Hello and welcome to Daily Commander!

Today we are going to be talking about Inferno of the Star Mounts!

The Inferno is a six mana 6/6 that can’t be countered, has flying and haste, and for a red mana it gets +1/+0 until end of turn and when its power becomes 20 this way, it deals 20 damage to any target.

The Inferno is indicative of a Big Mana Commander, in which the goal of the deck is to play big mana spells to win us the game, and in the case of The Inferno, the way we win the game is by getting his power to 20 when we activate his ability so we can deal 20 damage to a player and then attack either for the rest or aim at another player.

The goal of the deck is simple, we need to get enough mana to cast The Inferno and activate his ability, use other methods to get his power up, and to get the most out of that damage as possible, while also making sure we hinder our opponents every step of the way.

First things first, we need ways to generate a lot of mana, and if they can help us get more damage through than that will be perfect.

Soulbright Flamekin is an interesting way to get a ton of mana, because for two mana we can give a creature we control trample, and if it is the third time the ability has resolved then we get eight mana, which we can use early in the game to ramp out The Inferno or cast some other spells that will help us ramp, or when we get The Inferno out in the mid to late game to give The Inferno trample to deal with any potential blockers.

If we want to make to most out of all of that mana, then we can also employ the use of cost reducers like Dragonlord’s Servant and Dragonspeaker Shaman which reduce the cost of Dragon spells we cast by 1 and 2 mana respectively, though they will likely be heavy targets for removal.

Ideally we have something like Glittering Stockpile, which is a mana rock that can tap for a red mana and puts a stash counter on it, and at some point we can sacrifice it and add an amount of mana equal to the number of stash counters on it, which will help us cast our spells and boost The Inferno when we reach a critical mass of them.

Similarly we can use Crucible of the Spirit Dragon in the early game to put charge counters on it so we can remove a number of them to get mana to cast The Inferno or use its ability, or for another Dragon spell or Dragon ability.

A Dragon that we would want to cast would be Leyline Tyrant, which helps keeps us from losing unspent red mana as steps and phases end and when it dies it can deal an extra bit of damage. This pairs excellently with Braid of Fire, which makes adds a red mana to our mana pool as a Cumulative Upkeep cost, meaning we get more and more red mana as time goes on, and with Leyline Tyrant, we can bank that mana for later.

Since our plan relies on us being able to cast our spells and use a bunch of mana, any way we can hinder our opponents will be extremely helpful.

Since we are in only one color, we can play Winter Moon without any repercussions since our mana base is almost all Mountains, and this will hinder any multicolor decks or decks that have a greedy mana base since it prevents players from untapping more than one nonbasic land during their untap step.

One of the other most reliable ways to slow down our opponents in terms of mana generation is to play Blood Moon or Magus of the Moon, since it turns all nonbasic lands into Mountains, which doesn’t affect us much, but will probably serve to make our opponents lives much more difficult.

If we also want to make sure that our damage gets through and we prevent some life gain issues that may hinder our plan, then we can use Leyline of Punishment, which if we have it in our opening hand, we can play it for free, which not only prevents life gain, but also has damage unable to be prevented, meaning any Fog effects are also cancelled.

The thing is that once these cards get onto the battlefield, our opponents will likely want them off the battlefield, meaning that they spend time and mana to remove them, which means we can use something like Mana Geyser to make full use of our opponents tapping out to get a bunch of mana to help fuel The Inferno.

Talking about Game Changers for a brief moment, if we happen to have a lot of cards that give mana in our graveyard then we can use Underworld Breach as a way to get more mana from those spells, even if we do have to exile three cards to do it. It can definitely help us in the end game to get so much mana.

Now that we have access to a bunch of mana and have hindered our opponents, now we need ways to win the game.

Cards that increase The Inferno’s power are going to be crucial if we want to use use less mana for more activations of The Inferno’s ability, so something like Unleash Fury becomes a massive boon, turning what would normally take 14 mana into now only using 10 mana.

We can also use cheap combat tricks like Brute Force to help save us some mana to get The Inferno near enough so that we spend only 5 mana total if we use Brute Force first then use Unleash Fury, then use The Inferno’s ability to boost it the rest of the way.

The next thing is to make the most use out of that damage by using damage multipliers like Isengard Unleashed, which has damage can’t be prevented this turn and if a source we control would deal damage to an opponent or permanent an opponent controls then it deals triple that damage instead, which will absolutely end at least one opponent from The Inferno’s ability.

To make sure that we have the game won, we can have Kediss, Emberclaw Familiar in play so once we have one opponent down from The Inferno’s ability, we can spend whatever mana we have left to boost The Inferno and swing at the most vulnerable opponent, whatever combat damage is dealt to that opponent, it will be dealt to the other opponent.

The Inferno is very much an all in sort of Commander, in that when you are ready to go and win, you go in full steam ahead. You need to make sure that you have all the pieces that you need to win and some contingencies, because too many interruptions will have you lose the game.

You need to use everything that you have in order to win on the spot, because if you don’t then you will most likely lose on the crack back from any surviving opponents. This is a glass cannon deck, very strong but also very brittle.

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

Peace,

From, J.M. Casual