worked here, I was immediately compelled by, and it was a Kranko mob boss deck that focused around goblin's ability to make a ton of mana. So it was like a Kranko big mana expel deck. Oh, okay. And wasn't really using the goblin anthems or the goblin burn effects. It was just using goblins to make a bunch of mana to cast big spells. So I wanted to talk about that version today. Goblins are very good at making a lot of treasures or making a lot of mana. The first one I wanted to mention was Housequad Heavy. This is from Aetherdrift. So yes, you have to start your engines. Yes you do. It's 2-in-a-red, very 2-3. Other goblins you control have haste. That's great with Kranko obviously. And then at the beginning of combat on your turn, you make a 1-1 red goblin creature token. That token attacks this combat available. Once you hit max speed, pretty easy in a goblin deck. It taps to add red for each goblin you control. That is a goblin's cradle. Yeah, it was going to come in too. A little goblin's cradle. You make a ton of mana for every goblin you have. And you can sink that into a huge expel later on in the game. That's really awesome. Yeah, and I mean it fits really perfectly into your Kranko curve too. Housequad Heavy on 3, Kranko on 4. Tap, make a minimum of 3 goblins. Because it has haste, and then the Housequad Heavy makes an additional one. And then you're off to the races. Once you get that Housequad Heavy at max speed, you're going to make a lot of mana. No kidding. The next one is a new one. This is Molten Core Maestro. He's so cute. He's so cute. He's great for this deck too. He's excited, okay. We'll go ahead. Yeah, we have a 2-2 for 2 mana goblin bard. He says, whenever you cast an instant or sorcery spell, put a plus and plus on count on this creature. If 5 or more mana was spent to cast that spell, add an amount of red equal to this creature's power. Yes! Yeah, so he makes a ton of mana for these instant or sorcery. And then if you ever get into a situation where you're chaining together the X-Bells in this deck, he would just keep on making more to feed to the next one. Yeah, some of the best X-Bells in red are big impulse draw spells. You cast a Commune with Lava type of effect, and you exhale the top X cards of your library, and you get to play them until the end of your next turn. So you have some time with it, but you get some amount of mana back with your molten core maestro, which is kind of cool. Yeah, the next one that we can talk about in the mana category is a Village Pillageur's. Oh yeah! Or when I love these guys. This card's awesome! So we have a 5-5 goblin warrior. He has Wither, which means the damage that he dealt to creatures is dealt in the form of minus one, minus one counters. And then whenever he enters, he deals one damage to each creature you're opponent to control. And then whenever a creature an opponent controls with a counter on it dies, you create a tapped treasure token. Sick! So this gets rid of all the one ones. All of the X ones on the battlefield will just straight up die, and if they don't die, they get way smaller. And then if their stuff dies with counters on it, which you so graciously placed upon them, you get to make a whole bunch of mana. I think this card's sweet. It's great if you can copy it, which I could see this deck having some amount of like a red impulse, not impulse copies, you know what I mean? When you copy a thing and it dies on your own step, it's an impulse copy. Oh yes, yes, yes, yes. That's the new official term. It's a temporary copy of Village Villagers. Then you get a second one that enters, you deal two, kill all the X2s, and you get two treasures for each thing dying. That's really sweet, yeah. So I could see this working with that kind of package. It's going to make you a ton of treasures for your next turn and set up for that one big turn where you're going to burn everybody out with an expo. I actually think that plan works a lot better than I was considering at first. I think that there's definitely a place for those type of cards in here, because you could also copy your house squad heavy and have two goblin cradles. There are instance and sorceries that trigger your molten fella, molten core maestro, and help sort of set up your instance and sorcery synergies and your goblin synergies, which is cool. And then goblins are really good at giving you mana for having goblins and Cranko gives you goblins. So starting to use stuff like Bright Stone Ritual or Battle Hymn, which are both big rituals that essentially give you red for each creature you control or goblin you control. I had never seen Bright Stone Ritual before. This card's not as an instance too. Yeah, I mean these kind of effects are really, really powerful for that one big sort of goblin storm style turn. Yeah, we're like, oh, you got 30 goblins here, you're probably going to attack us. Oh, absolutely not. Absolutely not. I have much weirder plans. Bright Stone Ritual into a big expo is just really, really sweet and it gets you some classic goblin synergy. What I have seen is Skirk Prospector. Oh, yes. Turn all those goblins into red mana. You can do a very similar thing. If you have a butt done of goblins in play, you can sac them all and dump them all into a huge red spell too. Ashnod's altar, of course, turns creatures into mana. A Pharexian altar, if you fancy, turns creatures into mana. A classic powerful kindred spell is Mana Echoes. Oh, yeah. So it's for mana for an enchantment. Whenever a creature enters the battlefield, you may add an amount of colorless equal to the number of creatures you control that share a creature type with it. So you tap Cranko and make 10 goblins. And Moulton Echoes will make you 9 times 10. Yeah, Mana Echoes will make you 9 times 10 mana. Casual 90 mana. Okay, I think we're getting somewhere now. Mana Echoes used to be this card that was the boogie man in the format and then everybody was like, yeah, we won't play Mana Echoes anymore. But which means now is the perfect time to bring back Mana Echoes. This card's really cool. It's great with goblins that make so many things all at once. I did want to mention this is a great Hexing Squulcher deck, obviously a very powerful card, but you're putting sort of all your goblins eggs in one big basket. In one goblin basket. So playing a goblin that says your spells can't be countered is a very big deal if you're trying to resolve a Mana Echoes or you're trying to resolve a big burn spell to close out the game. Like Crackle with Power or Comet Storm. Crackle with Power and Comet Storm are some of the best payoffs for these kind of big explosive Mana decks where they can slam the door shut on a game once you have a ton of mana in your mana pool. Yeah, I mean if you have Mana Echoes and you like play a couple goblins, you add let's say 6 mana to your mana pool with Mana Echoes. You could put that mana into something like Goblin Negotiation, which is an X spell that deals X damage to target creature and creates a number of 1-1 red goblin creatures equal to the amount of XS damage dealt to that creature this way. So you put a bunch of the mana into goblin negotiations, cast negot goblin negotiations, make even more goblins. I like this. Now you've got like 20 mana to play with and can close the door with something else. One of your big Impulse Draw spells that we mentioned before. So I really like this idea of like a goblin deck that is just using goblin creatures to funnel them into mana with either sac-out-lits or rituals or some combination