Hello and welcome to the first Daily Commander!

For this first Daily Commander, I will be talking about Adamaro, First to Desire, which is weirdly apt.

So this is a 3 mana */* which cares about the cards in your opponents hands to determine its own power and toughness.

Now this is not the most ideal Commander to work with, but it is definitely an interesting challenge.

If you are like me then the first thing to come into your mind is utilizing one of red’s most dangerous features: wheel effects.

Now for those of you who don’t know, a wheel effect is where a player discards their hand and refills it either with the same number of cards that they had originally or seven cards or some variant, named after the card Wheel of Fortune, which was printed originally in Alpha.

Now this is a double edged sword in many cases, because not only are you providing yourself with a fresh hand for a benefit, but you are also providing your opponents with more cards.

So how do we mitigate wheel effects?

We punish the draws.

In essence the plan is to become a Group Slug burn deck, meaning that we are benefitting everyone at the table while also doing a serious amount of damage along the way.

While red doesn’t have as many draw hate cards, there are still a few that we can use in conjunction with wheel effects to make things better for us, with one being a two for one special.

The sleeper hit of the deck is going to be a card called Molten Psyche

This card is simultaneously a wheel effect while also punishing draws, which when played in conjunction with other similar effects, this can be a serious hit to an opponent.

We can achieve Metalcraft pretty easily with mana rocks like Arcane Signet, Sol Ring, Ruby Medallion if your budget allows for it , cheap ways to make artifacts like Voldaren Epicure or even cheap artifacts like Experimental Synthesizer.

In the most likely scenario, you play this on turn three with Metalcraft on and burn your opponents for 3-5 damage.

We still need to continue punishing the draws, which thankfully Duskmourn has provided another way to punish the number of wheel effects that we should be using.

While the first strike on your turn is nice incidental value, we aren’t really aiming to attack. If we can get a bit of damage in that’ll be nice, but not the big plan.

Another thing to keep in mind is that we will be discarding A LOT of cards, so we will need to take advantage of effects that help synergize with that.

Madness, Flashback, Retrace, Aftermath, and cards that allow you to recast things from the graveyard are definitely going to be necessary. I would also keep in mind that you would probably need a slightly higher land count (37-40) to make sure that you can actually hit the land drops as you are churning through your deck.

Now, the big question, how do we win?

As you may have noticed, a lot of the times the damage that we are going to be doing is small, and burn as a strategy is difficult to run successfully in Commander. While this is a quirky Group Slug burn deck, it’s still a burn deck and we need to use burn deck’s best friends: damage increasers and multipliers.

While some damage increasers and multipliers can run a higher price (in mana value and in price), there are still a couple that can be used effectively.

A bunch of the cards we have will be burn cards, and a lot of them ideally should have some way to recur them from the graveyard or we should have some ways to recur them so we will be consistently needling our opponents until we can get a damage increaser or multiplier on the battlefield to really put the hurt on.

The biggest weaknesses of the deck should be apparent. With how often you’ll be wheeling your deck, there will be times when the pieces you need or want are in the graveyard.

Any piece of graveyard hate makes the deck less reliable and can really put a damper on your strategy. Such is the way of card games.

It doesn’t help that the Adamaro doesn’t really play into the strategy, since it mostly requires your opponents to have more cards in hand and doesn’t do anything else.

Being a mono-colored Commander makes things more difficult because we don’t have a lot of answers to certain other strategies, especially in red.

We need to focus on our own strategy and truck forward. A deck like this is not going to win a lot of the time, and depending on your budget will be more or less effective if you can manage to get the stronger damage multipliers and wheels. Weirdly you may even be able to occasionally mill someone out if they get greedy.

While Adamaro is not a great Commander, the ability is an interesting way to make use of the tools that red has to make a neat deck.

Thank you for reading and I will see you tomorrow for the next Daily Commander!

Peace,

From J.M. Casual