Hello and welcome to Daily Commander!

Today we are going to be talking about The Scorpion God!

The Scorpion God is a five mana 6/5 that whenever a creature with a -1/-1 counter dies, you draw a card, an activated ability to put -1/-1 counter on another creature, and when it dies it goes to your hand at the beginning of the next end step.

That last ability allows us to keep using The Scorpion God without really paying much heed to the Commander tax since it will return to our hand at the end of the turn it was destroyed.

It doesn’t help much against exile based removal, but that’s most Commanders.

Anyway, playing around with -1/-1 counters is interesting because it is not a counter that Wizards of the Coast likes to print too often.

Wizards likes +1/+1 counters a lot more than -1/-1 counters, which is why cards that produce +1/+1 counters are in nearly every set.

This shouldn’t deter us, but it is a factor to consider.

What we should consider is a consistent way to make sure that we get a number of -1/-1 counters onto creatures, and Harbinger of Night is one of the more efficient ways of getting that done, with the caveat that it will die on the third upkeep due to it’s own effect.

This is one of the problems with the deck, since many of the cards that give -1/-1 counters often give the counters to themselves, which will often facilitate to a quicker death.

So that means, that we should be taking advantage of other death triggers with cards like Blood Artist.

If you have the budget then something like Dictate of Erebos can help clear the board for you when a creature you control dies from having a number of -1/-1 counters, which trigger The Scorpion God since ideally they should also have -1/-1 counters.

Another ideal way to get -1/-1 counters are cards that have Wither or Infect. While Infect would get you targeted quickly, something like Wither can be much less innocuous to get into play since if those creatures deal damage to other creature, they just get the -1/-1 counters.

Now that we have a plethora of ways to get the -1/-1 counters onto as many creatures as possible, what do we do now?

Since the plan is to have our opponent’s creatures be as weak as possible, something like Blasphemous Act to clear the board should do the trick, especially if we pair it up with a mass reanimation spell like Rise of the Dark Realms.

Not only do we get a ton of our opponents creatures and our creatures, but if the majority of them had -1/-1 counters, then The Scorpion God draws us a huge number of cards with that.

If we still have mana we can play a Song of Totentanz and give all of the creatures that we now get haste to close out the game.

The Scorpion God is a challenging Commander to build because of how narrow the ability is, but the fact that it has the ability to come back to our hand in the event of a board wipe or targeted nonexile removal makes this a comparatively mana cheap Commander.

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

Peace,

From J.M. Casual