Hello and welcome to Daily Commander!

Today we are going to be talking about Garth One-Eye!

Garth is a five mana 5/5 that can tap for us to make a choice of a card that hasn’t been chosen from among Disenchant, Braingeyser, Terror, Shivan Dragon, Regrowth, and Black Lotus and you create a copy of the card with the chosen name and may cast the copy, still paying its mana cost.

This is an interesting Commander in that it nets you, essentially, six extra cards to play with in two removal spells, a card draw spell, a recursion spell, a classic creature, and the most iconic card in all of Magic’s history.

Garth makes for an interesting toolbox deck, being able to go in a wide variety of directions, so I think leaning into that aspect of the deck will make it effective at dealing with whatever sort of decks we play against.

The first thing we need to do is have ways to make sure that we can activate Garth’s ability as soon as possible.

Thousand-Year Elixir is the most ideal example of this ability since it allows us to activate abilities of creatures as if they had haste on a generic artifact while also giving us the ability to pay an extra mana to untap a creature, meaning that we can use Garth’s ability an additional time.

Tyvar, Jubilant Brawler is a Planeswalker that can also grant our creatures this ability while also being able to untap a creature as his +1 and has the additional utility in being able to return a small creature from the graveyard to the battlefield. One of the better creatures to get from this would be a Bloom Tender, since once we have Garth out, we can tap for all five colors of mana.

Another way we can make sure that we can activate Garth’s ability as soon as possible is to give him haste, which we could do in a variety of ways. We can have Anger in the graveyard to give all our creatures haste, Song of Totentanz to make some Rat tokens and give all our creatures haste, or even Uncivil Unrest to give our creatures riot and can give creatures we control with +1/+1 counters the ability to deal double damage.

The next thing we need to consider are ways to use Garth’s ability over and over again, and to reset him if necessary.

When it comes to gaining additional value via untapping Garth over and over again, then Seedborn Muse comes to mind since it untaps all of our nonland permanents during our opponents untap steps, which means we can cast Disenchant and Terror as necessary.

If we want another cheap way to untap our nonland permanents, then Dramatic Reversal is also a solid option because we can do it instant speed if we need to remove something and we can do it cheaply to make sure we have the mana if we want to draw a lot of cards with Braingeyser.

Since Garth does have a soft limiter in the cards he can bring out, we need to play blink spells like Ephemerate to reset Garth in order for us to get access to the whole suite of cards Garth offers. We can use Garth’s Regrowth to continuously get Ephemerate into our hand so we can continuously reset Garth without spending too much mana.

While Ephemerate is the most efficient way to blink Garth, we can also use Ghostly Flicker as a way to bring Garth back, as well as a way to blink another creature like a Restoration Angel, which can blink Garth an additional time.

The last thing we can do is find ways to copy Garth’s ability, in order for us to get even more ways to make use of Garth’s ability.

Marvin, Murderous Mimic is one of the first choices that comes to mind in this regard, since it has all activated abilities of creature we control as long as they don’t have the same name as Marvin.

In addition, we have access to Robaran Mercenaries who has access to the activated abilities of legendary creatures we control while also having vigilance, Quicksilver Elemental to gain all activated abilities of a creature we control and we can pay blue mana as though it were mana of any color to activate it, or even Experiment Kraj to give Garth a +1/+1 counter in order for Kraj to gain his activated ability.

We can go the clone or copy token route, with one of the better options being Helm of the Host in order to get a copy of Garth consistently that isn’t legendary and gives the token copy haste in order for us to activate its ability immediately.

While we can definitely use all of these spells in order to go into one big combo cast, but what says more about Magic the Gathering than the fact we can get a ton of Black Lotus’s to cast a Shivan Dragon and win via it’s fire breathing effect?

That’s the thing about Garth that makes him a fun Commander to me, in that we have access to one of Magic’s most iconic cards and have a way to definitely abuse it maliciously with cards that have been released ever since, but we can use it for an extremely suboptimal play in order to win the game because we can.

That’s Magic to me.

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

Peace,

From, J.M. Casual