Hello and welcome to Daily Commander!

Today we are going to be talking about Lurrus of the Dream-Den!

Lurrus is a three mana 3/2 that has Companion with each permanent card in your starting deck has mana value 2 or less, lifelink, and once during each of your turns you may cast a permanent spell with mana value 2 or less from your graveyard.

The bane of many a constructed player, Lurrus in Commander isn’t as much of a problem. Lurrus cares about small permanents that have some form of recursive value, which often leans towards an aristocrats styled deck.

I have done quite a few aristocrat type of decks, but another deck archetype that Lurrus can help enable that I haven’t done too many of is a reanimator style deck.

Our goal is to find ways to get bigger creatures onto the battlefield for cheap via cheap reanimation spells. Luckily for us Lurrus is the Commander so we don’t need to worry about their Companion restriction.

The first thing we need to look for are ways to get our things into the graveyard, and the cheaper the better.

Stitcher’s Supplier is perfect for this because when it enters or dies we mill three cards, and with Lurrus we can use Stitcher’s Supplier multiple times a turn, sacrificing it for some value to mill us six per turn.

To help aid with that we can also use Snarling Gorehound, which allows us to surveil 1 whenever a creature with power 2 or less enters the battlefield under our control, which is going to be a number of our creatures.

Combine any sacrifice outlet, Bartolome del Presidio would be my personal choice, and we can get more value from a card like Scavenger’s Talent which helps us mill even more cards when we sacrifice things.

Now we should be looking out for ways to reanimate our creatures, ideally via permanents that are low mana cost.

Animate Dead is one of the best examples of this because, despite the templating, this allows us to bring a creature from a graveyard onto our battlefield, with the negligible penalty of -1/-0.

There is also Dance of the Dead, which has a similar effect to Animate Dead, but gives a +1/+1 and prevents the creature from untapping and requires the controller of the creature to pay 1 mana or 1 black mana to untap it.

As far as a creature way to reanimate our things, there is Priest of Fell Rites, which we can pay 3 life and sacrifice it to bring a creature from the graveyard to the battlefield as a sorcery. Even though it has flashback, we will not be using it because we have Lurrus as a way to bring it back.

That’s the important part, these cards can go to the graveyard through our milling shenanigans and we can play them because they are permanents with mana value 2 or lower.

As far as which creatures we bring back, we should look into creatures that are expensive to cast and have some sort of immediate value when they enter.

Sun Titan is a perfect target for this because it allows us to continue bringing our low mana permanents that reanimate things to the battlefield so we can get even more value.

There is also Reya Dawnbringer for more reanimation, Archon of Cruelty to remove resources from our opponent, Ashen Rider for removal, and Moonshaker Cavalry for a big swing to close out a game.

We can also have plenty of low cost creatures that help us by limiting what our opponents can do, like Grand Abolisher which prevents them from playing spells or activating abilities of creatures, artifacts, and enchantments on our turn or if you are feeling particularly mean you could also add Drannith Magistrate to prevent your opponents from playing outside of their hand (including the Command Zone).

Lurrus can help bring back a lot of things that allow us to control the pace of the game. As one would expect, the biggest weakness of the deck is graveyard interaction, but that is the risk with any graveyard based deck.

Just because a deck or playstyle has answers does not mean that you shouldn’t play it. Sometimes you may not be able to do what you want, but there will also be times when no one is able to interact and you run away with the game.

The law of averages is fun like that.

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

Peace,

From, J.M. Casual