Hello and welcome to Daily Commander!

Today we are going to be talking about Zagras, Thief of Heartbeats!

Zagras is a six mana 4/4 with flying, deathtouch, and haste that costs 1 less for each creature in your party, gives your other creatures deathtouch and whenever a creature you control deals combat damage to a Planeswalker, it destroys that Planeswalker.

Party is an interesting mechanic because it batches four creature types (Wizard, Rogue, Warrior, and Cleric) that normally don’t have much synergy with each other.

We can get around this the easy way and have creatures with Changeling, but where is the fun in that? We will get one creature that cheats this a bit, but we are going to be primarily focusing on getting the most out of having a party.

Burakos is going to function as our real only way to cheat the party requirement and even then, they play into having a full party.

Luckily for us, the other payoffs for having a large party are solid if we can manage to maintain that large party.

For example there is Multiclass Baldric, an equipment that gives different effects based on which creatures you control and if you have a full party then you can prevent all damage done to the equipped creature.

There is also Coveted Prize which is a tutor that costs less for each creature in your party and if you have a full party and if that card is mana value 4 or less you can cast it for free.

We also have a way to reanimate two creatures with Thwart the Grave that can cost potentially two mana.

While we have a few ways to benefit from having a full party, which creatures do we have?

Luckily for us there are a large number of creatures of each type that we can use for a variety of reasons, and are often of a low enough mana cost that we can potentially cast multiple creatures per turn.

Professional Face-Breaker allows us to slowly ramp whenever our creatures deal damage as well as card advantage if we have a glut of Treasures that we don’t need to use.

Liliana, Heretical Healer allows us access to a Cleric that can potentially become a Planeswalker that we can use to discard cards from our opponent’s hands, provide recursion for a creature or if we manage to ultimate we can consistently get our creatures back even after a board wipe.

Robber of the Rich allows us to take the top card of the defending player’s library if they have more cards in their hand than we do and cast it whenever we attack with a Rogue.

Dark Confidant is a Wizard that gives us more draws at the cost of some life, and there are a plethora of other options that we can use to pick from.

Now that we have several creatures with deathtouch, we should find ways to make even more use out of them.

Hooded Blightfang is excellent in this case because it gives all of our creatures the ability to drain all of our opponents, which if we have a full party of at least four creatures then we can drain for 4 life when we get Zagras out, who also has deathtouch.

This also is a redundant Planeswalker deathtouch effect, which can be useful in the cases which we don’t have Zagras on the battlefield but are dealing with some problematic Planeswalkers.

There is also Henrika Domnathi, or rather their transformed side of Henrika, Infernal Seer which gives creatures we control with flying, deathtouch and/or lifelink an additional bonus of +1/+0 until end of turn.

Zagras provides a toolbox of creatures to play with, which won’t win a lot of games, but it can be a fun enough casual deck that can contend with decks of a similar power level or scope.

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

Peace,

From, J.M. Casual