Hello and welcome to Daily Commander!

Today we are going to be talking about Kathril, Aspect Warper!

Kathril is a five mana 3/3 that when they enter you put a flying counter on any creature you control if a creature in your graveyard has flying, repeating the process for first strike, double strike, deathtouch, hexproof, indestructible, lifelink, menace, reach, trample, and vigilance and then put a +1/+1 counter on Kathril for each counter put on a creature this way.

Keyword soup is a phrase associated with this sort of archetype and one that is pretty easy to manage. All we need are creatures with all sorts of keyword abilities and get them into the graveyard, which not a difficult task to accomplish in our colors.

What we do need to do is make sure that we have the widest spread of abilities, and if we want to make it a bit of a challenge, we can try to see if we can find ways to get every single one of the mentioned keywords onto Kathril to give them eleven keywords and eleven +1/+1 counters, which will deal just enough Commander Damage to win because of double strike.

The first thing that we need to do is make sure that have plenty of creatures with as many keywords as possible.

Zetalpa, Primal Dawn is a bit of a meme for how often it is included in Commander precons, but for this deck Zetalpa is genuinely a great card to include because they have flying, double strike, vigilance, trample, and indestructible. Five of eleven keywords attached to one creature is already a massive head start.

Getting the other abilities in the graveyard is also pretty easy, and it also helps to have some form of redundancy like with Vampire Nighthawk and Nighthawk Scavenger, both of which have flying, deathtouch and lifelink but Nighthawk Scavenger also has the bonus of getting bigger for the number of card types in opponents graveyards.

Shrike Force has flying, double strike and vigilance, Sylvan Caryatid has defender and more importantly hexproof while also being able to tap for mana, Dragon Sniper has vigilance, reach and deathtouch while also being one mana to cast, and Qarsi Revenant having flying, deathtouch and lifelink and can exile it self from the graveyard to put an ability counter of all three of their abilities onto a creature.

We also have access to several utility creatures that are magnets for removal like Glissa Sunslayer, who has first strike and deathtouch who can choose from one of three abilities when they deal combat damage to a player which include us drawing a card and losing 1 life, destroy target enchantment, or remove up to three counters from target permanent.

Kunoros, Hound of Athreos is a solid pick as well to hold off from our opponents taking too much advantage of the graveyard by preventing creature cards in graveyards from entering the battlefield and preventing players from casting spells from graveyards while also having vigilance, menace, and lifelink.

The next thing that we need are ways to make sure that we can get the creatures with all of these keywords into the graveyard.

In terms of pure card selection and amount of cards we can get into the graveyard, Buried Alive is probably one of the best choices because we can put up to three creature cards from our library into the graveyard, which can immediately be a pile of keywords from just three cards,

Grisly Salvage is also pretty solid because it lets us reveal the top five cards of our library and put a creature or land card from among them into our hand while putting the rest into the graveyard, and for it being two mana and can be cast at instant speed makes it that much more effective.

Hostile Negotiations is a pretty interesting way for us to get cards into our graveyard since we exile two separate piles of three cards from the top of our library and reveal one and has an opponent choose one of the piles to put into our hand and the rest into our graveyard and we lose 3 life, which can end up being a win win for us in either scenario.

Jarad’s Orders let’s us look for two creature cards from our library and puts one into our hand and the other into the graveyard, Final Parting also does that but let’s us look for any two cards to put one into our hand and the other into the graveyard, and Unmarked Grave let’s us look for a nonlegendary card and put that into the graveyard.

If we happen to draw creatures that we want in the graveyard, then we can use Tortured Existence to pay one mana and discard a creature card in order to return a creature card from our graveyard into our hand in order to better sculpt what abilities we want for Kathril.

The last thing we need are ways to win, and while Kathril can do a decent job on their own, we can also make use of having all those creature cards with those keywords in our graveyard.

Bleeding Effect is a very neat card that I had no idea existed, but at the beginning of combat on our turn creatures we control gain the abilities of creatures in the graveyard from the same list as Kathril’s which if we have a couple of them in play we can set some of our utility creatures to come in and deal a bit of damage.

Better yet, we can use Eerie Ultimatum in order to bring back any number of permanents with different names from our graveyard onto the battlefield, which if we combine with an effect like Concordant Crossroads, which gives all creatures haste, can definitely help go for a massive swing, especially if we still have a few creatures strategically in the graveyard for Bleeding Effect to still work.

We can even make use of Odric, Lunarch Marshal who has essentially the same ability as Bleeding Effect, but also happens to include haste and skulk, which means that if we can get a creature with haste into the graveyard, which could be something as simple as a Banehound or even a Questing Beast to give our creatures haste to be able to attack immediately.

We can also use Resourceful Defense as a way to keep the counters from Kathril if they get removed from the battlefield while also able to move them around when Kathril comes back in order to make them even bigger and strong enough to one shot an opponent.

Kathril is a neat Commander that has a neat way to encourage a different sort of graveyard playstyle. It isn’t the most flashy and does become reliant on being able to do Commander Damage to win, but it is a deck that has a purpose and a clear goal in mind.

Of course graveyard removal is going to be the band of this deck’s existence, which is why there should be a decent amount of redundancy in the abilities that we have in the graveyard at any time in order to not be completely blown out.

I do think that there should be more variety of how keyword based Commanders should work based on how many new keywords we have and each color has access to, but since the list fluctuates every so often it would be hard to do without some sort of specific way of writing it down without being four paragraphs long.

Maybe one day.

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

Peace,

From, J.M. Casual