thereof. It's a far cry from the way that we normally see Cranko typically played, which is of course the theme of this episode, but it's just like it's very new and efficient. I think it'll get a lot of smiles whenever people see the way that's true. Yeah, I mean you're still playing Cranko, so people are still going to see Cranko and be like, well we got to be careful with that. And that's true, but you get to do these payoffs that are different than what people expect. And you can play some of the same payoffs if you'd like to, but I think having a top end that makes you feel a little bit more creative or a little bit more innovative is really fun. Yeah, so we have a couple of cards on here. You are playing an X spell deck. We will just mention a couple of X spell payoffs for you. Brass and Finiscope is four mana. It's a new card from Seekers of Strixhaven. It's apt to add two colorless and the next spell that you cast has X and its mana cost you draw a card and gain half of X life. Round it down. Seems good. It's a good mana rock and it draws you some cards in red. We will take it. Yeah. Elementalist Palette also lets you get mana to spend on X spells, which is nice. Alright, you want to move on to the next one? Do it. I am BitTrap. I am 26 years old, unemployed influencer who went viral for his mugshot back in 2020 and is adapting to regular life from his traumatic hoodlum origins. And I'm Ian, a 24 year old real life SpongeBob who has never done an ounce of trauma in my life. So we like to discuss business, dating, religion, substances and trauma. If you want relatable content you can learn from, subscribe to above the influence show for free on Spotify, Apple Podcasts or wherever you're listening. Thanks for letting me in on up. Now back to the show. Another type of commander looked at through another lens. This is Panlaza Sunfavorite. Ooh, lovely dinosaur commander. Panlaza is two red, green, white for a 4-4 whenever Panlaza is sunfavored or another dinosaur enters about a fold under your control. You may discover X where X is the creature's toughness. Do this only once each turn. And of course, discover is exile cards at the top of your deck until you hit something that is that value or lower. And you can either cast it or you can put it into your hand. Yeah, gotta have that modality there. Panlaza is usually a dinosaur deck of course. You play Panlaza, you discover for 4 and then usually a ramp spell, you play a bigger dinosaur, discover for even bigger. But discovering for 4 is pretty good. Yeah, even if you're not hitting a dinosaur, if you're not playing dinosaur abilities, if you just have ways to play Panlaza over and over again, then that could be a pretty cool deck, I think. Yeah, I think there's a dinosaur soup cookin'. So, I think Panlaza as a Naya blink deck is a great option. So you're starting to look at spells like Ephemarite or Cloud Shift or Teleportation Circle. All of these things that flicker Panlaza, let it re-enter the battlefield and get you some more value. Of course, Panlaza says only once each turn, but when you blink it, it's a new, brand new Panlaza. It doesn't even remember the older one. Like, I don't even know who that guy was. And it will let you discover again. I like this one that you found, Curator of Sun's Creation, which is a 3-3 that says, when you discover, discover again for the same value. Another way to get around that pesky once per turn clause that you love so much. I want more free spells! So, it kind of functions like a weird roaming throne in this deck where every Panlaza trickle will happen again. This one's a lot cheaper, though. Yeah, this sure is. The other thing is just like having a lot of creatures with ETBs obviously is great in any blink deck. And in a deck like this one, blinking dinosaurs is pretty good. So, it's more of like zeroing your focus on dinosaurs from like all of the dinosaurs to specific dinosaurs that will work really well with this ETB, the flicker effects you're putting in the deck. So, like, Topiary Stomper is a great, for example. Classic. He's so lovely. One green green, he enters, he gets a land, and he's a 4-4. He can't attack or block unless you have a bunch of things, but like, mmm, it's fun. We're here to see him tap dance. Yeah, exactly. Enter the battlefield a bunch and get a bunch of lands into play. One that I've been playing a lot more is a trumpeting Carnosaur for red-red for a 7-6 with triple. When he enters the battlefield, he discovers 5. So, he'll actually discover 5, and then Paneliza will see him enter, and discover 5 again. 6? Oh, discover 6, because he's got a 7-6. Wow, look at that. Oh, yeah. So, he can get a ton of value all by himself when he loves being blinked. Oh, yeah. This is a great creature to have entered the battlefield multiple times. It's also another good deck to put all of the temporary copy effects in it. True. All of these are sort of more common in like the big dinosaur blink deck, Atali. If you consider Atali a blink deck, I guess. Yeah, sounds wrong. But in this one, you have all of white's instant speed flicker effects, so these effects just get even better. When you're casting a bunch of stuff from exile, you can build around that, especially in these colors. Nya's pretty good at rewarding you for casting stuff from off-discover. Stuff like passionate archaeologists, one in a red creature, commander creatures you own have when you cast a spell from exile, this creature deals damage. Equal to that spell is mana value 2 target, Epona. Yeah, passionate archaeologists is so cheap mana value-wise, but really, whenever you see this at any point in the game, it is a danger. Bad. It's like really, really scary, because there's so many like big haymakers in this deck and the discoverers can be so high. Shadow of the Goblin is another one. It's a bit more cute and tidy, and it's just a value engine. Incremental. At the beginning of your first main phase, discard a card if you do draw a card. Whenever you play a land or cast a spell from anywhere other than your handy deals, one damage to each opponent. There's more poking them in the eye over and over. Oh yeah, that's always good. That's always good. I think if you're building around these types of effects, you're also playing a lot of impulse draw. You're also just focusing on casting your stuff from exile in all of the ways you possibly can, including discovering multiple times. Yeah. One I liked a lot in this style of deck is Appa, steadfast guardian. Look at him go. He's the cutest little boy. He's too white white for a 3-4 with flash and flying. When he enters, airbend any number of other target non-land permanents you control. Incredible. And whenever you cast a spell from exile, make a 1-1 white ally. Yeah, a little army in a can. Lots to like here. Yeah. Great creature to blink because he can protect your entire board. Exiles your creatures and you can replay them for two to reuse those ETBs. And he's like, great. You're casting stuff from exile off a discoverer or perhaps off of airbending. I'll give you some friends as well. Yeah. And all this on a flash creature as well. Like you can get this plan started so fast and out of nowhere. On the end step before someone's turn, you're like, oh, all of a sudden we're in Appa combo deck. We're like, yawking and dancing. Yawking. Cool. Really, really cool. Another payoff for casting things from exile that happens to be a dinosaur as well is flaming Tyrannosaurus. Oh, no. Great fight scene is on the opposite side of the battlefield. It is