Hello and welcome to Daily Commander!

Today we are going to be talking about Jolrael, Mwonvuli Recluse!

Jolrael is a two mana 1/2 who makes a 2/2 Cat creature token whenever you draw your second card each turn and for six mana each creature you control has base power X/X where X is the number of cards in your hand until the end of the turn.

Card draw matters cards is not often attributed to green, but it definitely is an interesting avenue to play with the color, especially when looking for something more off kilter.

Green does have access to card draw so this shouldn’t be too hard, but we also need to take advantage of the activated ability, so we need a lot of mana as well.

One of the first things to look at are ways we can draw additional cards passively, and we have a few ways to achieve this.

Shapers’ Sanctuary is a cheap way to offer a form of pseudo protection on our opponent’s turns because if there is something that Commander players don’t like doing is giving other people the chance to draw cards.

To go along with that, we can also use Season of Growth, which scries when a creature enters the battlefield and if we target a creature with a spell we draw a card. This can help us draw extra cards on our opponents turns when we play any instant speed protection.

A sneaky way to to help you draw cards on your opponents turns is to play Viridian Revel, a card that let’s you draw a card whenever an artifact is put into an opponent’s graveyard, which means that any artifact tokens like Treasures and Clues count, as do things like Commander’s Sphere.

The next thing we need to look at is ways that we can ramp as often as we can.

Since we should ideally be drawing at least one other card each turn, On the Trail becomes active much more often because it also triggers on our opponents turns.

Luckily green is the ramp color so there are a plethora of cheap ways to put lands onto the battlefield, and some of them even have card draw attached like Explore.

Summer Bloom just lets us straight up play three more lands, Wayward Swordtooth is a way to get a cheap yet powerful creature on the board that allows us to play an additional land, and Azusa, Lost but Seeking gives us two more land drops per turn.

If we don’t mind a bit of reciprocal card draw and ramp, we can play Rites of Flourishing to help us guarantee a second draw on our turns and to ramp us even quicker.

Now that we have a ton of lands in play and hopefully a bunch of cards in hand, we need to have ways to win.

Overrun effects are the most ideal, and for this one I wanted to spotlight Overwhelming Encounter because of the potential for the boost to be more permanent than just a one turn buff.

To help getting our creatures bigger and giving trample, there is also The Crowd Goes Wild, which if we have a bunch of lands and some creatures we can give them all a +1/+1 counters and trample, then use Jolrael’s ability to make them even bigger.

Even with three cards in hand, we turn any of our 2/2 Cats into 3/3’s with a +1/+1 counter and trample, which is nothing to sneeze at.

If we boost our creatures first, then we can potentially win the game with Overwhelming Stampede, which can essentially double the power of our creatures and give them trample.

Jolrael, in a weird way, plays like an Elfball Commander in that it wants to get a lot of creatures and mana for a big swing, but without any of the Elf synergies that we would want in that strategy.

While we are slightly limited with having a second draw theme, we should still be able to produce a wide enough board and generate enough mana to make an alpha strike happen with a decent amount of frequency.

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

Peace,

From, J.M. Casual