Hello and welcome to Daily Commmander!

Today we are going to be talking about Saheeli, the Gifted!

Saheeli is a four mana 4 loyalty Planeswalker with a +1 to create a colorless Servo artifact creature token, another +1 to (via errata) give the next spell you cast this turn to have affinity for artifacts, and a -7 to create a token copy of each artifact you control, giving them haste and exiling them at the beginning of your next end step.

Saheeli is an artifact matters Commander in a very general sense, making you get additional value for your spells if you have a lot of artifacts on the field and to make a ton of token copies of plenty of artifacts.

The plan of this deck is to get as many artifacts as we can onto the battlefield, give our big spells a massive discount, and potentially make a ton of artifacts to win us the game.

First things first, we need a ton of artifacts that we can get onto the battlefield, for as cheaply as possible.

The artifact lands like Seat of the Synod, Great Furnace, and Darksteel Citadel are easy enough to include because not only do they not enter tapped, but they are also artifacts that we can get value from if we do manage to get the -7 off since they all make copies of themselves that we can use to cast more spells.

Speaking of lands, we can also use Inventors’ Fair as a way to gain us some incidental life while also having a way to tutor up an artifact like Unwinding Clock, which untaps all artifacts we control on other players untap steps, which would also include our artifact lands and mana rocks like Izzet Signet so we always have mana open.

Low cost mana rocks like Mind Stone also become effective because not only can we tap it for mana in the early game, but we can also sacrifice it to draw a card. Jhoira, Weatherlight Captain can also help facilitate a lot of card draw because whenever we cast a historic spell, which includes artifacts, we draw a card.

To help make that even easier, we can play something like Etherium Sculptor, Foundry Inspector, Jhoira’s Familiar and Enthusiastic Mechanaut, each of which discount your artifact spells by 1 which can make casting big artifact spells like Thopter Assembly easier.

The reason why we would want to cast something like Thopter Assembly is that if we control no other Thopters than Thopter Assembly then it comes back to our hand and makes five Thopter artifact creature tokens, making more bodies to help get Saheeli’s +1 to give our next spell affinity for artifacts even easier.

The next thing we need to look out for are spells that we want to cast that have affinity for artifacts, ideally big X spells to get a bigger value for X.

Whir of Invention is a solid choice for this option because not only would we get the benefits of affinity for artifacts, but it also has Improvise, which means we can tap any artifacts to help pay for X, meaning we can tutor a massive artifact onto the battlefield since affinity reduces the cost and we have “extra mana” in the artifacts we tap for Improvise.

We can use Delete if we want to clear the board of nonartifact creatures and deal some damage to each player, Universal Surveillance to draw a massive amount of cards also being helped by Improvise, or Curse of Swine to exile a ton of creatures our opponents control and substituting them with Boar tokens.

If we want to look away from X spells, we can still get a massive discount on creatures like Triplicate Titan, which not only is a massive body, but if it dies then create three tokens that have one if the original Triplicate Titan’s abilities, which also helps make our affinity even stronger.

Inkweel Leviathan is a massive body that has islandwalk and trample and shroud making it a tough creature to interact with, Darksteel Colossus for a massive body that returns to our library if it were to go to the graveyard, and Hellkite Igniter which for two mana gets +X/+0 where X is the number of artifacts we control.

The last thing we need are ways for us to win, and in a general artifact deck like ours we have a couple of options, especially if we can use Saheeli’s -7.

Combustible Gearhulk is a way for us to either get a ton of cards in our hand or deal a decent amount of damage to an opponent since they either let us draw three cards or we mill them and that opponent takes damage equal to the total mana value of the milled cards, and if we have a decent amount of high mana value cards that can be a lot of damage dealt, especially if we make a token copy of it with Saheeli.

Speaking of dealing damage with high mana value artifacts, Bosh, Iron Golem is a way for us to sacrifice an artifact and deal damage to an opponent equal to that artifact’s mana value, which if nothing else we can sacrifice Bosh to deal 8 damage to an opponent.

Kappa Cannoneer is way for us to get an aggressive creature on board that also happens to have ward 4 and whenever it or another artifact enters the battlefield then it gets a +1/+1 counter and can’t be blocked, which if we manage to get Saheeli’s -7 online then we get a ton of triggers for not just the Kappa Cannoneer, but also the token copy that enters that can attack immediately.

We can also use the Improvise trick with Saheeli’s Directive in order to reveal a ton of artifacts from the top X cards of our library and put any number of artifacts with mana value X or less onto the battlefield and the rest in the graveyard, which means if we have at least six artifacts then we can have X be 12 we can cast most artifacts in the game.

What we get out can really depend on what you have access to, God-Pharaoh’s Statue to tax our opponents while also draining them, Spine of Ish Sah and Meteor Golem to destroys some permanents, Rings of Brighthearth to copy Saheeli’s ability, Chimil, the Inner Sun to get a ton of discover 5 casts that also makes your spells unable to be countered, or Simulacrum Synthesizer to make a bunch of Construct tokens that get bigger for each artifact you control whenever another artifact of mana value 3 or greater enters under your control.

Saheeli is an artifact value Commander in a very general sense, meaning that she can serve a wide variety of artifact strategies. Being that she is a Planeswalker she has a disadvantage in that there will be three other players that can attack her and make it difficult to keep alive, but we can mold our deck to protect her and make it work, though it is a bit more of a challenge.

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

Peace,

From, J.M. Casual