Hello and welcome to Daily Commander!

Today we are going to be talking about Sen Triplets!

Sen Triplets is a five mana 3/3 that at the beginning of your upkeep you choose an opponent who can’t cast spells or activate abilities and plays with their hands revealed during this turn, and you can play lands and cast spells from that player’s hand this turn.

Normally Sen Triplets is played as a theft Commander, and they are very good at accomplishing that goal, but what if I took that and twisted it on its head a bit? What if we made Sen Triplets into a Group Hug deck?

There are cards that fit within the Group Hug archetype in our colors that allow us to make a deck that benefits everyone, but just happens to benefit us more than our opponents. Now that makes for an interesting way to play Sen Triplets.

Since we are playing a Group Hug deck, the first thing we need to do is find ways to give our opponents more resources that we can use, in this case card draw.

Cut a Deal is a great way to not only give your opponents the chance to draw some cards, but also give yourself some additional cards if your opponents decide to draw since you draw a card for each of your opponents that decided to draw.

If you want additional card draw, then you can use something like Faerie Mastermind to have the ability to give each player an additional draw, with any player who drew their second card to drawing you another card.

Font of Mythos draws everyone else two additional cards, Howling Mine draws an additional card, Loran of the Third Path provides utility in destroying an enchantment or artifact but also can tap to have you and an opponent draw an additional card, and Minds Aglow allows you and your opponents to pool in mana to draw a whole bunch of cards.

Remember, during your turn you can play an opponents cards, so the more cards you give your opponents, then the more cards you also have access to.

The next thing we need to look at are ways to gain additional resources to cast spell, which usually means ways to get more mana reliably.

If we want to gain a decent amount of incidental mana, then Black Market is a great way in this regard because whenever a creature dies then you get to put a charge counter on it and make a black mana for each charge counter at the beginning of your first main phase as a way to pay generic mana costs of your opponents spells.

Since you need to have the correct colors of mana to cast your opponents spells, Treasures make another excellent way to fix your colors, so Black Market Connections works better in that regard since you can make a Treasure token at the beginning of your upkeep at the cost of 1 life. Now you can also draw a card from 2 life and make a Shapeshifter with changeling for 3 life, which can be helpful depending on the circumstance.

If you don’t mind playing a bit into a control aspect and have a decent amount of mana saved up, then you can cast Spell Swindle as a way to counter an opponents spell and make Treasure tokens equal to the mana value of the spell that was countered.

Playing into the Group Hug aspect of the deck while also potentially making you more Treasures to fix your mana base, Master of Ceremonies works really well since at the beginning of your upkeep your opponents make a choice that benefits that opponent and you, ranging from making a Treasure token, a Citizen token, or drawing a card.

If an opponent has pulled really far ahead, then you can play Beza, the Bounding Spring to help you equalize things a bit by either gaining you life if an opponent has more life, making you a Fish token if an opponent has more creatures, or makes a Treasure token if an opponent is ahead on lands.

At a certain point in the game we should be able to deprive an opponent of resources that we should be able to win the game with their cards.

Nihiloor works well because not only do they give us more opportunities to take some creatures our opponents control, but if we attack with creatures that our opponents own that we cast earlier because of Sen Triplets as well as creatures we steal from our opponents from Nihiloor, then we can drain our opponents.

If we want to continuously deprive our opponents of resources, then something like Herald of Leshrac can be used to dastardly effect in its cumulative upkeep ability to steal a land from our opponents, returning them when it leaves the battlefield but can get out of hand if not dealt with since we should cast our opponents removal spells to give the Herald a better shot at stealing lands.

Of course with all of the things that we are taking from our opponents, then something like Agent of Treachery can benefit us further because it draws us three cards if we control three or more permanents that we don’t own, while also stealing something when it enters.

Gonti, Night Minister is also a way to ramp not just us but also our opponents if any player happens to cast a spell that they don’t own by making them a Treasure. The reason why our opponents also benefit from this is if a player attacks one of your opponents, then they exile the top card of that player’s library face down and they may play that card and spend mana of any color to cast that spell.

Sen Triplets is very much a Commander that can be built to be a heavily theft based deck, but you can add some Group Hug elements to the deck as a way to give yourself additional resources to play with. Of course players who know what Sen Triplets does will immediately try to get rid of it, which means that our opponents will gain the benefits of you playing Group Hug cards while you lose out on playing those cards.

It’s definitely a tough deck to pilot, but one that I think can be done to great effect if you don’t mind a slightly off the wall way to play your opponents cards.

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

Peace,

From, J.M. Casual