Hello and welcome to Daily Commander!

Today we are going to be talking about Belbe, Corrupted Observer!

Belbe is a two mana 2/2 where at the beginning of each player’s postcombat main phase, that player adds two colorless mana for each of your opponents who lost life this turn.

This is an easy idea in concept, making sure each opponent is hurting each other while your deck is tuned to get the most value out this, but the trouble does come in and making sure we have enough enablers to get that value.

Not to say that it is impossible, it’s just a puzzle to solve.

The first thing to look for is ways to get our opponents to lose life simultaneously.

Subversion is good because it enables Belbe on every one of your turns, with the slight downside that you need five mana to cast it.

There are several one mana creatures that can deal damage to all of your opponents for one reason or another. Pulse Tracker does this whenever it attacks, Night Market Lookout does this whenever it is tapped, and Maggot Carrier does it when it enters the battlefield.

If we want a touch of removal, then there is Tithing Blade which forces an opponent to sacrifice a creature, and then can be Crafted for five mana to Consuming Sepulcher to drain each opponent.

There is even Leechridden Swamp that for black and tap itself it can have each opponent lose a life, but only when you control two or more black permanents.

Once we are able to get the mana that we need, then we need ways to use all that mana effectively, which primarily means X spells.

For creature options, Hydra’s in general are very useful to have on hand because they can be huge creatures to act as defenders because Belbe is symmetrical. If our opponents have creatures with evasion, then they have less mana to use.

Voracious Hydra is great to have because it’s sort of a modal creature spell in which that it can be a big wall or be a fight spell if we have an overload of mana.

If you have access to it, there is also Goldvein Hydra, which can be a solid body that has a benefit when it dies in making Treasure tokens.

We also have access to Profane Command, which allows us the options making an opponent lose life, reanimate a creature, give a creature -X/-X, or give X creatures fear until end of turn.

Damnable Pact can refuel our hand or have a way an opponent lose that last bit of life, Dread Summons to mill our opponents and give us some bodies, Valgavoth’s Onslaught for a large number of bodies that can be bigger the more mana we use.

On an additional note, there is an X spells specific mana rock called Elementalist’s Palatte, which gets two charge counters whenever you cast an X spell, and can make colorless mana equal to the number of charge counters it has, which can only be used for X costs.

The way we win is a combination of big creatures to deal damage and big X spells that can help close a game.

Torment of Hailfire is a classic finisher because the more mana we have access to, the more oppressive it becomes. If an opponent can’t fulfill the requirements then they lose a lot of life, but otherwise they fall way behind making it easier for you to finish things out.

If we don’t have X spells to cast, then we need an ideal mana sink that can take all the mana we don’t need and Helix Pinnacle is perfect for that.

We dump any excess mana into it to get tower counters and when we hit 100 tower counters, we win the game. It is also hard to interact with it because it has shroud, and not many people play non-targeting enchantment removal.

Belbe is an enabler, and with enough protection spells we can make the most use of it’s ability. Again it is symmetrical, so your opponents will be incentivized to hit you a bit to gain their own value from it, but let them know that if Belbe dies, then they don’t get that mana.

*Edit after the fact: I say that Belbe is symmetrical here when that isn’t technically correct. Belbe is partially symmetrical and our opponents only get mana if they hit our other opponents and not us. My bad!

Not the craziest deck, but the balance of cards to enable big mana spells, those big mana spells, and utility spells is a delicate balance.

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

Peace,

From, J.M. Casual