Hello and welcome to Commander Bites!

Today we are going to be taking a look at Sorin of House Markov!

Sorin is a two mana 1/4 with lifelink and extort and at the beginning of your postcombat main phase, if you gained 3 or more life this turn, you exile Sorin and then return him to the battlefield transformed under his owner’s control as Sorin, Ravenous Neonate. This Sorin is a three loyalty Planeswalker that has extort, a +2 to create a Food token, a -1 to deal damage equal to the amount of life you gained this turn to any target, and a -6 to gain control of target creature, making a Vampire in addition to its other types and we put a lifelink counter on it if we control a white permanent other than itself or Sorin.

Game Plan

One minor issue when writing these blogs is that I forget which Commanders I have or haven’t talked about before and I could have sworn that I have talked about this Sorin before.

Seeing as I haven’t yet, I have come to rectify that because this Sorin happens to be one of my personal favorites because it takes a life gain strategy and turn it into pretty solid burn strategy because of the amount of life you can feasibly gain in a single turn is actually much more than you would expect.

Support

Ideally we want to be flipping Sorin as soon as we can, so any very cheap life gain spells are going to do so very quickly.

If we just want cheap, pure life gain then we have the one mana Chaplain’s Blessing which just gains us 5 life, meaning that we can flip Sorin almost as soon as we cast him, provided we have the mana, and we can deal at minimum 5 damage to any target when we do flip him or 6 if we pay Extort when we cast the Blessing, which can matter.

There are cards that also increase the amount of life gain we get that we can cast for cheap in Case of the Uneaten Feast and Cleric Class, both have the first mode of gaining us 1 additional life whenever we would gain life. The Case can let us cast creatures from the graveyard when we solve it and sacrifice it while the Cleric Class puts +1/+1 counters on a creature we control if we would gain life on level 2, and even reanimate a creature and gain life equal to its toughness when we get to level 3.

We can also be interactive with our life gain spells like with Cling to Dust, which let’s us exile target card from a graveyard and if it was a creature then we gain 3 life, or otherwise we just draw a card. Light of Hope is a solid modal spell that can give a +1/+1 counter on a creature, destroy an enchantment, or gain us 4 life.

There is also of course cards like Soul Warden and Soul Attendant which gain us 1 life whenever another creature enters the battlefield, Starscape Cleric that has each opponent lose 1 life whenever we gain life and has Offspring, Rhox Faithmender to double amount of life gain we get, and even Serra Ascendant to have a one mana 6/6 with flying and lifelink because we start the game with more than 30 life.

And of course, when talking about life gain and life loss, we have access to the loop of Sanguine Bond and Exquisite Blood, which makes it so that whenever we gain life an opponent loses that much life and whenever an opponent loses life we gain that much life in an infinite loop until we win the game.

Setbacks

We may have all the life gain in the world, but Sorin has the distinct flaw of becoming a Planeswalker, which are notoriously easy to deal with in Commander because there are three other players that can attack him and we may not have the ideal number of defenders to deal with that.

Sorin is a low enough mana value that we can cast him a couple of times to still manage, but aggro against Sorin is a major weakness of the deck. This leads to another flaw of the deck and that is if Sorin is not in play, then the deck only has one other backup strategy if you happen to run the life loss, life gain loop strategy, which if you are playing in lower brackets you can’t really do.

You can go for a somewhat aggressive strategy using creatures that also gain benefits from life gain like Ajani’s Pridemate which gets bigger whenever we gain life or Elenda’s Hierophant which also gets bigger whenever we gain life but when it dies we make X 1/1 Vampire tokens with lifelink where X equals its power when it dies.

Also, while not often, poison is very much the only anathema of the deck because even if we gain an infinite amount of life, we still die to ten poison counters, and while not everyone does play a poison deck, there is still enough of a precedent that you need to be aware of it.

This deck also has the potential of being a tracking nightmare if you aren’t careful and diligent in tracking how much life you have gained or lost, and hopefully it doesn’t stall the game out too much if you do lose track of how much life you gained.

Bracket Rating: High 3, Mid 4

Sorin has the potential of being a very powerful Commander, especially if you have multiple ways to achieve the life gain, life loss loop, of which there are a couple, and since a lot of those are true two card combos, that makes them bracket 4.

Outside of those loops, Sorin is a still a potent enough threat that needs to be dealt with because you can gain a whole lot of life in one fell swoop and for only one loyalty you can destroy a large creature, or more sensibly deal a lot of damage to an opponent to potentially win the game.

Thank you for reading, see you all tomorrow!

Peace,

From, J.M. Casual