Hello and welcome to Daily Commander!

Today we are going to be talking about Tannuk, Memorial Ensign!

Tannuk is a three mana 2/4 with a Landfall ability where whenever a land you control enters, Tannuk deals 1 damage to each opponent and if it is the second time this ability has resolved this turn you draw a card.

Ending the focus on Edge of Eternities Commanders, I wanted to take a look at a classic archetype that I’ve talked about before and that is Landfall, which has been becoming more and more supported as time has gone on and especially in red and green.

The catch for this deck though is that the way that we win, ideally, is going to be through the Landfall trigger. We are going to be getting as many land drops in as possible so we burn our opponents out, getting a little sneaky in getting a ton of damage in, but the goal is to burn by Landfall.

Since this is a deck that is going to be built around getting a ton of land drops, we should be working on ways to get a ton of lands in play.

Ideally we are going to be playing a higher than normal land count, probably in the range of 42 to 45 lands, so the more land drops we can get in the better. This is why Summer Bloom is such a perfect card for the deck since we can get up to three additional land drops for the turn.

Journey of Discovery is an interesting card since it has an Entwine cost, meaning that we would normally only be able to choose only one of the two option, which are get two basic lands into our hand or we get to play two additional lands this turn, if we Entwine it we can get both, and since we are going to be a playing a lot of lands, this is actually a pretty feasible strategy.

Explore lets you play an additional land this turn and draws you a card, Scale the Heights puts a +1/+1 counter on a creature you control while also gaining you two life and letting you play an additional land and draws you a card, and Dryad of the Ilysian Grove lets you play an additional land each turn and turns your lands into every basic land type.

One of the more interesting ways to get some land value would be Zell Dincht since he lets you play an additional land each turn, gets +1/+0 for each land we control, but at the cost of returning a land to our hand at the beginning of our end step. This is actually good for us since it gives us one additional land drop if we happen to be low on lands to play.

We can also play Nahiri’s Lithoforming, which as an additional cost has us sacrifice X lands, but draws us X cards and let’s us play X additional lands this turn, though they do come in tapped. We can mitigate this with something like a Ramunap Excavator which lets us play lands from our graveyard and a Spelunking, which draws us a card, puts a land in play, and has our lands come in untapped.

The next thing we need are ways to help get more damage through, and there are a couple of ways we can achieve that.

Ojer Axonil, Deepest Might is one of the better ways to get this done since if a red source we control would deal an amount of damage less than their power to an opponent, that source deals damage equal to Ojer Axonil’s power instead, meaning at minimum each Landfall trigger deals 4 damage to each opponent.

It also has a bit of recursion by becoming the land Temple of Power (triggering Landfall) which normally taps for red and can become Ojer Axonil again if we dealt 4 or more noncombat damage to an opponent from a red source we control and pay three mana.

We can make use of the Room Spiked Corridor//Torture Pit which Spiked Corridor makes three 1/1 Devils that deal 1 damage to any target when they die, but more important Torture Pit has if a source we control would deal noncombat damage to an opponent, it deals that much damage plus 2 instead.

Torbran, Thane of Red Fell has a noncombat red source of damage we control deal to an opponent or permanent an opponent controls deal that much damage plus 2, Mechanized Warfare does so when a red source or an artifact source would deal damage it would deal that much plus 1, and Embermaw Hellion does so with any damage dealt by another red source we control it deals that much plus 1 instead.

Since these are all cumulative, we can have one land drop deal like 6 additional damage with just the damage additions mentioned and not counting Ojer Axonil into the calculations, because I believe there are some timing oddities when that is involved with other damage replacement effects.

So while the plan is working to win using Tannuk’s Landfall triggers, we do need to have a back up plan, and that is through more Landfall triggers.

Gladiolus Amicitia is a great example of additive Landfall effects that benefit us since when he enters we can get a land from our library into play and whenever we trigger Landfall then another creature we control gets +2/+2 and trample until end of turn, which if we manage to combine with a bunch of other multiple land per turn synergies can have Tannuk able to win through Commander Damage.

One of these ways could be using Boundless Realms, which searches our library for X basic lands where X is the number of lands we control and puts them onto the battlefield tapped or something like Aftermath Analyst which mills three cards but also can sacrifice itself after we pay four mana to get all lands from our graveyard into play tapped.

We can also make use of other damage dealing Landfall triggers like Tunneling Geopede and Spitfire Lagac, both of which deal 1 damage to each opponent whenever we get a Landfall trigger, which when combined with the damage increasers can be fatal.

There is also Ancient Greenwarden, which let’s us play lands from the graveyard, but more importantly has if a land we control would cause the triggered ability of a permanent we control to trigger, it triggers an additional time, meaning any Landfall trigger we would get doubles which could help win us the game.

Tannuk is a simple enough Commander in that we go all in on one strategy to get value and a win condition. Since people tend to not play a bunch of land removal we will have plenty of mana to cast Tannuk if he gets destroyed and if our board gets cleared.

There is a decent amount of redundancy in the deck that we should be able to get a decent number of wins, though there are some ways we can spice up the deck if we happen to want to change the game play up a bit, like an Omnath, Locus of Rage and Avenger of Zendikar to go wide and big or Mossborn Hydra to go super tall for each Landfall trigger, the choice is yours.

I am theorizing a potential bit of Storm shenanigans with Underworld Breach, but that needs some more time to cook before that can be fully complete and it should be pretty neat to see work or fail spectacularly.

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

Peace,

From, J.M. Casual