Hello and welcome to Daily Commander!

Today we are going to be talking about Jace, Vryn’s Prodigy!

Jace is a two mana 0/2 that taps to draw a card and then discard a card and if there are five or more cards in your graveyard, exile Jace and return him under the battlefield transformed as Jace, Telepath Unbound, a Planeswalker with five starting loyalty, a plus one to give a creature -2/-0 until end of turn, a minus three to cast an instant or sorcery from our graveyard this turn exiling it if it would go to the graveyard, and a minus nine to get an emblem with “Whenever you cast a spell, target opponent mills five cards.”

Jace serves as a decent utility/toolbox Commander that has a game plan that is pretty well suited to mill, and while that is probably the best way to take him, I wanted to explore his toolbox nature while having mill be the eventual win con, but not the end all be all goal.

The plan is to have a bunch of solid utility cards to help keep the board state under control, flip Jace as soon as we can, and have ways to get more loyalty counters onto Jace so that when we do get to that ultimate we can cast a couple of spells reliably to start milling our opponents.

The first thing we need are ways to get flip Jace as soon as we can, while also being able to get some utility out of it.

Fact or Fiction is one of the better ways to do so because we reveal the top five cards of our library and then an opponent separates them into two piles, with us being able to put one pile into our hand and the other into the graveyard, which we can choose to start getting cards into our hand and into the graveyard for Jace to flip.

Frantic Search can let us draw two cards and then discard two cards and then untap up to three lands, Winds of Rebuke to bounce a nonland permanent to its owner’s hand and then each player mills two cards, and Mission Briefing to surveil 2 and then choose an instant or sorcery to cast it that turn, exiling it if it would go to the graveyard.

Bond of Insight is pretty good for us to use as well because it has each player mill four cards and then we return up to two instant and/or sorcery cards from our graveyard and put them into our hand and then exile Bond of Insight.

If our graveyard is getting a bit too full for our liking or we need to get cards from our graveyard into our hand, we can use Recall, which let’s us discard X cards from our hand and then return a card for each card discarded this way, then exiling Recall.

Wheel effects can also be an effective way for us to get Jace to flip as fast as possible, with Jace’s Archivist being a way do it consistently if necessary because for one blue and tap each player discards their hand and draws cards equal to the greatest number of cards discarded this way.

The next thing we need are the utility spells that will help us secure our position as the game goes on.

Tempted by the Oriq is a solid surprise card that people will probably not expect and since we are mono blue then we can take full advantage of casting it and for each opponent gaining control of one target creature or Planeswalker that player controls with mana value three or less. Taking a utility creature, an early aggro piece, or a cheap Planeswalker can start swinging the game towards our favor.

Merchant Scroll and Personal Tutor can help you search for an instant and a sorcery respectively and either put it into your hand in the case of Merchant Scroll or on top of your library in the case of Personal Tutor, which with the amount of card draw we have, we can protect ourselves from some potential mill strategies.

Something like Jace’s Triumph becomes very useful for us because it would normally only draw us two cards, but since we are going to be controlling a Jace Planeswalker, then we draw three cards instead. We can even include a couple other Jace Planeswalkers for a bit of extra utility like Jace, Architect of Thought which can weaken our creatures that attack us by giving them a -1/-0, getting a mini Fact or Fiction but with three cards and the cards going to the bottom of our library, and ultimates with searching our opponents libraries and casting something for free.

Ripples of Potential is one of the better ways to protect Jace since it first proliferates and then we choose any number of permanents that had a counter put on them this way and have those permanents phase out. We can also keep something like a Lier, Disciple of the Drowned to make our spell uncounterable and giving instants and sorceries in our graveyard now have Flashback equal to that card’s mana value.

Experimental Augury helps us by looking at the top three cards of our library and puts one in our hand and the rest on the bottom of our library while also able to proliferate, Serum Snare to bounce a nonland permanent to its owner’s hand and if its mana value was three or less we proliferate, and Radtorm to have a Storm way to proliferate just so we can get to Jace’s ultimate.

The last thing we need to do is have a way to win, which would be mill for us, of which we can be pretty creative with our mill suite especially when we get to Jace’s ultimate.

Jace’s Mindseeker is pretty neat because we mill an opponent for five and then we can cast an instant or sorcery from among the milled cards for free, which is very much a flip of the coin but depending on we go up against can be pretty interesting at the very least.

Terisian Mindbreaker is also a solid way for us to make use of milling an opponent since normally we would need seven mana and wait for a turn in order to have the defending player mill half of their library, rounded up, but the fact that it has Unearth for only four mana means that if we discard it early we can get a good bit of mill going.

Rod of Absorption is also another card that can benefit us in the long game since whenever a player cast an instant or sorcery we exile it instead, and then we can pay X mana and sacrifice it in order to cast any number of spells exiled with it with total mana value of X for free, which if we cast a bunch of cheap cantrips we can have a ton of spells we cast to have the Jace emblem mill an opponent five cards.

If we really want to grind in on the mill for the long game, then The Water Crystal is also a good option because it makes our blue spells cheaper and whenever an opponent would mill one or more cards, they mill that many plus four more cards and for six mana can have each opponent mill cards equal to the number of cards in our hand.

We can then have each opponent mill even more cards by using Riverchurn Monument as our finisher because we can have any number of target players mill two cards normally, but there is an Exhaust ability to have any number of players each mill cards equal to the number of cards in their graveyard.

Jace makes for a solid utility Commander that while he does want to focus in on a mill game plan, his abilities leave him open enough to allow us to broaden our strategy in order to have a more toolbox strategy that has a mill win, but isn’t the major focus.

Being that Jace can be flipped pretty quickly, our opponents are incentivized in getting rid of him as soon as possible before he flips because of how much value he can snowball into if left unchecked. Planeswalkers have a notoriously difficult time in Commander because of the multiplayer nature of the format, which means that once he does flip then he will likely be attacked often.

Still, if we set up some solid defensive walls and play to keep the board as light as possible, then we can keep Jace in play long enough to ultimate and then we can start working on milling our opponents. We have enough card draw and access to counter spells and bounce spells to keep creatures away from Jace to ultimate.

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

Peace,

From, J.M. Casual