Hello and welcome to Daily Commander!

Today we are going to be talking about Medomai the Ageless!

Medomai is a six mana 4/4 with flying and whenever they deal combat damage to a player, you take an extra turn and it cannot attack during extra turns.

Extra turns are contentious topics when concerning Commander, but it is still an interesting way to play the game that can be tricky to navigate, especially with the rider of Medomai not being able to attack during extra turns.

So the idea is to find a way to stack as many extra turns as possible until we can win the game, i.e. a potential infinite turn loop. It’s going to be difficult to figure out, but I’, sure we can make something work.

In an attempt to stack as many turns as possible, we need to make sure that we can be in a position to do so by leaning into a control and combo playstyle.

No More Lies is great for the early game, especially if we can counter an early Commander or threat because No More Lies exiles the spell. This also helps in the mid to late game if an opponent casts a board wipe as we begin to set things up.

A lot of soft counter spells also exile the card, which is useful against graveyard strategies, so Reject, Defabricate, and Syncopate are solid cards to include, as well as a sneaky Mana Tithe, Rebuff the Wicked, or Lapse of Certainty to really surprise your opponents.

Against aggro decks, especially against multicolor decks that lean on greedy mana bases, Settle the Wreckage can be especially devastating. Same goes for Aetherize and Aetherspouts.

Righteous Cause can also be helpful to make sure that we have a healthy life total because it counts whenever any creature attacks, and Turn the Tables can sweep a board if your opponents aren’t expecting it.

The next thing we need to do is make sure we can cast our spells in a mana efficient manner, so any way we can reduce the cost of our things will be incredibly necessary.

Pearl and Sapphire Medallion are almost auto includes because of how they effect all of your spells and not just a specific type.

There is also Grand Arbiter Augustin IV, which also discounts your spells while taxing your opponents spells. Speaking of taxing, that can be an effective way to make sure our opponents can’t interact with us.

Dovin, Hand of Control, God-Pharaoh’s Statue, and Tithe Taker can help ensure that you can still cast your spells while making it difficult for your opponent to interact with you.

There are also some color specific hate cards that you have access to if you want to be really specific, like Drought which forces opponents to sacrifice Swamps for spells and activated abilities, High Seas to tax red and green creature spells, and Suppression Field for taxing just activated abilities.

Now comes the way we attempt to get a whole lot of extra turns, which requires us to get a few creatures onto the battlefield.

Wedding Announcement is a solid way to get some bodies onto the battlefield relatively cheaply, offers card advantage, and when it flips it becomes an anthem to make our attacks better.

Other creature token makers include cards like Skrelv’s Hive, Brimaz, King of Oreskos, and Horn of Gondor and we need to make sure that we can get a sufficient number of creatures onto our battlefield.

Then we need to cast a card like Nanogene Conversion, which transforms all creatures into a copy of a target creature, in this case Medomai, and we need to swing them all to the most vulnerable player. Since it transforms all creatures, this also affects our opponents things, but if we have a substantially wide board it shouldn’t matter as much.

If we can get a few to hit, then we should have access to an excessive number of extra turns, which we can play out since our Medomai will be out of action and we should still have a decent number of tokens to swing until we win the game.

There are a few slower ways to get this into motion, such as Irenicus’s Vile Duplication, Quantum Misalignment, Spark Double, and Storm of Saruman, but it should result in a similar outcome, albeit with fewer extra turns.

Medomai doesn’t look like it, but it can prove to be a surprising extra turn combo Commander if we play our cards right. This is an extremely fragile combo that folds to targeted destruction, counter magic, and board sweepers, but is still in the realm of possibility to pull off.

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

Peace,

From, J.M. Casual