Hello and welcome to Daily Commander!

Today we are going to be talking about Yurlok of Scorch Thrash!

Yurlok is a four mana 4/4 with vigilance and a player losing unspent mana causes that player to lose that much life and for one mana and tap, each player adds a black, red, and green mana.

Mana burn was an old mechanic that was basically this effect permanently, and was removed from the game because the situations in which a player would have excess mana was not something that came up often in regular play.

Now that there is a nonzero amount of ways to generate infinite mana or have mana stay until the end of turn or to give mana for your opponents to use, having something to punish that is quite the game plan.

Our goal is to not be so aggressive in combat, but rather be more of a burn type of deck while being able to protect our own things and use a ton of mana to our advantage so we don’t take the damage.

First we need ways to give ourselves and our opponents extra mana so that they can take more damage from Yurlok’s ability.

Shizuko, Caller of Autumns is such an example because they give three green mana at the beginning of each player’s upkeep and they have until the end of the turn to take advantage of that mana.

There is also Eladamri’s Vineyard and Magus of the Vineyard who both add two green mana at the beginning of each player’s precombat main phase, and both also happen to be one mana so we can take advantage of them early in the game.

We can also use mana increasers that would normally not prove to be much of a benefit to us like Mana Flare or Heartbeat of Spring to further incentivize our opponents into getting a ton of mana that they may not be able to use immediately.

Now we may also need to incentivize our opponents into tapping their own lands for mana, just so we can get Yurlok’s ability to be a bit more effective.

Citadel of Pain is such an example where it deals X damage to a player for each untapped land they have in play, which in Commander can be quite a number of lands.

There is also Stoneshaker Shaman, which forces a player to sacrifice an untapped land, which most of the time will have the players tap the land or have Stoneshaker Shaman eat a removal spell because people don’t want their lands messed with.

We can also mess around with people’s land drops by using something like Tectonic Instability where whenever a land enters play, that player’s lands become tapped. All of the sudden players are much more careful about their land drops and need to spend mana before their lands become tapped, or they tap lands in response to the trigger.

You get a similar effect from War’s Toll, but it counts when a player taps their lands they all get tapped unless they tap them all for mana in response, and it makes their attacks awkward because if one creature attacks, they must all attack.

Now we need to find a way to deal with how we deal with excess mana that we generate from the variety of effects that will also force us to generate a ton of mana.

Helix Pinnacle is a mana sink with a win condition attached to it, meaning that whenever we have a ton of excess mana we can just dump it all to Helix Pinnacle to win us the game. It even has Shroud to protect it from targeted removal.

We can use otherwise less than ideal mana sinks to help generate us some value like playing Dark Depths fairly, use Comet Storm to burn out our opponents the rest of the way, Exsanguinate to drain our opponents, and maybe even a Voracious Hydra to get rid of a problematic creature.

Yurlok does offer a pretty gimmicky playstyle, but when pulled off correctly then there is a chance that you can burn out your opponents to win the game. Add in some damage doublers and you can potentially win the game even faster.

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

Peace,

From, J.M. Casual