Hello and welcome to Daily Commander!

Today we are going to be talking about Yusri, Fortune’s Flame!

Yusri is a three mana 2/3 with flying and whenever Yusri attacks choose a number between 1 and 5, flip that many coins and call it, with every one you call correctly you draw a card and every one you call wrong you take 2 damage. However if you call all five correctly you can cast spells from your hand without paying their mana costs.

Having a coin flip commander is not completely a novelty, they even had a whole Secret Lair deck for it.

The fun of this is playing with coins (or calling odd or even on a dice if you can’t flip a coin) and trying to make it work for you.

Calling 5 coin flips in a row is difficult and, unless you want to cheat, hard to manipulate.

However it is not impossible.

Having cards that can manipulate your coin flip or allow you multiple coin flips are basically essential in making the deck work, unless you want to fully commit to having a random deck, which I would not be opposed to.

Krark’s Thumb is the most iconic coin flip card, so it’ll fetch a higher price, but it is definitely worth it if you want to have better odds at winning the coin flips.

Now not only was there the Secret Lair that focused on coin flips, but Modern Horizons 2 also had a coin flip theme with it, which helps because Yusri was from that set.

So looking at Modern Horizons 2 we can see that not only are there cards that benefit us winning a flip giving us resources, like Tavern Scoundrel giving us two Treasure tokens for each coin flip we win, but we also have a potential win condition.

A reprint from Odyssey, Chance Encounter allows us to win the game if we have ten luck counters on it. Now we don’t always need to rely on coin flips, though we most certainly will, but we just need to win one and then we can get sneaky.

As is becoming a recurring mechanic here, proliferate continues to be a very good mechanic that allows us to add a luck counter on Chance Encounter, making it more and more of threat as the game goes on.

Now we won’t solely rely on proliferate to boost up Chance Encounter we need to have a decent chunk of coin flip cards as well.

Yusri allows us to potentially go hard into a spell slinging mess, but there is also the possibility that we lose flips. If we lose a couple of flips that’s fine, but we can’t continuously cause damage to ourselves, we leave ourselves vulnerable in that instance.

There is something we can play to help us in that regard, but it is definitely still very risky.

This is a bit of a sneaky tech card to help protect yourself if your life total starts getting too low, but it has the downside of potentially making you lose.

Desperate Gambit has an opponent call the coin toss, and if you win then the creature you targeted deals double damage, but if you lose the coin flip then that creature deals no damage.

So you intentionally want to lose this coin toss because Yusri’s ability specifically does damage to you if you lose the coin flip, so it prevents the damage that it would deal to you in the times that you lose a flip.

However, even if after all of that, if you lose all five coin flips and Yusri would deal 10 damage to you, instead it deals 20 damage to you.

It’s definitely risky, but that’s in the name of chance, and the question becomes are you willing to chance a coin flip to win?

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

Peace,

From J.M. Casual