Hello and welcome to Daily Commander!

Today we are going to be talking about Brigone, Soldier of Meletis!

Brigone is a two mana 2/2 with vigilance, a Heroic ability for whenever you cast a spell that targets Brigone you put a +1/+1 counter on her and if you tap and remove a counter from Brigone then you can draw a card.

Straightforward and simple is the name of the game for Brigone, a Voltron style Commander that wants a lot of spells to target her in order to grow bigger and have the ability to draw cards.

There are plenty of ways we can make this a little more interesting in terms of the spells that we can target Brigone with, but the overall game plan is still the same: grow big and win with Commander Damage.

The first thing to look at are the spells we can cast in order to get Brigone bigger via targeting, and one of the better options are Auras.

Twinblade Blessing is really good because we can cast it with flash and it gives the enchanted creature double strike, meaning that we have the chance to get rid of an opponent via Commander damage once we hit eleven power.

Hyena Umbra is a nice boost and gives first strike and umbra armor (formerly totem armor), Angelic Gift draws a card and gives the creature it enchants flying, Mantle of the Ancients is an excellent recursion piece if we have a ton of Auras in the graveyard while also giving a massive boost, and All That Glitters works amazingly well with all the Auras.

To make our lives a little easier, we can also use Transcendent Envoy and Starfield Mystic to make our Auras cheaper to cast onto Brigone in order to cast even more, Heliod’s Pilgrim can help us tutor an Aura into our hand, and Umbra Mystic gives all Auras attached to permanents we control umbra armor.

We can also make use of Bestow creatures like Glyph Elemental, which gives itself a +1/+1 counter through a Landfall trigger and the enchanted creature gets +1/+1 for each +1/+1 counter on Glyph Elemental, which means that if Brigone is removed from the battlefield, we have a decent sized creature left in place.

Now that we have an idea on the sort of cards we would like to play, we need to make use of Brigone’s second ability and how to exploit that.

Hope and Glory is a fine enough card, but since it targets two creatures to give them a bonus, we can tap Brigone precombat to draw a card, cast Hope and Glory to untap and give a bonus and another counter, go to combat and then draw an additional card.

Acrobatic Leap gives a solid defensive boost while also untapping the creature and giving it flying, Djeru’s Resolve untaps a creature and prevents all combat damage dealt to it, Rustler Rampage to untap all of your creatures and give target creature double strike, or Refuse to Yield in order to absolutely guarantee that Brigone survives a combat.

We can even play the mass untappers like Drumbellower which untaps our creatures on each untap step in order to untap Brigone each turn to draw a bunch of cards. If we pair it with a Virtue of Loyalty then we get an additional counter on Brigone that we can use to draw another card.

Speaking of counters, there are cards like Guiding Voice which just give a +1/+1 counter to a creature while also letting us rummage, Light of Hope being a modal spell that can gain us life, destroy an enchantment or put a +1/+1 counter on a creature, and Angelic Intervention to give protection to Brigone from any color or colorless and gives a +1/+1 counter.

Now we get onto the real way we win win the deck, which hinges on the fact that a lot of the spells we are casting are low in mana value: a surprise Storm deck.

Tempest Technique is a new Storm Aura card from Tarkir: Dragonstorm which gives the enchanted creature +1/+1 for each enchantment you control. Now Brigone only gets the Heroic trigger off of the initial casting of Tempest Technique, but that hardly matters since each instance of Tempest Technique stacks upon itself to give a massive boost.

That’s not the only Storm spell we have access to, in that we also have access to Astral Steel, which gives a +1/+2 bonus to target creature, which again if we manage to cast a bunch of smaller spells in the interim then we get a massive swing of damage.

If we want some more bodies, then we also have a pseudo Storm card in Murmuration, which at the beginning of your end step will make a 1/2 Bird token with flying for each spell you cast that turn, which if we stagger our spells will make a number of tokens we can use to either chip in some damage or play defensively.

If we really want to take advantage of casting spells, we can make use of Aetherflux Reservoir as a potential finisher, especially if we have Auras that give Brigone lifelink to help get to activating it faster.

Brigone is a straightforward Commander that can be built in a straightforward way, but we can still have fun with how we make use of her interactions. Since she is also two mana, the Commander Tax isn’t as restrictive and we can still hold off on going ham until we hit a solid point in the game.

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

Peace,

From, J.M. Casual