Hello and welcome to Daily Commander!

Today we are going to be talking about Gavi, Nest Warden!

Gavi is a five mana 2/5 that allows you to pay 0 for the cycling cost of the first card you cycle each turn and whenever you draw your second card each turn you create a 2/2 red and white Dinosaur Cat creature token.

Cycling as a mechanic is fairly well supported, and there have been many cards that help cycling. This adds a go wide strategy to a draw matters strategy and we can take advantage of all of that by making it so that our cycling costs are even cheaper.

The plan is to pack the deck with as many ways to cycle as possible, find ways we can discount our cycling so we can cycle often, and make it so that we have a massive herd of Dinosaur Cats to win us the game through sheer numbers.

The first thing we need are ways to make sure as many cards we play have cycling, can gain or give cycling, or can draw us cards on our opponents turns.

Tectonic Reformation is perfect for this deck because it gives each land in our hand a cycling ability that costs one red mana, and this is ideal for all the lands in our deck that don’t have cycling, and there will be plenty of lands that we do have that have a cycling ability.

Rhet-Tomb Mystic gives creatures in our hand a cycling ability of one and a blue and Jo Grant gives historic cards in our hand a cycling ability of two and a white while also gaining a +1/+1 counter to herself whenever we cycle a card.

As far as other cards that have cycling, we have a decent variety to pick and choose from, with many of them providing benefits whenever they are cycled or whenever another card is cycled while they are in play, like Marauding Mako, which whenever we discard one or more cards it gets that many +1/+1 counters while also having a cycling cost of two mana.

Flourishing Fox gets a +1/+1 counter whenever we cycle a card, Vizier of Tumbling Sands can tap itself to untap target permanent or when we cycle it we can untap target permanent, Neutralize is a counter spell with cycling 2, and Dismantling Wave normally would let is destroy up to one target artifact or enchantment each opponent controls, unless we pay a massive eight mana cycling cost to destroy all artifacts and enchantments.

The next thing we need is to get as many discounts to our cycling costs as possible, because while Gavi does make it so that the first cycling cost is free, we still need to pay the rest.

Fluctuator is the ideal card for this because for just two mana, we can have cycling ability costs be two mana cheaper, and this usually means we get a ton of free draws because there are a lot of cards that have a cycling cost of just two generic mana, meaning we pay two mana for free draws for the rest of the game.

If we want to reduce it even further for some of the more expensive cycling costs, we can use Crystalline Resonance, which has it so that whenever we cycle a card, we can have it become a copy of another permanent we control except it has this ability, which can copy Fluctuator to make our cycling costs four mana cheaper.

New Perspectives is also great for us if we just keep drawing and drawing cards because when it enters it draws us three cards and as long as we have seven or more cards in our hand we can pay zero mana rather than pay cycling costs, which can let us get a ton of value from cycling so many cards, as long as we keep a full hand.

While we do want to cycle cards, there may be times when we need to cast a card from a graveyard, which is where Abandoned Sarcophagus comes into play because we may cast spells that have a cycling ability from our graveyard, at the cost of if a card with a cycling ability would be put into our graveyard from anywhere and it wasn’t cycled, then it is exiled instead.

Rooting Moloch is also helpful because if we really need to cast a spell that has cycling from our graveyard we can play it to exile a card from our graveyard with cycling and until the end of our next turn we can play that card. We can’t cycle it because that’s an ability that if from our hand, but we can make do.

The danger of cycling through our deck is the danger we could deck ourselves out, and that is where something as simple as an Elixir of Immortality comes in clutch because we can pay two mana and tap it in order to gain 5 life and shuffle it and our graveyard back into out library.

The last thing we need are ways for us to win, ideally by getting rid of our opponents things to clear a path for our Dinosaur Cats and other creatures.

Astral Slide is pretty helpful because whenever a player cycles a cared, we may exile a creature and return it to the battlefield under its owner’s control, which ideally we should be cycling a ton of cards in order to exile all of our opponent’s creatures.

We can also double up on this effect by using Astral Drift which whenever we cycle it or anther card while it is in play we may exile a creature and return it to the battlefield under its owner’s control at the beginning of the next end step.

There is also no sense in putting all of our eggs in Gavi making tokens, we can also make use of the plethora of other cards that make tokens whenever we cycle or draw cards. Valiant Rescuer makes a 1/1 Human Soldier token whenever we cycle the first time each turn, Homunculus Horde to make a copy of itself whenever we draw our second card each turn, and Mischievous Mystic to make a 1/1 Faerie with flying whenever we draw our second card each turn.

Alandra, Sky Dreamer makes a 2/2 Drake token with flying whenever we draw our second card each turn and whenever we draw our fifth card each turn then Alandra and Drakes we control each get +X/+X until end of turn where X is the number of cards in our hand.

There are also plenty of ways we can turn our cycling into damage with Drannith Stinger which deals 1 damage to each opponent whenever we cycle another card, Magmakin Artillerist which whenever we discard one or more cards we deal that much damage to each opponent, and Zenith Flare which deals X damage to any target and we gain X life where X is the number of cards with cycling in our graveyard.

Herald of the Forgotten is a massive recursion piece for us if our boadr gets wiped since when it enters, if we cast it, then we may return any number of permanents with cycling abilities from our graveyard to the battlefield.

If we are looking for pure aggro that can potentially win us a game, then Warleader’s Call can be very helpful in giving creatures we control +1/+1 and whenever a creature we control enters it deals 1 damage to each opponent or we can turn our tokens into 4/4 Angels with flying and vigilance with Divine Visitation for even more damage.

Gavi is an engine Commander in that when they are in play we cycle cards as often as we can in order to get as much value as we can, not just including the tokens that Gavi makes but from the plethora of other cycling, drawing, and discard benefits that come from it.

The issues are that this can potentially be a deck that takes long turns since we are going to be drawing and discarding a lot of cards on our turn, so we do need to play quickly and efficiently in order to not waste people’s time.

What this deck also struggles with is that since we are going wide, board wipes will set the deck back by quite a bit, even more so if it is exile based removal since there are cards we play that can interact with the cards with cycling in our graveyard.

Gavi can also lead to similar play patterns in us drawing a lot of cards in order to get a lot of tokens from Gavi and other sources we control, but there is some flexibility in what payoffs we can use to make the most out of us drawing a lot of cards, and any payoff we choose can win us the game.

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

Peace,

From, J.M. Casual