Hello and welcome to Daily Commander!

Today we are going to be talking about Baral and Kari Zev!

Baral and Kari Zev is a three mana 2/4 with first strike, menace, and whenever you cast your first instant or sorcery each turn, you may cast a spell with lesser mana value that shares a card type with it from your hand without paying its mana cost and if you don’t you create First Mate Ragavan, a legendary 2/1 red Monkey Pirate creature token that gains haste until end of turn.

An interesting way to incentivize casting bigger instants and sorceries in order to cast smaller instants and sorceries from your hand for free. With that being said, what we’re going to do a bit of trickery in order to take full advantage of Baral and Kari Zev.

The plan is to utilize spells that normally have a massive mana value but have ways we can either cast them at a massive discount or cast them for free if we can, which ideally means that we can cast a cheaper instant or sorcery that puts us in an advantageous position.

The first thing to look at are the expensive to cast spells that we want to cast that let us cast them for free or for very cheap.

Commandeer is an amazing card that not a lot of people immediately expect, but it is great because while it is normally seven mana to gain control of target noncreature, choosing new target for it if it was an instant or sorcery and taking complete control of it if it was an artifact or enchantment, we can instead exile two blue cards to cast this.

In a similar vein, Fury of the Horde is also a seven mana spell that we can cast by exiling two red cards in order for us to untap all creatures we control that attacked this turn and after this main phase get an additional combat phase and an additional main phase.

Pyrokinesis is a six mana spell that lets us exile a red card instead of paying its mana cost to deal 4 damage divided among any number of creatures, Archive Trap is a five mana spell that mills an opponent for thirteen cards but can do so for zero mana if an opponent searched their library, and Misdirection is a five mana spell we can cast by exiling a blue card instead in order to change the target of a spell with a single target.

We can also use cards that have a way to get cheaper like Treasure Cruise, which draws us three cards and is normally eight mana but has Delve, which let’s us exile cards from our graveyard to help pay one of it’s generic mana costs.

In a similar vein we also have Dig Through Time, which let’s us look at the top seven cards of our library and put two of them into our hand and the rest on the bottom of our library in any order, and we can also do that at instant speed.

The next thing we need are the cheaper spells that we want to cast in order to get the most benefit we can from our expensive spells.

Since most of our higher cost free spells cost at minimum five mana, Into the Fire is a great way for us to either clear the board of smaller creatures by dealing 2 damage to each creature, Planeswalker, and battle or it can do us a solid by letting us put any number of cards from our hand to the bottom of our library and then draw that many cards plus one, which can completely refresh our hand.

Slick Sequence deals 2 damage to any target and if we’ve cast another spell this turn we draw a card, Quick Study draws us two cards, Brainsurge draws us four cards and let’s us put two back on top of our library an Solve the Equation let’s us tutor for an instant or sorcery and puts it in our hand.

Rituals also become really valuable for us to continue casting spells after we’ve gotten our free spells, so something like Seething Song becomes very strong when cast for free because we get five extra mana for free to cast even more spells.

Mana Geyser also becomes massive amounts of mana upside if we manage to cast it for free, especially in the late game, because we add a red mana for each tapped land our opponent controls, which even if our opponents didn’t do a lot of ramping can still net us anywhere between three to fifteen mana for free.

With those rituals we can also make use of cards that we already cast by using something like Past in Flames, which gives each instant and sorcery in our graveyard Flashback until end of turn where the Flashback cost is the equal to the mana cost, while itself has Flashback, meaning we can do this twice.

The last thing we need is a payoff for casting a bunch of spells in a turn.

Sorcerer Class is a slow accumulation of value, but it is excellent value since when it enters we draw two cards then discard two cards, we level it up for two mana to have our creatures tap for a red or blue mana that can be used to cast an instant or sorcery spell or gain a Class level, and for five mana whenever we cast an instant or sorcery spell, that spell deals damage to each opponent equal to the number of instant and sorcery spells we’ve cast this turn.

Rite of the Dragoncaller is a bit pricey to play and dedicate, but the payout of having a bunch of 5/5 red Dragon creature tokens with flying whenever we cast an instant or sorcery is too much to not consider even a little bit.

We can even start doing some free spell shenanigans on our opponents turns with something like Leyline of Anticipation, which let’s us cast spells as if they had flash, and it can get onto the battlefield for free if it was in our opening hand.

Of course if we want a lot of insane spell value during our turns, especially if we are able to get a chain of spells going is Thousand-Year Storm, which whenever we cast an instant or sorcery spell we copy it for each other instant and sorcery spell we’ve previously cast this turn, choosing new targets for the copies.

This can turn a casting a couple of free spells into massive value and while there are many ways to take advantage of this, something as simple as a Crackle With Power can become a devastating way for us to deal a ton of damage to win the game several times over.

Baral and Kari Zev are a fun value engine Commander in which that we can gain a ton of value from casting a ton of free spells and the more we accumulate, the bigger our win can be because of that accumulated value.

Being that they need to be in play for all of this to work, we need to make sure that they are protected, which once people start catching on to what we’re doing it can be a bit tricky. Spell slinger decks are also historically difficult to pilot for players of all skill levels, so keeping track of things may not be to everyone’s taste.

It can also be frustrating not being able to cast a spell for free because it doesn’t share a card type, but at the very least it isn’t for absolutely nothing since we get a First Mate Ragavan as a consolation prize that can block or attack as we need it.

As far as spell slinger Commanders go, Baral and Kari Zev provide a neat axis of play, and even if we can’t always get it working, we can be pretty confident that we can still get it working a good amount of the time for us to cast a massive number of spells.

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

Peace,

From, J.M. Casual