Hello and welcome to Commander Bites!

Today we are going to take a look at Graaz, Unstoppable Juggernaut!

Graaz is an eight mana 7/5 that has Juggernauts you control must attack if able, Juggernauts you control can’t be blocked by Walls, and other you controls have base power and toughness 5/3 and are Juggernauts in addition to their other types.

Game Plan

Colorless decks are always an interesting deck building challenge to overcome. You lose access to colored mana and a lot of pieces of interaction and need to find a way to compensate for it with unique abilities.

Graaz’s take on this is a full on aggro strategy, turning your cheap artifact creatures or artifact creature tokens into larger creatures that cannot be blocked by a fairly niche creature type, which is definitely an interesting deck building challenge to be sure.

Support

One thing that we do need to contend with is that Graaz is eight mana, so we need a lot of ramp in order to cast them.

Thankfully for us, there are a lot of ways we can produce colorless mana in the form of mana rocks like Sol Ring to make two colorless mana, Thran Dynamo to make three colorless mana, and The Eternity Elevator which adds three colorless mana normally but if we get 20+ charge counters on it can add X mana of any one color where X is the number of charge counters on it.

Not only do we have the mana rocks, but we also have mana producing creatures that can don’t just stay as a mana rock that can block and can instead attack when Graaz is in play. Manakin can add one colorless, Palladium Myr can add two colorless, and Ornithopter of Paradise can add one mana of any color and has flying.

As we get onto the creatures, we have so much access to cheap creatures that actually work really well when they are bigger. Plague Myr is the perfect example of this because it can normally add one colorless mana, but it also has infect, which gives us an alternate way to win.

Gingerbrute is a one mana 1/1 with haste that for one mana cannot be blocked except by creatures with haste, and when it becomes a 5/3, that is a lot more damage that can be difficult for some decks to interact with.

Stonecoil Serpent goes even further because it enters with X +1/+1 counters, has reach and trample and more importantly protection from multicolored, which can be a lot of creatures and removal spells in Commander.

There is also a neat bit of tech we can use in Inquisitorial Rosette because whenever the equipped creature attacks we make a 2/2 Astartes Warrior creature token with vigilance that’s attacking and then we give attacking creatures we control menace until end of turn.

Not only that, but there are also a lot of ways we can buff our artifact creatures in order to have them deal more and more damage like Steel Overseer which can tap to put a +1/+1 counter on each artifact creature we control or even Chief of the Foundry which gives artifact creatures we control +1/+1.

Colorless also happens to have a lot of creatures that come in with more creatures like Threefold Thunderhulk, which enters with three +1/+1 counters and when it enters or attacks we make a number of 1/1 Gnome artifact creature tokens equal to it’s power, which gets bigger when Graaz is in play, and for two mana and sacrifice another artifact we put a +1/+1 counter on it so we can get more tokens later.

We even have access to a way to get any artifact we have in exile through Karn, the Great Creator which for a -2 can let us grab a face-up artifact we control in exile (or outside the game in casual settings) and put that card into our hand, while also being able to turn a noncreature artifact we control into a creature and shutting down activated abilities of artifacts our opponents control.

Setbacks

The biggest issues that colorless decks have is that it has very few pieces of interaction that are not board based.

There have been some more recent developments to add some more instant speed interaction with cards like Null Elemental Blast and Eldritch Immunity, but the options are pretty slim.

It also doesn’t help that a lot of the available options cost a lot of mana to cast, and while they are pretty good effects, we need to find the balance of wanting to have more creatures to the board or to play one or two big spells in order to address a threat on board.

We also need to deal with the fact that while not all of our cards are artifacts, a majority are artifacts and/or creatures, which means that interaction that deals with both are particularly devastating, even more so if we happened to get lucky with our draws and have a ton of ways to produce mana to cast Graaz.

Which leads to the next point in that Graaz is eight mana, and while we can pack the deck with as many ways to make mana as possible, if all we are doing is ramping then there is the potential of us falling behind dramatically because our opponents may be developing the board in different ways.

Bracket Rating: 2

While I originally was thinking that Graaz was going to be much lower from my initial evaluation, after looking around I do think that Graaz is still a solid Commander to build around.

Aggro in general has a hard time in Commander, and while Graaz doesn’t solve the aggro issue, it does provide much more resources as a way to potentially close out the game in a much more efficient way by turning your mana producing creatures into actual threats that can push damage though.

Not the strongest Commander in the bunch, but definitely a fun one to build, especially as a budget Commander because of how many solid artifacts are probably already in a player’s collection or can be obtained relatively cheaply, with a couple of exceptions that aren’t even that crazy expensive.

Thank you for reading, see you all tomorrow!

Peace,

From, J.M. Casual