Hello and welcome to Daily Commander!

Today we are going to be talking about Dina, Soul Steeper!

Dina is a two mana 1/3 that has whenever you gain life, each opponents loses 1 life and for 1 mana and sacrifice another creature, Dina gets +X/+0 where X is the sacrificed creature’s power.

Dina is looking to play an aristocrats strategy, where the name of the game is to drain our opponents whenever we gain life. Dina can also enable one of the more infamous infinite life drain combos, but we won’t focus on that aspect of the deck.

Instead, we will need to find ways to gain life so that we don’t only have one win condition in the deck. This is going to be primarily a deck that wins via attrition and the life gain will help make sure we don’t die too quickly.

First we need as many incidental ways to gain life, which is not that hard to do in our colors.

Jaddi Offshoot is a one mana defender that has Landfall gain one life, which is something ideally we’ll be doing every turn. There is also Kazandu Nectarpot who has the same Landfall trigger, but is one more mana expensive.

Similarly there is Gala Greeters, which has three modes for whenever a creature enters the battlefield under our control, either putting a +1/+1 counter on itself, making a tapped Treasure token, or gain 2 life.

We also have access to Haywire Mite, which can be used to exile a noncreature artifact or noncreature enchantment that can also gain us some life.

Then we also have access to Deathrite Shaman and Scavenging Ooze, which can be used to exile our opponents graveyards for a variety of effects for both, but they also help us gain some incidental life if we exile a creature card.

The next thing we need to look at are cards that give us a benefit from having a higher life total or gaining life in general.

Cosmos Elixir serves a double purpose, one as an additional way to gain life to enable Dina, but once we have a higher life total then we start to draw an additional card.

As a form of insurance, we can also use something like Eternity Vessel, which allows us to reset our life total equal to the number of charge counters on it after a Landfall triggers. The charge counters it enters with is equal to our life total at the time, which if we can get it early on can count as a huge swing of life.

We also have access to a Class enchantment in Gourmand’s Talent, which gives our artifacts the Food ability, levels up to whenever we gain life for the first time each turn we make a 3/3 Raccoon token, and at third level we get to put a +1/+1 counter on each creature we control.

There is also Preacher of the Schism, which if our life total is the highest among other players then we get to draw a card whenever it attacks and lose a life, but if we are at a lower life total then we make a 1/1 Vampire with lifelink.

As for how this deck wins, like I said this deck wins via attrition, and the best way we can get that through is by stacking as many similar effects to Dina that we can get.

Marauding Blight-Priest is such an option, because whenever we gain life, each opponent loses 1 life, just life Dina. For a stronger version of that effect, we have access to Vito, Thorn of the Dusk Rose, which drains a target opponent equal to the amount of life that we gained, and gives our creature lifelink, which can be a massive swing in the late game.

Another similar version of the effect is Enduring Tenacity, which also drains a target opponent equal to the amount of life we gained, but has the benefit of also having the ability to return to the battlefield when it dies as an enchantment that is no longer a creature.

If you really want to, you can have the standby infinite combo in Sanguine Bond and Exquisite Blood, but the more interesting option to have as a way to close out a game is to have so much life that you could potentially win via Aetherflux Reservoir.

Dina is an enabler sort of Commander, in that she enables potential strategies if we manage to sequence our cards correctly. The issue comes with making sure that we have all of our pieces together in order to form an orderly machine.

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

Peace,

From, J.M. Casual