terrifying. It's a crazy card. Five five with menace whenever you cast a spell from anywhere other than your hand. Flaming Tyrannosaurus deals three damage to any target and you can put a plus one plus one counter on him. When he dies, he deals damage equal to his power to each opponent. Each. So they're sitting there being like, well, we got to do something about this dinosaur. But don't kill it. But don't kill the dinosaur because if you do, then it's just going to get worse. What are you crazy? Yeah. And all that. I mean, and you also just get the instant value from just playing the card. Penelosa will let you discover and you get that trigger right away. Right away. Pretty gross. Another one that I like in cast from exile decks is spiderverse. Whenever you cast a spell from anywhere other than your hand, you may copy it. If you do choose new targets for the copy. If it is a permanent, it gains haste. Do this once a turn. Two flaming Tyrannosaurus. Gross. Gross. Yeah, that would be magical dreams. I mean, this seems super fun. I'm really interested in just being like, okay, what can we do with this that isn't necessarily just another dinosaur deck that we can get Trixie and really maximize that discover ability. One that we talk about a lot on this channel and I like very much is Avatar's Wrath. This card is so good. Two white white furry, a sorcery. Choose up to one target creature then air bend all other creatures until your next turn, your opponent's can cast spells from anywhere other than their hand, exile Avatar's Wrath. This card reads so simple, but then you see it in practice and it is brutal when you are hit by this card. I got hit by it recently and I can't do anything. I literally like my board is gone and I can't cast any spells, I pass. It's pretty nuts, especially in a deck that wants to replay its creatures. So in this case, you prop, there's a very good chance that you just don't choose a thing. You air bend all your stuff, replay Pantlaza for two and then you've got two things on the board and your opponents can't cast any of the stuff that was just airbended for the next turn. It's also importantly for mana, so it's a very good thing to discover. Hit off of the Pantlaza. Yeah, another control piece that we can play in this deck is Destined Confrontation, Azula and Zuko at it. Each player chooses any number of creatures they control with total power, four or less, then sacrifices all other creatures they control and then slaughter the strong does a very similar thing for three mana. So just these cards that because Pantlaza is for power, we can play, keep our commander around and get rid of all of the scary stuff that we don't want to see. Yeah, I mean if you've got your engine is really concentrated on one thing, having a couple ways to just clear the board and make sure you can keep doing your Dirtily Value Engine is going to be very powerful. So moving away from this specific deck build, I have a cute deck idea for you. I have a cute. Yeah, so this is probably a very bracket one, but I like the idea a lot. So Pantlaza is of course called the Sun Favored and so I had an idea to build a deck that was Pantlaza Frolicking in the Sun. Oh, so nice. All of the art in this deck has the Sun in it and I was like, that's a cute deck idea, but as we were looking at the cards, it's like wait. This kind of works? Yeah, Pantlaza actually just likes a lot of these cards already. So some dinosaurs that have Sun art in them is Burning Sun's Avatar, whose Sun bathing will give them go. No, babies. And then Cloudpiercer from Ikoria has the Sun in the background. So majestic. Yeah, it's going to be the alternate art. But then there's just some cards that work with the Pantlaza strategy that we were talking about previously that also happen to have the Sun in them. Another round is XX2 and a white for a sorcery, any number of creatures you control, then return them to the battlefield under their own is control, repeat this process X more times. And this card's nuts. I've never cast it and every time I read it, I'm like, why haven't I cast this? Yeah, this is absolutely insane. Can you imagine a turn where you get to, I don't know, X is two, something simple. And then you're like, I blink Pantlaza three times and then cascade into a whole bunch of stuff. Yeah. Morning Tide's Light is a really cool card. I haven't gotten to play yet, but this card looks sick. It's three and a white exile, any number of target creatures at the beginning of the next and separate turn those cards back to the battle for the tap under their own is control until your next turn prevent all damage that would be dealt to you. Exile Morning Tide's Light. So it's like a preemptive fog. Like you play it, blink your whole board, get a ton of value and then you're like, and then no one can get me. Stuff's going to get dicey, so I'm just going to cast this in advance and I'll let you play with each other. Yeah. And then Congregation at Dawn is an older card. It is green, green and a white. It searches your library for three creature cards. You reveal them, shuffle your library and then put those cards on top in any order. They're at the, they're at dawn. The sun sets in the background and you can stack your deck and put some of your best creatures on top to either cascade into or to draw. Seems good. So it's a cute deck idea. If you like Bracket One style decks where you're building around a theme or an art style or something like that, I think this could be very appealing. That's cute. All right. Let's move on to this next one. We're talking about Ghost Shintai of Life's Origin. This is of course typically a Shrine's Commander, three and a green for a legendary enchantment creature, Shrine. It has a Wooberg activation, so it's mana, color identity is five. Yeah. Return target enchantment card from your graveyard to the battlefield. What? Who even read that part of Ghost Shintai? I literally have never seen that part of the card activated before. Nope. It just says Wooberg on it and then nothing. And then whenever Ghost Shintai of Life's Origin or another non-token Shrine enters the battlefield under your control, create another token Shrine. Yeah. You get a ton of Shrine's. Your Shrine's work really well. Typically this is built around all of the Shrine's, especially after Avatar. We have even more Shrine's. Yeah, a ton of Shrine's. But I really like this idea of a enchantment reanimator deck. Wooberg is expensive. This is an expensive way to do that. But I do like that it's a commander that has this specific ability and you could build around that idea using all the colors of the wind. Yeah. Because Ghost Shintai doesn't care what the size, what type of enchantment is, and there has to be a Shrine. Nope. You can bring back any enchantment. Yeah. As long as it's worth paying Wooberg for, you can use it to bring it back. It's some really cool ones. Yes. To bring back. But first, we got to put some enchantments in the graveyard. Turdu. So we're going to find some mill and discard outlets in this deck. The classics are all great. Faithless Looting, Frantic Search, any deck where you want to put stuff in the graveyard, those cards are always going to be good. But we did find some synergistic options and discard outlets that will care about the plan, but also help you put cards in your graveyard. One of my favorites is Bramble Familiar. Oh. Bramble Familiar is so cute. It also is really broken. It's pretty sweet. So it is a one in the green for a 2-2 Elemental Raccoon. He taps for a green and can also pay one in the green to discard a card and put him back into your hand. And then he has the Adventure Spell Fetch Quest, which is a 7 mana sorcery that says mill 7 cards, then put a creature, enchantment, or land card from among the build cards onto the battlefield. