Hello and welcome to Daily Commander!

Today we are going to be talking about Hope Estheim!

Hope is a two mana 2/2 with lifelink and at the beginning of your end step, each opponent mills X cards where X is the amount of life you gained this turn.

As of writing this, the Final Fantasy set has been nearly fully spoiled (only two cards remain, I believe) and now I think that it is a great time for us to talk about some of the more interesting Commanders in the set, at least in my opinion.

Hope is probably one of the most interesting Commanders of the set to me because it is a white card that cares about milling and a blue card that cares about life gain, and I think that in Commander that this card can be a pretty interesting way to play with both strategies, one that keeps you alive and one that will win you the game.

So the game plan for this deck is to gain a bunch of life while also milling our opponents, while also being able to stay alive.

The first thing we need are consistent ways of gaining life, ideally they should also be very cheap and have some flexibility.

If we are looking for pure life gain, there are a lot of cards like Chaplain’s Blessing that just gain us life, which for one mana to gain 5 life is pretty decent for this deck because it also mills all of our opponents for five cards as well at the beginning of our end step. Remember, we want the life gain on our turn because it trigger on our end step.

We also have some access to removal, one in Lucky Offering which can destroy an artifact with mana value three or less while also gaining us 3 life, and another in Light of Hope, which we can hold at instant speed to either gain 4 life on our turn, or destroy an enchantment or put a +1/+1 counter on a creature on our opponents turns.

Clay-Fired Bricks gets a basic Plains from our deck and gains us two life that can make two Gnome creature tokens and become an anthem later, Heliod’s Intervention can destroy X artifacts and enchantments or we can gain twice X life, and Revitalize to just gain us 3 life and draw a card.

Rest for the Weary is an interesting card in that it would normally gain us 4 life, but if we triggered Landfall on our turn, then we can gain 8 life, which is one of the higher life totals we can gain at this low of a mana cost.

In addition we can play cards like Cleric Class, which gain us 1 additional life whenever we do gain life, Leyline of Hope which also gains us an additional 1 life while being able to be played for free if its in our opening hand and becomes an anthem if we have seven or more life than our starting life total, and Boon Reflection which lets us gain twice as much life.

The next thing we need to do is be able to protect ourselves from our opponents, and if they gain life then that’s just a bonus.

Absorb is such a spell which if we are going through our turn and our opponents want to stop or slow us down, then we can play it to counter the spell while also being able to gain 3 life. Overrule is also counter spell, but we can put X amount of mana into it to counter a spell unless its controller pays X and we gain X life.

Azorius Charm is a solid way for us to gain some value in giving our creatures lifelink for a turn, drawing us a card, or out a target attacking creature on the top of it’s owner’s library, which if we do that we can potentially mill that creature on our turn.

White Sun’s Twilight is an excellent way for us to not only gain life and make X Phyrexian Mite tokens, but if X is five or more then we destroy all other creatures, in which we can protect our our things with a Dawn’s Truce if we gift a card to an opponent or use something like Blacksmith’s Skill or Loran’s Escape to protect just Hope by giving them hexproof and indestructible until end of turn so we can still get the milling at the end of our turn.

To also make sure that our opponents have no access to their graveyard, we can also play Rest in Peace, which also exiles our graveyard but it isn’t as detrimental than if our opponents lose access to their graveyard.

In addition we can also play Dennick, Pious Apprentice to prevent cards in all graveyards from being targeted by spells or abilities, and can be cast with Disturb into Dennick, Pious Apparition which allows us to investigate whenever one or more creatures are put into graveyards from anywhere.

Now our win condition relies on us milling our opponents, and we need a reliable way to get a massive amount of milling done.

One of the few blue cards that can gain us life is Illusions of Grandeur, which gains us 20 life when it enters and loses us 20 life when it leaves, which shouldn’t really matter since our life total should ideally be absurdly high that we can still deal with the loss of 20 life.

Now where the real important strategies of this card is with cards like Flicker of Fate and Scrollshift, both of which can be used to exile Illusions of Grandeur and return it to the battlefield, meaning we gain an additional 20 life meaning we get to mill 20 more cards.

We can also make use of cards that can copy Illusions of Grandeur like Copy Enchantment, Mirrormade, or Clever Impersonator all of which can enter as a copy of Illusions of Grandeur.

Now while this is the best way to get a mass amount of mill going, we need other ways to supplement this mill. Patient Rebuilding can be used to get a consistent mill three cards from our opponents at the beginning of our upkeep while also drawing us a card for each land milled to the graveyard this way while Fractured Sanity can be used to mill either fourteen cards or four cards if we cycle it.

Of course we can further supplement all of this milling with something like Bruvac the Grandiloquent to double the number of cards that our opponent mills, which with even just one casting of Illusions of Grandeur can mean our opponents mill 40 cards instead, which with all the other milling we have done can mean our opponents lose on their very next turn.

Hope is an engine Commander in that it is the central piece of the deck in order for it to work at full efficiency. He is two mana, which means we can get a couple castings of him in before it becomes problematic, and we have plenty of ways to protect him for really cheap.

We may not always be able to protect Hope and we can’t avoid exile based sweepers and Commander Damage, but we should be able to find ways to win a decent amount of games with Hope, hopefully.

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

Peace,

From, J.M. Casual