Hello and welcome to Daily Commander!

Today we are going to be talking about Bayek of Siwa!

Bayek is a five mana 3/4 with double strike and a Disguise ability of 1 a red and a white, and as long as it is your turn, historic creatures you control have double strike.

Coming from the Assassin’s Creed set, we have a way that gives artifact creatures and legendary creatures we control double strike. The obvious route that this leads us is to find ways to reanimate big artifact creatures and legendary creatures and smash face.

That is a perfectly reasonable way to build the deck and not something that we can rule out, but there was a different reason why Bayek intrigued me.

While not every creature that has a way to give poison counters a historic permanent, there are still a non-zero number of ways we can get this to work.

There are still a number of artifact creatures that have Infect and more recently some white creatures that have Toxic, of which something with either of these effects with double strike will give double the number of poison counters.

Skrelv’s Hive makes a Phyrexian Mite that is an artifact creature with Toxic 1 and can’t block at the start of each of your turns, which is the best repeatable way to get a historic creature into play that we can make use of.

This is definitely an unorthodox strategy that people won’t immediately expect when you put Bayek in the Command Zone, but once people realize what you’re up to, you should be in a position to get a benefit from it.

Now this is also a strategy that we can keep hidden for a little while until we are ready to deploy.

We need to make it seem like we are a go wide aggro deck that just so happens to make a bunch of little historic creatures, because not only will it help us in the trick, but also allow us a secondary win condition.

Anim Pakal makes a huge number of artifact creature tokens, which means that it will be prime for removal bait and board wipes. Again, this is what we want to happen, and make it seem like our strategy is not working.

It will seem to our opponents that our strategy is easy to figure out and deal with, but what they won’t expect is while that the real win condition is to win by poison.

Definitely an uphill battle considering our colors are not the most conducive to dealing mass amounts of poison, but it is still possible if we play our cards right, especially if we make it seem like we messed our own turn up.

After a few turns we should have a decent amount of mana to make White Sun’s Twilight effective in making a bunch of Phyrexian Mites, especially if we have a haste enabler like Mass Hysteria.

We then cast Bayek to give our Mites double strike and at minimum we can beat one opponent via poison damage.

Pair that with some extra combat spells or ways to increase the number of Mite tokens we make, though the token doubles are quite expensive price wise, then we should be able to clean up the game pretty quickly.

At the face of things, Bayek is a straightforward build with a focus on historic permanents dealing damage, but aggro tends to have a difficult time in Commander in terms of winning the game.

However, if we can facilitate the game plan with poison, then we have a better chance at winning the game, even if it’s a bit sneaky. Apropos for an Assassin’s Creed Commander though.

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

Peace,

From, J.M. Casual