Hello and welcome to Daily Commander!

Today we are going to be talking about Anax, Hardened in the Forge!

Anax is a three mana */3 that has power equal to your devotion to red and whenever Anax or another nontoken creature you control dies, you make a 1/1 Satyr that can’t block, but you make two if a creature had power 4 or greater.

A devotion deck is an interesting build challenge because you need leverage useful on field abilities while not doing nothing.

Enchantments and creatures are the ideal way to go, so that’s what we’re going to focus on.

Now while I would like to go for a Voltron type of strategy, red’s protection is a little limited so there is a high probability that Anax is going to die a couple of times.

So we need anthem effects, but there is a problem with that. While there are quite a few anthem effects coming from artifacts, that doesn’t help devotion.

However there are really good creature lord effects in red, and they also happen to help with our devotion plan. The only caveat is that we’ll need to add another strategy to our deck.

Goblins have some of the best creature lords, especially because these lords also have multiple red pips.

The plan now becomes a full on aggro assault with goblins, with some support from other red pip heavy creatures.

Goblins like Goblin King, Goblin Trashmaster, and Goblin Chieftain are some of the heavy hitters, especially because not only do they give your goblins buffs, but give an additional ability or provide some sort of utility.

Goblin King gives mountainwalk, Goblin Chieftain gives haste, and Goblin Trashmaster allows you to sacrifice a goblin to destroy an artifact.

It also helps that there are plenty of other goblins also happen to be red pip heavy, but we aren’t just going to be taking advantage of goblins.

Homura, Human Ascendant is a below rate creature with a subpar ability, but when it dies we can flip it into an anthem that gives our creatures +2/+2, flying and firebreathing.

Which means that we can sacrifice Homura to an effect like Collateral Damage to burn our opponent or Infernal Plunge to ramp us into something, and we have a massive buff for our creatures that actually make things tricky for our opponent.

If they wipe the board when we have Anax, a bunch of goblins and goblin lords on the field with Homura’s Essence on the battlefield, they would need to use some exile based removal to make sure that Anax doesn’t trigger.

Now how do we win?

The ideal way to win would be through combat damage, but if our goal is to make a bunch of small things onto the battlefield due to goblins or Anax’s effect, let’s make another use for them.

Impact Tremors can definitely help speed up our aggro plan by dealing a ton of damage to each opponent when all of the tokens come in and we swing out.

What would especially be good is if we also take that part into our own hands.

If we have a bunch of creatures, swing out and deal a whole bunch of damage, then we can use something like Blasphemous Act to clear the board of any stragglers, kill our high powered creatures with Anax out, then make a bunch of Satyr tokens.

With Impact Tremors out we deal a ton of damage with those Satyr’s entering, and we have a massive board that needs to be dealt with.

Sure they can’t block, but our goal isn’t to block.

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

Peace,

From J.M. Casual