Hello and welcome to Daily Commander!

Today we are going to be talking about The Archimandrite!

The Archimandrite is a five mana 0/5 that at the beginning of your upkeep gains you X life where X is the number of cards in your hand minus 4, and whenever you gain life, Advisors, Artificers, and Monks gain vigilance and +X/+0 until end of turn where X is the amount of life you gained, and if you tap three untapped Advisors, Artificers, and/or Monks you draw a card.

This is such an odd combination of effects in that you want to have a lot cards in hand, gain life, and support three different creature types. Each ability feeds into each other, so that you can potentially always have it trigger, it’s just a lot of hoops to jump through.

What I think we should do is pick one creature type to be the primary focus, while having the other creature types act as support to help us get access to The Archimandrite’s draw ability.

I think that the best creature type to focus on is Monks, primarily since a lot of them can gain a benefit from an aggressive strategy, as well as a spellslinger subtheme.

Monastery Swiftspear is a perfect example of this in that it is a Monk with haste and prowess, meaning that we can go swinging as soon as we play it, it gets bigger inherently via the prowess, and giving it vigilance makes it more resilient after we attack.

We can also use Monastery Mentor as a way to get a ton of other Monks with prowess out on the battlefield whenever we cast a noncreature spell. We can also use Third Path Iconoclast to get less of a benefit in that regard since the bodies they make are Soldiers, but it is still good to get a ton of bodies in play.

There is also Githzerai Monk, a Monk with flash and flying which when it enters it taps all creatures we don’t control, Pinnacle Monk to bring back an instant or sorcery or be a land if we need it, or Narset, Enlightened Exile to give all of our creatures prowess and cast a card from our graveyard with mana value less than or equal to Narset’s power.

With us having a primary focus on Monks, we should have access to the other creature types to act as support to make sure we can do what we want.

Michiko Konda, Truth Seeker is a neat Advisor we can use as a way to make our opponents more wary in dealing damage to us, especially since with she prevents that damage and forces that opponent to sacrifice a permanent.

We can also use Dauntless Dismantler to slow down decks that are artifact dependent as well as get rid of artifacts of a certain mana value, which usually means for one mana we can get rid of a ton of artifact tokens.

Denry Kiln, Editor in Chief enters with either a +1/+1 counter, first strike counter, or vigilance counter and whenever a nontoken creature we control enters we put the same number and kind of counters on that creature, first strike probably going to be the one we use the most.

If we are planning to draw a ton of cards, then Duelist of the Mind is an option worth considering since it has power equal to the number of cards we’ve drawn and once each turn if we commit a crime we can draw and discard a card.

Now we need a way to win the game, which means that we need to find a way to draw more cards and gain life.

Teferi’s Ageless Insight allows us to draw an additional card, barring the first draw in our draw step, which if we combine with cheap cantrips like Consider or Opt, then we can have a decent number of cards for our next upkeep.

As far as gaining life more consistently, we have True Conviction, which gives our creatures double strike and lifelink, which means that when we hit with the first strike damage, we gain a ton of life and boost our creatures, and when they come in for the second attack it deals even more damage and we gain even more life.

In order to keep ahead we can play cards like Lightning Helix to deal 3 damage and gain us 3 life, or Absorb to counter a spell to gain us 3 life, Revitalize to gain us 3 life and draw a card, Faithful Mending to gain us 2 life draw two and then discard two with a flashback so we can do it again, there are a ton of cheap cantrips that also happen to gain us life.

If we want a huge swing of power, then there is Beacon of Immortality, which doubles a player’s life total, which if we pair it with something like Flying Crane Technique, can win us the game if our opponent doesn’t have an answer.

The Archimandrite is an unusual Commander in that it wants to do a lot of things and requires us to jump through a few hoops in order to make it work. While we can definitely make it work, we do need to do a number of things in order to make the deck consistently win.

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

Peace,

From, J.M. Casual