Hello and welcome to Daily Commander!

Today we are going to be talking about Nin, the Pain Artist!

Nin is a two mana 1/1 with an activated for X, red, blue and tap to deal damage to target creature and it’s controller draws X cards.

This is an interesting Commander because while the ability reads like it wants to deal damage to your opponent’s creatures, you don’t want to deal damage to those creatures because they draw the cards.

So it wants you to target your own things to draw cards, but why?

Well the answer is simple and something that we can definitely play with in order to take the most advantage of Nin’s abilities.

Stuffy Doll effects are pretty cool, because it means that you are definitely trying to get your creatures to get damage dealt to them, but the double edged sword is that when your opponents see a Stuffy Doll on the field they don’t attack you.

This is good in that they aren’t trying to attack you at risk of getting hurt, but the this is bad because they aren’t going to intentionally trigger its ability and focus exile based removal on it.

Which means that we’ll need more that one Stuffy Doll in our deck. Brash Taunter is another option because it has the option to fight another creature to trigger its own ability.

If you don’t mind tracking Daybound/Nightbound then Ill-Tempered Loner has the Brash Taunter effect of being able to target anything but the backside of Howlpack Avenger gives that effect to all of your creatures, though they don’t have indestructible.

Mogg Maniac is the most mana efficient of these options at two mana, but they can only target an opponent and doesn’t have indestructible. There are also Equipment in Blazing Sunsteel and Fiendlash that give the equipped creature the Brash Taunter ability.

The next obstacle is getting the mana to make the most of this sort of effect, and there are not as many options for these, but there are some options.

There are a couple of mana reducers that are for activated abilities, Training Grounds being a solid pick because it reduces the generic cost by 2, and Heartstone which reduces the cost by 1.

We also have to option to look for the few mana dorks and mana rocks that work only for activated abilities. Omen Hawker is pretty good as a one drop that gives one blue and a colorless mana for activated abilities and The Enigma Jewel which gives two generic mana for activated abilities.

Our options on this front are smaller than we would like, but there enough that we can use effectively.

The best way for us to win is to get as many of our opponents as possible while being as mana efficient as possible, and for that we take a look at copying abilities.

If we have Illusionist’s Bracers equipped to Nin, then we can copy that ability to get any of our creatures again. If we have something like a Strionic Resonator out then we can copy the triggered ability, which achieves what we want, at the price of two mana.

This also means that any damage based board wipes like Blasphemous Act can be severely lethal if we have a couple of Stuffy Doll type effects on the battlefield.

Nin is an underrated Commander in my opinion, and has over time been able to slowly grow their ever expanding list of cards to play to make their deck just a little better.

It’s not going to be a super tournament winner, but it is a fun build around to play around with in my opinion.

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

Peace,

From, J.M. Casual