Hello and welcome to Daily Commander!

Today we are going to talk about Quintorius, Field Historian!

Quintorius is a five mana 2/4 that gives other Spirits you control +1/+0 and whenever one or more cards leave your graveyard you create a 3/2 red and white Spirit creature token.

Quintorius plays with the graveyard in an interesting way for red and white, and there are a few ways we can play with actually triggering Quintorius since his ability states that the cards need to leave the graveyard, not just get exiled.

The plan is to play with what goes into our graveyard, as well as unique ways to get cards out of the graveyard that aren’t just based on exiling the card and supplement with some Spirit strategies.

The first thing we need to look at are cards that either allow us to cast from the graveyard or can leave the graveyard on their own.

Shenanigans is a perfect example of what we’re looking for, and it is the only red card with dredge, which allows us to get additional cards in the graveyard while also being able to serve as a recursive utility card that can destroy an artifact for only two mana.

Not forgotten is an interesting card because it takes a card from a graveyard and puts it on the top or bottom of that player’s library and it makes a 1/1 Spirit, so not only are we getting a Spirit from Quintorius for taking a card out of the graveyard, but we are also getting a second Spirit that can act as a blocker.

Of course flashback is going be one of the mechanics that we are going to use consistently because of us getting an additional use of a spell is always good. Faithless Looting will help us draw cards and get cards into the graveyard, Sevinne’s Reclamation will bring a permanent with mana value 3 or less to the battlefield while if we cast it from the graveyard we copy the spell, and Past in Flames gives all of the spells in our graveyard flashback.

One of the more consistent ways we can get something out of the graveyard is to play Squee, Goblin Nabob and Squee, the Immortal as the first can come back to our hand at the beginning of our upkeep and the second can be cast from graveyard or exile.

The next thing we need to consider when making the deck is to play some great Spirits, or ways to get more Spirits into play.

Drogskol Reinforcements is creature that can give other Spirits we control Melee, which means our Spirits get bigger the more opponents we attack and they also happen to get protection from any noncombat damage. This means that we can play damage based board wipes like Blasphemous Act while still having our Spirits in play.

Blood Age General is a way to get our Spirits even stronger whenever we attack, Returned Pastcaller can return a Spirit, instant, or sorcery from our graveyard into our hand, Drogskol Cavalry can gain us 2 life whenever a Spirit comes into play while also being able to make Spirits themselves, Kami of False Hope can prevent all combat damage that would be dealt by sacrificing itself, Guardian of Faith can protect our creatures from a board wipe by phasing them out.

Spirits can also leave the graveyard in a variety of ways, with the better way to do so being the Disturb mechanic. Twinblade Geist is a nice early creature to get onto the battlefield since it has first strike, but when it is cast via Disturb as Twinblade Invocation, then it can give another creature double strike, which can be a doozy as the game goes on.

We even have a way to exile an opponents graveyard and gain value for Spirits in Release to Memory, which exiles an opponents graveyard and for each creature card in the graveyard we make a 1/1 colorless Spirit token. Aether Shockwave can tap all Spirits or more importantly all non-Spirit creatures, which helps us get damage through.

Our goal is to get as wide as possible with a huge number of Spirits, and we can get a bit creative in how we go about it.

Séance is an interesting card in this regard because we can exile a creature from our graveyard to make a token copy of it as a Spirit at the beginning of each upkeep, which means we can bring back a utility Spirit like Selfless Spirit to sacrifice itself to give our creatures indestructible or Kami of Ancient Law to destroy an enchantment.

If we manage to get a large number of Spirits into play then we can use Katilda, Dawnheart Martyr as a way to serve as an evasive large creature that can swing for a ton of damage and gain us a lot of life, or Disturb it onto a creature as Katilda’s Rising Dawn so that another creature can become an evasive large creature that can swing for a ton of damage and gain us a lot of life.

We even have a way to make an opposing player lose the game with a Spirit in Faithbound Judge, which is a solid body that has defender that can attack after a couple of turns, but it can Disturb as Sinner’s Judgement, which will slowly tick up judgement counters until it hits three making the player it enchants lose the game.

As a matter of course we can play a bunch of anthems to make our Spirits bigger, Rally the Ranks being one of the more efficient options because it is a cheap typal way to get our Spirits bigger or Intangible Virtue to give all of our creature tokens +1/+1.

In addition, we can play Warstorm Surge as a way to deal damage to our opponents whenever a creature enters the battlefield equal to its power, which if we have Quintorius in play, any Spirit he makes means we deal 4 damage minimum whenever he makes a Spirit, more if we have more buff effects.

Quintorius is an interesting Commander in that he has a solid idea and theme to build a deck around, however he can struggle in the late game if there are no more consistent ways to get cards out of our graveyard.

Quintorius can actually do decently around graveyard hate, in fact he encourages some graveyard hate from our opponents in order to make more Spirits, so he can actually serve well on the defense, it is the offensive where he struggles. I still think that he is an interesting Commander to build around, it just takes a bit of creative thinking to work properly.

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

Peace,

From, J.M. Casual