Hello and welcome to Commander Bites!

Today we are going to be taking a look at Nine-Fingers Keene!

Keene is a four mana 4/4 with menace, ward of pay 9 life, and whenever Keene deals combat damage to a player you look at the top nine cards of your library and you may put a Gate cards from among them onto the battlefield and then if you control nine or more Gates, then you put the rest into your hand, otherwise they go to the bottom of your library in a random order.

Game Plan

Having a Gates based Commander is pretty interesting, especially when considering that we now have a lot more Gates than just the Ravnican Gates thanks to Commander Legends: Battle for Baldur’s Gate.

There are 14 Gates that we have access to so we know of at least one condition that is available to us and there are a good amount of other Gate based synergies we can use, but there are also some tricky ways to make sure that Keene allows us to gain insane card advantage.

Support

First thing is that we need to get land based synergies, mostly Gate based synergies at that.

Gatecreeper Vine is a way for us to search our library for a basic land or a Gate card and put it into our hand and Circuitous Route is also a way for us to get two basic lands and/or Gate cards onto the battlefield tapped.

Explore the Underdark is similar to Circuitous Route in looking for two basic lands and/or Gate cards, but we also get to take the initiative, which is a bit of a pain to track however we can get a myriad of bonuses from playing with the initiative like ramp, buffing Keene, and ultimately cheating a creature out onto the battlefield.

Sage of the Maze is a weird synergy piece because it can tap to add two colors of mana in any combination of colors and we can tap an untapped Gate we control in order to untap it while also being able to tap it to make a land we control into an X/X Citizen creature token where X is twice the number of Gates we control.

Now we do have to make up for the fact that a lot of Gates enter the battlefield tapped, but we can make up for that by using something like Spelunking, which draws us a card and let’s us put a land onto the battlefield and lands we control enter the battlefield untapped.

As far as some of the tricky things we can do, we also happen to have access to Omo, Queen of Vesuva. Whenever Omo enters or attacks we put an everything counter on up to one land and up to one creature, and a creature with an everything counter on it is all creature types and a land with one of these counters is every land type.

This means that we can turn a basic Swamp into a Gate, or a Locus land into a Gate, and so on and so one, meaning we can play into a couple of other land synergies like say a Crypt Ghast let’s any land we control with an everything counter tap for an additional black mana or let our Baldur’s Gate tap for even more mana since it can add X mana of any one color where X is the number of other Gates we control.

Since we are looking to play a deck that is based on Gates, of course we have access to Maze’s End as a win condition. If you were unaware Maze’s End let’s us search our library for a Gate card, put it onto the battlefield, and if we control ten or more Gates with different names we win the game.

Setbacks

This is a pretty one note deck, which isn’t a bad thing, but we do need to put in a bit of work in order for us to make the deck interesting other than just being a plain old Gates deck.

The other thing that is slowing this deck down is the fact that in order for us to gain the insane card advantage that Keene offers is one we have to make sure Keene deals combat damage to a player and two we need nine Gates in order for us to do so.

Not that bad in theory, but Keene needs to have enough protection and evasion in order for us to do so and we also need to get as many ways to get a Gate into play as possible in order for Keene to go online.

We do have access to that sort of ramp, but those need a lot of mana to be cast and while we are in the colors of excessive ramp, we also need to have a very specific form of ramp to do the job.

Especially with such a heavy Commander focused deck like Keene, we need as much protection as we can get to make sure that Keene can survive a combat, and while the menace and ward for 9 life helps, it really doesn’t stop a Wrath of God or Keene being chump blocked by two Zombie tokens.

Bracket Rating: 2

I think that with Keene’s strategy being fairly narrow in scope, and while also having access to a lot of Landfall synergies, that does not make for a very powerful deck.

It’s a strong deck that fulfills a very niche purpose, and those can be some really fun decks to play around with and find weird strategies to play around with. However it doesn’t make the deck powerful, and by also limiting our colors we are also limited to the number of Gates we can play.

It’s still a fun deck to play with and I’m glad we do have access to a Commander that explicitly cares about Gates and isn’t one that can potentially work well with Gates because it has some land synergies.

Thank you for reading, see you all tomorrow!

Peace,

From J.M. Casual