Hello and welcome to Daily Commander!

Today we are going to be talking about The Howling Abomination!

The Howling Abomination is a five mana 5/5 with haste, trample if you’ve cast three or more spells this turn and when a spell is cast that targets The Howling Abomination then it gets +2/+2 until end of turn and deals 2 damage to each opponent.

This is a Voltron Commander if I ever saw one, but it also has an interesting spell slinging component that gives an interesting dimension to building the deck.

Of course the deck will be filled with combat tricks to boost The Howling Abomination, but we should also have ways to make it even easier to take out our opponents.

This is a design space I’ve noticed becoming more and more prominent, but creatures that deal damage when they are tapped and also untap themselves whenever you cast an instant or sorcery.

Thermo-Alchemist is one of the better ones because it does this at two mana and can hit each oppponent.

There is also Chandra, Fire of Kaladesh that untaps herself when you cast a red spell, taps to deal a damage to a player and if she dealt three or more damage this turn she transforms into Chandra, Roaring Flame that can deal more burn but also ultimate into an emblem that can continuously deal damage.

Now we need to focus on the sort of combat tricks that we are going to be playing. The biggest factor to look at is that they need to be cheap to cast, and green has a plethora of combat tricks that accomplish this, Giant Growth being the ubiquitous example.

Don’t knock red in its combat tricks, since they have been becoming just as numerous as the green ones. Monstrous Rage not only acts as a combat trick that provides a temporary boost, but also give The Howling Abomination a more permanent access to trample with the Monster Role token.

We should also take mana into consideration, so I would advise to get a Storm-Kiln artist to get a Treasure token whenever you cast or copy an instant or sorcery so you can keep on spell slinging.

Since The Howling Abomination triggers whenever a spell is cast that targets it, they have a form of protection if we manage to simultaneously deal a huge amount of damage onto our opponents in a short enough amount of time.

While this would normally function as our way to win, it is still somewhat fragile as most aggro decks go since while The Howling Abomination does have a sort of protection, it isn’t full protection.

We need a backup plan that makes full use of us casting a bunch of spells.

Of course that leads us to Storm, which will work beautifully for a deck like ours. A spell slinging aggro deck that has a Storm backup when we can cast a critical mass of combat tricks should lead us into a winning position.

Chatterstorm is one of the cheapest ways to get a bunch of tokens after a massive spell slinging turn, especially if we have the aforementioned Storm-Kiln artist to get a Treasure token for each Storm copy.

This allows us a huge swath of mana for other Storm spells to get us into a winning position. If we have a haste enabler in something like Mass Hysteria then all of our tokens can attack and even better still there is Haze of Rage which is a Storm card that gives all of our creatures +1/+0.

If we have the mana and want to be a bit cheeky then we can have Elemental Eruption to make a large number of 4/4 Dragon Elementals with flying and prowess to further make use of our combat tricks.

The Howling Abomination is a combat focused Commander with a spell slinging components, which for me is something interesting because I have wanted to make a spell slinging Storm deck for a long time, but I’ve always had trouble in alternate win conditions if the Storm plan goes bust.

The Howling Abomination doesn’t have Storm as the priority, but having it as a secondary plan makes it much more interesting to play for me.

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

Peace,

From, J.M. Casual