Hello and welcome to Daily Commander!

Today we are going to be talking about Ketramose, the New Dawn!

Ketramose is a three mana 4/4 with menace, lifelink, indestructible who can’t attack or block unless there are seven or more cards in exile, and whenever one or more cards are put into exile from graveyards and/or the battlefield during your turn you draw a card and lose 1 life.

I’ve wanted to make a Ketramose based deck for a while, but for a good bit of time Ketramose was out of the ideal “budget” range I tend to look for. Now that the hype for Ketramose has gone down a good bit to make Ketramose a bit easier to get, I do think that there are some fun ways to play this deck.

Ketramose leans more towards a midrange to control type of strategy in order to get the most value, though needing the exile to occur on our turn to draw a card provides an interesting challenge to work around.

The first thing we need are ways we can get some solid early value from exiling things we control.

The Warp mechanic plays really well here since it enters for an effect then exiles itself at the beginning of the next end step, which is still our turn for the sake of Ketramose. Starfield Shepard can serve as a way for us to get some more lands in the early game while able to get a small utility creature in the mid to late game.

All-Fates Stalker can exile a creature for a turn when it enters the battlefield, and with the Warp we get an additional exile on our turn, so we can exile a creature an opponent controls that doesn’t have an enters ability or a token with the first Warp for two exile triggers for Ketramose and then a third exile trigger when we play All-Fates Stalker from exile.

We can also use exile as a way to start getting things our of our opponents graveyard via something like Emperor of Bones, which exiles a card from a graveyard at the beginning of combat on our turn and whenever one or more +1/+1 counters are put on the Emperor we put a creature exiled with its ability onto the battlefield with a finality counter on it, haste, and sacrifices itself at the beginning of the next end step, which with a finality counter exiles it again.

The thing that is a bit annoying is that we have plenty of access to great exile based removal at instant speed, but we do get the most benefit from playing it on our turn. We have Swords to Plowshares, Path to Exile, Anguished Unmaking, Despark as cheap exile based removal that we can use in case of an emergency on our opponents turns to remove a threat, or on our turns to get a benefit from Ketramose.

The next thing we need are ways we can gain a benefit from exiling things as well as ways to mass exile things.

The Darkness Crystal is great because it makes out black spells cheaper, makes it so nontoken creatures out opponents control would exile themselves if they would die while also gaining 2 life at the same time, and for six mana we can put creature card exiled with The Darkness Crystal onto the battlefield tapped with two +1/+1 counters.

Since Ketramose can also trigger from exiling things from a graveyard, Lion Sash also works well since it can exile a card from a graveyard and if it was a permanent we put a +1/+1 counter on it and we can Reconfigure it onto a creature and the equipped creature gets +1/+1 for each +1/+1 counter on Lion Sash.

Anticausal Vestige is a good way for us to get some exile value because when it leaves the battlefield we draw a card and then put a permanent card with mana value less than or equal to the number of lands we control from our hand to the battlefield tapped, which can serve a number of uses especially since it has Warp.

Some of the permanents we can put down can also help us with exiling things like Rest in Peace which exiles all graveyards and if a card or token would be out into a graveyard from anywhere it becomes exiled instead, which can backfire a little bit if our opponents have a lot of cards in their graveyard when we play it, but it can also mean a lot of advantages to help us win the game.

The best thing about Ketramose is that since they are indestructible we can play board wipes like Day of Judgement with little troubles, and even exile board wipes like Urza’s Ruinous Blast which can exile all nonland permanents that aren’t legendary can get us a ton of cards.

Since our deck leans into the control and midrange play style, we need ways to get as much advantage from Ketramose as possible so we can get the right cards to win the game.

Turns out there are a lot of exile loops we can exploit to draw our deck, like having either a Restoration Angel, which blinks a non-Angel creature we control, and an Icewind Stalwart, which blinks a non-Warrior creature we control to get an exile loop to cycle through our deck as much as we need.

This is all well and good, but doesn’t help us if we lose all of our life to the infinite loop, so we can keep ourselves at parity with cards like Elas il-Kor, Sadistic Pilgrim which gain us 1 life when a creature enters under our control while having it when another creature we control dies each opponent loses 1 life, or Suture Priest which also gains us 1 life when a creature we control enters and has it so an opponent loses 1 life whenever a creature they control enters.

We can also make use of the infinite enters the battlefield triggers with something like Genesis Chamber, which if it is untapped and a creature we control enters we make a 1/1 Myr token which can stop the loop if we want if we fear decking ourselves out.

Speaking of making use of us drawing cards, Psychosis Crawler can also be used to make use of us drawing cards since whenever we draw a card each opponent loses one life, or if we have some extra mana to spare we can use Words of Waste to turn our next draw into having our opponents discard a card or Words of Worship to turn that draw into life gain.

If we happen to be able to get a solid engine running, then we can use Carnival of Souls as well to have it so whenever a creature enters we lose 1 life and add a black mana, which can get us a whole lot of mana we can use to fuel some of these effects and use for a massive X spell like Exsanguinate to have each opponent lose X life while we gain life equal to the amount lost this way or Torment of Hailfire if you have access to it to have each player lose 3 life unless they sacrifice a nonland permanent they control or discard a card repeated X times.

Ketramose is an engine card, meaning that they need to be in play for us to get the most out of our deck and to get to our win conditions. We are going to be playing a decent amount of removal, and since Ketramose has indestructible, so we have some modes of keeping them safe in order to get what we need.

The risk we play is that there is the chance we either drain ourselves to zero or we deck ourselves out if we happen to be a bit too greedy with how we play our cards or we mess up one of the loops we have made. While our interaction suite is solid, our battlefield presence may be a bit on the lighter side, so we may be leaving ourselves too open to opponents, especially if we play removal as soon as we can.

Since we do have some complicated potential loops, it can also benefit us from learning our lines of play so we aren’t taking so long on our turn that we annoy our opponents. Goldfishing is an important part of deckbuilding and making sure you know what your deck does can make playing long and complicated combos a much better experience for everyone.

With a little bit of patience and a bit of thinking, Ketramose can provided some interesting games that can win us the game in a convoluted way, which is my favorite way to play the game.

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

Peace,

From, J.M. Casual