Hello and welcome to Daily Commander!

Today we are going to be talking about Cromat!

A five mana 5/5 with five activated abilities: destroy a creature that is blocked by or blocking Cromat, flying until end of turn, regenerate it, +1/+1 until end of turn, and put it on top of your library.

One of the earliest five color Commanders and it really does show. All of these abilities serve different purposes and not all of them are the most useful, but that is where the challenge comes in.

Making five color Commanders is always tricky because unless you have a theme based on the Commander, like Go-Shintai of Life’s Origin for Shrines or The Ur-Dragon for Dragons, they all tend to feel like five color good stuff.

How do we make use of a Commander that has situational abilities that make them slightly more powerful?

The best way to do that is to go all in and make a Voltron type of Commander with a lot of backup players to make Cromat more effective.

Looking at the most commonly played cards from Cromat, because I was honestly stumped into where to go with building the deck, I noticed that a lot of the most commonly played cards are Mutate cards.

Mutate is fine and probably the more ideal way to go, but my issue with that is that unless you can get a bunch of protection on Cromat, then you are wasting a lot of resources for something that dies to a Go For the Throat, at least in my opinion.

What I would rather try to do is focus on getting the protection via something like Lightning Greaves and focus on Equipment. You’re going to be able to make use of the Equipment on other creatures until you are able to get Cromat onto the battlefield.

If you can get the Swords cycle than that would be good for additional resources and protection, but there are a plethora of other Equipment that you can use without breaking the bank.

The next biggest challenge will be getting access to all the mana you need for Cromat’s ability.

One of the better ways is to make sure that the equipment that we do have is easier to put onto Cromat, and Puresteel Paladin is perfect for that.

Being able to freely put Equipment onto Cromat will come at a premium, especially if we focus on Equipment that give massive bonuses with huge Equip costs like Colossus Hammer.

Since Cromat is in all colors allows us some other ways to gain benefits from Equipment, including an enchantment from the Fallout decks called Strong Back that discounts Equip abilities and Aura costs as well as an additional +2/+2 for each Aura and Equipment on the creature.

Now we have to find a way to make sure that we guarantee that we deal damage to our opponents to close out the game.

While there are options that we can take advantage of in other Equipment or Auras, the most ideal way to make sure we can get through is to make sure we cannot be blocked.

Rogue’s Passage is the easiest way to make that happen, especially since people don’t generally play with land destruction in Commander.

Even if there is someone who does, we can run some backups in Auras like Aqueous Form which allows our creature to become unblockable and can scry 1 just in case.

Put in some combat tricks that give indestructible or some other form of protection and Cromat has the game.

This was a pretty straightforward build and I can see why people have moved towards the Mutate style of Cromat. It adds a bit of flavor for a Commander that is otherwise underwhelming.

Like I said, I prefer using Equipment over Mutate creatures because when you overcommit using Mutate, you can lose a lot of resources very quickly, whereas if you overcommit with Equipment then you still have access to the Equipment.

Just my opinion, of course.

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

Peace,

From, J.M. Casual