Hello and welcome to Daily Commander! Today we are going to be taking a look at Minn, Wily Illusionist!

Coming in from the Forgotten Realms is a three mana 1/3 that creates an Illusion creature token whenever you draw your second card in a turn that gets stronger for each other Illusion you control, and when an Illusion you control dies, allows you to put a permanent from your hand to the battlefield with mana value less than or equal to that Illusion’s power.

So for the first time on his blog, I am going to go through and make a typal Commander This means that the focus of the deck is to have a bunch of Illusions and accrue value for them.

Along with that we should have cards that reward you for drawing more than one card each turn, of which there are many ways to facilitate drawing cards in blue.

Cheap one mana cantrips like Opt and Consider are musts, along with a few other creatures that reward you for drawing your second card, or even more cards if you can manage it.

While you do have plenty of options to draw cards, the question becomes what permanents can you put onto the battlefield?

Looking at the available Illusions at our disposal, there is actually a decent variety of power levels available, with the highest being 7 power in Illusionary Wall.

Now most of the time we aren’t going to always have the higher power illusions available to us, but what we will have is an Illusion that grows for each Illusion we control with Minn’s ability.

One annoying factor to consider is that a lot of older Illusions or ones that err on the higher power side, have the somewhat common Illusion downside in that if they are targeted with a spell or ability, then they must be sacrificed.

Now this would normally be very bad, but we want them to die, in order to activate Minn’s ability since it triggers off of every Illusion and not just the tokens.

Other than having other Illusions to bring out, lands are a safe bet since Minn allows for any permanent, but some enchantments or even battles to get some long term value.

If it fits your budget, Rhystic Study to get more draws, Back to Basics to punish greedy mana bases, or if you want to get around the Illusion drawbacks, you can choose Aura’s to put on those Illusions.

Using a niche trick involving how Aura’s interact with being “put” onto the battlefield instead of “cast”, then you can avoid targeting the Illusion with Aura’s and make them even more effective at drawing cards or sneaking damage through.

Minn actually allows for some flexibility in how you can play them. you can either choose to go full aggro and just attack with massive Illusions, or you can go for a more control style gameplay, utilizing enchantments that are debilitating for your opponents while not hurting you at all.

If you don’t really like the Illusions that are available to you, then you can definitely go for some “Illusions” instead.

Using effects like Leyline of Transformation or creatures that have Changeling, can really expand what sorts of things you can put into play. Blue has an interesting number of large creatures for a moderate mana value, but have the downside that they die if they attack if you don’t sacrifice lands or pay a cost of some sort.

Now we turn what would normally be a downside into upside with getting more permanents onto the battlefield for a steep discount.

Like I said, this deck has more flexibility than it would seem, but what are the weaknesses that they all need to deal with?

Well anything that punishes draws can prove to be detrimental, and as I recall the first Daily Commander I made mentioned some draw hate.

Not only that, but since this deck has a reliance on having your Commander on the battlefield, you are very susceptible to creature removal, meaning that you’ll need to deploy when you have some answers.

Which bring another problem in that you will need to find a good balance of permanents and non-permanents to make the deck work, but not fold to removal.

It also doesn’t help that this deck also has a need for the graveyard for it to do it’s magic.

I think that Minn has a lot of neat building plans, but can also be fairly fragile. Nonetheless this was an interesting Commander to build around.

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

Peace,

From J.M. Casual