Hello and welcome to Daily Commander!

Today we are going to take a look at Ich-Tekik, Salvage Splicer

A five mana 1/1 that makes a 3/3 Golem and when an artifact leaves the battlefield you put a counter on Ich-Tekik and all Golem’s you control and also is the first Commander with Partner that we’ll be looking at.

This is an interesting build to look at because a Commander with Partner is half of the equation. There are a huge number of possibilities to consider depending on the kind of build that we want to go with, but what I want to take a look at is exploiting Ich-Tekik’s enters ability.

Now the best way to make that work without consistently kill Ich-Tekik is to utilize blink and flicker effects, and there are two colors that use that the best: white and blue.

Unfortunately the only two-color Commander that is white and blue that has Partner, has no real synergy with Ich-Tekik.

With that in mind, the Partner Commander that will work best with this particular build is Rebbec, Architect of Ascension.

White has the stronger blink and flicker effects, and Rebbec gives our artifacts protection for each mana value of artifacts we control.

This is fine since we aren’t planning to run equipment, and any artifacts we do choose to put in our deck are really going to provide us with some sort of advancement of our board.

Mana rocks will help us ramp out to Ich-Tekik, there will be plenty of artifact token generation, and of course some utility artifacts that will help advance our board position.

Something like Nexus of Becoming allows us to have artifacts on the battlefield while simultaneously having Golems that provide benefit.

We can even turn any utility creatures into Golems if we need to, which gives them much better protection and benefit for future turns when we start blinking Ich-Tekik.

There are also a plethora of other artifacts that we can use to help advance our board state, mostly because with higher mana value Commanders, we’ll be wanting to make sure we can cast them onto the battlefield safely.

With green we have a decent amount of ramp as well as creatures that can make Clue, Map, and Food tokens to help draw cards, buff our creatures, ramp more, or help us stabilize in the later game.

We will need to hold a few back to make sure that we can buff our creatures, but that shouldn’t be that hard with a mass amount of token makers.

We should also make sure that we have artifacts that can sacrifice themselves like a Mishra’s Bauble or Sungrass Egg to help us draw or ramp when we are starting to run low.

Now that we have the artifacts sorted, we need to get some strong blink and flicker effects.

While we would want the more immediate exile and return to the battlefield effects to accrue immediate value, the slower exile until end of turn is good to protect Ich-Tekik when a board wipe is on its way.

My favorite blink/flicker effect comes in Teleportation Circle because it just does it every turn, but it can be a bit pricier than some people would like.

I also think that having a small number of board wipes will be necessary, especially if your opponents are playing with a bunch of artifacts. Now we need to be careful in which board wipes we play, or at the very least be ready to provide protection to the Golems we control.

Now this is where the price of the deck can increase because a lot of things that give mass indestructible to your stuff tend to err on the more expensive side.

While single target indestructible can work, if you have a mass quantity of Golem’s or Rebbec out, those may not be able to work.

A cheap way to keep your Golem’s safe is For the Common Good, which you can cost for X = 0 and still have your tokens safe from a huge board wipe. The benefit of Ich-Tekik’s ability is that it counts all artifacts and can still apply the counters when destroyed.

This is a deck that needs a lot of moving parts to make effective, which means that there will be many times that a reset would be required.

Like I mentioned earlier, Ich-Tekik is a higher mana value Commander, which means that you need to be ready when you deploy.

If you cast Ich-Tekik when you hit five mana, you have to be concerned with board wipes at that point, which means that unless you have a decent amount of reanimation in the deck, Ich-Tekik is just going to be more expensive in the long run.

If you have seven or eight mana, then you can start comfortably casting Ich-Tekik, provided that you have the protection to keep them around.

This is a long game deck, so you need to be prepared for it.

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

Peace,

From J.M. Casual