Hello and welcome to Daily Commander!

Today we are going to be talking about Mishra, Tamer of Mak Fawa!

We have a five mana 4/4 that gives your permanents ward that has your opponents sacrifice a permanent and for each artifact in your graveyard has unearth for one a red and a black.

Now this is a straightforward strategy, getting massive and expensive artifacts into the graveyard and reanimate them, but we can do a little twist on that formula.

Now Mishra’s ability affects all artifacts in your graveyard, and while having big creatures is nice, what if we decided to sweeten the pot.

There have been plenty of equipment that auto equip onto creatures lately, so why don’t we take advantage of those?

No one expects an artifact reanimator deck to be a Voltron style deck as well.

The plan is simple, we have artifact creatures inhabit the graveyard that we can use and abuse as necessary, while also committing some space in the deck for some equipment.

Now we can use plenty of equipment in the early game, especially if we can stick a Hammer of Nazahn onto the battlefield to equip it to Mishra.

Equipment is normally balanced in having to pay the equip cost to attach it to a creature, but if we have something like Hammer of Nazahn out, then we can suit up Mishra no problem.

We can use things like Colossus Hammer to get a huge swing in or we can use a more expensive Equipment like Embercleave to auto equip onto Mishra after we loaded him up with other Equipment.

As far as creatures, we can have the usual suite of large artifact creatures that are either really expensive or have a huge downside like Cumulative Upkeep.

A couple of personal choice are Phyrexian Soulgorger, Metalwork Colossus, Draco, Barricade Breaker, Mage-Ring Responder are some big guys to immediately go for.

I would avoid anything that has a death trigger since anything that was brought back via Unearth will be exiled when they leave the battlefield.

Now one of the big things to keep in mind is that this game plan needs a decent chunk of mana, so mana rocks are a must, but the best way to take advantage of this is to have a way to use the artifact with Unearth as a way to get some value for it.

Slobad, Iron Golem can be used to get a ton of mana to cast artifacts from you hand (of which you should have a lot of), so you can have some way to make use of a creature that is going to die anyway.

There will come a point where you have exhausted all the artifacts in your graveyard, what do you do then?

Wizards of the Coast has done a decent job making interacting with cards in exile exceedingly difficult, but having Karn, the Great Creator becoming significantly cheaper after being banned in Pioneer makes things a little easier for you.

Now if you wanted to add a control element to your deck, then you can definitely add Mycosynth Lattice to make sure your opponents are locked out of the game when Karn is out on the battlefield.

This is a combo that can upset people, so be warned.

The biggest weakness of this deck is as usual graveyard hate, but Karn does help soften that blow a little bit.

You can even be lighter on your protection suite because of Mishra’s static ability giving your permanents such an expensive Ward cost.

Now this benefit can be mitigated if your opponent has a lot of things to sacrifice that they don’t mind sacrificing like tokens, but that is why you still have a couple of protection pieces, just to be safe.

Having recursive based protection is good because it helps keep Mishra on the battlefield longer since you need that mana to get your artifacts out of the graveyard.

Now Mishra absolutely folds to exile based removal, and unfortunately Karn can’t bring Mishra back because he isn’t an artifact (at least this version of Mishra).

Mishra is an interesting Commander because while building him can be very straightforward, there is a way to add a twist to it to keep it fresh.

Most of the time the default gameplay loop will be getting the large artifact creatures onto the battlefield and swing, but there will be times when you can surprise an opponent with a neat Voltron backup plan.

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

Peace,

From J.M. Casual