Hello and welcome to Daily Commander!

Today we are going to be talking about Yennet, Cryptic Sovereign!

Yennet is a five mana 3/5 with flying, vigilance, menace and whenever she attacks you reveal the top card of your library and you may cast a spell with an odd mana value for free and if you don’t cast it then you draw a card.

Yennet is an interesting Commander to build around because you are intentionally putting spells in with an odd mana value so you can cast them for free, but the biggest gamble is manipulating the top card of your library to make sure you get the best odd mana value spells to cast.

The goal of this deck is to mess with the top card of our library so we can make sure we cast some haymakers early to get into a dominant position.

The first thing we need to look for are ways to manipulate the top cards of our library.

Portent is a solid example of what we are looking for because not only do we get the chance to look at the top three cards of not just our library, but also our opponents libraries if we want to play defensively and shuffle their library. The extra card at the beginning of the next turn’s upkeep is just another bonus.

Ponder is the same effect just for your own library and you get to draw a card immediately, Brainstorm draws you three and lets you put two cards from your hand on top of your library which helps if you drew a card you wanted to cast too early, and if you have access to a Sensei’s Divining Top then you should be able to do a ton of filtering to get what you want.

A fun card that I have never seen before personally is Soothsaying, which for five mana let’s you shuffle your library, but for X mana you can look at the top X cards of your library and arrange them in any order, which can massively swing things in your favor to gain an advantage, especially in the late game.

While the goal of the deck is to cast big spells with odd mana values, we need to have a suite of spells that can help us get to that point in the game.

Obscura Charm is a solid pick for the sort of card I’m talking about because it is a modal odd mana spell that gives us a variety of abilities we can use, like bringing something small back, a situational counter spell, and a kill spell for a small threat. It isn’t flashy, but in the early game it can help us keep parity with our opponents.

Since ideally all of our spell are going to have an odd mana value, we should have a decent suite of removal spells. Murder, Path to Exile, Swords to Plowshares, Void Rend, and Mortify are just some of the spells we should have to deal with the early game which is where we are the most vulnerable while still being able to have their use in the later game.

We can also make use of enchantments like Fortune Teller’s Talent, which allows us a way to look at the top card of our library, but we can level up as the game goes by, which can let us cast a spell from the top of our library so long as we cast a spell this turn and when fully leveled up will give a discount of 2 mana for spells not cast from our hand.

Now that we’ve hit the late game, we should start getting our haymakers to actually win the game.

Breach the Multiverse and Mnemonic Deluge are some fun bits of synergy, if a bit optimistic to pull off. The plan is to cast Breach the Multiverse to mill everyone ten cards each to get a creature or Planeswalker from everyone, then on the next turn cast Mnemonic Deluge to either cast Breach the Multiverse three more times or to get a milled instant or sorcery to exploit.

While extra turn spells like Time Warp and Alrund’s Epiphany are solid options to include, there are some other ways we can win the game. We can use Blatant Thievery to steal an important permanent from each opponent, Plague Wind to Wipe our opponents board of creatures, and Curse of Unbinding to consistently steal an opponent’s creatures and mill them out at the same time.

If we want a creature way to win the game then we have options like Toxrill, the Corrosive to slowly kill our opponents creature while making a massive Slug army, Elesh Norn, Grand Cenobite to give our creatures a massive boost while draining our opponents, and Jin-Gitaxias as a way to copy the first instant, sorcery, or artifact spell we control while also countering the first one of those spells from our opponents.

Yennet is a Commander that really values a midrange strategy, using smaller spells to control the board state until we hit our big spells to further dominate the game. The difficult part can be making sure we get to the late game, especially since Yennet is a decently high cost Commander with a strong ability, which can draw our opponents to focus us if we don’t play carefully.

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

Peace,

From, J.M. Casual