Hello and welcome to Daily Commander!

Today we are going to be talking about Shanid, Sleepers’ Scourge!

Shanid is a four mana 2/4 with menace, gives your legendary creatures menace and whenever you play a legendary land or cast a legendary spell, you draw a card and lose a life.

Legendary typal is not a new concept in the game, but in my opinion it is one of the more interesting archetypes to come out of because a lot of legendary cards being made since Commander became popular.

So we should definitely play around with it in a way that is fun, and we are in the color combinations in which we can take advantage from having a number of legendary creatures.

Ratadrabik allows us to swing with our legendary creatures and make a token copy of them when they die, which means that if Shanid dies, we can still gain the benefit of Shanid’s effect and when we get them out again we have two copies of that effect.

Sure the copies of the legendary creatures aren’t legendary anymore, but having what is essentially another copy of a legendary creature when they die forces our opponents to either get rid of Ratadrabik or use exile removal for our legendary creatures.

Imagine getting a second copy of a Kroxa effect to get two opponents to discard and potentially lose life, or a second Birgi to make sure that you can keep casting more spells.

Speaking of casting more spells, we should also keep in mind that Shanid’s last ability triggers whenever you play a legendary land or cast a legendary spell. This means that the way we build our ramp package is a little different.

The Monuments from Amonkhet are the best examples of getting cheaper cards while also getting some sort of value from them. Oketra’s makes creature tokens, Hazoret’s loots, and Bontu’s drain and they all discount the colored spells that they represent by one mana.

Which means that any of our creature spells get a discount and any multicolored creature spells we have get an additional discount.

We also have a suite of interesting legendary cards that we can use to protect ourselves.

Shell of the Last Kappa exiles spells that target us and gives us the option to cast one of those spells for free, the Oaths from various sets can provide a decent enter the battlefield effect while expanding our options to play planeswalkers, and the number of legendary Equipment we have at our disposal.

The least interesting thing about this deck is its win condition, which is a go wide aggro deck. Shanid’s ability to give our legendary creatures menace makes them much better on the offensive, so we have to do what we can to make sure we are advantageous in those exchanges.

There is Flowering of the White Tree which gives our legendary creatures a +2/+1 and ward 1, Mirror Box which allows us to ignore the legend rule and is another anthem.

Even Bayek of Siwa, who we talked about some time back can fit in the deck because legendary creatures are historic cards.

We have a plethora of ways to pump our legendary creatures and protect them so that isn’t as much of an issue.

Like I said, a go wide aggro deck with legendary creatures is not the most interesting game plan, but it should be the most consistent.

Shanid is not the most flexible Commander despite it being a decent one to run as a legendary typal deck, so we have to make do with the tools we got.

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

Peace,

From, J.M. Casual