Hello and welcome to Commander Bites!

Today we are going to be taking a look at Jiang Yanggu, Never Alone!

Jiang Yanggu is a four mana 2/2 that when they enter you create Mowu, a legendary 3/3 green Dog creature token and at the beginning of your end step, untap all tokens you control.

Game Plan

Continuing with our look at Reality Fracture, we are going to be taking a look at Jiang Yanggu, while whose Echoverse version has lost their faithful companion in Mowu, but in the normal universe still has Mowu despite being desparked.

This Jiang Yanggu is an interesting build around because green can make a decent number of tokens, and with the right combination of cards we can use that to our advantage.

Support

As far as token generation, we actually have a good amount of ways to make tokens for either a decently cheap cost or they also happen to perform some solid utility function.

An example of a cheap way we can get some tokens in play is Crashing Footfalls, which has a suspend 4 for one green mana and makes two 4/4 Rhino tokens with trample, which if we can get on turn one can gain us a couple of solid bodies later on that we can get for either combat purposes or for other reasons.

Springleaf Parade is also a great card for us because we create X 1/1 Shapeshifter tokens with changeling and we give creature tokens we control the ability to tap one mana for any color, which is excellent for us to cast bigger spells.

While they don’t make creature tokens, Enduring Vitality also happens to fill in a similar niche to Springleaf Parade, except it allows us to give all of our creatures the ability to tap for one mana of any color, and when it dies it comes back to the battlefield as an enchantment so we can keep the effect going.

A great card that not only makes tokens for us but also has some excellent utility is Pest Infestation, which destroys up to X target artifacts or enchantments and we create twice X 1/1 Pest creature tokens that gain us 1 life when they die.

Once we have a good number of bodies in play, other than using them for mana we have plenty of ways to tap them for some form of value. One of the more recent examples of this are the cards that have Station, with Evendo, Waking Haven letting us add green mana for each creature we control when we hit 12 charge counters or The Eternity Elevator which normally taps for three colorless but once we hit 20 charge counters we can add X amount of mana where X is the number of charge counters on it.

Sprout Swarm is also a great way for us to make use of our tokens untapping because we can cast it at instant speed to make a 1/1 Saproling creature token and since it has Buyback and Convoke, we can tap our recently untapped creature who are mostly green in order to get more tokens that we can use to cast Sprout Swarm again and again.

Add in a Quina, Qu Gourmet and we get two tokens with Sprout Swarm because Quina makes a 1/1 Frog whenever we create a token, and add in another token doubler like Primal Vigor, Parallel Lives, or Doubling Season then you are very close to achieving an infinite way to generate creature tokens, guaranteed if you have two token doublers.

If that isn’t your jam, then you can always Chord of Calling to use your creatures as fuel to bring out a creature with mana value X or less because it also has Convoke, Shamanic Revolution to draw a card for each creature you control, or even a Craterhoof Behemoth to swing out and win because of how many creatures you have in play.

Since we have access to a bunch of small tokens, we can also make great use of March of the World Ooze, which makes our creatures have base power and toughness 6/6 and are Oozes in addition to their other types and whenever an opponent casts a spell that’s not on their turn we create a 3/3 Elephant creature token.

Setbacks

Tokens, tokens everywhere and all die to a board wipe, that should be very clear.

The issue that all go wide decks is how vulnerable they are, despite the number of bodies they can produce and how quickly they can do so. It doesn’t matter if you have a convoluted way to make infinite tokens through Sprout Swarm, they all die to a Toxic Deluge for 1 or 2 life.

It hurts even worse when an Overloaded Cyclonic Rift is cast against us because since a majority of our creatures are tokens, they just disappear when they get bounced, which is a much worse feeling than having your creatures die.

Since we also have a bunch of creatures, we are also vulnerable to decks that get fueled by our creatures dying, Toxrill, the Corrosive becomes especially terrible against us if we aren’t able to buff up our creatures in a reasonable way since after a single turn cycle all of our tokens turn into tokens for Toxrill.

There are quite a few payoffs we can use with the massive number of creatures that we can create, but that can lead to games ending up leading down predictable pathways. The deck can be quite inflexible at times where if a big Craterhoof Behemoth swing is blanked or stopped in some way, then we don’t have too many other ways to close out the game.

Bracket Rating: 2

I think that Jiang Yanggu works well as a supporting player in decks that care about tokens, a couple come to mind like Queen Allenal of Ruadach or Jetmir, Nexus of Revels, but as an individual Commander they struggle a bit.

They have a strong ability that can fuel other strategies, but as far as closing things out they can struggle to do so if their board isn’t as wide as possible. Even then he is still seems solid as a lower bracket Commander that cares about tokens.

Thank you for reading, see you all tomorrow!

Peace,

From, J.M. Casual