Hello and welcome to Daily Commander!

Today we are going to be talking about Akul the Unrepentant!

Akul is a four mana 5/5 with flying, trample, and once each turn as a sorcery if you sacrifice three other creatures you can put a creature card from your hand to the battlefield.

A slow way to get big things onto the battlefield, but a way to cheat out big mana things is not a bad thing. We just need plenty of small things to sacrifice to get the big things out.

Ideally these small things should have some death triggers so we can get even more value from them, and the big creatures should have a strong enters the battlefield triggers as well.

First thing we need to look at is the suite of small creatures with death triggers that we are going to use.

Greedy Freebooter is a one drop that can give you a scry and a Treasure token when it dies, so having it early to serve as a blocker can serve us well. Impulsive Pilferer only make a Treasure when it dies, but it also has Encore that immediately gives us three bodies to sacrifice to Akul and get even more Treasures.

Any other creature that makes creature tokens will be useful because we can double dip on Akul’s ability, so Harried Spearguard, Infestation Sage, and Nested Shambler work well.

There are also the creatures that come back via Persist or Undying that we can also use to double dip, like Putrid Goblin and Butcher Ghoul, or the creatures that give your opponents creatures -1/-1 like Shambling Goblin or Festering Goblin.

Another series of creature we should take a look at are creatures that benefit from things being sacrificed.

Juri, Master of the Revue is a great choice in this aspect because they count any permanent being sacrificed, which means our creatures and Treasures, and if we need to deal some extra damage we can sacrifice Juri do so.

Crime Novelist only gets a benefit whenever we sacrifice an artifact, but they get bigger and add a red mana which can help us ramp up to get more things onto the battlefield.

Mayhem Devil is the ideal include because we can get rid of small creatures, or send damage to our opponents to slowly deal damage, Sawblade Skinripper to deal damage equal to the number of permanents we’ve sacrificed, and Rakdos, The Muscle potentially steal some of our opponents things.

Now that we have our set up, we need to get the payoffs onto the battlefield, and they should have some sort of benefit when they hit the battlefield.

Avatar of Slaughter is a huge body and gives everything double strike and must attack each combat if able, so that helps us get a ton of damage through, especially if we can get a way to give our creatures haste, which is plentiful in red.

If we want to get rid of something on the battlefield, then we have access to Cityscape Leveler as well, which not only gets rid of something when it enters the battlefield, but also when it attacks.

If we are aiming to go in a more aggressive direction then we have Graaz, Unstoppable Juggernaut to turn all of our things into 5/3’s that must attack, which pairs really well with Avatar of Slaughter.

If battlefield control is our flavor, and if we have access to them, there is always creatures with Annihilator or Blightsteel Colossus, which can end games if we have haste makers.

Akul is a generically solid sacrifice Commander that can be built for any budget and can be upgraded quite easily and tuned to however you want to cheat big things onto the battlefield. It is slow and can only be done once per turn, but that doesn’t mean that fun things can’t be done with it.

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

Peace,

From, J.M. Casual