Hello and welcome to Daily Commander!

Today we are going to be talking about River Song!

River is a three mana 2/2 that has you draw cards from the bottom of your library rather than the top, and whenever an opponent scries, surveils, or searches their library you put a +1/+1 counter on River and then River deals damage to that player equal to River’s power.

River provides a very unique condition on how you play the game, having something that cares about the bottom of your deck being a fairly rare line of text, incredibly so allowing you to draw from the bottom being a unique ability to River.

What’s more interesting is that she is a specific hate piece to effects that are becoming more and more common in Magic, and it provides an interesting avenue of play. The game plan is to mess around with the order of our library, all the while having a few cheeky ways to have our opponents search their library so that River can deal a bit of incidental damage.

The first thing we need are a number of reliable ways for us to get cards we want to the bottom of our library.

Preordain is pretty great for this because it allows us to scry 2 and then draw a card, which is great for the early game because of how cheap it is to get a card we want to the bottom of our library for later and card we need now in our hand, but when River comes into play it reverses the process, especially since the bottom of the library is much harder to interact with.

There are plenty of cards that were made for a draft environment that can take a card from the graveyard and add it to the bottom of the library. Barkform Harvester, Hoverstone Pilgrim, Epitaph Golem all let you pay two mana to put a card from a graveyard to the bottom of your library to the bottom of your graveyard.

We also have access to cards like Impulse, which doesn’t draw us cards per se, instead letting us look at the top four cards of our library and put one of them into our hand and the rest on the bottom of our library in any order, which means when we have River in play we can sculpt our future draws using the now “bottom” of our library.

Experimental Augury is better in this regard because while it only looks at the top three cards of our library, it also happens to proliferate, which means that if we have at least one +1/+1 counter on River, we can accelerate her ability to deal damage to our opponents when they search, scry, or surveil.

Dig Through Time is probably the best spell for this sort of deck because we can look at the top seven cards of our library to put two in our hand and the rest on the bottom of our library in any order, which allows for a massive amount of card selection and ability to arrange for future draws, which we can also pay using Delve to help us save on mana.

The next thing that we need to look at are ways that we can help facilitate River’s ability to hate out scrying, surveilling, and searching.

Hired Giant is normally not that great of a card because it is fine creature on rate with an ability that will ramp your opponents, but with River Song in play, we get three triggers off of her ability, with the ability resolving as you see appropriate (I believe, judges correct me on this) to make River be able to deal more and more damage fairly quickly.

Another way you can get everyone to search their library at the same time is with Field of Ruin, which does destroy a nonbasic land an opponent controls and has everyone search their library for a basic land, which again gives River three triggers and deals increasingly more damage.

Krenko’s Buzzcrusher can also be used to destroy nonbasic lands, one for each player, and for each land destroyed this way its controller may search their library for a basic and put it into play tapped, while also getting a decent sized creature with flying and trample.

Getting the our opponents to surveil is nonexistent as far as I can find, but there are a couple ways for us to get our opponents to scry. Eager Construct lets every player scry 1 when it enters and Myr Custodian lets us scry 2 and our opponents to then scry 1 when it enters, so again we get River to trigger three times.

There is a bold way for us to get all of our opponents to search their library, but it can definitely backfire on us and that is with Boldwyr Heavyweights. Now they are a four mana 8/8 with trample, but when they enter each opponent may search their library for a creature and put it into play, which is a risky play that we should only do if we can answer what our opponents are going to tutor or River can deal enough damage that it could win us the game.

The last thing we need to do is have a way to win the game, which may be a bit convoluted considering our deck has a potential two card infinite turn combo.

Timestream Navigator is a card that can let us have an extra turn, provided we have the city’s blessing, and then puts itself on the bottom of our library. If we activate Timestream Navigator on our upkeep with River in play, we put it on the bottom of our library then draw it for turn then play it so that next turn we can repeat the process.

Now that doesn’t functionally do much other than us looping extra turns and maybe us getting a few lands into play, but if we combine it with a Lithoform Engine to copy the activated ability we get an additional extra turn so we can “bank” extra enough extra turns to draw our deck and win.

If that is not the way you want to win, then we can use The Temporal Anchor to get a consistent scry 2 on each of our upkeeps and if we choose to put any cards on the bottom of our library from scrying then we exile that many cards from the bottom of our library and on our turn we can cast those spells.

From there we can play more and more spells that can have an opponent search their library and slowly deprive them of resources, with one of the more brutal ways to do so being From the Ashes, which destroys all nonbasic lands and for each land destroyed this way their controller can search their library for a basic to put onto the battlefield, which the more colors an opponent is running can be more and more restrictive.

With any luck our opponents would have been scrying, surveilling, and searching their library on their own that River has gotten bigger and bigger and has been dealing more and more damage that they will have been wary to search, scry, or surveil.

River is a value Commander that can turn surprisingly oppressive if built in a malicious way. I didn’t intend to build River that way, but of the few ways we can have our opponents trigger River’s Spoilers ability, it can be pretty mean.

I didn’t even mention a potential land deprival strategy I found because of how mean it is.

River can be built as a bit of a way to keep things “fair” in that we limit how much searching is done because of how much searching Commander has access to, but can definitely be built in a powerful way.

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

Peace,

From, J.M. Casual