Hello and welcome to Daily Commander!

Today we are going to be talking about Rielle, the Everwise!

Rielle is a three mana 0/3 that gets +1/+0 for each instant and sorcery in your graveyard, and whenever you discard one or more cards for the first time each turn, you draw that many cards.

There is an obvious synergy in Rielle’s abilities that the idea for how to play them is simple, the question is what is the most effective way to go about it?

We are looking to get a good number of instants and sorceries into the graveyard while also getting value from discarding cards by drawing more cards.

First thing we need to consider are other cards that get value from having a large number of instants and sorceries in the graveyard.

Crackling Drake is the best example of this because not only is their power equal to the number of instants and sorceries in your graveyard, but also in exile. This means that cards that exile themselves, like cards with Flashback, can be used with fewer repurcussions.

While there are cards similar to Crackling Drake like Spellheart Chimera, Enigma Drake, Haughty Djinn, and Melek, Reforged Researcher, they all are limited to focusing only on the graveyard. While this isn’t as effective, Spellheart Chimera and Enigma Drake have flying, Haughty Djinn discounts our instants and sorceries by 1, while Melek discounts the first instant or sorcery you cast each turn by 3.

There is also a bit of a secret tech of a card that we can use to even make our lands have more utility in the graveyard in Mirran Safehouse, which has all activated abilities of lands in our graveyard.

This means any utility lands or creature lands don’t lose any effectiveness if they are discarded.

The next most important thing to look at are the ways we can discard cards in order to trigger Rielle’s ability to draw the most cards as possible.

Forgotten Creation is extremely effective in this regard because it discards our whole hand meaning that we get double the amount of cards with Rielle’s ability.

There are also the plethora of looting and rummaging spells that we can use to abuse the ability and draw an absurd amount of cards. Faithless Looting basically reads draw two, discard two, then draw two for 1 mana with a Flashback of 3 mana.

We also have cards like Big Score and Unexpected Windfall that each end up drawing three cards and making two Treasures. If we want excessive mana generation then we also have Path of the Pyromancer that we can use to discard our hand to gain that much red mana and draw that many cards plus one plus that many cards with Rielle.

Even in terms of protection there is Forbid, a counter spell that has a Buyback cost of discarding two cards, which we can use on our opponent’s turns to draw us an additional two cards on their turns while maintaining a threat for the other players.

I should stress that we only can do this once per turn so it isn’t completely abuseable, but if we had a blink or flicker spell then we can double up this effect to get even more value.

Ideally we also have a way to have no maximum hand size like Reliquary Tower or Spellbook, because otherwise we discard to hand size and if we didn’t discard in our turn prior with Rielle out, we draw and then discard some more.

Now the question is how do we win the game if we draw a bunch of cards? There are several ways we can go about this, depending on what playstyle you want to go for.

Teferi, Temporal Pilgrim is a way to go about a win in a control manner because if we manage to draw a massive number of cards then we can ultimate Teferi pretty quickly to bounce everything an opponent has and swing with our huge creatures.

We have a way to win with mill if we have both Psychic Corrosion and Jace’s Erasure to mill our opponents out, if we want to deal damage for each card we draw then we have Niv-Mizzet Parun, if we want a go wide aggro plan then we have The Locust God, if we want a go tall aggro plan we have Proft’s Eidetic Memory.

If we also manage to get cards like Wonder and Anger into the graveyard, then creatures we summon that grow bigger with the instants and sorceries have flying and haste, meaning that they are much harder to deal with.

As far as what instants and sorceries we have, anything that can cast from the graveyard like cards with Flashback, Aftermath, or Retrace are among the many effects we have access to.

Rielle is an enabler to a very risky strategy, because there is a nonzero chance that we mill ourselves out. There are ways we can win via that position like Thassa’s Oracle or Jace, Wielder of Mysteries or Laboratory Maniac, but I am not a fan of those.

If we can get a Living Conundrum on the battlefield and manage to mill ourselves out and win via combat, that is a better way to go about it, but that’s just me.

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

Peace,

From, J.M. Casual