Hello and welcome to Daily Commander!

Today we are going to be talking about Kuon, Ogre Ascendant!

A three mana 2/4 that flips into an enchantment that has your opponents sacrifice a creature at the beginning of each of their upkeeps.

Flip Commanders are neat build arounds in my opinion, purely because it’s a challenge to see how fast you can flip them.

Now this is not to difficult to get on the field, a single Dark Ritual can get Kuon on the battlefield turn one, but then it will be subjected to any form of destruction.

The type of deck that this is going to end up is very much an instant speed kill deck, but we also have to consider that we are going to be sacrificing creatures on our turns as well.

So we combine it with aristocrat effects.

Anything that benefits from our creatures dying plus any creatures that have an effect when they die are also a necessity for this deck.

Having these creatures in the deck will definitely makes sure that we can operate even if a board wipe is played, and will even be a bad idea for your opponents to play any sweepers.

Now that we have a way to maintain being a threat, how what is the best way to satisfy Kuon’s flip condition?

While board wipes are the first thought, we can’t have destruction based board wipes. We need to take advantage of Kuon’s high toughness and use toughness reduction based removal.

This will handle a lot of smaller creatures that are played during the early turns and has no significant effect on Kuon.

Now we of course need to play instant removal, things like Cut Down and Go for the Throat, but the hardest part will be needing to keep up with higher volumes of creatures.

When Kuon transforms, we can get at least one creature to die on each opponent’s turn, which with something like Blood Artist that’s a boon, but what if the opponent has a lot of creatures or worse yet, no creatures?

Well we need to take advantage of another sneaky benefit to being a mono-colored deck with a Commander with three black pips, and that is Devotion.

This opens us up to having a massive swing if we happen to stick a bunch of creatures and enchantments onto the battlefield, especially if they have a lot of black pips.

There are also creatures like Underworld Hermit which makes a ton of Squirrels that we can sacrifice for Kuon’s ability.

The major weakness of the deck, as I’m sure you can see, is that if there is something that keeps you from gaining death triggers, then the part of your deck that is an aristocrat deck will suffer.

However, if you have the devotion back up plan then you should be able to pivot in that direction relatively easily. Black has been getting better removal each set, so being able to sustain yourself shouldn’t be too difficult.

It really is interesting that this deck is relatively straightforward to build, Kuon ends up being a fairly decent midrange of Commander. This makes my life easier because it’s easier to write about, but also not as interesting for you guys as it ends up sounding basic.

Oh well, such is the way of choosing a random commander.

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

Peace,

From J.M. Casual