Hello and welcome to Daily Commander!

Today we are going to be talking about Bhaal, Lord of Murder!

Bhaal is a five mana 4/4 that has indestructible when your life total is less than or equal to half your starting life total and whenever another nontoken creature you control dies, put a +1/+1 counter on target creature and goad it.

Bhaal is an interesting blend of being an aristocrat Commander along with having traits of forcing combat, which puts us at an interesting crossroads in how we want to take the deck. We can use Bhaal as a way to buff our creatures and then have them attack, or we can buff our opponents creatures and have them attack each other.

Given that we want our creatures to die, sticking +1/+1 counters on them doesn’t seem like the most ideal plan if we want to sacrifice them, so the plan for the deck is to stack +1/+1 counters on our opponents creatures and have them attack each other, all the while getting a few pot shots in as well.

The first thing we need are creatures that we want to sacrifice, whether because they have value when they die or have some avenue of recursion.

Timeline Culler is a solid creature to have because it has a cheap Warp ability while also having haste, but the bigger benefit is that it can be cast for its Warp ability from the graveyard, all the while getting our life total a little lower so we can get Bhaal to become indestructible.

Squee, the Immortal can be cast from the graveyard or exile, Murderous Redcap has Persist and when it enters the battlefield it deals damage equal to its power to any target, and Mosswood Dreadknight can draw us a card and lose 1 life from its Adventure Dread Whispers or can be cast from our graveyard as an Adventure if it died until the end of our next turn.

We can also make use of creatures that sacrifice themselves for value, like Insidious Fungus, which we can pay two mana and sacrifice it to destroy an artifact, enchantment, or draw us a card and then put a land from our hand onto the battlefield tapped.

There are also creatures like Accursed Marauder, which has each player sacrifice a creature, which is beneficial for us in that we can remove a creature an opponent controls while also having a creature to be sacrificed to trigger Bhaal.

What we need next are ways to sacrifice creatures and other ways to goad our opponents into attacking each other.

Ziatora, the Incinerator is a large creatures that lets us sacrifice a creature at the beginning of the end step to deal damage equal to that creature’s power to any target and then we make three Treasure tokens, which for the number of creatures we can sacrifice can dramatically help us ramp while also triggering Bhaal.

Braids, Arisen Nightmare can also be a way for us to sacrifice creatures since at the beginning of our end step we can sacrifice an artifact, creature, enchantment, land, or Planeswalker and if we do then each opponent may sacrifice a permanent of their choice that shares a card type with it, if they don’t then that player loses 2 life and we draw a card. While they can sacrifice the creature we put counters on, we can make it a catch 22 where we put the counters on a valuable creature that they may want to keep and force them to sacrifice a utility creature.

There are also plenty of other cards we can use to sacrifice creatures for value like Corrupted Conviction which has us sacrifice a creature as an additional cost to draw two cards, Deadly Dispute to sacrifice an artifact or creature to draw two cards and make a Treasure token, or a Victimize to choose two creatures from our graveyard, then sacrifice a creature to return the chosen cards to the battlefield tapped.

As far as getting our opponents to have some additional goad effects, we have access to plenty of them as well. Shiny Impetus gives the enchanted creature +2/+2 and makes them goaded, all the while when that creature attacks we make a Treasure token.

Agitator Ant also happens to play well with Bhaal, since at the beginning of our end step we may have each player put two +1/+1 counters on a creature they control and goad each creature that had counters put on them this way.

Incriminating Impetus is a sneaky way for us to get more out of a goaded creature because it gives the enchanted creature +2/+2 and goads them as well, but it also suspects a creature, which means that it gives that creature menace and doesn’t allow them to block, meaning that even if we attach it to creature with vigilance, we can still be able to allow attacks through since it can’t block.

The last thing we need are ways to get our opponents creatures even bigger, and ways to make use of them before they are used against us.

Sheltering Ancient is a card that would normally be pretty bad, but it has a cumulative upkeep of giving a +1/+1 counter on target creature an opponent controls, which means that if we happen to keep stacking +1/+1 counters on a creature that we continuously goad, then we can have bigger and bigger creatures deal more and more damage to our opponents.

In a similar vein, but also to our benefit, we have access to Evolutionary Escalation, which has it so we put three +1/+1 counters on a creature we control and then put three +1/+1 counters on a creature an opponent controls, which when combined with something like Primal Vigor which doubles the number of counters made for each player, it can get pretty out of hand.

The Sound of Drums is also a card to consider because it goads the enchanted creature and when that creature would deal combat damage to a permanent or player, it deals double that damage instead, while also being able to pay three mana to return it from the graveyard to our hand as a way to continuously have our opponents creatures deal double damage.

Death Kiss also works in our favor in this regard because whenever a creature an opponent controls attacks one our opponents, we double that creature’s power until the end of turn and can make it monstrous, which when we do then we goad up to X target creatures our opponents control.

That is until we get to the last two players, in which we play cards like Besmirch to get ourselves ahead of our opponents by taking control of target creature they control, untap it, give it haste, and goad it to attack its controller, and before we give it up we can sacrifice it to a Viscera Seer to scry 1 and then start shifting the counters onto our creatures.

There is also Living Death, which we can use to have every player exile all creatures from their graveyards and then sacrifice all creatures they control and put all cards exiled onto the battlefield, after having sacrificed all the other creatures we control so we have more things in play.

From there, if we happen to have the mana for it, we can cast Insurrection which untaps all creatures and gain control of all of them while also giving them haste so we can swing in with an army of creatures.

Bhaal is an interesting blend of playing aristocrats, forced combat, and a bit of group slug so we can use it to win the game. It spreads out how combat can be done and doesn’t solely rely on us attacking our opponents to win us the game.

The difficulty comes in when we don’t happen to have ideal creatures to attack our other opponents, like if we are playing against control type decks where there are much fewer creatures, or our opponents manage to deal with the goaded creatures by blink effects or they happen to remove Bhaal from the game.

Bhaal’s indestructible is conditional, needing us to have half of our starting life total in order to be online, so that protection not always being available can be a bit annoying. We also don’t have the benefit of some other aristocrat decks in being able to sacrifice tokens in order to gain a benefit, meaning we need creatures in play to die which may not always be available to get the ball rolling (pun not intended).

Bhaal is an interesting puzzle of a Commander, in that I do think that we can make a solid deck working that has our opponents attacking each other while we sacrifice creatures for benefit, but it needs a way to speed it up while also dealing with decks that don’t play many creatures.

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

Peace,

From, J.M. Casual