Hello and welcome to Daily Commander!

Today we are going to be talking about Syrix, Carrier of the Flame!

Syrix is a four mana 3/3 with flying, haste, and at the beginning of your end step is a creature card left your graveyard this turn, target Phoenix you control deals damage equal to its power to any target, and whenever a Phoenix you control dies, you may cast Syrix from your graveyard.

Commanders that can recur themselves from the graveyard for much cheaper than their Commander Tax cost is always good, especially with a creature type that can recur themselves fairly easily.

The plan is simple, get a bunch of Phoenixes moving around and dealing damage to our opponents.

First we need to look at our potential suite of Phoenixes, mostly because not all Phoenixes are created equal and have different ways of recursion.

Skyfire Phoenix is one of the best option because it comes back to the battlefield whenever you cast your Commander from anywhere, which is excellent because having two flying and hasty creatures with decent power is excellent.

Phoenix Chick is good for being a cheap Phoenix to get onto the battlefield early that has a cheap way to get itself onto the battlefield again while making itself a bit bigger.

Everquill Phoenix is more of a situational option, but whenever it mutates it makes a Feather token which for one mana can bring a Phoenix from our graveyard to the battlefield tapped, which can be useful for when we are prevented from bringing a Phoenix onto the battlefield, like against mill or discard.

Flame-Wreathed Phoenix is going to potentially be one of our bigger options for Syrix’s ability to deal damage because we give an opponent an option to make it bigger at the risk of it having haste and coming back to our hand when it dies. More than likely Flame-Wreathed Phoenix will hang back to make use of Syrix’s ability, but may swing to close out a game.

Our creature suite isn’t going to be completely made up of Phoenixes, we are going to have a reanimator and support package tied to our creatures.

Chainer, Nightmare Adept is ideal for this because not only can we discard Phoenixes to make it so we can cast Syrix from the graveyard, but we can also cast another Phoenix from the graveyard to trigger Syrix’s ability.

Alesha, Who Laughs at Fate is also great in getting our Phoenixes back into play after we attack, and since most Phoenixes are between 3 and 6 mana, we should be able to get them into play relatively easily.

Tormod, the Desecrator is great because whenever a creature leaves our graveyard we make a tapped 2/2 Zombie, Skeleton Crew similarly makes 2/2 Skeleton Pirates whenever a creature leaves your graveyard while giving Skeletons and Pirates a +1/+1 bonus, and Pitiless Plunderer to make a Treasure token whenever a creature we control dies.

We also have Bloodline Pretender and Metallic Mimic as the generic typal pieces, which can also be used in making Syrix’s first ability more fatal as we get Phoenixes moving around.

Now as to how we win the game, we are going to be going into a full aggro mode.

Descendants’ Fury is perfect for this because as soon as we deal combat damage to an opponent with one of our Phoenixes, we can sacrifice one of them to bring in a new Phoenix to the battlefield while still being able to bring back the one we sacrificed.

In getting more Phoenixes into play, we also have Molten Echoes which creates a copy of a creature of a creature type we declare that has haste and exiles itself at the end of turn. This means if we get more and more Phoenixes in play, which when they die can allow us to cast Syrix if they are in the graveyard.

We can also get Gratuitous Violence into play to have our Phoenixes able to deal double damage to players or Planeswalkers an opponent control, getting us to a win even quicker.

Syrix as a deck is easy enough to understand and has a way to work around Commander Tax, but as with many graveyard decks will be crippled whenever there is some graveyard removal.

Hopefully we work fast enough to make sure we win before it becomes a problem.

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

Peace,

From, J.M. Casual