Hello and welcome to Daily Commander!

Today we are going to be talking about Queen Marchesa!

Queen Marchesa is a four mana 3/3 with deathtouch, haste, when she enters the battlefield you become the monarch and at the beginning of your upkeep, if an opponent is the monarch you create a 1/1 Assassin creature token with deathtouch and haste.

Monarch has been a popular mechanic in Commander ever since its introduction, mostly because it draws people cards and incentivizes people to engage in combat to not drag out games, so more than likely we can play around with the mechanic and use it to our advantage.

The interesting aspect about Queen Marchesa is that she rewards you in not being the monarch, and there are a ton of cards that give us additional bonuses if we are the monarch, so we should find ways to play with both.

Taking a look at some of the cards that interact with the monarch mechanic in our colors, we are aiming to be focusing on a more midrange style deck that forces our opponents to reconsider attacking us while we slowly build a wide board.

Champions of Minas Tirith is an example of this because it forces any opponent who wants to attack us to pay mana equal to cards in their hand, and if they don’t they cannot attack us.

Emberwilde Captain has a similar punish effect if you are the monarch in that if an opponent attack you while you are the monarch, the attacking opponent is dealt damage equal to the number of cards in their hand.

There is also Archon of Coronation which prevents damage from making you lose life. While an opponent will still become monarch if they hit you, if someone is making a big swing on you, you have some form of protection.

All of these cards also make you the monarch, so even if you lose it you can get it back pretty easily.

Playing into the flavor of monarch and Queen Marchesa, there are also the two Court cycles of cards that we can play to help facilitate our midrange plan.

The Courts from Wilds of Eldraine Commander all do something inherently, but do an additional effect if you are the monarch. Court of Embereth creates a 3/1 Knight token and if you are the monarch you deal damage to each opponent equal to the number of creatures you control.

Court of Locthwain exiles the top card of an opponent’s library, allowing you to play that card and spend mana of any type to cast it, giving you a free spell to cast if you are the monarch while Court of Ardenvale returns a permanent with mana value 3 or less to your hand or to the battlefield if you are the monarch.

The Court cycle from Commander Legends do something, but does a stronger version of that effect if you are the monarch.

Court of Ambition has an opponent lose 3 or 6 life and discard 1 or 2 cards, Court of Grace either makes a 1/1 flying Spirit or a 4/4 flying Angel, and Court of Ire deals 2 or 7 damage to a target.

As I said earlier, we are going to be slowly accumulating a wide board of creatures based off of our ways to incidentally make creature tokens, whether we are the monarch or not.

Cards that help boost our creature tokens come at a benefit, like Securiton Squadron, which has a benefit whether we play it early or later. If we play it early, we can present some decent blockers, whereas if we play it later then our tokens become bigger threats, especially the tokens Queen Marchesa makes since they have haste.

Intangible Virtue, Inspiring Leader, and Leyline of the Meek are all token anthems with Leyline of the Meek being particularly useful because of it being a Leyline.

Roar of Resistance gives all our creature tokens haste and when one or more creatures attack, we can pay one and a red for any creature attacking our opponents or Planeswalkers they control to gain +2/+0. This means that if one opponent attacks another, we can boost their creatures to deal much more damage.

Then of course we have the ever reliable token replacer in Divine Visitation, which turns any of our small tokens into 4/4 Angels, which when combined with something like Echoing Assault or Determined Iteration can get out of hand pretty quickly.

Queen Marchesa is an engine Commander, helping us facilitate our win conditions rather than being a win condition on their own. She gets the ball rolling and allows us to set up a win, long may she reign.

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

Peace,

From, J.M. Casual