Hello and welcome to Daily Commander!

Today we are going to be talking about Kynaios and Tiro of Meletis!

Kynaios and Tiro is a four mana 2/8 with at the beginning of your end step you draw a card and then each player may put a land from their hand to the battlefield and each opponent who didn’t draws a card.

Kynaios and Tiro are often associated as one of the group hug Commanders, and while I started to go that direction, something else caught my attention and that was how high their toughness was.

Immediately my mind shifted into the pair being ideal for a toughness matters Commander, especially since there are quite a few creatures with defender in our colors.

The first thing to look for are creatures that have high toughness, and most of those will be creatures with defender.

The Pride of the Hull Clade is the prime example of this, having a massive 15 toughness and gets cheaper the more toughness you have on the battlefield.

If you want to help get this kickstarted then a creature like Arboreal Grazer come in handy, being a one mana creature with 3 toughness and let’s you put another land onto the battlefield, helping you ramp,. You can also have Sylvan Caryatid or Leafkin Druid to act as mana dorks with high toughness.

Another solid pick is Fecund Greenshell, which while it doesn’t have defender, does have a high toughness and synergizes well with all your other high toughness creatures by letting you either ramp or draw a card.

There are also some cheap to cast defenders with massive toughness like Wall of Earth, Wall of Denial, Wall of Hope, and Wall of Essence that cost one or two mana.

Since we have access to more colors we can get more use out of cards that can allow our defenders to attack or use their toughness rather than their power.

High Alert is the premier example of this game plan, especially with the activated ability that allows us to untap a creature. Cribbing a bit from our Doran, the Siege Tower list, we can also use cards like Rolling Stones and Assault Formation for some extra redundancy.

Walking Bulwark is also a card that we can play and get more consistent use out of it in order to give our defenders haste, attack as if they didn’t have defender, and use their toughness instead of power when dealing damage.

We get more access to creatures that also have conditional defender, like Surge Engine which we can use as a mana sink to turn off defender naturally, Skyclave Squid and Shoal Serpent which have Landfall triggers to let them attack as if they didn’t have defender, or Nivix Cyclops which can get bigger and attack without defender if you cast instant or sorcery spell.

Since it’s going to take a while for us to get all the pieces that we need, we also need to make sure we have a control aspect of our deck to keep things in check.

With the addition of red in our deck, we have access to Pramikon, Sky Rampart which can control the direction of combat, meaning we can direct an aggro deck away from us.

The other benefit of having creatures with low power is that we can use board wipes that destroy creatures having high power like Restricted Office//Lecture Hall which destroys creatures with power 3 or higher and gives our other permanents hexproof.

There is also Tetsuko Umezawa, Fugitive to make our creatures unblockable, The Council of Four to draw us more cards and make Knights if an opponent plays a lot of spells while also having a creature with huge toughness, or Wall of Frost to keep an opponents creature tapped for a turn.

With Kynaios and Tiro at the helm of this deck, we are using their ability as a way to maintain parity with our opponents. They let us draw more cards and ramp a little quicker to get us into a much more advantageous position, at the cost of our opponents doing the same.

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

Peace,

From, J.M. Casual