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Creature Enchantment. Cool. In the early game, it's a mana dork, but then in the late game, once you have a decent amount of mana, you can pick this card up and then, I don't know, if your goxentai gets removed or if you just want to spend the 7 mana to fill up the graveyard, you get to bring back a big thing too. So that's really sick. Cool, cool, cool, cool, cool. Here's another one. Desk Guard's great. I mean, hardened academic is red and white for a creature bird cleric. It has flying. It has haste. And you discard a card. This creature gains lifelink until end of turn. Whenever one or more cards leave your graveyard, you put a counter on it. So it gets bigger, gains your life, and it's a discard outlet. And then we got Malcolm Alluring Scoundrel. Great. This card, I've just been looking at this card so much more. So it's a 2-1 with flash for 2 mana and flying. Whenever he does combat damage to a player, put a chorus counter on it, draw a card, then discard a card. If there are four more chorus counters on Malcolm, you may cast the discarded card without paying its mana cost. So you're going to have a lot of very big, expensive enchantments in this deck. Malcolm is a way to fill up the graveyard early, but if he doesn't get removed and it feels so bad to remove him, then you'll just start cheating the mana cost of everything that you discard later on. Yeah, you got to keep an eye on Malcolm. He will get there eventually. I like this Include a lot. It's Overlord of the Floodpits. This is 3 blue blue for a 5-3 Avatar Horror with impending 1 blue blue. So impending 4 so you can pay 3 mana to play it as an enchantment and it will eventually become a creature. Or it's 5 mana to cast it as a 5-3 with flying. When it enters or attacks, draw 2 and discard a card. 3 mana, you get to draw 2, pitch your big enchantment, set up for when you have a reanimation effect. Or Overlord of the Floodpits is a perfectly good thing for you to reanimate. It's a 5-3 flyer for a 5 mana. So getting it out of your graveyard and then starting to slam people in the air as you're turning through your deck and putting more enchantments in is fine by me. Pretty sweet. I'll play that. I like the ancient one as well. I spawn this card and it's just so sick. Is a blue and a black for an 8-8 legendary creature spirit god. 2 mana 8-8, yeah. It has to send 8 so you can't attack or block unless there are 8 or more permanent cards in your graveyard. Surprisingly easy to do in this deck. And then he has an activated ability for 2 a blue and a black. Draw a card then discard a card. If you discarded a card this way, target player mills cards equal to its mana value. There you go. After discarding the card that you want in there, these 7-8 mana enchantments, you're also milling more of these enchantments into the graveyard as well. So really, really awesome. This card's awesome. So fun. And then the infamous Cruel Claw. It's just 3-3 menace. Whenever he hits, you can exile cards on top of your library. You can discard a card to cast the thing that you hit off of his triggered ability. Very nice. Oh yeah. Could get lucky and hit something big, but you always discard the card you want to. You could also play a couple of shrines in here if you wanted to. Do a little dabble in shrines. Sanctum of calm waters lets you draw cards where X is the number of shrines you control. It will be a couple with your commander in play and then you discard a card. Nice. Or a Ghost Shintai of Life's Wisdom is a 2 mana shrine. You can pay 1 and have you mill for the number of shrines you control. So with your commander in play, it's 3. It's a nice little engine. It's an enchantment. It synergizes with your shrines. It's very cheap to get down to. Super cheap. A nice engine for a very cheap mana cost. Now for the fun part. Yep. What big enchantments are we cheating in? Surely. Rachel. There's nothing big and terrifying. In all five colors? I've died to this card. I'm going to be fine. Go ahead. Yeah. Baleful Omen. Baneful. Oh baneful. Baneful Omen is for Black Black Black. We're in enchantment at the beginning of your end step. Reveal the top card of your library. If you do each opponent loses life equal to that card's converted mana cost. I've definitely died to this. It looks slow. It is. You can get absolutely wrecked by it. You can get domed if the right card is on top of the library. I also do like that it's like instant effect. You get the card of your graveyard with Goshen Ty and then at the end step that you do this you can start burning the table out which is really cool. Well, there's a couple of effects that are good like this. Everybody knows omniscience. Ten mana. Five mana omniscience. Pretty good. But also there's omniscience at home with one with the multiverse. Six blue blue for an enchantment. You can get a melee look at the top card of your library at any time. Great when you're doing some self milling and you play lands and cast spells from the top of your library. Great. Once during each of your turns you may cast a spell from your hand or the top of your library without paying. It's mana cost. So just one spell for free. Yeah, only one thing. And a whole future site. This card is very good. It's even after you've put it into play like you just have a card that lets you play stuff off the top and then you find something big and chunky on top and you can slam it into play. That's pretty cool. Very classic, very scary card. Nix blue, an ancient. Seven mana for a 5-5 trample. When you type a permanent for mana it produces three times as much of that mana. Three times! I've never seen a Nix blue an ancient hit the battlefield and they don't win the game immediately. He's basically omniscience. Honestly, that's how it feels. That's sort of the cool thing about your commander's activated ability is you can do it on instep I believe. Yeah, it's instant speed. You can do it at any point. You can hold it up and on instep, reanimate, get a Nix blue an ancient, untap and you can go off and you've got a ton of untapped mana. Pretty sweet. We got demolisher spawn from dusk morn, 7-7 trample haste. Whenever demolisher spawn attacks, if there are four or more card types among cards in your graveyard, other attacking creatures get plus four, plus four until end of turn. What I found that when you're playing an enchantment deck, it's surprisingly easy to hit delirium especially because we're discarding things and things like that. At minimum, probably have one enchantment, maybe a fetch land, a ramp spell in there. You'll probably find a way to get this into play fairly easy. Sweet. The other thing I wanted to talk about is redundancy. Your commander does have a reanimation effect on it. It is four mana to get your commander to play, five mana to activate it. That is a lot. It's pretty slow. It's pretty telegraphed. If you have a big scary thing in your graveyard, your opponents are probably not going to let you untap with your commander. I wanted to have a lot of redundant pieces that let you bring your enchantments back of your own will. There's a lot of ways to do that. The rise of the Witch King is too black and a green for a sorcery. Each player sacrifices a creature. If you sacrifice