Hello and welcome to Commander Bites!

Today we are going to be taking a look at Kethis, the Hidden Hand!

Kethis is a three mana 3/4 that makes legendary spell you cast cost 1 less to cast and you can exile two legendary cards from your graveyard to give legendary card in your graveyard “You may play this card from your graveyard” until the end of turn.

Game Plan

A legendary matters Commander is a very interesting play space because you need to consider what sort of utility effects are you willing to lose out on just to play a legendary card or if you can find a legendary card that can fulfill that niche.

What’s most fascinating to me in particular is that Kethis cares about legendary cards in your graveyard, meaning that we can play around with a wide variety of legendary card types, so long as we also have a way of getting legendary cards into the graveyard so we can play them.

Support

With the wide variety of effects that legendary creatures have, we can aim for more of a toolbox approach in order to make use of that very variety.

The Queen of Dale is a great recent example of a great card for us because whenever an opponent casts their first noncreature spell each turn, we recruit which means we draw a card and then discard a card, and if we discarded a nonland card then we make a 1/1 Soldier creature token. This helps us build a board, draw cards, and get legendary cards into the graveyard.

Reki, the History of Kamigawa draws us card whenever we play a legendary spell, Saffi Eriksdotter can sacrifice themselves to have make it so that if a creature we control would be put into the graveyard this turn we return it to the battlefield, and Yoshimaru, Ever Faithful gets a +1/+1 counter whenever another legendary permanent enters under our control.

The Channel lands from Kamigawa: Neon Dynasty can also be very useful for us because Takenuma, Abandoned Mire mills three cards and let’s return a creature or Planeswalker from our graveyard to our hand, Eiganjo, Seat of the Empire deals 4 damage to target attacking or blocking creature, and Boseiju, Who Endures can destroy an artifact, enchantment, or nonbasic land an opponent controls and gives them a card with a basic land type in return.

What’s also great about those lands is that they get cheaper to use for each legendary creature we control and since they aren’t spells, they can’t be countered through a traditional counter spell.

We can also put the focus of the deck on Planeswalkers like Wrenn and Realmbreaker which let’s our lands tap for any color as a static ability, animates a land we control until our next turn, mill three cards and put a permanent from among them into our hand, and as an ultimate we can gain an emblem that let’s us play lands and spells from our graveyard.

Liliana, Dreadhorde General is also solid because whenever a creature we control dies we draw a card, we can make a 2/2 Zombie, have each player sacrifice two creatures of their choice, and as an ultimate we can have each opponent choose a permanent they control of each permanent type and have them sacrifice the rest.

While they are few, there are also legendary instants and sorceries like Yawgmoth’s Vile Offering which puts a creature or Planeswalker from a graveyard onto the battlefield whole also destroying a creature or Planeswalker, Urza’s Ruinous Blast to exile all nonland permanents that aren’t legendary, and Primevals’ Glorious Rebirth which returns all legendary permanent cards from our graveyard onto the battlefield.

There is even a tutor for the deck in the form of Captain Sisay, which we can tap in order to search our library for a legendary card and puts it into our hand and shuffle, meaning that we can get whatever legendary answer we need as we need it.

Setbacks

What this deck will struggle with is the fact that not every legendary card can do everything, and we do need to have cards that aren’t legendary in our deck to have it function.

While the loss of theme is manageable, realistically it affects our ability to reanimate a legendary card from our graveyard if we are unable to fuel it with legendary cards to exile as well as legendary cards that we want to play that turn.

As it is a deck that uses the graveyard, any card that affects our graveyard is going to be a struggle to deal with, though we can manage to some extent. We do decently well against other forms of removal, and can actually survive some number of board wipes if we happen to play more into the Planeswalker side of things.

The deck will struggle finding a focus, which often means that it will struggle to win if we just play legendary good stuff. We can use our Planeswalkers to accrue a value/control win, use something like Avacyn’s Memorial to make our legendary permanents indestructible to be a bit more of an aggressive deck, or use the toolbox strategy and chip away at the opponents with our Commander and other legendary cards.

We just need to make sure that the deck does have a game plan of some sort, because other wise we’ll be losing games because we don’t know what to do.

Bracket Rating: High 2, Mid 3

Despite there being a lot of good legendary cards, having a deck that is a lot of them can actually be a detriment in power level.

There are some Commanders that can make use of having a ton of legendary cards or even just legendary creatures, but that’s also because they provide some other sort of value other than just working well with legendary cards.

Kethis provides a great utility for decks that care about legendary cards, but as a Commander can struggle finding an identity other than legendary good stuff.

However, with a bit of focus I do think that Kethis can be a solid deck that can play into bracket 3 while also having the ability to be a lower power level to be a fun deck to play that isn’t oppressive or heavily restrictive.

Thank you for reading, see you all tomorrow!

Peace,

From, J.M. Casual