Hello and welcome to Daily Commander!

Today we are going to be talking about Vren, The Relentless!

Vren is a four mana 3/4 with ward 2 that exiles creatures your opponents control when they die, and at he beginning of each end step you create X 1/1 black Rat creature tokens that get +1/+1 for each other Rat you control where X is the number of creatures your opponents control that were exiled this turn.

Rats are an interesting creature type to build around because they tend to work best in a go wide strategy, and having a build that also makes Rats that get bigger the more of them there are is also not unusual for Rats, but can get expensive when playing cards like Relentless Rats or Rat Colony.

This is an effect that is meant to mimic that playstyle without just using those sorts of cards and encourages you to remove creatures or have your opponents remove creatures on their turn. This deck has more open space than one realizes, and Rats do have plenty of other typal synergies that we can use to our advantage.

The first thing we need to look at are other Rat typal synergies to help make our large Rats even more of a threat.

Piper of the Swarm is a great lord for Rats, in that it gives Rats you control menace, can make you more Rats, and if you sacrifice three Rats then you can take control of another target creature.

Twisted Sewer Witch is also a really solid piece of Rat typal support in that it makes a Rat token when they enter and then attaches a Wicked Role token onto each Rat you control, which makes each opponent lose 1 life if that Aura is put in the graveyard. This means any removal to your Rats turns into additional damage.

In terms of actual Rats that have synergy with the deck, there are plenty that also get bigger for each Rat you control, like Persistent Marshstalker, Pack Rat, Swarm of Rats and Pestilence Rats, with these Rats being fairly cheap mana wise to play and Persistent Marshstalker being able to recur itself and Pack Rat to make more copies of itself making them decent picks.

As a way to get more Rats into your hand and provide an additional win condition, Karumonix, the Rat King gives your Rats toxic 1 and when it enters you look at the top five cards and put the Rats among them into your hand and the rest on the bottom of your library.

Marrow-Gnawer and Ashcoat of the Shadow Swarm are at the top end of Rat support to choose from, with Marrow-Gnawer giving Rats you control fear and able to make a ton of Rats for the price of one Rat and Ashcoat being able to boost your Rats by the number of other Rats you control and mill some cards and returning some Rats back to your hand.

Those two can be more expensive, and the deck should be able to function without them, but it would be remiss of me not to mention them.

The next thing to look at is the removal suite we play, which doesn’t always have to kill a creature.

Reality Shift exiles a creature and has the controller of that creature manifest the top card of their library, which because of the way that Vren is worded, it counts anytime a creature an opponents controlled is exiled, not just when they would be exiled because of Vren’s effect.

This means that something like Curse of the Swine, which allows you to exile X number of creatures and replaces them with 2/2 Boars means that you can get rid of creatures with indestructible and still get a Rat token.

Onto the destroy based removal there are ways to take care of indestructible creatures like Tragic Slip, traditional kill spells like Murder and Doom Blade, and edict based removal like Mire in Misery.

Force of Despair becomes a cheap mass removal spell if an opponent is playing a lot of creatures because for exiling a black card from our hand if it isn’t our turn we can cast it for free to destroy all creatures that entered the battlefield this turn, which if we time it correctly when our Vren triggers its ability at the end step, we can get even more Rat tokens in play while keeping them safe from the Force of Despair destroying them.

As far as how we win it should be a simple matter of getting enough Rats in play to overwhelm our opponents.

Reflections of Littjara helps us in that regard because it copies a spell we control of the creature type we declare, which will be Rat, which means any cheap Rat we cast doubles up to make our Rat tokens get massive.

Door of Destinies is a fun pick as well because we choose a creature type and whenever we cast a spell of that type the Door gets a charge counter and creatures we control of that type get +1/+1 for each charge counter the Door has.

If we have assembled an incredibly large number of Rats but are still unable to make solid attacks because of a flood gate sort of effect, then we can play Valley Rotcaller, which drains each opponent whenever it attacks equal to the number of Squirrels, Bats, Lizards, and Rats we control, which means we can attack with just the Rotcaller if we are restricted in our attacks to still deal a massive swing of damage.

Vren helps play into a typical typal play pattern of getting enough Rats and typal buffs in play in order to gain an advantage, but also has the unique addition of keeping your opponents from playing into any reckless attacks or sacrifice effects in order to keep you from getting more Rats. Eventually it will become difficult for your opponents to manage and there is a chance that you will be getting at least one Rat per turn, maybe more if your opponents decide to go for a desperate play.

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

Peace,

From, J.M. Casual