Hello and welcome to Daily Commander!

Today we are going to be talking about Uro, Titan of Nature’s Wrath!

Uro is a three mana 6/6 that sacrifices itself when it enters the battlefield unless it escaped, and when it does enter the battlefield or attacks you gain 3 life and draw a card then you may put a land card from your hand onto the battlefield and can escape from the graveyard for two green, two blue, and exile five other cards from your graveyard.

Uro is very well known in Magic circles in being a pure value engine, being able to come in, gain you life, draw you cards, ramp you, and being a massive body for real cheap. The challenge is what to do with this deck without it being blue green value.

Then I thought, well since it is giving me a ton of value, why not use that value in not casting big spells sooner, and rather use it to be the catalyst for a spellslinger deck. The game plan is to recur in a variety of ways Uro so we don’t have to exile cards from our graveyard to gain life, draw cards, and ramp to cast a ton of spells.

So the first thing that we need to look for are ways to recur Uro from the graveyard, ideally as cheap as possible.

Regrowth is very much the classic example of what we’re looking for because for just two mana we can return Uro from our graveyard to our hand, and we can cast him for three mana instead of four mana and exiling cards from the graveyard.

In a similar vein we also have access to Auroral Procession, Recollect, and Revive, which also bring back a card from our graveyard back to our hand for two mana, with Auroral Procession being a green and a blue to cast, Recollect being three mana to do so, and Revive only being able to return green cards to our hand from the graveyard.

There is also Aether Helix, which is five mana but can bounce something to it’s owner’s hand while also able to bring something from our graveyard back to our hand, which can be used a bit more defensively.

Among the cheaper to cast cards that are able to bring a card from the graveyard back to our hand, there are plenty that we can use that have some form of downside, like Wildest Dreams which is a double X spell that can bring X permanents from the graveyard to our hand and exiles itself or Bygone Marvels which can copy itself if we have eight or more permanents in the graveyard and can bring a permanent from the graveyard to our hand.

We can also take advantage of the slim window that Uro stays on the battlefield and use flicker and blink effects like Essence Flux to get an additional Uro trigger. There are not too many options we have in this case since the flicker effect is mostly in white and blue, and blue only has so many flicker effects at instant speed that are cheap to cast, but they are an additional option to get additional Uro triggers.

The next thing that we need since we are a spellslinger deck, we need cheap spells to cast that also happen to be cantrips.

Peek is a very simple card to understand in that it is one mana to look at an opponent’s hand and we draw a card. Simple and clean, and we also have another version of this effect in Gitaxian Probe, but instead of being just one mana, we can instead pay 2 life to get the same effect and since Uro is gaining us a ton of life, we can spare 2.

Because we are also in green, we have access to cantrips that also happen to ramp us like Growth Spiral which let’s us draw a card and put a land from our hand to the battlefield, Joint Exploration which let’s us scry 2 then draw a card and if we kicked it we can put a land onto the battlefield, and Explore which let’s us play an additional land and we draw a card.

If we happen to draw just a ton of lands and have no additional cards to get them onto the battlefield, then we can play Manabond which let’s us reveal our hand and put all lands from our hand onto the battlefield and discard the rest, which we can use to cast Uro if we really need to.

We can also accrue some slow value as we draw cards with cards like Ominous Seas, which puts a foreshadow counter on itself whenever we draw a card and we can remove eight of them to make an 8/8 Kraken token to get a big body on the battlefield reliably and some what consistently.

Since we are going to be a spellslinger deck, we need the payoffs for a spellslinger deck.

Storm is going to be the popular option, and one that has some interesting choices made available to us. Aeve, Progenitor Ooze is a creature that has Storm that isn’t legendary if it is a token, and it enters the battlefield with a +1/+1 counter for each other Ooze we control, so the more spells we cast the bigger and bigger Aeve gets when we finally do cast them.

If we are a bit short on mana to cast Aeve, we can always go for the classic Chatterstorm, which makes a 1/1 Squirrel token for only two mana, meaning that we can potentially get a ton of Squirrels in play after doing a bunch of Uro shenanigans. If we want bigger creatures from a Storm spell then we can also cast Hunting Pack, which makes 4/4 Beast tokens, but is seven mana to cast.

In order to potentially continue accruing Storm value we can also cast Mind’s Desire which shuffles our library and exiles the top card of our library and let’s us play that card until the end of turn without paying its mana cost, which can help us circumvent some of the bigger Storm spell payoffs.

To help clear the board we can cast Temporal Fissure to bounce creatures, use Amphibian Downpour to turn our opponents problematic creatures into 1/1 Frogs with no abilities, or gain a bunch of life with Weather the Storm to combat any aggro strategies.

We can also use what I like to call pseudo-Storm cards, or cards that care about how many other spells you cast. Cards like Sentinel Tower which when you cast an instant or sorcery deals damage equal to 1 plus the number of instants and sorceries you cast that turn prior to that one.

There is also Thrasta, Tempest’s Roar which is normally ten and two green to cast, but they get three mana cheaper for each other spell cast this turn, meaning that after four spells we can get a two mana trample, haste, trample over Planeswalkers, and hexproof for the turn they enter 7/7 for only two mana.

Uro is very much a value engine Commander, and while we could always build an Uro value deck, we can actually use the value that Uro generates in order to cast a ton of spells and have a different avenue of spellslinger decks.

Uro is pure value, plain and simple, so rather than go big and cast huge spells quicker, I think it would be much more interesting to build Uro to help us cast as many spells as possible and gain value in a different way.

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

Peace,

From, J.M Casual