Hello and welcome to Daily Commander!

Today we are talking about Kemba, Kha Regent!

Kemba is a three mana 2/4 with at the beginning of your upkeep you create a 2/2 Cat creature token for each Equipment attached to Kemba.

This is an interesting combination of abilities because it incentivizes having a bunch of Equipment attached to Kemba, which would be ideal for a Voltron strategy, but the incentive is to make a bunch of Cat tokens, ideal for a go wide typal aggro deck.

It is interesting because this allows us options to pivot if one strategy is not working, which is how I want to build the deck. A primarily Voltron deck with a Cat aggro backup plan.

One of the first things to look for are ways to get around Equipment’s inherent weaknesses: can only Equip as a sorcery and it costs mana to Equip.

Luckily there are ways for us to get around it because of cards like Forge Anew, which allows us to bring back an Equipment from the graveyard, allows us to activate Equip abilities at instant speed on our turn, and to give the first Equip a cost of zero on our turn.

Sigarda’s Aid is the ideal option to have because it allows us to cast Equipment and Auras at instant speed and whenever an Equipment enters the battlefield we can automatically attach it to a creature. I like Forge Anew a bit better because if Kemba is destroyed, then we can attach Equipment at a later turn.

Remember we need to be able to be flexible and more options is never bad.

Puresteel Paladin is also an include in the deck because once we hit three artifacts then all Equip costs become 0, which in our deck shouldn’t be that hard to accomplish.

Now we need to look at the suite of Equipment that we will be using.

Ideally we want a decent number of Equipment that auto attach to a creature, like Celestial Armor, which not only is an Equipment with a decent buff, but also doubles as a protection spell.

Thunder Lasso is not as effective, but being able to tap a creature when the Equipped creature attacks isn’t something to sneeze at, especially for slower decks that put up defenses to make it harder to get through.

Other Equipment to look at are some of the classics like Blackblade Reforged which boosts +1/+1 for each land you control and has a cheaper Equip cost for legendary creatures, Stoneforge Masterwork to make use of the typal strategy, and Swiftfoot Boots for protection and haste.

There are also Reconfigure creatures like Lion Sash which acts as graveyard hate and if the Equipped creature dies then Lion Sash can still protect the board. There is also Cloudsteel Kirin to give your Equipped creature a Platinum Angel effect, meaning any removal will be heading to that creature instead of Kemba.

Now when we need to pivot to a Cat typal strategy, we have plenty of ways to take over the game.

To help the go wide Cat deck go further, we have Leonin Warleader, which is a Cat themselves and makes two Cat creature tokens with lifelink that are tapped and attacking when it attacks.

If we want to further make use of a ton of creatures entering the battlefield, Mace of the Valiant gets a charge counter whenever a creature you control enters the battlefield, meaning that we can have a huge creature along with an army of Cat tokens.

To help finish the game, there is Raksha Golden Cub, which if they are equipped then they give all our Cats +2/+2 and double strike, which can help us clear a problematic board or take out a player.

With the release of Foundations there is a lot of new Cat support to help the deck pivot as necessary,

Kemba is a neat Commander that has a flexible playstyle, where if we have access to our Equipment package then we can go in on that, or if we need to switch to a more go wide typal aggro strategy, then we can do so very easily.

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

Peace,

From, J.M. Casual