Hello and welcome to Daily Commander!

Today we are going to be talking about Arvinox, the Mind Flail!

Arvinox is an eight mana 9/9 that isn’t a creature unless you control three or more permanents you don’t own and at the beginning of your end step, exile the bottom card of each of your opponents library face down and for as long as those cards are exiled you may look at them, cast permanent spells, and you may spend mana of any color to cast those spells.

Arvinox is an interesting theft Commander in that it only wants to take your opponents permanents, but it also has the ability of not being a creature unless you control three or more permanents you don’t own. This makes it harder to interact with, which is good for us, but we also need to make sure we can get to eight mana.

We can pack the deck with rituals and mana accelerators, but what if we take the deck into a more controlling route and slow roll it. There are ways we can steal from our opponents in the meantime so when Arvinox hits the field it is already a major threat to be dealt with.

First we need to have other ways to get things our opponents control, especially if they do so incidentally.

Gisa, Glorious Resurrector is great for this because it affects whenever a creature our opponent dies, which means that sacrifice strategies become stifled and combat becomes trickier for our opponents. It also acts as a way to exile a bunch of creatures our opponents control if we play a board wipe that we get those creatures on our side.

Thieving Amalgam is another option to consider because we get to manifest the top of their library at the beginning of their upkeep, which can be detrimental if they are playing with the top of their library. Now manifest works best if we steal creatures, but depriving them of a spell or land can be just as useful.

Of course there is also Gonti, Lord of Luxury which steals a card from the top of an opponent’s library that we can cast, but we also have the new Gonti, Night Minister, which if a player casts a spell they don’t own they make a Treasure token and whenever a creature deals damage to an opponent they take the top card of that opponent’s library and play with mana of any type being able to cast any spell.

This incentivizes our opponents to attack each other to get something and get a bit of mana, but we make the most use of it since our deck is built around it.

Speaking of, we need to find ways to make sure our opponents don’t attack us by depriving them of cards.

Cunning Rhetoric is great for this because if an opponent attacks us or a PLaneswalker we control we exile the top card of their library and we can play that card and spend mana of any color to cast it.

Another way we can control what an opponent has is by using a lesser used type of creature that puts cards from a graveyard to the bottom of its owner’s library, like Junktroller. This means that when we get Arvinox out onto the battlefield and our opponent gets something into the graveyard that we can use, we can use Junktroller to get that card to the bottom of the library.

Another way we can manipulate the bottom of our opponents graveyard is Psychotic Episode, which allows you to take a card from our opponent’s hand and put it to the bottom of their library, which is a fairly unique way of removal that black doesn’t get.

There is also Dead Man’s Chest, which enchants a creature our opponent controls and when it dies we exile cards equal to its power from our opponents library and cast spells spending mana as if it were mana of any type to cast it.

Since our deck is going to be much more of a controlling sort of deck that has high mana payoffs, we need to make sure we can use all of that mana.

Worst Fears can be a way to set us up in an advantageous position because it controls a player on their next turn, which if we end up in a situation where there are three players then we can have one attack another and then swing on the open player, while making sure that they don’t have the resources to defend themselves.

We can also make use of the high mana board wipes that black has access to like In Garruk’s Wake which destroys all creatures and Planeswalkers we don’t control, or Rise of the Dark Realms to steal all creatures from all graveyards after a board wipe.

Blood Money is also something we can use when Arvinox is not a creature and wipe the board while also getting a tapped Treasure token for each nontoken creature destroyed.

Arvinox is a Commander that leads a play style while not being essential to the play style. There are a ton of ways we can use to steal our opponents things to get Arvinox online quicker, but they can help us catch up if we fall behind while also hindering our opponents.

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

Peace,

From, J.M. Casual