Hello and welcome to Daily Commander!

Today we are going to be talking about Chandra, Fire of Kaladesh!

Chandra is a three mana 2/2 that untaps herself whenever you cast a red spell and she can tap to deal 1 damage to target player and if she has dealt 3 or more damage this turn, she exiles herself and returns to the battlefield transformed as Chandra, Roaring Flame, a 4 loyalty Planeswalker with a +1 to deal 2 damage to target player or Planeswalker (via errata), a -2 to deal damage to target creature, and a -7 to deal 6 damage to each opponent and each plater dealt damage this way gets an emblem with “At the beginning of your upkeep, this emblem does 3 damage to you.”

This Chandra, as with most Chandra’s, wants us to burn our opponents in order to flip and burn our opponents some more. Flipping her should not be too much of an issue, the issue is making sure we can do it consistently.

The name of the game is to get Chandra to flip over as often as possible, and do what we can to have her get her last loyalty ability to activate several times, and there are a couple of ways we can get this done.

The first thing that we need are cheap spells that we can cast that will help the front side of Chandra untap so she can become the Planeswalker side as quickly as possible.

This is where cheap burn spells are going to be our best friend, especially since we are already going with a burn plan. Lightning Bolt is probably one of the best includes of the deck because of how versatile it is at being able to target anything and deal 3 damage to it at the rate of one mana at instant speed. It is hard to beat Lightning Bolt, but there are a couple of potential options to help us out.

Boltwave comes close to being a really solid card, especially with the burn plan we have since it can deal 3 damage to all of our opponents for one mana. The biggest drawback is that it is sorcery speed. If we want a bit of utility in our burn spells, then we can use Play with Fire, which can deal 2 damage to any target, but if we hit a player with it we can scry 1.

If we want to play a bit more on the defensive side of things, we can play cards like Pyroblast and Red Elemental Blast, both of which can counter a blue spell or destroy a blue permanent, which may be situational in some cases, but dealing with blue consistently can help us if we face some more control based decks.

The best part about Chandra is that she untaps whenever we cast a red spell, meaning we can also include some cheap red creatures like Monastery Swiftspear, a one mana haste creature with prowess to start putting pressure on in the early game or Soul-Scar Mage to have our burn spells be able to deal with indestructible creatures by giving creatures -1/-1 counters instead of dealing damage if they take noncombat damage from a source we control.

Now we get to the tricky part of the deck, and that is finding ways to get Chandra to ultimate faster, or get multiple uses of her ultimate.

Chandra, Acolyte of Flame is a solid start since as one of her 0 loyalty abilities, she adds a loyalty counter to each red Planeswalker we control. She can also make two 1/1 Elemental creatures with haste and are sacrificed at the beginning of the end step and can help us cast our instants and sorceries of mana value 3 or less from our graveyard, exiling them if they would go to the graveyard this turn.

We have a couple of ways to proliferate in red, one is through Cacophony Scamp, which we may sacrifice when it deals combat damage to a player and then proliferate if we do, and when it dies we deal damage to any target equal to its power. The other red way we have access to proliferate is through Volt Charge, which does 3 damage to any target and then proliferates.

While these aren’t the best options, we do have a couple of colorless ways to make use of proliferating, one of my favorites being Recon Craft Theta which makes an Alien creature token when it enters and proliferates whenever it attacks and has a low Crew cost of 2.

If we just manage to get Chandra to ultimate, we have ways to copy that ability. Chandra’s Regulator, which allows us to pay one mana to copy a Chandra’s loyalty ability, being able to choose new targets for the copy. This means we can copy Chandra, Acolyte of Flame’s 0 ability to add another counter to our various Chandras, or more likely to have us get an additional copy of Chandra, Roaring Flame’s ultimate.

In order for us to win the game, we need to be making sure that we can apply as much burn pressure as we can throughout the game in order to have Chandra’s ultimate finish our opponents off.

Fiery Inscription would be a solid card to cast in the early game in order to get more out of any burn spell we cast, especially single target burn spells. The more we whittle our opponents down in the early game, the more chance we have of having Chandra’s ultimate to take our opponents down.

I didn’t mention this earlier because it worked better in the winning the game section, but there is Repeated Reverberation which copies the next instant, sorcery, or most importantly Planeswalker loyalty ability twice. This means that if we manage to cast it and then activate Chandra’s ultimate, then our opponents lose 18 life and get three emblems that deal 9 damage on their upkeeps.

We can also potentially get that number even higher if we cast something like Reverberate and/or Reiterate to get additional copies of Repeated Reverberation, which, if my math is correct, would copy Chandra’s ultimate six times leaving us with seven triggers for a total of 42 damage and seven emblems that deal 21 damage per upkeep.

Now that is pie in the sky, maybe one game ever to get it to resolve, but it is a fun dream to achieve for the deck. If we want to make sure we can deal with players who think it sneaky to have a life gain deck, then we can play something like Skullcrack which not only prevents players from gaining life, but also has damage unable to be prevented for this turn, and deals 3 damage to a player or Planeswalker to boot.

Chandra can very much be a guided Commander in that you know exactly what sort of deck you’re making, in this case a burn deck, so it would be very tempting to play a bunch of burn cards and call it a day. However, burn is a tough archetype to play in Commander where we need to deal with 120 life from our opponents, and this is if we don’t play against life gain.

Being able to get creative with getting as much burn as possible is fun, because while it would be tempting to play damage multipliers with the emblem, the damage won’t increase (at least I believe it won’t because of CR 114.2 in the Comprehensive Rules) because we don’t control the emblem, our opponents do. So rather than having our emblems do more damage, we need to find ways to get more emblems on our opponents, while also dealing a ton of damage in the meantime.

It is more tricky than it seems, but being able to think a bit more laterally for a Commander makes deck building a whole lot more fun, at least for me.

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

Peace,

From, J.M. Casual