Hello and welcome to Daily Commander!

Today we are going to be talking about Kaima, the Fractured Calm!

Kaima is a four mana 3/3 that at the beginning of your end step, goad each creature your opponents control that’s enchanted by an Aura you control and you put a +1/+1 counter on Kaima for each creature goaded this way.

This is a weird card in its colors, but that means that this leads to an interesting puzzle to solve. It’s not often in red and green that you enchant your opponents creatures, those tend to be in white and blue, but that means we need to be creative in our strategy.

There are enchantments that we can use to take advantage of Kaima’s effect, though at the risk of them being late game threats against us, but there are ways we can work around this.

When we are looking for enchantments to use, we are going to be looking for enchantments that will make it so that damage gets through against our other opponents.

Undying Rage is a great example of what we are looking for because we can enchant an opponent’s creature, making it stronger and unable to block and if that creature dies and Undying Rage goes to the graveyard, it comes right back so we can use it again.

Similarly we can use Rancor as a one man version of the effect, but doesn’t give an opponent’s creature a downside, but it does come back to our hand once it goes to the graveyard, because inevitably our opponents will see our plan.

Sluggishness is a card I had no idea existed and all it does is make it so that a creature can’t block and it comes back to our hand, which is all that is needed for Kaima.

Keen Sense doesn’t recur, but it does have a neat ruling in that if you enchant an opponent’s creature and it deals damage to someone else, which is guaranteed to happen since your opponents creatures will be goaded.

Now that we have a veritable suite of Auras, we need a way to get them into our hand as expeditiously as possible.

Kruphix’s Insight is perfect for this because it digs through the top six cards of our library and puts up to three of them into our hand and the rest into the graveyard.

If we happen to fill in some of our creature suit with enchantment creatures that give use benefits when we play enchantments, like Destiny Spinner which keeps our creatures and enchantments from being countered, then that makes it a much more efficient card.

There are also some nonenchanment creatures like Knickknack Ouphe, which we can use as a late game mana sink to get a bunch of Auras onto the battlefield if we dump a ton of mana into it.

The way we win the game is to find ways to enchant multiple creatures our opponents control in order to goad them all to make Kaima huge.

Smoke Spirits’ Aid is one such spell that is perfect for the late game to dump a ton of mana into to give a bunch of our opponents creatures an Aura that deals one damage to its controller and you get a Treasure token.

Similarly, though a big more dangerous is Giant Inheritance, which gives the enchanted creature +5/+5 and gives it the ability to give other attacking creatures a Monster Role token, but we won’t get that benefit until it come back to our turn since the creature with the Monster Role token may not be goaded yet. The spell does recur, so if we are in the end game and it comes back to us we can cast it on one of our on creatures.

We may need to pre-goad our opponents creatures as a precaution to make sure we don’t get hit if Kaima gets removed, so something like Bothersome Quasit to goad a creature when we cast a noncreature spell, like one of our many Auras.

If we want a way to goad a huge number of smaller creatures, then Baeloth Barrityl, Entertainer is a good choice because not only does it goad creatures with power less then itself, but when a goaded attacking or blocking creature dies, you get a Treasure token.

Kaima is an interesting Commander in that you want to play a sort of Group Slug strategy, but not lean too far into it because your the last opponent may develop a large enough board presence to be a problem. It’s going to take a bit of maneuvering, but Kaima does get the ideas flowing.

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

Peace,

From, J.M. Casual