Hello and welcome to Daily Commander!

Today we are going to be talking about Feather, the Redeemed!

Feather is a three mana 3/4 with flying and whenever you cast an instant or sorcery that targets a creature you control, exile that card instead of putting it into your graveyard as it resolves and if you do you return it to your hand at the beginning of the next end step.

A very strong Commander that loves for you to be casting spells, is also a card that can be made at any budget. In fact, I would think that keeping the budget as low as possible can be an interesting challenge for the deck.

The goal of this deck is to only include cards that cost less than a dollar, with me including a deck list to prove that I followed the rules as best as I could. Prices do change, so hopefully this doesn’t bite me in the future.

The first thing we need to do is grab some instants and sorceries that provide a really solid utility, a good boost, while being low cost to cast.

Boon of Safety fulfills all three of these requirements because giving a shield counter to our creatures can help them survive a less than ideal attack or block and the scrying can help us sculpt our draws as we need them.

What we also need are cards like Rebellious Strike, which not only provide a massive +3/+0 boost, but also draws us a card. Defiant Strike and Expedite also fulfill this purpose, which also helps since these cards are also cheap to cast as well.

We also have access to cards like Loran’s Escape and Blacksmith’s Skill, which provide a target creature we control with hexproof and indestructible, which can help make them resilient against board wipes and targeted removal, of which many would be played to remove Feather from the board.

Since we are going to be casting a ton of instants and sorcery spells, we should also be playing cards that deal some additional damage when we cast them.

Guttersnipe is one of the classic ways to get extra value from casting a ton of instants and sorceries, especially if we are getting a bunch of them back into our hand to cast them again to get more value. Dealing 2 damage to each opponent will accumulate over time, especially with the volume of instants and sorceries in the deck.

Kessig Flamebreather, Firebrand Archer, and Erebor Flamesmith all do similar effects in that they all deal 1 damage when you cast either a noncreature spell in the case of Kessig Flamebreather and Firebrand Archer or instants and sorceries in the case of Erebor Flamesmith.

We can also make use of any instants and sorceries that are in the graveyard using cards like Dreadhorde Arcanist, who can cast an instant or sorcery from our graveyard with mana value less than or equal to its power when it attacks, without paying for it and exiling it afterwards.

There is also Smoldering Egg, which gets a number of ember counters equal to the amount of mana spent to cast an instant or sorcery spell until it gets seven or more to become Ashmouth Dragon, which when we cast an instant or sorcery spell it deals 2 damage to any target, which we can use to clear some small creatures or deal the last bit of damage that we need.

As for how we win, we are going to make use of some copying effects to buff all of our creatures and gain a ton of benefits.

Mirrorwing Dragon is a way to copy instants and sorceries that target only it and copies them for each creature that player controls and target all of those creatures. Notably this means that if an opponent plays a removal spell that targets only Mirrorwing Dragon, all of their creatures get effected along with the Dragon.

Zada, Hedron Grinder only works whenever you cast an instant or sorcery that targets her, but that doesn’t discount the power that has when we cast something like Angelfire Ignition, which puts two +1/+1 counters on target creature and gives them vigilance, trample, lifelink, indestructible, and haste until end of turn, which will then target all of our creatures.

Speaking of copying spells, Leonin Lightscribe helps get our creatures even bigger whenever we cast or copy an instant or sorcery spell by giving creatures we control +1/+1 whenever we do.

We can also make use of Heroic effects while we work to get our spell copying abilities out, so Akroan Crusader and Vanguard of Brimaz can get more bodies on the battlefield, Tenth District Legionnaire gets bigger and scries, and Illuminator Virtuoso helps us dig through our deck while getting bigger.

Feather is a straightforward deck that wants us to play a ton of cheap instants and sorceries that gain us some sort of value and allows us to replay them again and again so we get even more value.

The risk that Feather has is that she is a well known Commander in being very efficient in instant and sorcery recursion that she may be targeted early and often as the game progresses. We have ways to stabilize, but we only have so many ways to do so. She can be a very strong Commander, and a very budget friendly Commander as well.

If you would like to check out the budget build I made, which at the time of writing is under $20, you can check on this Moxfield link.

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

Peace,

From, J.M. Casual