Hello and welcome to Commander Bites!

Today we are going to be taking a look at Celes, Rune Knight!

Celes is a four mana 4/4 that when she enters you discard any number of cards and then draw that many cards, and whenever one or more other creatures you control enter, if one or more of them entered from a graveyard or was cast from a graveyard, you put a +1/+1 counter on each creature you control.

Game Plan

Reanimator strategies are always an interesting gamble to play because you need to make sure that you get the creatures you want into the graveyard in the first place.

Celes has a way for us to facilitate that strategy in wheeling our hand when she enters while also netting us one additional card. This also means we can add some discard synergies to get even more uses from Celes, along with ways we can make use of noncreature spells from the graveyard.

Support

There are plenty of ways we can get creatures from our graveyard onto the battlefield, with Reanimate being the namesake of the strategy, the cheapest to cast with little downside, and with no limit on what kind of creature you can get from the graveyard.

We also have access to cards like Animate Dead and Necromancy, both of which let us get a creature from any graveyard and put it into play under our control, which if I’m reading Celes correctly, will still let us trigger her ability to put +1/+1 counters on our creatures because it doesn’t specify that they need to come from our graveyard.

What also becomes incredibly helpful for us are creatures that have Persist like Putrid Goblin or Murderous Redcap, and that is because when they enter with a -1/-1 counter, Celes then puts a +1/+1 counter on them, negating both counters meaning that with a sacrifice outlet we can get basically infinite counters through the Persist triggers.

Murderous Redcap can also help us potentially win the game because when it enters it deals damage equal to its power to any target, which if we use Goblin Bombardment as a sacrifice outlet to deal 1 damage to any target, then we win the game through infinite damage.

As far as what works great as a reanimation target, Sun Titan is a great option because when it enters or attacks we can return a permanent with mana value 3 or less from our graveyard to the battlefield, meaning that we have a consistent way to bring our smaller creatures back into play to get a Celes trigger.

Chainer, Nightmare Adept is also a solid option for us because once per turn we can discard a card to let us cast a creature spell from our graveyard this turn and whenever a nontoken creature we control enters and it wasn’t cast from our hand, that creature gains haste until end of turn.

Since we are sending a ton of cards to the graveyard through Celes’s wheel effect, we can make use of cards that have flashback like Dread Return, which let’s us reanimate a creature and has a flashback cost of sacrifice three creatures to do it again.

Even if we don’t have a lot of cards with flashback that can help us get cards into our graveyard like Buried Alive or Entomb, we can make use of Flashback, which gives an instant or sorcery in our graveyard flashback equal to it’s mana value.

If you really want to push Celes triggering off of casting creatures from our graveyard as well, you can make a solid case for using Underworld Breach in order to do so, especially since you are filling up your graveyard anyway.

Setbacks

Which is where all reanimator decks can have issues with, and that is interaction with the graveyard. Many decks nowadays have at least one piece of graveyard interaction whether that be a Bojuka Bog or a Tormod’s Crypt or something similar, so any card that can clear our graveyard completely is devastating.

Even one time ways to exile a card from our graveyard like a Deathrite Shaman can be annoying if we want to pull an important piece from our graveyard or cast a spell via flashback.

Since our deck is filled with reanimation spells, we aren’t as concerned if Celes gets destroyed with a kill spell. What becomes a pain is exile based removal, not just on Celes, but in general.

While a Farewell is always going to be a pain to deal with, what’s also a pain are cards like Path to Exile or Swords to Plowshares, which isn’t so much of a problem for Celes being that she is our Commander, but a major piece of our game plan getting exiled can also be frustrating.

There are a variety of ways we can win with the deck, but they do hinge on Celes being in play, and while there are some options for protecting her, we aren’t always going to be able to cast them or we may have wheeled them away.

Bracket Rating: High 3 or Low 4

Celes can be a pretty strong Commander, especially if you play into the combo aspect of her by using a sacrifice outlet and a Persist creature.

There can be enough redundancy in the deck to make sure that the deck can do what it wants to do, but as you move into the higher brackets, there is also the concern of more interaction.

Some Game Changers in the deck can really be helpful in making sure you have the right pieces you need in order to get the combo or get cards where they need to be when you need them if you are just doing a standard reanimation strategy.

Celes has plenty of options to play around with and there is a lot of room to customize the deck to your liking.

Thank you for reading, see you all tomorrow!

Peace,

From, J.M. Casual