Hello and welcome to Daily Commander!

Today we are going to be taking a look at Ovika, Enigma Goliath!

A seven mana 6/6 with flying and Ward 3 mana and 3 life with whenever you cast a noncreature spell you make X 1/1 Phyrexian Goblin creature tokens where X was that spells mana value and those tokens gain haste.

Now this is a massive Commander that has a solid go wide effect, but unlike Jarad from yesterday, it is a bit more difficult for us to make use of going all in on pure noncreature spells, but I do think that having essentially a mirror from Jarad is a neat challenge so that is what we will do.

Now we have access to all sorts of other card types at our disposal since this activates on any noncreature spell, so what’s the plan.

Well luckily we can make use of utility mana rocks to ramp us, because we are going to need it severely.

Midnight Clock has the utility of being a mana rock and able to reset our library, graveyard, and hand as the game goes on.

We need to make use of these sort of mana rocks in order to ramp us to the sun so things like Sol Ring and Arcane Signet are necessities.

Now our removal will mostly consist of counter spells and damage spells that can get rid of problematic small threats that will be needling us.

For that we can play cards that create tokens or we fall to a solid backup of having a couple of utility Planeswalkers.

There are a ton of Chandra’s that we can use that can either deal damage, ramp us, or help us refuel our hands.

Now this also presents another interesting quandary. We will need a lot of mana to cast Ovika and still have some mana up to keep Ovika protected, what do we use all that mana for?

My idea is that we fall back on the classic red and blue game plan of spell slinging and if we want to do some spell slinging, then Storm is something to actually take into consideration.

Something like Empty the Warrens to give us a massive field advantage or Grapeshot to deal a severe amount of damage are the easy go to’s but what other options do we have if we want to play in this space?

Well if we are going wide, then why not so for a massive swing of damage as a finisher?

Something like Haze of Rage is doubly good because not only will it pump our massive board, but it also has Buyback which will be an effective back up to have if we don’t end winning the game from the massive swing.

Luckily the tokens Ovika makes have haste, so they can immediately attack. We can also look towards some of the creature lord options that we did in Adamaro if we want to further buff up our creatures.

Ovika is another straightforward build, but there are plenty of options to consider when making the deck. I chose a mirror type of build to the previous Jarad build, and since it has access to more options that Jarad I think it is ultimately a much more flexible build, despite being straightforward.

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

Peace,

From J.M. Casual