Hello and welcome to Commander Bites!

Today we are going to be taking a look at Kwia Vigorbloom!

Kwia is a six mana 6/6 with flying, vigilance, lifelink, ward 2, and whenever you gain life, you create a colorless artifact token named Lotus with “Tap, sacrifice this token: Add three mana of any one color.” This ability only triggers once each turn.

Game Plan

Life gain strategies have been gaining a good amount of support lately, and now there is a way to play life gain in a different way rather than draining your opponent or just overwhelming your aggro opponent in having too much life.

Now we have access to a life gain Commander that can go into a huge ramp strategy, and we don’t need to be consistently gaining life. It becomes much more beneficial for us to slowly gain life, and since Kwia triggers once each turn, this means any way we can gain at least 1 life each turn, we can net twelve mana each turn.

Support

Since the idea is to gain at least 1 life each turn, we have plenty of cheap ways we can get it done while also impacting the board state.

Authority of the Consuls is one way to do this since not only does it make it so that whenever a creature an opponent controls enters we gain 1 life, but it also has creatures our opponents control enter the battlefield tapped.

We can even double up on this effect with Blind Obedience, which has it so that artifacts and creatures our opponents control enter tapped, and since Extort does not affect color identity, we can pay a white mana to have each opponent lose 1 life and we gain 1 life whenever we cast a spell.

There are also cards like Soul Warden, Soul’s Attendant, and Essence Warden that gain us 1 life whenever another creature enters the battlefield, regardless of who controls it. We can have all three in our deck for redundancy and since they are one mana each, having them all just guarantees us having one of them in play as early as possible.

Solarium Sentry is a new card to consider, especially for the early game, because it gains us 2 life whenever an opponent casts a spell with mana value two or less, which is excellent for the early game in gaining us small bits of life and have our opponents be wary in casting cheap spells when we do have Kwia in play.

As we get access to more and more mana, we can cast bigger cards like Sunscorch Regent, which has it so that whenever an opponent casts a spell we put a +1/+1 counter on it and we gain 1 life, so we have a threat that can keep growing and gain us more life to make more Lotus tokens.

There are also cards that have life gain synergies that we can make use of like Crested Sunmare, which creates a 5/5 Horse creature token at the beginning of each end step if we gained life this turn, and the Sunmare also happens to give other Horses we control indestructible.

Once we have a decent number of Lotus tokens, we can gain more value from them by using cards like Second Harvest to double the number of Lotus tokens, or City of Death which makes a Treasure token for its first chapter and the next five chapters create a token copy of target non-Saga token we control or Oltec Matterweaver which has whenever we cast a creature spell we can either make a 1/1 Gnome creature token or create a token copy of artifact token we control.

As far as payoffs, there are a ton of directions we can go in this regard since you should ideally have a ton of mana to work with. You can cast Finale of Glory to make X 2/2 Soldier tokens with vigilance and X 4/4 Angel tokens with flying and vigilance if X is 10 or more while also being able to cast Finale of Devastation to find a creature of mana value X or less and then giving creatures you control +X/+X and haste to swing out to win.

If you want one huge creature that can take out a player then there is also Goldvein Hydra which enters with X +1/+1 counters, has vigilance, trample, and haste and when it dies we create X tapped Treasure tokens where X is its power.

To take advantage of gaining so much life and to present an out of nowhere win, there is Borrowing the East Win which deals X damage to each player and each creature with horsemanship, so there is even a way to burn our opponents in this deck.

Setbacks

The issue with Kwia is that once we start establishing our engine, Kwia is going to be a massive magnet for removal.

The ward 2 can help, but is a lot of people have one mana removal and see that we have a way to generate an absurd amount of mana, they won’t mind spending the extra two mana to destroy Kwia.

Kwia is also six mana, which isn’t a lot considering that we are in the two best colors for ramp, but if Kwia keeps getting removed then we are going to need to hold on to those Lotus tokens to make sure we can cast them again.

Board wipes of course are a common concern, though at the very least we can plan for some of them by having mana sinks that we can dump our mana into like Helix Pinnacle to offer an alternate win condition or Gleaming Splendor to draw cards.

If we can get a consistent way to get Lotus tokens to get big mana payoffs, then we are going to become the archenemy, meaning that people will go out of their way to destroy our things in any capacity, which can be overwhelming at a certain point.

We do have access to some solid protection spells in our colors, but those will not last forever, which means that if we want to win the game, ideally we should win quickly, because if we don’t then three other players are going to try and beat us together.

Bracket Rating: High 3, Low 4

Kwia has the potential of being a incredibly strong Commander, whose only limitation in being an absurd Commander is that they are six mana and need a particular way to get a mana boost once each turn.

Kwia can definitely present themselves as being a problem Commander, but there are a few guard rails to make sure that they aren’t going to make you an immediate threat. Once you set up your engines to gain life to make Lotus tokens consistently, that’s when you become a problem.

I am considering building Kwia, who I think has a decent chance at being a fairly high bracket Commander once optimized, and am so glad that life gain has been getting some more interesting ways to play the game.

Thank you for reading, see you all tomorrow!

Peace,

From, J.M. Casual