Hello and welcome to Commander Bites!

Today we are going to be taking a look at Tui and La, Moon and Ocean!

Tui and La are a four mana 3/3 that whenever they become tapped you draw a card and whenever they become untapped you put a +1/+1 counter on them

Game Plan

Thematically I really like what Tui and La represent as a Commander with regards to them being the physical manifestations of the moon and ocean and waterbending in general for Avatar.

Them caring about being tapped or untapped speaks on a core concept of waterbending in Avatar of push and pull, and playing around with that in Magic, especially in blue, is a fairly easy enough game plan to work with in order to draw cards and get Tui and La bigger.

Support

Seeing as our deck wants to have Tui an La get tapped and untapped, we should be looking at some cheap and efficient ways to do so.

Vizier of Tumbling Sands comes to mind because they can tap themselves to untap another target permanent or you can cycle them for two mana to also untap target permanent. Three mana for a long term untapping creature or two mana to untap Tui and La and draw a card as well is not a bad deal.

Retreat to Coralhelm is a pretty solid utility card that has a Landfall trigger of being able to tap or untap target creature or to scry 1, which can be helpful in smoothing out our own draws whenever we tap Tui and La.

We also have access to some funky ways to tap and untap Tui and La through something like Aura of Dominion. For one mana and tap an untapped creature we can untap the enchanted creature, which means that if we have the mana we can tap Tui and La to then untap them to draw more cards and get them bigger fairly quickly.

If we happen to combine this with something like High Tide, which let’s our Islands tap for an additional blue mana, we can get a lot of cards and +1/+1 counters for Tui and La. If we combine that with other ways to untap permanents we control then we can get even more mana by untapping our Islands after having activated the High Tide.

There are other available options to tap Tui and La, such as playing with Vehicles like Smuggler’s Copter which whenever it attacks or blocks the we may draw a card and if we do then we discard a card.

Agatha’s Soul Cauldron is also an interesting option to play around with because creatures we control with +1/+1 counters have the activated abilities of all creature cards exiled with it’s ability to exile a card from a graveyard and if a creature was exiled this was then you can put a +1/+1 counter on target creature we control.

You can even potentially get a convoluted loop going if you exile a Palladium Myr which adds two colorless mana and Pili-Pala which for two mana and untap it we can add one mana of any color to our mana pool. It isn’t fast, or efficient, but it is a potential loop we can use to make Tui and La massive and draw our deck.

As far as how we win, we can actually use effects like Laboratory Maniac to get us into a win by drawing ourselves out and instead of losing we win the game.

This deck is also a contender for being a reliable way to win with Triskaidekaphile and/or Twenty-Toed Toad, which have conditions where at the beginning of our upkeep for Triskaidekaphile or when Twenty-Toed Toad attacks and we have thirteen or twenty cards respectively, we win the game.

Worst comes to worst you can find a way to make Tui and La unblockable and have them win via Commander Damage through all the counters you gave them.

Setbacks

This is a very difficult strategy to pull of reliable because it requires a lot of moving parts in order to get working the way that you want it.

First off we need Tui and La to stay in play, along with a number of spells that can protect it, which we do have in abundance to be fair, but it is still something we need to be mindful of.

Second, this deck is very insular, meaning that we don’t really play with your opponents and are really focused in you doing your own thing. It can get pretty dull after a while until you set up some sort of tap and untap engine that will win you the game.

Third, you need a lot of cards to get the deck going the way that you want it. To play it effectively you of course need Tui and La in play, along with a number of ways to tap or untap them in order to draw cards and get them bigger.

Lastly your win conditions are very telegraphed, meaning that once you play a Laboratory Maniac, a Twenty-Toed Toad, or even a Rogue’s Passage and will deal with them accordingly to make sure that you can’t win. A lot of your board and game plan revolves around you doing the thing and if you can’t do the thing, you’ll lose the game.

Bracket Rating: 1, low 2

This is an interesting deck in theory, but what the deck will struggle with the most is against interaction. Building a complex machine that this deck is asking you to build makes the deck fragile, where the removal of a single component can prevent you from playing the game.

That being said, Tui and La are still an interesting deck to build around because of the synergies they have with cards that tap and untap while not having any way to tap themselves, meaning you need to do the work in getting the Commander to work.

I enjoy Commanders that have a payoff but no direct method to get to that payoff, therefore you need to build your deck to achieve that payoff rather than have an all in one Commander that does everything for you.

While not too strong, it does make for an interesting low powered deck to play around with.

Thank you for reading, see you all tomorrow!

Peace,

From, J.M. Casual