the creature this way, you may return another permanent card from your graveyard to the battlefield. And the permanents. Oh yeah, permanent. Pretty sick. Four mana. Everybody sacks a thing. You sack your little shrine token that your commander makes and bring back your omniscience or your demolisher spawn or any number of real problems. Squirming emergence. You can return. You can return target non-land permanent card in your graveyard with mana value less than or equal to the number of permanent cards in your graveyard. So you can bring back a non-land permanent. You have 10 things in the graveyard. You can bring back something that costs less than 10. Man, that's pretty good. That's okay. Pretty good. And if you're tired of targeting things, you're in five colors. So you can play eerie ultimatum. Oh. You can get a white, black, black, green, green for a sorcery return, any number of permanent cards with different names from your graveyard to the battlefield. With different names? All your lands, all your enchantments, get it all back. Yeah, everything in the graveyard, slam it back onto the battlefield. If you've got the money to spend, replenish, returns all the enchantments from your graveyard to play. Spendy, spendy, spendy. But very good. Yeah, absolutely. And then you can also talk about the new one from Strixhaven. Restoration seminar. It has paradigm and it says return target non-land permanent card from your graveyard to the battlefield, but you get to do that every single turn. So if you, I would imagine this deck has a pretty strong ramp package. You're playing a lot of really expensive spells and your commander you want to get down as early as possible. So being able to cast this Restoration Seminar ahead of curve is going to be really good. Yeah, awesome. Finally, there's one more way to re... Well, there's a lot, but there's one more way to do it every single turn and that's Starfield with Nix. We'll bring an enchantment back from at the beginning of your upkeep. You may return target enchantment from your graveyard to the battlefield. And then also, I mean, as a game closer, Starfield with Nix also works pretty well. As long as you have five or more enchantments, each other non-oriented enchantment you control is a creature, and it's another types with power and toughness equal to its mana value. You're playing some big expensive enchantments in this deck. That's not how I thought I'd die to Amnisians, but it did happen. It did happen. I got hit with a 10-10 and then vanished. Pretty good. All right, let's move on to one of my least favorite commander designs of all time. That's one thing that we have in common is that we both hate this commander, Jota the Unifier. Yeah, so for anyone that hasn't had the pleasure of running into Jota the Unifier, he has all five colors, white, blue, black, red, green for a 5-5, human wizard, legendary creatures you control get plus X plus X, where X is the number of legendary creatures you control. You had minimum one with Jota in play. Whenever you cast a legendary spell from your hand, exile cards from the top of your library until you exile a legendary non-land card with lesser mana value, put it onto or you can cast it without paying its mana cost and put the rest on the bottom in a random order. So legendary cascade. Surely that isn't problematic. So Jota is usually a stack of whatever legendary creatures you'd like, and they all get onto the battlefield and have plus 9, plus 9. Just immediately, it's a very, very powerful commander, but I was like, okay, let's look at this commander that I don't typically like and see how creative we can get with it, how thoughtful we can be about how what goes into a Jota deck. And I do like the direction that you found. I think that it is, we're still playing a Jota deck, but at least we have a more solid direction other than just legendary soup. Yes. So I was like, what is an archetype that's been sporting a lot with legends? Jota is like a bunch of legends we could all put into the same deck and it would be sort of cool to see them all fighting on the same side. And for me, that was food. They keep making cool food commanders. They're everywhere. Like the past three sets we've had, food, synergy. They keep showing up. Every UB set has a food subtype thing going on. And there's a lot of really neat legends that you can build around. The one that I thought would be coolest. I love this. Is having a secret commander. Okay, okay. Asmarana, Mardica, Dicada, Kool-Dacar. Yeah. We've got it. I've got no problem. That's mostly it. Nobody, nobody check. I probably missed at least one syllable. But it's zero mana. Asmo zero mana. So if you have a one mana legend to cast, you're guaranteed to get an asmo out of your deck. Which is cool. And there's actually a surprising number of one mana legends that work with the strategy. Right. We'll cascade into asmo. And she's got a very powerful ability. I mean sacrificing two foods to have target creature deal six damage to itself is a really good removal spell. Yeah, that's business. If you can like, if you're like, I'm always going to try to have asmo on the battlefield. And I have a million legends in my deck that help me do that. So I was looking at like one mana legends that you could cast that are good to go Jota and one mana to cascade into asmo. And there's a lot. Yeah. That work pretty well with foods. Like the enigma jewel is just a blue legendary artifact that taps to add two colorless mana to activate. It's just abilities. But you can crack foods with that. Pretty cool. And it's a little soul ring for your activated abilities. Or like Momo, playful pet is a one mana legend when he leaves play, you make a food. Yeah. Yeah. Jota also triggers off of any legendary spell that you cast. So Talarian or Saractarian's soul cleaver is a one mana legendary artifact. It's an equipment. So the equipment creature has vigilance and they whenever artifacts or creatures hit the graveyard, it gets a counter. So as you're sacrificing your food to your asmo to kill things, actually that would be three counters. Yeah. If two foods have hit the graveyard and you've killed a creature. So the creature will get three plus and plus on counters. Yeah. I mean, so there's like some real synergy going on here. If you do want to build around asmo specifically, you need a pretty high density of one drops. Ten or 12 I think is probably enough to have one by the time Jota's on the board and you have the mana to cast a one drop. That same turn. But then I was like, ooh, food stuff. Yeah. There's so many cool things you can put in this deck. Like Samwise Gamgee and Peregrine Took are the immediate ones, but you combine them with the cabbage merchant. Right. And they get to work with a rag-a-ost deft gastronaut. And also you have blues. You can play the Goose Mother. It's all coming together. Yeah. One little one from the turtle set that I found was Lita, a little orphan amphibian. Yeah. Whenever another creature you control enters, you can choose one that hasn't been chosen. She can put the counter on herself. She either scries or she makes a food token. Hey, we like those around here. Nice. Yeah. Lita's a little like gala greeters. So all the food, the cards in one deck under one roof is really, really cool. I love this deck idea. Yeah. You don't have to build around asmo. Of course, you could just stick it full of all of the food legends you have sitting around and see what it does. I'm sure it'll do something great. Yep. And that minimum, I mean, you are still a Joda deck. And they're also huge. They're also enormous. