Hello and welcome to Daily Commander!

Today we are going to be talking about Sol’kanar the Swamp King!

Sol’kanar is a five mana 5/5 with swampwalk and whenever a player casts a black spell, you gain one life.

This is an interesting card because there can be a way that this card is not like a lot of other red, black, and blue Commanders which tend to err on the control or midrange aspect of the three colors, while Sol’kanar is going for a life gain theme.

Now this is not impossible to play with, but it does require a bit of creative thinking and making use of one thing that a lot of Commander players don’t like, but we’ll get to that later.

The first thing we need to do is take advantage of the not often used ability of swampwalk on Sol’kanar as a way to guarantee a bit of damage.

Urborg, Tomb of Yawgmoth is probably the best way to make sure that we can get lands our opponents control to become Swamps, with the biggest factor against using it being its price point.

There is the alternative of Blanket of Night, which does the same thing but is an enchantment and is much cheaper to have.

We also have access to ways of turning single lands into Swamps, like Evil Presence which for one mana turns a land into a Swamp or Contaminated Ground which does the same thing for two mana but also has that land’s controller lose two life when it’s tapped.

Why do we need to focus on such niche aspect of Sol’Kanar? Because we can play around with a quirky aspect of early Magic design as well.

Color changing cards and type changing cards are not seen often unless they are attached to some form of enchantment based removal like Witness Protection or Imprisoned in the Moon, but I’m talking something a bit more substantial.

Mind Bend can turn our swampwalk into islandwalk or plainswalk, but much more substantially we can turn the aspect of Sol’kanar that cares about black spells into another color.

Magical Hack and Spectral Shift do a similar effect, with Magical Hack focusing on lands and Spectral Shift being able to do either land type or color on spells or permanent or both if cast with Entwine.

There is also Swirl the Mists which is an enchantment that does it for colors and Whim of Volrath being repeatable with Buyback .

This opens us up to make use of a variety of strategies, but the one I want to focus on is the previously mentioned maligned tactic: an infinite combo.

While infinite combos are not something that many Commander players tend to like (perhaps a topic for Casual Chat?), this one at least can end the game when declared and not stall things out.

For those unaware of the combo, you need both Exquisite Blood and Sanguine Bond, or cards with similar effects, and gain life in any way, like Sol’Kanar’s effect. When you gain life Sanguine Bond has an opponent lose 1 life, which then triggers Exquisite Blood for you to gain 1 life which triggers Sanguine Bond again, and this cycle repeats until you win.

The reason why we have all the color changing cards is to better guarantee the combo going off if we don’t have a black spell to get Sol’kanar’s ability to trigger.

What’s keeping this combo from going off is that it is a well known combo that when a player recognizes that you have it, you will be the target before the second piece gets in play.

So you will need to keep these cards close to your chest until you can guarantee you can play them safely.

This Sol’kanar is a sneaky combo deck, which is facilitated by the fact that Sol’kanar has a life gain ability that we can manipulate to work in our favor. We have the ability to sneak in some damage with other creatures with swampwalk to help the illusion until we are ready to win, but it will be tough to enable if we play the combo pieces too early.

It’s risky, but can eek out a win if we are able to get it working.

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

Peace,

From, J.M. Casual