Hello and welcome to Commander Bites!

Today we are going to be talking about Bess, Soul Nourisher!

Bess is a three mana 1/1 with whenever one or more other creatures you control with base power and toughness 1/1 enters under your control, you put a +1/+1 counter on Bess. Whenever Bess attacks, each other creature you control with base power and toughness 1/1 gets +X/+X until end of turn where X is the number of +1/+1 counters on Bess.

Game Plan

The game plan is simple on the face of things: get a bunch of cheap creatures into play in order to get Bess bigger and when we swing with all of our small creatures then we get a bunch of big creatures that deal a ton of damage.

However, the interesting thing about Bess is that she cares about base power and toughness of creatures, meaning that we can still modify our other creatures power and toughness through anthem effects and other counters, meaning that growing wide and growing tall is the ideal move.

Support

Small creatures are going to be the ideal creatures for us, and there are a lot of creatures that actually work really well with Bess in this regard.

Managorger Hydra, for example, has a base power and toughness of 1/1 and whenever a player casts a spell we put a +1/+1 counter on it. Ideally our opponents are not going to initially be concerned with the Hydra, unless they decide to cast a whole lot of spells at once and we start accumulating a ton of counters on it.

Rhys the Redeemed is also a solid card for us to consider because we can get them out as soon as turn one and to start making 1/1 Elf Warrior creature tokens as soon as we can, and in the late game we can have them make a ton of creature tokens. This is one of the few occasions where making one token at a time is better because Bess triggers when one or more 1/1 creatures enter and not each individual one.

Sigil Captain is not a 1/1 but does benefit 1/1 creatures by putting two +1/+1 counters on them, Farmer Cotton makes X 1/1 Halfling creature tokens and X Food tokens, and Cultivator of Blades is a 1/1 with Fabricate 2 to either put two +1/+1 counters on themselves or make two 1/1 Servo tokens and when it attacks we can give other creatures we control +X/+X where X is it’s power.

Release to Memory is an interesting form of interaction because we can exile target opponents graveyard and for each creature card exiled this way we get to make a 1/1 Spirit token, which while only giving one +1/+1 counter to Bess can potentially make a lot of tokens depending on the opponent.

Now this is more of me realizing an idea that seems to work if you can stack the triggers correctly. Endless Foot Assault has it so that whenever you attack, for each opponent you create a 1/1 Ninja creature token that is tapped and attacking that player and Squad for two mana to get even more of this trigger.

The idea is that Endless Foot Assault and Bess’s trigger activate at the same time so you stack the Endless Foot Assault’s trigger to activate first to make the tokens, putting a +1/+1 counter on Bess and once it finishes resolving we have more bodies that are attacking meaning that Bess buffs more creatures and we can get even more damage through potentially, especially if we happened to get more copies from the Squad ability.

We also have access to anthems aplenty with Intangible Virtue to give our tokens +1/+1 and vigilance, Beastmaster Ascension to give our creatures +5/+5 when it gets seven or more quest counters from our creatures attacking, Primal Rage to give our creatures trample, and Mirari’s Wake to give our creatures +1/+1 and has our lands add an additional mana of any type it could produce.

Setbacks

To be blunt, this deck’s greatest weakness is the fact that it is very transparent in what it’s game plan is and any opponent will know to keep your board small or to keep Bess off the field.

Bess not having protection is a bit rough, but we do have access to a number of spells that can protect Bess for a fairly low cost. Board wipes are an issue, but as a go wide deck we should be aware of how to deal with these sort of issues.

Another issue we face is that we are at a crossroads of being both a go wide deck and a go tall deck. While our ideal game plan has us get a bunch of small creatures in order to buff Bess, we should also give our creatures a bit of help through some number of anthem effects as a contingency plan.

Bess can’t be in play forever so having some back up plans in other anthems can be very helpful, which is where matters can complicate themselves because you are melding two strategies that can work well together but need a lot of support to do so.

Deck building philosophy aside, we are also not a very interactive deck, meaning that combo decks have an edge over us because we can’t really do too much to interact with them. Sure we can have creatures that can deal with some problematic artifacts and enchantment, but as far as us dealing with spells on the stack, we have limited options.

Bracket Rating: High 2, Low 3

I do think that Bess has a decent amount of potential as a Commander that works well with going wide and tall, the issues coming from the fact that the strategy is straightforward and predictable.

If your opponents manage to spot what you are planning to do and hold their board wipes after you overcommitted to making a ton of tokens, then the blow out is going to not be great.

The deck does still does well in bracket 3 with the right cards to keep Bess alive, but it can’t go too much higher than that because of the lack of interaction against combo decks that tend to be more prevalent in higher bracket decks.

But in lower brackets where you can focus on keeping Bess in play much more easily and can do a decent amount of token generation, I think Bess settles well there.

Thank you for reading, see you all tomorrow!

Peace,

From, J.M. Casual