Hello and welcome to Commander Bites!

Today we are going to be looking at Vivi Ornitier!

Vivi is a three mana 0/3 that has an activated ability for zero mana where you can add X mana in any combination of colors that are red and/or blue where X is Vivi’s power that you can activate only once and only during your turn. Whenever you cast a noncreature spell, you put a +1/+1 counter on Vivi and it deals 1 damage to each opponent.

Game Plan

Banned from Standard for how much it was taking over the meta, Vivi has managed to earn its way into the top 10 Commanders on EDHREC and also happened to be the third saltiest card on their top 100 saltiest cards list.

Vivi’s game plan is simple to understand, difficult to execute because the idea is to cast a bunch of spells to make Vivi bigger and bigger and then when you have a good amount of power on Vivi, you go off onto your payoff.

This sounds easy in theory, but as with any deck that wants to cast a lot of spells the way you sequence your cards and cash out on Vivi can be tricky to tell.

Support

A majority of our deck is going to be packed with cheap cantrips and the cheapest interaction that we can cast in order to get Vivi as big as we can possible get him.

If we manage to get Vivi into play as early as we can then we can use something like An Offer You Can’t Refuse in order to counter a noncreature spell early while also giving the controller of that spell two Treasure tokens. The trick there is that we can use it on one of our own spells in order for us to gain two Treasure tokens.

This means a spell like Gitaxian Probe, which we can cast by paying 2 life instead of the one blue mana to cast it because it cost’s one blue Phyrexian mana, will net us two additional mana we can use to cast another really cheap spell to grow Vivi that still grows Vivi. And if nothing else it gives us hand information from an opponent and draws us a card.

Cheap rituals are also very good for Vivi, so something like Rite of Flame can get us two red mana and potentially one additional red mana if an opponent also happens to have a Rite of Flame in their graveyard.

Obviously if you have access to a free spell then you can use that to your advantage in a number of ways. If you cast a Commandeer for example you can steal an opponent’s noncreature spell to use however you would like, Fierce Guardianship is a free counter spell for noncreature spells if you have Vivi out, and Blazing Shoal can make Vivi bigger in order to get more mana for your pay off.

We also have cards like Curiosity and Ophidian Eye, both of which let us draw a card whenever the enchanted creature deals damage to an opponent, meaning we shouldn’t be without cards because Vivi deals damage whenever we cantrip so we have a better chance at finding an answer.

The way we win is to cast spell after spell, cantrip after cantrip, extra turn spell after extra turn spell in order to ping our opponents out or to get Vivi big enough that we can cast a haymaker spell that will kill all of our opponents like a Crackle with Power or you can cast Wisdom of Ages to return all your cheap instants and sorceries to do it all again.

Setbacks

Vivi is going to be a lightning rod of removal, no matter what bracket you happen to be in.

To be the third saltiest card in the game according to one of the most popular websites for Commander means that a good chunk of people will not like you playing Vivi as your Commander. It also doesn’t help that you need to execute your game plan on your turn, meaning that after casting all of your spells if you end your turn not winning the game, you will be hard targeted on your next turn.

The higher you go in the brackets, there will be more interaction that you need to play around and while Vivi has the tools to fight through it, that is still not going to be easy. Higher brackets are replete with free interaction, odds are you’re playing those cards as well, so expect Vivi to be interacted with often.

While ideally you are dealing a lot of damage to your opponents, if your opponents are playing some amount of life gain then you will likely have a harder time dealing enough damage to them in order to win the game, especially if they gain so much life you don’t have the cards to feasibly win.

There are also cards that make casting your free spells harder, Vexing Bauble being the major one because it makes it so that no player can cast a spell that uses no mana. You still get the cast trigger from it, but any utility you get from casting that spell will not be ideal and may set you behind a bit.

Bracket Rating: 5

Vivi is a strong Commander, and can make very good use of cheap to free interaction and mana acceleration, while also being able to provide mana and dealing damage to your opponents in order for you to potentially win the game.

Some of those cards are on the Game Changers list and after three you’re defaulted into bracket 4. The thing is that Vivi can make use of so many of them in an efficient way that Vivi is cEDH viable, even winning or placing high in several tournaments.

Vivi is a must answer Commander when they hit the board, and if an opponent has no answers to Vivi, then there is a massive chance that you will run away with the game. The higher brackets actually make Vivi much more of a tolerable Commander in that case because of all the interaction available.

Thank you for reading, see you all tomorrow!

Peace,

From, J.M. Casual