Hello and welcome to Daily Commander!

Today we are going to be talking about Jhoira of the Ghitu!

Jhoira is a three mana 2/2 with if you pay two mana and exile a nonland card from your hand you put four time counters on the exiled card and if that card doesn’t have suspend, it gains suspend.

Playing around with suspend is always a neat way to work with casting big spells, especially in a way that is actually fairly cheap. The issue does come with getting those time counters off in an efficient manner, but there are ways around it.

Our goal is to get big mana spells that present a lot of value exiled for cheap and then get rid of the time counters in an expedient way.

The first thing that we should look at are ways to make sure that we have the mana to get Jhoira’s ability working once she’s in play.

Braid of Fire is probably the most consistent way we can do so, because it’s Cumulative Upkeep of add one red mana to our mana pool can be used to get several cards out of our hand for Jhoira as the game progresses.

Another way to get a decent amount of mana onto the battlefield while making use of red’s ability to make Treasure tokens is Alchemist’s Talent, which makes two tapped Treasure tokens when it enters the battlefield, but if you level it up to Level 2, then your Treasures make two mana instead.

If you don’t mind giving your opponents a bit of extra mana, then you can use Mana Flare to make everyone’s lands tap for double mana, or if you don’t mind jumping a couple of hoops there is also Barbflare Gremlin, which if it is tapped then every land taps for an additional mana but it deals 1 damage to its controller.

The next thing we should focus on is making sure we can get rid of the time counters on our exiled cards to get them out faster.

The Ninth Doctor gives us an additional upkeep step after he untaps during our untap step, which by the wording of time counters means we get to remove an additional time counter every turn.

Speaking of the Doctor Who cards, they introduced a mechanic called time travel, which means that for each suspended card you own and for each permanent you control with a time counter on it, you may add or remove a time counter.

We are primarily going to be removing time counters from our suspended cards, so The Tenth Doctor which allows us to time travel three times is excellent to consider, especially since it has an additional way to exile cards with time counters for us.

Time Beetle time travels whenever it deals combat damage and has skulk to help us get damage through, Rotating Fireplace is a mana rock that adds more colorless mana for each time counter on it and can allow us to time travel for four mana, and there is of course All of History, All at Once, which is a storm card that time travels, which we can use to get a ton of spells out quickly.

There is also Fury Charm, a modal spell that can either destroy an artifact, give a creature +1/+1 and trample until end of turn or remove two time counters from a permanent or suspended card.

Timecrafting is an instant that can either remove or add X time counters from a permanent or suspended card, Paradox Haze gives a player an additional upkeep after their first upkeep, and Sphinx of the Second Sun which gives us an additional beginning phase (untap, upkeep, and draw) at the beginning of our postcombat main phase.

As far as how we win, we just take advantage of the fact that we have access to big mana spells that give us major value.

Extra turn spells are one of the first thoughts that come to mind, and Temporal Mastery is one of the better options because not only is it a big mana extra turn spell, but if it happens to be the first card we draw in a turn, then we get to get an extra turn for only two mana.

There is Ovika, Enigma Goliath which whenever we cast a noncreature spell we make X 1/1 Phyrexian Goblin tokens with hast where X is the mana value of the spell, which means that multiple big mana spells that aren’t creatures also becomes a massive board.

Delayed Blast Fireball deals five damage to each opponent and each creature they control if it was cast from exile, Overflowing Insight draws us seven cards, Insurrection steals all of our opponents creatures, Swarm Intelligence allows us to copy instant and sorcery spells when we cast them, and there is always of course Omniscience for us to cast anything from our hand for free.

If we really want to be mean, then we can play super board wipes in Decree of Annihilation, Jokulhaups, or Worldfire while still having plenty of cards suspended for us to cast on our future turns to win us the game.

Jhoira is a value Commander where you can cheat things into play very efficiently, if you also manage to play efficiently. Jhoira was historically a problem Commander, but has since lost some of that old favor. If you build this deck correctly, then you can remind people that there are some messed up old Commanders out there that still have some kick in them.

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

Peace,

From, J.M. Casual