Hello and welcome to Daily Commander!

Today we are going to be taking a look at Damia, Sage of Stone!

We have a massive 7 mana 4/4 that has deathtouch, skips your draw step and at the beginning of your upkeep, you draw until you have seven cards in hand.

This is a quirky Commander, it is a mana intensive card that gives you insane amounts of card draw, should they not be removed.

Now thankfully the three colors gives us some flexibility, but the question is what sort of strategy do we run?

The most ideal strategy is to lean into the biggest part of the card, and that is taking advantage of being able to effectively wheel every turn.

There have been a few cards that have been printed that reward you while you draw a bunch of cards, so we should start off there.

Something like Ominous Seas out alongside Damia allows us to make one, maybe even two Kraken tokens a turn, which is not the worst thing to have around.

There are also plenty of low mana creatures that reward you for having drawn your second card each turn or have power equal to the number of cards that you have drawn in a turn.

Of course there are plenty of creatures that just get a +1/+1 counter whenever you draw a card, so you should play a number of those, just to make sure that you are able to have a board presence.

Protection will be your next biggest issue, because having a 7 mana Commander means that in order to cast them without being worried that they will immediately be destroyed is important.

The best way to deal with having a big mana Commander is to go for a more general midrange plan, pack tons of removal and maintain a fairly even board state until you are ready to deploy.

You will probably end up having a few more board wipes and spot removal than most other decks, which means that you’ll have a little more flexibility in playing removal than most other players.

Playing spot removal in Commander is always tricky because in some cases it can be difficult to determine what the most problematic card on the field is.

With black and green you have access to most types of removal so the issue more so comes in what do you remove. Usually a Commander can be a safe option, but sometimes removing a mana rock can help slow a problematic player if they got a Sol Ring early for example.

Blue also gives you access to counter spells, which are even more difficult to assess in Commander, but my general rule of thumb is that it countering a Commander is usually a safe bet.

Now the question becomes how do we win? Well we need to take advantage of all the card draw we have, and the best way to do that is making sure your opponents don’t draw anything else.

Mill in Commander is an offbeat strategy at the best of times and almost impossible to get working effectively every other time.

The biggest weakness of mill in Commander is that you need to mill three other players with 99 card decks, most of which may have some sort of recursion or may have a major benefit in having cards in the graveyard.

However, the biggest advantage that we’ll have is the speed in which we mill our opponents.

With Damia in play, the floor is that we mill two cards every turn and the ceiling is that we mill fourteen cards each turn. Generally prefer to look at averages rather than extremes because they are most likely to occur.

So more likely we’ll end up milling our opponents between 6-8 cards each turn, not including any other incidental draw we have in our deck. Or, if you have the budget for it, Sheoldred the Apocalypse to drain your opponents into oblivion while widening the gap for you drawing so many cards.

This paired with ways to get our opponents graveyards into exile like Leyline of the Void or Tormod’s Crypt, and we have a recipe for a midrange to control style deck.

Damia is tricky to build around because of the high mana value, but with some ramp and removal, we can make a solid enough deck to be a contender.

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

Peace,

From J.M. Casual