Hello and welcome to Daily Commander!

Today we are going to be talking about The Ancient One!

The Ancient One is a two mana 8/8 with Descend 8 that prevents it from attacking or blocking unless there are eight or more permanents in our graveyard, and an activated ability for four mana to draw a card, then discard a card and the card discarded will mill a player a number of cards equal to its mana value.

I remember when this card was spoiled and was trying to think of a way to make use of it in Pioneer to no real avail. The issue was a difficulty in getting enough cards in the graveyard in a reasonable amount of time.

In Commander, however, I believe that we have a better chance at getting this active much more consistently. It’s still going to take some work, but it is going to be a bit easier.

The first thing we need are ways to mill at a cheap enough cost to be worth it, along with a majority of permanents to get The Ancient One live and ready to swing.

Ripples of Undeath is a way to consistently mill cards, and as the game goes on and if we mill a card from it that we may need, then we can pay an extra mana and three life to get it into our hand.

While a majority of our cards will be permanents, we will still need some number of instants and sorceries that can effectively mill us for a decent chunk, like Consider which surveils 1 and draws us a card, or Contingency Plan to have us surveil 5 to plan for the future and clear any dead draws.

There is also The Everflowing Well, which mills 2 then draws 2 and at Descend 8 it transforms into a land called The Myriad Pools, which copies permanent spells we cast using mana produced by The Myriad Pools.

We also have a couple of mana dorks that mill a card and add colorless mana in Millikin and Deranged Assistant

Now the issue that comes with self mill is that we lose access to a lot of useful creatures to help us maintain some form of board presence. Luckily there are some solutions to this.

Narcomoeba comes to the battlefield when it is milled, and while it is a 1/1 with flying, it can still serve as a suitable blocker. Prized Amalgam is similar in that aspect because it can come back to the battlefield if a creature from our graveyard enters the battlefield via an ability or casting it.

We can also make use of the variety of creatures that can enter the battlefield from the graveyard either by paying mana or achieving a specific condition like Reassembling Skeleton or Nether Traitor.

There are even cards like Creeping Chill which can get it’s effect either by casting it or milling it.

While we are removing things from our graveyard, we should have enough cards in our graveyard to make that a non-issue.

There are two paths we can take, one is a beatdown strategy and the other is a combo strategy that will take some intense set up and mulligans to succeed.

For the first path, we use cards that have a Lhurgoyf type of effect like Cruel Somnophage, where the creature’s power and toughness is determined by the number of cards in all graveyards or your graveyard.

Souls of the Lost is also a solid creature to consider, especially for the early game where we can get some cards into the graveyard at the start of the game, Boneyard Mycodrax for the midgame that can Scavenge and make a creature huge, and Apocalypse Demon for the late game big swing.

The second path is a combo strategy that attempts to mirror an old deck that was banned in Pioneer in an Oops, All Spells strategy. This can be difficult to achieve, but not impossible.

There are two major necessities for this combo to work: no lands, and a way to mill us a lot.

The combo goes as such: have no lands and get as many MDFC spells that are also lands, play cards that can ramp us like the legal Moxen and Lotus Bloom, then cast Balustrade Spy to mill ourselves completely, getting the value in the creatures that return themselves to the battlefield.

Then when it gets to our turn, before our draw step we can cast Thassa’s Oracle to win the game.

Thassa’s Oracle is one of the most despised cards in Commander, and people will not enjoy that this is how you win the game, so keep that in mind.

I would personally recommend the beat down strategy because we can actually use The Ancient One to help win the game, rather than just being a vector in which to have the correct colors to win the game via Thassa’s Oracle.

The Ancient One isn’t the best self mill Commander, but it is easier to get online in Commander than in some other formats and self mill is always a fun and risky game plan, in my opinion.

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

Peace,

From, J.M. Casual