Hello and welcome to Daily Commander!

Today we are going to be talking about Talion, the Kindly Lord!

Talion is a four mana 3/4 with flying and as they enter you choose a number between 1 and 10 and whenever an opponent casts a spell with mana value, power, or toughness equal to the chosen number that that player loses 2 life and you draw a card.

Talion is an interesting Commander in that we choose a number that will have us gain card advantage while simultaneously having our opponents lose life. I remember when this card was spoiled and people were not sure how good this deck would be, and now there have been cEDH decks made using Talion as an advantage engine.

We aren’t going that route with Talion, but I think that looking to build a higher power deck with Talion would be an interesting exercise in how much advantage we can gain from playing them. The deck is looking to a midrange sort of deck, having plenty of control elements to help us maintain an advantage until we hit our win conditions.

Since we are working on some control elements, we should be playing ways to interrupt our opponents as much as we can.

Spellskite is a tricky card that we can use to redirect a spell or ability to target it for a Phyrexian blue, which means that if an opponent is casting some sort of spell to protect a creature, give some counters, remove Talion, or start some sort of combo by targeting something, we can shift it to Spellskite to our advantage.

There are plenty of people playing all sorts of draw engines in their decks, especially the higher power you go, so something like Notion Thief can be a real hinderance to our opponents while giving us additional draws. If we combine that with wheel effects it can be especially devastating, but that’s if you want to be mean.

We also have access to plenty of cheap counter spells in cards like Swan Song which can counter an enchantment, instant, or sorcery and give the controller of that spell a 2/2 Bird with flying, Strix Serenade to do the same with artifacts, creatures, or Planeswalker spells, an An Offer You Can’t Refuse to counter a noncreature spell and give the controller two Treasure tokens, which you can cast on one of your spells to ramp.

If we are playing against someone who needs activated or triggered abilities, we can play Tishana’s Tidebinder in order to counter that, and if it came from an artifact, creature, or Planeswalker, that permanent becomes a Treasure token and loses all abilities as long as they remain on the battlefield.

There are also spells we can cast for free or really cheap if our opponents fulfill a condition in the oft forgotten spell type Trap. Archive Trap can mill an opponent for 13 cards for zero mana if an opponent searched their library this turn, which can go into Ravenous Trap which can be cast for zero mana if an opponent had three or more cards enter their graveyard from anywhere to exile their graveyard, and Mindbreak Trap to exile any number of spells for zero if an opponent cast three or more spells this turn.

Now Talion is a decent control piece in that we can chose a low enough number to slow our opponents down, but we may need to reset it from time to time.

This is where we can take advantage of clone spells if we need to reset Talion’s number. Quasiduplicate is a way for us to create a token copy of a creature that we control, and also has the ability for us to cast it again via its Jump-start ability by letting us discard a card and cast it from the graveyard, exiling it when it resolves.

We can take advantage of cards like Mirror Box and Mirror Gallery to let us deal with the legend rule issue, or we can use spells like Irenicus’s Vile Duplication which makes a token copy of a creature we control and makes it not a legendary creature if it was legendary, or something like Spark Double which becomes a copy of a creature that enters with an additional +1/+1 counter and isn’t legendary if that creature (or Planeswalker) is legendary.

If we don’t have access to or want to have a copy of Talion on the field in order to have additional copies for further aspects of control, we can always go the old fashioned way and cast some self bounce spells like Snap in order to get Talion back into our hand, and with Snap we can untap two lands to boot.

There are also ways we can threaten Talion to come in at flash speed with something like High Fae Trickster, which itself has flash and can give all our spells that ability to be cast as if they had flash, which can also help in cases of us needing to cast some sorcery board wipes like Kindred Dominance to destroy all creatures except a creature type of our choice.

We are going to be depriving our opponents of resources, all the while using resources of our own, so we should have access to those resources as often as possible.

Emet-Selch of the Third Seat is perfect for this because ideally we will be able to cast a spell from our graveyard on each turn for two mana cheaper because they cast a spell that would have them take damage from Talion. It is once per turn, but we have the threat of being able to cast a strong removal spell from our graveyard at any time.

For example, if our opponent is playing an aggressive deck, we can deter them from attacking us by having Aetherize in the graveyard so that they don’t attack us, or we can leverage a deal from it if an opponent wants to stay in the game and has a beneficial effect for us, and since Emet-Selch discounts spells cast from our graveyard, we can do it for two mana.

Targeted removal spells like Infernal Grasp and Go for the Throat cost only one black mana, which can be useful if we happen to be tight on mana, Fabricate to search for an artifact and put it into our hand for only one mana if cast from our graveyard, and Propaganda to protect ourselves if we milled it or it was removed from our hands or the battlefield.

Bolas’s Citadel is probably what we are going to end up using fairly often as a way for us to churn through our deck to retrieve cards that we need or want to cast at the cost of some life. The win conditions of the deck can be the cEDH classic in Demonic Consultation into Thassa’s Oracle, or if you are on a budget and want to cast your spells into oblivion then you can have Laboratory Maniac in play to win if you have no more cards in your library or win via a Storm effect like Tendrils of Agony or Brain Freeze.

Talion is a Commander that can provide a lot of value, and all of that is from just having them on the battlefield, keeping our opponents from casting too many spells that may trigger them. The numbers, from a bit of research, that would be ideal to pick are either 2 or 3, and we have ways to add or change the numbers as we need.

It is a little more work since we need to keep track of the spells our opponents cast to see if we get value from them, but it can lead to us gaining a huge advantage fairly quickly if our opponents don’t care and play into it, drawing us a huge number of cards while taking damage.

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

Peace,

From, J.M. Casual