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Very open-ended, Commander. Super open-ended. Can be built in a lot of different ways. The most common are as planeswalkers or plus and plus encounters or perhaps in fact. In fact is the way I see it built a lot. Yeah. Those are the big ones. So we were looking at Atraxa and just being like, okay, we have a lot of different kinds of counters these days. We've got keyword counters. We got shield counters. Charge counters. Charge counters. Like what is a cool way you could really flip Atraxa on her head and do something a little different. And yeah, we were like experience counters. It's kind of cool. Maybe. Yeah. You can play all the experience counter legends. There's not a ton of them. They don't really work together. But we found one idea that I really, really like. I don't know if this is the nicest way, but it's certainly really, really cool. And it's Atraxa stun counters. I love this. Yeah. So there's a ton of cards in the game that do stun counter things, tapping opponents, creatures, and Atraxa as a way to proliferate those stun counters, which in most games we'll just straight up take a creature out of the game. You may never run. To stun counters is like, that's impossible. You may never untap with that. Yeah. I mean, using proliferation to just hold down your opponent's board so you can crack in with an Atraxa or with your creatures that have like plus one counters on it or something like that. Yeah. I think that combination is pretty nasty. So let's talk about these cool stun counter cards first. Yeah. I love payoffs for stun counters, especially in recent years. Probably the best one is just fear of sleep paralysis. That's cards nuts. It kind of is a giant flying Atraxa in some way. So flying 6, 6 enchantment creature nightmare, whenever it or another creature enters and whenever you fully unlock a room, probably won't matter. There is one room that puts stun counters on things. There you go. You can tap a creature and then put a stun counter on it. It also says stun counters can't be removed from your opponent's control. Oh no. So not only are you locked under the Atraxa proliferating the stun counters forever, as long as this thing's in play, they just straight up never go. Now you have to answer the fear of sleep paralysis before you even start looking at Atraxa. Pretty brutal. Another one is a sensational Spider-Man. You want to read this one? I totally forgot that he did stun counters. I love the Spider-Man control. One white bluber, a 33 Spider-Human hero. Then Spider-Man attacks, taps target creature defending player controls and put a stun counter on it. You may remove up to three stun counters from among all permanence draw cards equal to the number of stun counters removed this way. This deck is going to have a lot of extraneous stun counters that removing three does not seem crazy. Yeah, and she's just filling up your hand every single turn. Oh yeah. You swing. It's really, really sweet. And it's also just a repeatable way to put stun counters on things, which is one of the things that we were looking for. We're also just putting counters on our opponent's creatures, so there's a lot of synergy for that. Generous Patron is a 1-4 elf advisor for three mana that supports two when it enters, so it puts some counters on your stuff that you can start growing with Atraxa. It also says whenever you put one or more counters on a creature you don't control. You can draw a card. Like stun counters. Oh yeah, and it triggers for every creature that you put. You can put any number of counters, but if you put one stun counter on three creatures, you'll draw three cards. Which is very cool. All right, another payoff I wanted to mention because it's awesome and it never works. It's Verity Circle. It's cards awesome. It's tunably whenever a creature and opponent controls becomes tapped, if it isn't being declared as an attacker, you may draw a card. It also is five mana. You can tap a creature without flying. So anytime you tap something down with your stun abilities, you draw a card with a Verity Circle. Pretty, pretty backbreaking. Pretty cool. All right. In this deck, we are probably going to need a lot of control elements. Having down the opponent's creatures is one way to do it, but there's also just a couple of cards that are very tidy in this deck. You really like split up. Oh, I'm a big fan of split up. Three mana to deal with most of the problems has been insane in my games. But it destroys all tapped creatures or all untapped creatures. So if you're like, okay, I've got the tapped creatures under control, but I need to answer everything else at this point, that's fine. You can blow up all your untapped creatures and mine hit a Traxa, but you can tap a Traxa. It's fine. Or you can be like, oh, I've got a bunch of stuff tapped, but my board is looking pretty sick. I'm going to blow up all of the tapped stuff that I tapped down. Yeah. I mean, the one big thing is that you do still want to play some efficient removal in this deck because tapping down creatures makes it so that they can attack. But if someone has an Avenger of Zendikar, we mentioned that one earlier, tapping it down doesn't do anything to stop the plan. There's a million plants here. They're all getting counters. So split up and Cloud's limit break can be a really cool way to answer those creatures. Cloud's limit break is an instance that also has a bunch of modes. You can destroy one tapped thing, one tapped thing from everyone or all the tapped things. Oh yeah. There's a million cards these days that put stun counters on your opponent's creatures, usually multiple creatures, which is sort of what makes this really good because the more creatures that have stun counters on them, the better the proliferating is, of course, because you put even more counters on it. So we're just going to run through a couple of these and keep in mind there's just a pajillion of them. Yeah, so pick your favorites. There's a whole bunch. I've been playing summon Valorfor and summon Shiva a lot. These cards are great. A summon Valorfor is five mana each opponent chooses a creature with the greatest mana value among creatures they control and return those to hand. But then on two, three, and four, it taps up to one creature and puts a stun counter on it. Summon Shiva. Yep, go ahead. So you have the first two chapters, tap a creature and put a stun counter on it. The third chapter draws a card for every tapped creature your opponent controls. Pretty good. Nice engine. But there's also a bunch of stuff like Rhyme Chill that just taps two creatures and puts stun counters on them. This is a mechanic that Wizards has been using in an evergreen way. Instead of icing stuff down and not having a way to demonstrate that, they use stun counters to make it very clear that this creature can't untap. So you should be able to find lots of super budget ways to tap your opponent's stuff and stun them. And then over here, we can move on to ways to actually close out the game. Yeah. Tapping down your opponent's creatures does not kill them. Because now they're mad. Yeah, now they're angry and they're like, just send me already. Please. So Hilda of the Icy Crown is probably just one of the best creatures in this sort of tap strategy that you can get into. She's a four mana, three, four, in Azorius. Whenever you tap an untapped creature and opponent controls, you may pay one. When you do choose one, you