Hello and welcome to Daily Commander!

Today we are going to be talking about Volo, Itinerant Scholar!

Volo is a three mana 2/3 that when he enters you make an artifact token named Volo’s Journal with hexproof and “Whenever you cast a creature spell, note one of its creature types that hasn’t been noted for this artifact”, and a 2 mana and tap activated ability that draws you a card for each of those creature types and Choose a Background.

This is a fun deck building challenge that requires us to have a variety of creature types rather then the same one, a sort of anti-typal strategy if you will.

Having this as a deck to play around with will be a challenge to operate, but it is certainly a challenge that I love working with.

First things first though, we need to pick a Background to accompany it.

I decided that using Master Chef would probably be the most effective Background for us to use, since this is primarily a creature focused deck, we should be taking advantage of it by having the deck swarming with creatures.

Not only that, but it also allows us to play with Volo, Guide to Monsters, the Volo released from Adventures in the Forgotten Realms, which also cares about different creature type.

If we cast a creature spell with a creature type that we do not have in the graveyard or on the field, then we can copy that spell. Which means that we should also be staying away from other legendary creatures because if we copy them, they’ll just die to the legend rule.

To also help facilitate unique creature types, we should also have Long List of the Ents, which allows another +1/+1 counter on a creature type of a spell that we declare when it goes to the next chapter.

As far as what creatures we use, we have a wide swath to pick from, but the tricky part will be making sure that we don’t have any types that cross, so we can get the most benefit from both Volos.

We also need to make sure that we can cast our creature spells and I would suggest Prowling Serpopard as our choice because it is a creature that cannot be countered with a unique creature type that can also make our things not be countered.

Another creature that would be good to have is Star Whale, which can be cast with Suspend and gives our other creatures Ward 2, which is a solid bit of protection and if we get a copy of it then we get more protection as well as protection for each of the Star Whales.

That’s the beauty of this deck, with both Volo’s out then we have access to essentially a second copy of that creature if we can get it working.

As the game progresses, then we should be able to get able to draw a ton of cards, how do we use them?

We make our draws do all the work for us, because as the game has gone on there are cards that benefit us whenever we draw cards.

Psychosis Crawler is a way for us to turn our draws into damage while also having a potentially huge creature to act as protection. If we have Master Chef out and Volo out, then this also can never die if we have no cards in hand.

I don’t even need to mention that if we are able to copy it then we should be able to clean up the game fairly quickly with all the drawing we do.

Ominous Seas can create us a Kraken after eight draws, Proft’s Eidetic Memory to boost one of our creatures even more, Psychic Corrosion to mill our opponents, Archmage Ascension that could turn futures draws into tutors.

If we don’t have a way to give us no maximum hand size and we end up discarding cards, then we should also have ways to shuffle our graveyard back like Midnight Clock or Day’s Undoing.

And if all of that fails, we should have an army of creatures that are decently sized that can attack our opponents.

This is an interesting deck that requires a bit of a goofy mindset to build correctly, but when done right the only creatures that should share types are the two Volos. I love weird build around Commanders like this, and I am tempted to actually build it.

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

Peace,

From, J.M. Casual