Hello and welcome to Daily Commander!

Today we are going to be talking about Borborygmos Enraged!

Borborygmos is an eight mana 7/6 with trample and whenever he deals combat damage to a player, you reveal the top three cards of your library and you put all land cards into your hand while putting the rest into the graveyard and if you discard a land card he deals 3 damage to any target.

Borborygmos is a card that is much better in against a single opponent, and the reason for that is because of the fact that the burn is going to take a long time to deal with against three opponents.

However, we can make use of Borborygmos’s ability to be a free discard outlet to cards with discard synergies, as well as ways to recur the lands we discarded back into our hand to continuously deal burn damage. It’s going to be a slower strategy, but one I think we can pull off.

The first thing we need to do is have ways to ramp to get to Borborygmos, who is the lynchpin of the strategy especially since we are going to be having a higher land count than normal.

Lumbering Worldwagon is going to be a way we can ramp fairly consistently while also being a decent body that gets bigger and bigger the more we ramp. In addition we are also going to be looking at ways to get additional land drops, like with Azusa, Lost but Seeking to get to Borborygmos faster,

Mina and Denn, Wildborn also fall into the Azusa category of getting more land drops, but they also have the benefit of allowing us to bounce a land into our hand if we need to get a land to discard for Borborygmos.

Since we are going to be sending lands to the graveyard, Ramunap Excavator and Crucible of Worlds are going to be ways to get those lands into play if we are running low on lands.

Wrenn and Seven is an excellent way to get lands into your hand while also getting a way to ramp very quickly as necessary and even making a huge body to protect yourself as the game goes on, and even the ultimate has its fringe uses in our deck, especially if we want to keep the Commander tax low.

Now that we have our ramp considered, we also need to look at cards that benefit from cards being discarded.

Marauding Mako is a one drop that can become a problem as the game goes on if we have a few ways to discard cards, and once we have Borborygmos out we can start discarding lands to get the tiny Shark into a massive threat.

In a similar vein, Inti, Seneschal of the Sun is great to have because whenever you discard a card not only do you put a +1/+1 counter on a creature and give it trample, but you are also able to exile the top card of your library and play it that turn.

Magmakin Artillerist can be used to deal damage to each opponent whenever you discard one or more cards while also dealing a point of damage when you Cycle it, Surly Badgersaur can get you some Treasure tokens whenever you discard a land card while also getting other benefits if you discard other card types, and Skola Grovedancer can help you gain 1 life whenever a land card goes into your graveyard from anywhere.

A bit of a pricier include, depending on when you read this and what different formats use it for, is Monument to Endurance, which has three effects you can pick from whenever you discard a card, choosing one that hasn’t been chosen that turn. Drawing a card, making a Treasure, and having each opponent lose 3 life are all good effects and very flexible to whatever you need at the moment.

While we are going to be making use of discarding lands with Borborygmos, we should also have a way to have a backup plan involving those discarded lands.

Worldsoul’s Rage is a way to make the most use of your mana in dealing a good chunk of damage to an opponent while also getting a good number of lands onto the battlefield for the future.

Similarly, Reap the Past is a card that allows you to return a bunch of cards from your graveyard to your hand, most of which should be lands, and while it does exile itself it is still a card to consider due to the sheer number of lands you could return to get Borborygmos to continue to deal damage.

Bygone Marvels is an interesting card to play with because it has Descend 8, which means that if we have eight or more permanent cards in our graveyards then it gets an additional ability, which for Bygone Marvels is copying the spell twice. This means that for two mana we can return up to three lands into our hand, which means 9 more damage from Borborygmos.

We can also get a bit risky with Nahiri’s Lithoforming in sacrificing our own lands to draw more cards, while also having the ability to play more lands to refuel what we lost while still having some in hand to play.

In order to make to most out of Borborygmos’s ability, then we need damage multipliers like Furnace of Rath which can double the damage dealt to a permanent or player, or Fiery Emancipation and City on Fire each dealing triple the damage whenever a source we control deals damage to a permanent or player.

Borborygmos is an engine Commander, and one that requires a bit of set up to get working correctly. I do think that it is possible to make him work, it is just going to take some patience.

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

Peace,

From, J.M. Casual