Hello and welcome to Daily Commander!

Today we are going to be talking about Roon of the Hidden Realm!

A five mana 4/4 with vigilance and trample and an activated ability of 2 mana and tap Roon to exile another creature until the beginning of the next end step.

Blink Commanders are always interesting to play around with because it exploits what is usually a once per turn enters the battlefield effect.

Now Roon is interesting because the ability allows us not to just target our own things, but also our opponent’s things, at least until the end of the turn.

This means that we have access to a bit of removal, provided Roon sticks on the battlefield for a turn.

As you would expect, we should be taking a look at strong enters the battlefield abilities, and in all of these colors there is a draw a card effect upon entering the battlefield, so a few of those would work nicely.

While Roon has a solid activated ability, it will require some decent mana generation.

Eladamri’s Vineyard is an option to consider, especially if you want to attempt to have Roon be a pseudo group hug Commander, or at the very least have that leverage for your opponents to not immediately target you.

Not only that, but something else to consider is to have ways to untap Roon to reuse the ability whenever you have the mana available on your opponent’s turns.

Luckily for us there are a plethora of combat tricks that are intended to make a surprise blocker that also untap the creature and provide a buff. This will make Roon even more resilient as a removal piece, blocking problematic creatures while also able to exile a creature for a turn.

With all of that in mind, what are some ways we can make the best use for a blink Commander?

It took me a minute to figure out, but then it came to me since Duskmourn was the most recent set that released (at the time of writing this).

Face down creatures, when exiled, will return to the battlefield face up, which means that we a have a brand new avenue to look at Roon with.

Morph, Manifest, Megamorph, Disguise, Cloak, Manifest Dread are all abilities that can bring in face down creatures, and since Khan’s block a lot of the best ones will have a high flip cost to compensate for being stronger.

However, most of the effects to put cards face down cost around three mana, so getting those onto the battlefield are easy enough.

This means that anything you can put onto the battlefield, so long as it’s a permanent, with a face down mechanic can be put back onto the battlefield for a considerably lower cost, meaning that we can cheat in big things to help swing the game in out favor.

Of course the immediate ideas are big bombs like Eldrazi or Blightsteel Colossus, but those tend to be very pricey, so something like Jin-Gitaxias, Core Augur can also work if you want to go for a control type of build or Worldspine Wurm if you just want big beats.

The fun part about a blink Commander in multiple colors means that we can have taking advantage on the benefits that those sort of effects have.

Roon not only allows you to take advantage of enters the battlefield effects or cheating in big creatures for a discount, but also provide it’s own form of protection in exiling a problematic Commander or creature.

Of course this doesn’t effect itself, but if it was able to do that, then Roon would probably be seeing more play.

As it stands Roon makes for a blink Commander that has several plans to make the game variety much more interesting.

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

Peace,

From J.M. Casual