Hello and welcome to Daily Commander!

Today we are going to be talking about Zinnia, Valley’s Voice!

Zinnia is a three mana 1/3 with flying, and they get +X/+0 where X is the number of other creatures you control with base power 1 and creature spells you cast have offspring for 2 mana.

Zinnia is pretty neat in that it uses a go wide strategy to facilitate a Voltron like strategy, in that the more small creatures that you have, the bigger Zinnia gets. With Zinnia giving your creature spells offspring is helpful in that we can cast some pretty cheap creatures for a bit more mana to turbo out a bunch of tokens.

The game plan is to pack the battlefield to the brim with a bunch of small creatures to get Zinnia big enough that they can certainly pack a wallop to win via Commander damage.

The first thing that we need to consider are cheap creatures that can serve a utility, especially if we have multiple copies of.

Ornithopter of Paradise is such an example because even though we are paying a total of four mana, we are getting two flying creatures that can tap for mana of any color. We have a few ways that we can get a decent amount of mana generation in our colors, so any way we can take advantage of that would be helpful.

In a similar vein we can play creatures like Loyal Warhound or Knight of the White Orchid, each of which allows you to search your library for a basic Plains and tapped for Warhound and any Plains and untapped for the Knight onto the battlefield if an opponent controls more lands then we do, which if we can intentionally slow roll or are playing against a land heavy deck is not hard to achieve.

We can also make use of cheap utility creatures to add a bit of redundancy to the deck. Selfless Spirit to have an additional way to give our creatures indestructible, Spirited Companion to draw an additional card, Loyal Apprentice to get double the 1/1 Thopter tokens when Zinnia is in play, and even Junk Winder once we have enough tokens in order to get more ways to tap our opponents things.

One of the more interesting ways to get a ton of creatures onto the battlefield, albeit for a decent mana investment, is Hanged Executioner which when it enters makes a 1/1 Spirit token with flying, which means if we pay five mana we can get four 1/1 creatures to give a massive boost to Zinnia.

The next thing we need to look at are additional ways for us to gain benefit from making and having a bunch of small creatures.

Arabella, Abandoned Doll is an example of what we are looking for because whenever Arabella attacks it deals X damage to each opponent and we gain X life equal to the number of creatures with power 2 or less we control, which if our goal is to have a massive number of them, then this should not be a hard condition to satisfy.

Along with that, we can also use Enduring Innocence and Welcoming Vampire as ways to get more card draw in our deck whenever a creature of power 2 or less enters once per turn, but we can also make an offspring copy of them to get an additional bit of card draw, which is never a bad thing.

While our goal is to make Zinnia bigger, we can also make use of having small creatures to deal damage by using Tetsuko Umezawa, Fugitive to have creatures we control with power or toughness 1 unblockable, which can help get a ton of damage dealt to the opponents we aren’t attacking with Zinnia.

Since we are also making a lot of creature tokens, ways to deal damage to our opponents that trigger off of creatures entering the battlefield would be great. Impact Tremors is the best example of this, but there is also Molten Gatekeeper, which does what Impact Tremors does but is attached to a creature that we can get an additional copy of because of offspring.

Speaking of offspring, I had to check to see if it was viable and since it is, we can get multiple instances of offspring, meaning that we can cast an Agate Instigator for a grand total of six mana to get three additional Impact Tremors effects onto the battlefield, while also making Zinnia bigger.

We also have access to some unique board wipes and board clears like Perplexing Test which can either bounce all creature tokens or nontoken creatures to their owners’ hand at instant speed, the Dusk side of Dusk//Dawn which destroys creatures of power 3 or greater with the Dawn side being able to return all creatures with power 2 or less from our graveyard to our hand, and Austere Command which can choose two options between destroying all artifacts, enchantments, creatures of mana value 3 or less, or creatures of mana value 4 or greater.

In order for us to win, we need to play a little more on the aggressive side of things, so any way to help facilitate that would be beneficial.

Rapid Augmenter is a solid way to start since it gives creatures we control with base power 1 haste as it enters, and whenever another creature we control enters that wasn’t cast, Rapid Augmenter gets a +1/+1 counter and can’t be blocked this turn, which definitely helps get the aggro on pretty quickly.

Adding to the aggressive play style, we can use Combat Celebrant in order to get an additional combat when we exert it, or an offspring token that we make. Keep in mind, we would get additional combats if we exerted both at the same time, but we only get to untap our creatures on that first one, so stagger the exerts to get two additional combat steps and still be able to attack.

We can also help make sure that our creatures can stay alive from those multiple combats by using something like Boros Charm which can be used to deal damage to a player or Planeswalker, give a single creature double strike, or most importantly to give permanents we control indestructible until the end of the turn.

If we want a modal way to protect our things then we can also use Restoration Magic, which with it being a Tiered spell we can pay an additional cost for a better effect, with the first one being a one mana way to give a creature hexproof and indestructible, the second being the same but also gaining us 3 life if we pay an extra mana, and the last tier giving all permanents we control hexproof and indestructible and gaining 6 life for a total of five mana.

Even if our board is cleared, we also have access to some solid recursion with Raise the Past because most of our creatures have power 2 or less, meaning that unless it is an exile based board wipe, we can have a functioning board on our turn, and if set up correctly we can even be able to swing for game to win.

Zinnia is a value Commander in that the more tokens we have, the better they get to deal a bunch of damage. As with many go wide decks, our weakness lies in board wipes, but even then we should be able to recover from it pretty decently.

The real issue is making sure that we have enough mana to get the offspring costs working to get Zinnia bigger. We need a decent amount of lands and ways to generate mana to pay the offspring cost, which can also slow down our game plan a bit if we are not careful.

Zinnia can definitely do well in a game, but there are a few points of concern in order to make them work effectively.

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

Peace,

From, J.M. Casual