Hello and welcome to Daily Commander!

Today we are going to be talking about Mendicant Core, Guidelight!

Mendicant Core is a two mana */3 whose power is based on the number of artifacts you control, has Start your engines! and when you achieve max speed, whenever you cast an artifact spell, you may pay 1 to copy it.

A brand new Commander from Aetherdrift, and one with one of the sets new mechanics. Having done a prerelease and a couple of drafts on Arena, Start your engines! is a mechanic that can get online quicker than you would expect.

It does take a bit of creative thinking, and that is what I love to do when looking at potential Commanders.

The first thing that we need to look for are ways to get a ton of cheap artifacts onto the battlefield.

Creatures like Spyglass Siren are ideal in this instance because when they enter the battlefield it generates a Map token. Similarly there are the usual suspects in Thraben Inspector and Novice Inspector to make Clue tokens. If you manage to also get an Academy Manufactor into play, then you triple your artifact output.

Similarly we can get some cheap to zero cost artifacts like Mishra’s Bauble or Moonsnare Prototype to either gain some card advantage or turn our artifacts into mana rocks.

There are also quite a few Myr that we can use like Parcel Myr for card advantage, Gold Myr and Silver Myr for mana, or Myr Battlesphere to get a bunch of artifacts onto the battlefield. I don’t think the Myr are better than any other cheap artifacts, but they are pretty close to robots so they flavorfully look like they fit.

You also have your artifact cost reducers in Etherium Sculptor and Foundry Inspector, which also double as artifacts to make Mendicant Core even stronger.

Now comes the tricky part of Mendicant Core, in order to get to max speed quicker, we need to copy the trigger.

If we manage to copy the trigger when dealing damage, via an effect like Lithoform Engine, then we gain an additional speed. The reason this works is a little confusing, and I was confused when I learned of this interaction, but as I understand it’s that basically copying the trigger to increase speed bypasses the once per turn limit that is imposed on it.

It’s unintuitive and the YouTuber This is a Commander Channel explains it much better than I could. Needless to say, it is a complex interaction that gets us to max speed faster. This means that any way to copy triggered abilities like Strionic Resonator and the Adventure part of Virtue of Knowledge, Vantress Visions, are going to be major part of the deck.

Of course we can get to max speed the old fashioned way in hasty creatures like Gingerbrute, or evasive creatures like Surge Engine. Remember, your speed increases when an opponent loses life on your turn, so something like Lonely Arroyo and Explosive Apparatus which can deal a single point of damage to an opponent will trigger, provided its on our turn.

Now that we got to max speed, we need artifacts to copy, and I would focus on artifacts that have more utility use than big splashy effects.

Assimilation Aegis is something that we can really benefit from copying, because we can exile another problematic creature and have it become our opponents problem when we make our small artifacts into potential threats.

Staying within Aetherdrift and the stealing opponents creatures theme, Possession Engine is a strong contender because we can steal our opponents creatures and use them for whatever we need, like Crewing the Possession Engines to swing in.

If we want even more copying nonsense, we can copy a Twinning Staff, which adds an additional copy of the spell. If we copy the Twinning Staff we get another copy, which we can copy with Strionic Resonator for even more copies.

Mendicant Core is an interesting Commander in that it can help enable some wacky plays, but there needs to be some work put in to make work. If we manage to get a huge copy train going though, it will definitely be a sight to behold.

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

Peace,

From, J.M. Casual