Hello and welcome to Daily Commander!

Today we are going to be talking about Emrakul, the Promised End!

Emrakul is a thirteen mana 13/13 that costs one mana less to cast for each card type among cards in your graveyard, when you cast Emrakul you gain control of target opponent during that player’s next turn, and after that turn, that player takes an extra turn, with flying, trample, and protection from instant.

As tomorrow is the last Daily Commander, I wanted to do a Commander that I’ve wanted to talk about for a while but haven’t been able to and that’s because I find Emrakul to be a fascinating Commander that immediately puts a target on your back, and that’s because no one wants to lose their turn. There really isn’t a way to play Emrakul “nicely” as it were, so it was difficult for me to try and build a “fair” Emrakul deck.

So the game plan of this deck is to lean into being the archenemy, which I don’t often do because that isn’t my usual play style, but having at least one deck where you do what you can to turbo out Emrakul in order to take control of a player’s turn while your opponents try to stop you is pretty fun. This means that this deck will eschew the usual price cap I keep in mind for decks, and will be pretty mean in the grand scheme of things.

The first thing we need to do is have ways we can get the mana that we need to make cast emrakul.

Metalworker is one of the more ideal ways to accomplish this because we can tap it to reveal any number of artifact cards in our hand and then add two colorless mana to our mana pool for each card revealed this way, which since a lot of colorless cards are artifacts, can really get us a lot of mana.

To get even more mana from it, we can use Forsaken Monument, which has it so that when we tap a permanent for colorless mana, we add an additional colorless mana, all the while giving our colorless creatures +2/+2 and gaining us 2 life whenever we cast a colorless spell.

Ugin, the Ineffable makes it so that colorless spells we cast cost two mana less to cast as a static ability, while also letting us exile the top card of our library face down as a 2/2 Spirit creature token that when it leaves the battlefield we put that card into our hand, and can also destroy a permanent that is one or more colors.

While that Ugin is good, Ugin, Eye of the Storms is better because whenever we cast it and whenever we cast a colorless spell we exile up to one target permanent that is one or more colors, while being able to gain us 3 life and draw a card, make three colorless mana, and the ultimate letting us search our library for any number of colorless cards from our library, exiling them, and being able to cast them until end of turn for free.

We can also make Emrakul cheaper by filling up our graveyard with varous card types. With an artifact and a creature we can use Solemn Simulacrum to search for a basic and put into play tapped and when it dies we can draw a card, Kozilek’s Command for a kindred instant that can do two of either making X 0/1 Eldrazi Spawn tokens that can sacrifice themselves to make a colorless mana, scry X then draw a card, exile creature of mana value X or less, or exile up to X cards from graveyards.

The next thing we need are ways to protect our board, control the board, and generate some form of advantage for us.

Since this deck is aiming to be higher power, Game Changers are on the table, and one of the better more generic Game Changers is The One Ring. When it enters, if it was cast, then we get protection from everything until the end of our next turn, and at the beginning of our upkeep we lose 1 life for each burden counter which we get by tapping it to put a burden counter on it and drawing a card for each burden counter on it.

As far as other Game Changers go, the next best one for us would be Lion’s Eye Diamond, primarily because we get to make three mana by sacrificing it and discarding our hand as the cost to do so, which can get more card types into our graveyard to make Emrakul cheaper to cast.

Skittering Cicada is a sneaky way for us to gain advantage because it has flash and it let’s us cast our other colorless spells as though they had flash and whenever we cast a colorless spell, Skittering Cicada gets +X/+X and trample where X is the mana value of that spell, which means we can give it +13/+13 and trample to deal some serious damage.

Void Winnower is also a great way for us to keep control of the board because it prevents our opponents from casting spells with an even mana value and it also prevents our opponents from using creatures with even mana values to block, which with zero counting as even means that tokens can’t chump block our big creatures, making blocks much more awkward for our opponents.

Spine of Ish Sah destroys a permanent when it enters and returns to our hand when it goes to graveyard from our battlefield, God-Pharaoh’s Statue makes our opponents spells cost two more mana to cast and has each opponent lose 1 life at the beginning of our end step, and Mystic Forge let’s us look at the top of our library and cast artifact and colorless spells from the top of our library.

The last thing we need is how to win, and I think that we should go all in on controlling our opponents turns and have them beat each other.

Abstruse Archaic is an excellent way for us to take advantage of that by paying one mana and tapping it to copy target activated or trigged ability from a colorless source we control, which also let’s us choose a new target for the copy.

We can also use Mindslaver to have redundancy in effects since we can pay four mana and sacrifice it to control target player during that player’s next turn, which is cheaper to do and can set us up for when we cast Emrakul later by maybe dealing with a player who may be getting ahead or to go for the hat trick in taking control of all players.

Now one downside of Emrakul is that it gives the player we controlled an extra turn afterwards, but we can prevent that by using Ugin’s Nexus, which if a player would begin an extra turn then that player skips that turn instead, and if Ugin’s Nexus would be put in a graveyard from the battlefield, then we exile it and take an extra turn instead.

To help us seal the deal, we have the other Eldrazi Titans like Ulamog, the Defiler which exiles half of an opponents library rounded up, enters with X +1/+1 counters where X is the greatest mana value among cards in exile, and has annihilator X where X is the number of +1/+1 counters on it.

Ulamog, the Infinite Gyre destroys a permanent when it is cast and has annihilator 4 and Kozilek, Butcher of Truth draws us four cards when it is cast and also has annihilator 4 and both of them shuffle themselves and our graveyard back into our library if they would be put there from anywhere.

If we manage to have all of these big mana threats on board and still need to win, then there is also Summon: Bahamut, which with its first and second chapters destroys a target nonland permanent, then draws us two cards, and then it deals damage to each opponent equal to the total mana value of other permanents we control, which should ideally close out the game for us.

Emrakul is a Commander that can be difficult to be made for lower power, so leaning into the archenemy role while actively encouraging your opponents to try and stop you can lead to a different way to experience the game, all the while letting you play around the politicking aspect by having everyone come after you.

Now the difficulty can be in that since you are the archenemy, you are at a disadvantage in the early game because your opponents will be ready to actively stop you from doing anything while they develop their boards.

Any of your early set up cards will be targeted and the hardest thing will be trying to get anything to actively stick long enough for you to do anything in the early game.

What becomes a boon is that your opponents may be more reticent to play board wipes since it affects the other players, their teammates, as much as it will affect you, which can help give you a bit more time to set things up, unless you manage to go ahead enough that they are willing to risk their board to stop you.

Playing an archenemy deck can be pretty fun, though I personally wouldn’t want it to be my only way to play the game. Having one to spice up game night can be nice, but playing it all the time can be exhausting.

As we head to our last Daily Commander tomorrow, I am going to be talking about a very important Commander to me, it is the creature that made me love the game of Magic, and it happens to be from the very first set of Magic I bought.

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

Peace,

From, J.M. Casual