Hello and welcome to Daily Commander!

Today we are going to be talking about Kinnan, Bonder Prodigy!

Kinnan is a two mana 2/2 who whenever you tap a nonland permanent for mana you add one mana of any type that permanent produced and for five, a blue, and a green you look at the top five cards of your library and you may put a non-Human creature card from among them onto the battlefield and put the rest on the bottom of your library in a random order.

Kinnan has been a very popular cEDH Commander because of the amount of value that they offer. Making your mana dorks and mana rocks produce a ton of mana and then cheating big creatures into play or more often going on some combo line is incredibly enticing.

What I would like to do is try a tuned down version of the deck, which is going to be incredibly difficult since Kinnan is a Game Changer meaning that the deck will automatically be a Bracket 3 deck. This deck isn’t seeking any infinite mana combos or Storm lines, this is going to a good old fashioned creature feature deck.

The first thing we need are nonland permanents that make mana, and if they have a bit of extra utility then that’s a bonus.

Armored Scrapgorger works really well since it can tap for one mana of any color and whenever it becomes tapped, we exile a card from a graveyard and put an oil counter on it and as long as it has three or more oil counters on it then it gets +3/+0, meaning we can attack with it in the later game after tapping it for two mana with Kinnan

Since our goal is to also get some big creatures in play, Ilysian Caryatid is a great choice as well since it normally adds one mana of any color, but if we control a creature with power 4 or greater then we add two mana of any color instead.

Maraleaf Pixie adds either green or blue mana, Paradise Druid to have a hexproof mana dork as long as they are untapped, and of course the trio of Llanowar Elves, Elvish Mystic, and Fyndhorn Elves to have one mana creatures that also tap for a green mana.

While a lot of green decks tend to opt out of playing mana rocks because of how efficient their mana ramp is, we gain a benefit from playing mana rocks like Simic Signet to add three mana instead of two, Talisman of Curiosity to add either two colorless or a combination or green and blue at the cost of one damage, and even Arcane Signet and Sol Ring gain significant value in adding more mana.

One of the better mana rocks would be Midnight Clock since it adds a blue mana, we can pay three mana to put an hour counter on it, and it gains an hour counter at the beginning of each upkeep, with the twelfth hour counter letting us shuffle our graveyard and hand to our library and drawing us seven cards.

The next thing we need are ways we can untap our creatures, multiple times if we can pull it off.

Intruder Alarm is an odd inclusion, but the reason why I like it is that it functions as a bit of a control piece as well since all creatures can’t untap during the untap steps, but whenever a creature comes into play we untap all creatures, and since our job is to cheat creatures out we can potentially get a bunch of untaps of our creatures in a single turn.

Since we have a Game Changer in the Command Zone, we can also play Seedborn Muse as a way to untap all permanents we control during each players untap steps as a way to refuel not just our creatures, but also our lands and mana producing artifacts.

If you don’t want to include any other Game Changers, we can use Quest for Renewal as a decent enough replacement since whenever we tap a creature we put a quest counter on it and when it has four or more quest counters on it, then we can untap our creatures at our opponents untap steps.

Murkfiend Liege is also a way for us to untap our green and/or blue creatures while also giving other green creatures we control +1/+1 and our other blue creatures +1/+1 as well.

We can also make Kinnan’s ability cheaper with something like Biomancer’s Familiar, which has activated abilities of creatures we control cost two mana less to activate, unable to reduce it to less then one mana. There is also Training Grounds, a one mana way to get the same effect, which if both were in play then Kinnan’s ability would be three mana instead of seven mana to use.

Lastly comes the big creatures, and this is where you can get the most creative.

In terms of a big creature with big stats that’ll do damage, Krosan Cloudscraper is great because it is just a 13/13 that dies if we can’t pay two green mana at the beginning of our upkeep, that also happens to have a Morph cost. Not that powerful in the grand scheme of creatures, but as far as just big creatures that do damage I like it.

Aven Fateshaper is an interesting creature in that when it comes into play we look at the top four cards of our library and put them in any order, which we can do a bit of a sneak peek to see what we are getting with Kinnan so we can better strategize if Kinnan is off the battlefield or sculpt our draws in the future if necessary.

Koma, Cosmos Serpent is a nice mix of a big creature that makes a 3/3 Serpent creature token named Koma’s Coil at the beginning of each upkeep, while also being able to sacrifice a Serpent to tap a target permanent and prevent it from activating its activated abilities this turn or give it indestructible for a turn.

Craterhoof Behemoth can be used to make our creatures massive in order to deal a huge swing of damage, Jin-Gitaxias, Progress Tyrant to copy any artifact, instant, or sorcery we cast and countering one artifact, instant, or sorcery our opponents cast each turn, or Terastodon to destroy up to three noncreature permanents and replace them with 3/3 Elephants.

We can also not forget that we can cast massive X spells to gain even more value from our mana creatures or our big creatures, Doppelgang being my personal favorite because it makes X copies of of X target permanents, which means that we can make a ton of copies of our nonland mana sources to get a huge swing of mana or something like Craterhoof Behemoth to get an even bigger swing of damage to win.

Kinnan is an efficient engine and value Commander, in that it fuels our nonland mana producers to make the mana to fuel their ability to cheat creatures into play that will help us win the game or at the very least help us accumulate even more value down the line.

The issue is that Kinnan is a well known Commander in all sorts of nonsense that he can pull off, which means that a lot of removal will be targeted towards Kinnan, even if we are deliberately nerfing ourselves as much as we can and not going into combo lines or infinite mana shenanigans.

Kinnan is incredibly strong, and even building for a lower powered Bracket, Kinnan is an efficient value engine that will either win a lot of games, or be targeted so hard that we can’t even play, which is always the risk of playing strong value engine Commanders.

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

Peace,

From, J.M. Casual