Hello and welcome to Daily Commander!

Today we are going to be talking about Xanathar, Guild Kingpin!

Xanathar is a six mana 5/6 that at the beginning of your upkeep you choose an opponent and until end of turn that player can’t cast spells, you may look at the top card of their library at any time, you may play the top card of their library at any time, and you may spend mana as though it were mana of any color to cast a spell this way.

Xanathar, true to his nature in Dungeons and Dragons, takes things from an opponent and allows us to play with them, all while preventing them from interacting with us.

This leads to a neat way to play a theft deck that allows you not only to continuously take you opponents cards, but also gives you the opportunity to do so relatively unhindered. The affected opponent can still activate abilities, but they are not likely going to have ways to answer Xanathar immediately in that way.

The plan is to take control of an opponent’s deck and play their best cards or get rid of ones that we see as problematic.

The first thing we need to do is find ways to gather information about the top card of our opponents libraries.

In terms of gathering information, Lantern of Insight is one of the cleanest ways to allow us to know what the top card of our opponents libraries are. While there is the downside of us also having the top of our libraries revealed, we can persevere.

There are, at least as far as I can tell, only two other cards that allow all players to play with the top card of their library revealed, one is Wizened Snitches, a creature that has the effect, and Field of Dreams, a World enchantment that has this effect, which is also one mana but is also an expensive Reserved List card.

Since we can play cards from the top of our opponent’s libraries, this also allows us to play lands, and Ghirapur Orrery allows everyone to play an additional land per turn, which is unfortunately the best we have access to due to our colors, but it also has the upside of making sure we have cards in our hand.

Dakra Mystic has the activated ability that has each player reveal the top card of their libraries and you may have them either all go to the graveyard or have all players draw a card, which if most of the revealed cards are lands, then you can have your opponents draw a card to look for a better card to play.

Bamboozle allows you to look at the top four cards of an opponents library, put two of them into the graveyard and arrange the other two at the top of their library, giving you a ton of card selection to pick the best card of the bunch.

We also have bounce spells and counter spells like Desynchronize and Hinder respectively, which put permanents and spells back to the top of an opponent’s library, meaning that if they spend a lot of mana on something we can put it way to cast later for ourselves.

The next thing we need are ways to further manipulate the top of our opponents libraries, either through milling or messing with the top with known information.

Misinformation is a great card in this regard because it allows us to take advantage of any of our opponents graveyard strategies by moving cards from their graveyard to the top of their library for us to use.

If our opponents aren’t playing a graveyard strategy, then we need cards like Ghoulcaller’s Bell which can mill each player one card consistently. If we want to simultaneously punish players who draw too many cards, then there is Dreamborn Muse which mills every player equal to the number of cards in their hand.

If we want to make a little more use of a mass mill card, then there is also Dread Summons, which mills each player for X cards and for each creature milled this way we create a tapped Zombie token.

There is also a unique board wipe that we have access to in Heartless Conscription, which exiles all creatures and for each card exiled this way we may play that card for as long as it remains exiled, allowing us to spend mana of type to cast those spells, which helps us clear the board and steal any difficult to remove creatures for ourselves.

Now we do need a way to win the game, and ideally we have enough mana to cast the spells we need, so we should work out ways to put us in an even better position.

Virtue of Knowledge, or more specifically it’s Adventure Vantress Visions, allows us to copy an activated or triggered ability, allowing us to choose new targets for the copy, and if we combine that with something like Strionic Resonator or Lithoform Engine, then we can take from all of our opponent’s libraries while not allowing them to cast spells in response.

We can also take advantage of cards like Sphinx of the Second Sun and Shadow of the Second Sun, which gives us an additional beginning phase, which comprise of untapping our things, upkeep effects like Xanathar’s, and the ability to draw more cards, which also allows us to play our other opponent’s cards.

Then we also have Paradox Haze, the most consistent way to get an additional upkeep after our first upkeep, which means that at the very least Xanathar’s ability will trigger twice, meaning we have two opponent’s blanked and allow us to play the top cards of their library.

From there we should be able to have a consistent amount of mana to allow us to play a bunch of our opponent’s cards to either win us the game, or set us in an extremely advantageous position.

Xanathar is a value Commander through and through, with the biggest issues coming from the fact that he is six mana and becomes a magnet for removal when he comes into play. If we can manage to get through all of that, then we should be able to win a ton of games with Xanathar, using our opponents things to do so.

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

Peace,

From, J.M. Casual