can make a four, four, white, and blue elemental creature token. That's big. You're going to be doing. Put a plus and plus on counter on each creature you control, great with the proliferation. And then you can also scry two and draw a card. She says everything in this deck. It feels like. Draws cards, putting counters on all your stuff to proliferate and be able to hit them next turn. So sick. We also have Will Breaker. If you want to read that one, his cards are nuts. Oh, I know Will. Three blue, blue, blue creature, human wizard. He's a two, three. Whenever a creature and opponent controls becomes the target of a spell or ability you control, you can control that creature for as long as you control Will Breaker. Yeah. So instead of just tapping the creatures down, they're mine now. Give them to me. I will kill you with them. I'll take those. Once they are unstunned, of course. Just give me a second. I'm coming. It takes a little bit of time. But being able to actually take advantage of all of this and transition it into a win condition is going to be really important because you need to close this door. And a good way to do that is with plus and plus on counters. This is just the best way to make a Traxa or your other creatures ginormous. So we'll just talk about a couple of these. Noble's Heritage is a great one that I've been putting in commanders that are more than two mana. It is two mana for a legendary enchantment background. It says, commander creatures you own have win this creature enters the battlefield and at the beginning of your upkeep, each player may put two plus one plus one counters on a creature they control. For each opponent that does, you gain protection from that player until your next turn. Your opponents probably won't take the counters from this. Maybe they might. Maybe they carry their way though because if a thing gets too big, it's tapped and stunned. And then Quartz of Garen Brig. Quartz of Garen Brig. Yeah, this one's nuts when you have a flying Vigilant Death Touch commander. When it enters, you become the monarch and at the beginning of your upkeep, distribute two plus one plus one counters among up to two target creatures. Then if you're the monarch, double the number of plus one counters on each creature you control. Yuck! Yeah, that's a lot of counters. You're fine distributing some counters. You're fine proliferating those doubling them. That speeds up a very fast clock. And again, it's going to be difficult to take the monarch for you. You gotta say, all their creatures are stunned so you'll never lose the monarch either. So just doubles every single turn. Yeah, awesome. There's a lot of really cool payoffs and ways to manipulate stun counters. So I think this Attraxa deck is actually pretty neat. It is still an Attraxa control deck. So it is going to be very powerful. It is something that your opponents are going to be like, hey, you get to play that once a week. Yeah, it's important to keep these things in mind. Not just for Attraxa, but a lot of the more powerful, more popular commanders on this list. It is a different way to play them, but you should still expect similar reactions from your opponents whenever your deck gets to do very powerful things. Yeah, like sure, it's not that Attraxa deck, but it's a Attraxa deck. I know what I'm looking at. And yeah, don't expect, don't play dumb about how powerful your commander is. These are powerful commanders. That's why they're popular. So I wanted to take a second and just talk about the idea for this episode and why we decided to do it. And it was this idea of being able to look at a commander and sort of squint or sort of read between the lines and figure out a way to build it off axis or at the very least sort of zoomed in the way that it normally does. Because I think we're getting such generically powerful commanders these days and they're very popular that just building them with all the best cards in class tends to be like, well, my deck looks like everybody else's and it's a little bit too powerful. So being able to zoom in and be like, okay, I'm building a dinosaur deck, but not any dinosaur deck, a dinosaur blink deck. So I'm not even looking at this category of dinosaur. I'm looking at this smaller box. The specific me-ship dinosaurs that do this one thing, I like that. I mean, because what a lot of players want is to feel like a special snowflake with their deck. I added very unique cards to this deck and this allows you to do it with commanders that are more popular in our format. So yeah, here's a couple of ways that we thought about to do this with any commander that you can think of that you like. Finding like unique twists on what a commander does or the archetype that it's in is cool. Like you know, a traxa with stun counters, finding unique weird counters instead of just you know, the most popular, more powerful ones. Yeah, just sort of adding another comma on the end of it is a great thing where it's like it's a traxa counters, comma stun. It's not just a traxa all the best counters. We also mentioned talking about like restrictions, adding a restriction onto your deck or being like, I'm only going to play, you know, frogs in this deck in my blink deck. Instead of, you know, the normal generic blink packages, you'll find something very cool about those sorts of restrictions that don't necessarily like just completely neuter the power level of your deck. Sometimes you find that those things can be just as powerful and also fun to play. Yeah. I mean, just like with goblins, you look at goblins and you're like, goblins are really good at making a lot of stuff. But what's really good with a lot of stuff? Or what does a lot of stuff give me other than just damage? A lot of stuff gives me a lot of cards if I focus on that or a lot of mana if I focus on that. And so looking at the step two, I guess, being like where like maybe the road takes you one direction, but you're going to turn right where most people stay on the main road. And the other thing is I would say looking at the kind of secondary ability of some of these commanders, like what we did with Goshen Tai, a lot of commanders, especially these days where they have like just, you know, three value engine lines of text, a lot of them get ignored like with Goshen Tai. So if we can find more commanders like that where it's like, oh, that part of this deck never really gets utilized that much. What if we just went all in on that plan? What if it's less about the tokens and it's more about the reanimation for sure. Really really cool stuff. Yeah, you can do this too. You can look at a commander that you like and be like, well, everybody's building it in this way and like focus in on it. Find why you really like it and maybe focus on that section of it. It can be challenging. It takes a little bit more time, a little bit more research, but it's more rewarding in the end. Absolutely. We talk about some commanders that we built in sort of weird ways in just a moment, but if you want to pick up any of the cards, any of the decks that we talked about in today's episode, you can support the show by going to cardkingdom.com slash command. Card Kingdom is the very best place to buy a whole bunch of cards in one spot. I know I get frustrated when my cards start coming in and piecemeal and I just want to sit down and build and Card Kingdom's got so many cards under one roof that you can paste in a deck list. They're going to have most of it there. You can pick all the versions that you want. You only have