Hello and welcome to Daily Commander!

Today we are going to be talking about Rocco, Street Chef!

Rocco is a three mana 2/4 that exiles the top card of everyone’s library at the beginning of your library that can be played until the beginning of your next end step and if a player plays a land from exile or casts a spell from exile, you put a +1/+1 counter on target creature and make a Food token.

There are several ways we can take the deck, but the way that interests me most is the Food making angle, particularly since there has been quite a bit of Food support printed recently that helps make the deck much more interesting.

The goal of this deck is to try and make a ton of Food tokens, use them creatively to generate us an advantage, and use the payoffs to win the game.

The first thing to look at are other ways to help us generate Food tokens, the more we can make the better.

Farmer Cotton is excellent in this regard because we can just dump a ton of mana to make a bunch of Food tokens as well as a bunch of Halfling tokens we can use. Even if we only use four mana to make two Food tokens and two Halflings, we still have a decent number of ways to defend ourselves while still making Food.

Speaking of Lord of the Rings, Peregrin Took is also a massive Food maker since what he does is make an additional Food token whenever you make one or more token, which means there are plenty of ways for us to always be up on the amount of Food we make.

Gilded Goose makes a Food and we can use it either to make more Food or to sacrifice a Food to make a mana, Hurska Sweet-Tooth can make a Food when it attacks and can boost a creature when we gain life if we pay mana to boost the creature by the amount of life we gained, and Many Partings can be used as a way to fix our mana and make a Food token.

One of the most synergistic pieces we have access to is Graham O’Brien, who makes a Food token whenever you cast a spell from anywhere other than your hand, which works so well with Rocco.

The next thing we need to do is find ways to make use of Rocco’s ability to make Food tokens from playing cards from exile.

Wild Wasteland is really good for this because while it skips our draw steps, it exiles the top two cards of our library and let’s us play them this turn. This helps us dig through our deck faster and gets cards in exile consistently that we can play.

Outpost Siege can exile the top card of our library that can be played until the end of turn or deal damage whenever a creature leaves the battlefield, Valakut Exploration exiles a card as a Landfall triggers and outs them back in the graveyard at the end of turn and deals some damage when it does so, and Glimpse the Impossible to exile the top three cards of our library to play them this turn and have them come back to the graveyard while also potentially making some Eldrazi Spawn tokens.

We can also incorporate Invasion of Kaldheim as a way exile our hand to draw more cards while still being able to play the cards we exiled for a turn. It can also become Pyre of the World Tree, which lets us discard a land to deal 2 damage, but more importantly whenever we discard a land card, we exile the top card of our library and can play it this turn.

One of the best ways to not only give ourselves a bunch of new cards that we can cast from exile, but also forces our opponents to cast cards from exile is Memory Vessel, which exiles the top seven cards of every players library that can be played until our next turn and prevents them from playing cards from their hand until then.

Now that we have plenty of ways to get Food tokens, we need ways to win the game with our Food tokens.

One of the first cards that immediately came to mind for me was Banquet Guests, which is an X spell that has Affinity for Food, which means the more Food we have the more +1/+1 counters we get, especially since it enters with twice X +1/+1 counters and we can sacrifice Food tokens to give it indestructible.

Apothecary White is an interesting card because she makes us a Food for each opponent we attack and we can pay a mana and tap a number of Food tokens to make some Human tokens.

Feasting Hobbit has Devour Food 3 which means they get three +1/+1 counters for each Food sacrificed as it enters and creatures with lower power then it can’t block it, which if we sacrifice enough Food, then we have a potential way to win the game.

We also have access to utility spells that use Food, like Night of Sweets’ Revenge which lets us tap Foods we control for green mana and can be an Overrun to help finish the game, Hobbit’s Sting which deals damage to a creature equal to the number of creatures and Food you control, and Nuka-Cola Vending Machine to be an alternate way to generate Food tokens and whenever we sacrifice a Food we make a tapped Treasure token.

Rocco can definitely be built to take full advantage of their exile based buff ability, but I think that building a theme around Food is an interesting restriction on what is in all reality a very strong ability. The way a deck is themed is an important aspect of deck building, and it has been a bit since I went more for an interesting theme rather than a weird build.

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

Peace,

From, J.M.Casual