Hello and welcome to Daily Commander!

Today we are going to be talking about Bruse Tarl, Roving Rancher!

Bruse Tarl is a four mana 4/3 that gives your Oxen double strike, and whenever he enters or attacks you exile the top card of your library and if it’s a land card you create a 2/2 Ox creature token, and otherwise you may cast it until the end of your next turn.

Red and white have recently been playing around with interacting with things that are in exile and it is an interesting way to play a deck.

So we should play cards that benefit from being cast from exile or have cards that benefit played from exile.

Keep in mind we do lose lands that are exiled, but we should be able to manage that.

First we need to find other cards that benefit from cards being cast from exile, of which there are a few in our colors.

The first one that came to mind was Pia Nalaar, Consul of Revival, which give Thopters haste and whenever we play a land or cast a spell from exile, we make a Thopter.

Ideally our mana curve should not get higher than 5 mana spells, so Wild-Magic Sorcerer, which gives the first spell we cast from exile cascade, a huge benefit to cast another spell from exile to get the benefits we need.

The reason I say we should not have too many spells with a mana value higher than 5 is because of Quintorius Kand, which deals 2 damage to each opponent while gaining us 2 life whenever a spell is cast from exile and has ways to enable that quite effectively.

Furthermore, if we are able to make a lot of tokens, then Party Thrasher would be a benefit to have because it gives our noncreature spells cast from exile convoke, which we can use even further to our advantage.

We also need to consider what Oxen are there in the game, and while most of them are in our colors, they aren’t always the best creatures for this strategy.

Earth-Origin Yak is a solid enough creature that acts as a combat trick, especially if we have a few other Ox tokens on the battlefield.

Ox of Agonas is an option that we can use to refuel our hand and be able to cast bring back via Escape with a +1/+1 counter, meaning that with Bruse Tarl out, it swings for 10 damage.

There are ways to get Ox tokens, however they are attached to removal, like Bovine Intervention and Contraband Livestock, so we will most likely use them on our opponents creatures but we can use them on our things in a pinch.

More than likely we will be using Changelings in the deck, which I tend to not like using in typal decks, but this is one of the few times where it is more necessary to have them.

Taurean Mauler at least looks in flavor of being an Ox creature type, and it becomes more of a threat as the game goes on and opponents cast spells.

Metallic Mimic, Bloodline Pretender, and Adaptive Automaton are the trio of artifact creatures that have benefits for and from a creature type and help fill up the Ox quota.

So this deck is going to hopefully have a decent influx of token creatures, ideally with most of them having double strike, so we need ways to make sure that they have a sufficient amount of power to do so.

Crescendo of War is a card I didn’t know existed, but it works perfectly for a low to the ground aggro deck because it accumulates counters at the beginning of each upkeep and has a benefit whether we are on offense or on defense.

Heroic Charge is great for the late game because not only does it boost our creatures by +2/+1, if it was kicked then it gives those creatures trample, which is insanely effective on double striking creatures.

We also have a sneaky ritual in Open the Omenpaths which we can use to cast a few other spells from exile if we are a mana short, or we can use it to boost our creatures if we need a little more damage.

Bruse Tarl is more so of an enabler type of Commander for an aggro deck using a less than stellar creature type, but it does open up the floor to cards that play with being in exile.

While Bruse Tarl only benefits from the ones he exiles, we have ways to make them more effective as the game goes on.

I do like cards that play with exile effects, and I do think that the direction that is being taken with that is pretty interesting and I can’t wait to see what’s in store for the future.

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

Peace,

From, J.M. Casual