to pay shipping once and it's going to show up safe and sound in a little plastic box with a sticker and a packing peanut to keep them safe. We love Card Kingdom and you will too. Use our affiliate link at cardkinddom.com slash command. Once those cards are in your hand, you've got to support them. You've got to keep them safe. You've got to support us using our affiliate link at elderbro.com slash command. Elderbro has deck boxes, sleeves, binders. They've got the stuff that you need to keep your collection organized, safe and looking good. If you haven't tried out Apex Leaves yet, I don't know how. We've been singing their praises for ages. They're really nice. They've really cracked art sleeves that just last a long time, shuffle really well and look good. If you haven't checked out Apex Leaves, give them a look. We really love them and they've got a lot of cool other stuff there as well, especially make sure you've signed up for that newsletter. They've got great deals where they just clean house and get ready for a new set to come out. If you're not signed up for that newsletter, you don't know when it's going to be. So what are you doing? Got to find out. Go to oldpro.com slash command and you're supporting the show. All right, let's talk about some weirdos that we've built. Some commanders that were like, I know how I'm supposed to build it. What if we didn't do that? Not that though. If we did this other thing instead. Yeah. I literally like a lot of these decks and I'm excited to talk about them. The one that I've been talking about the most lately, I think is my Noren stickers deck. Noren's a chaos deck. It's a burn deck and I have some elements of that, but I really wanted to focus my Noren deck on doing something weird and doing something that really only a commander like this can do, which was get a sticker on that guy and I can reuse the sticker ability over and over and over and over and over again. Yeah. What? Weird. It's so cool. You're taking a commander that very much wants to do a very specific thing and you're kind of reaching as far in the opposite direction because Noren really doesn't want a sticker. He's like, no thank you. Like the adhesive? I don't like the way it feels and anytime you cast a sticker spell, he leaps. Yes, he's like, I'm out of here. I'm not staying for this. So you've got to figure out how to get a sticker on him and when you do, it's really good. Yeah, you found such a unique deck idea. That's so beautiful. Like in the way that it plays and the strategy. It's very rewarding because if you can get a sticker on him, you're like, yeah. And look at it go. Yeah, that was super cool. Pretty sweet. What about you? Yeah, so I have a deck that uses a very spooky commander and I always have to be like, oh wait a second, every time I pull it out, it is Tiamat, the classic dragon from the Dungeons and Dragons set, but I built it as not a dragon type of deck, but a Dungeons and Dragons type of deck where instead of playing all the dragon synergies and dragon tempests and things like that, I'm playing a bunch of adventurer cards and ways to venture into the dungeon, ways to roll dice and Tiamat is more of just a five color thematic addition to the deck. I mean, Tiamat's like the dragons of Dungeons and Dragons. She's the god of dragons. Like she's the gal. Yeah, so it's a really, really cool deck. I love the style of it. It's a unique play style that whenever I pull it out, it's always like kind of refreshing for people. They're like, oh, everybody gets stomped by dragons. I'm like, hold on a second. You're going to join me in an adventure. We're going to go on a quest together. Yeah, it's really, really fun. It's fun. I mean, I think these are the decks that really stick with me are the ones that I figure out how to build in a special way. I think those are the ones that last longer in your collection where you're like, well, if I can't take the deck apart because this deck's mine. Nobody's got like this version, which is very cool. The one that I'm like most excited about and still working on is I have a Captain Sisei deck that lets me tutor for any legendary permanent. It's very powerful. Captain Sisei is sort of known for being a stacks commander because you can search for the right stacks pieces at the right time. And it was a real bogeyman for a long time. It's still very powerful, but I use it specifically to find Agatha Soul Cauldron, which I just think is a really cool, fun, powerful card. So I built the deck with green, white, activated ability legends. Sweet. So it's all built around weird activated abilities that I can give to legends and have multiple legends with those. It's neat. It does some strange things and it's toolbox in the best way where you're like, I can combine cards that should not have been combined. That's actually really sick. It's cool. If you're feeling real frisky, you can exile your Sisei under the Agatha Soul Cauldron. Anything can be a Sisei. And then you have this abundance of wealth. Green, white legends are really good at making a ton of mana too, so it lets you dump your hand. So ballas and all that stuff. So yeah, it's cool. It was a very niche way to be like, okay, I'm looking at specifically green, white legends with activated abilities that might care about counters or tapping. What are those? It's really, really cool. It's a really cool deck building. It's kind of restriction almost, but also it just kind of blooms into something that's maybe even better than the original in some ways. What I like about this topic and just the decks that we're talking about today is that it's a really cool place for these classic commanders that kind of just fall off once they've been solved. Right? Like you've seen Ardragon, you've seen Miram Sentinel Worm, all these Traxa and things like that. And they're so popular, so beloved in the format. And it's sad to see them go once their time has passed or they get overshadowed by the next cool popular commander. And so this is a way to kind of revive them and bring them back to kind of the forefront of our hearts and our minds and the format and things like that. Absolutely. While also building them in a unique way. Look at them in a whole new light. And of course, let us know in the comments all of your cool deck ideas and unique ways that you've put a spin on popular commanders. And make sure you go check out Reggie's stuff. Well, again, we're going to leave all of his links in the show notes, but it is time to go. It's time to say thank you to our amazing team here at the command zone. Thank you to Karina Cruz, Josh Diaz, John Schneider, Rob Galati, Jamie Block, Jordan Pridgen, Jake Boss, Becky Bell, Eric Lem, Manson Lung, Josh Murphy, Evan Limburger, Sam Waldo, Josh Lee Kwai, Jimmy Wong, and of course, to Reggie for taking time to record with me today. We hope you enjoyed it. We'll see you next time. Bye bye. Don't you wish everything was more rewarding? With a racket and almost everything is. You can earn cashback on those new shoes you've been wanting. You can save on the next trip you book. You can cash in on groceries. Just join shop your favorite brands and save. Boots, Sephora, Assos, Selfridges, M&S, Sainsbury's. The list is long. Save online at over 550 stores and when it's time to redeem those rewards, get your money exactly how you want it. Choose bank transfer or PayPal. So go ahead, take a trip, fill a cart, get a new outfit. Racket and is a world of rewards. Join today for free. 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