Hello and welcome to Commander Bites!

Today we are going to be taking a look at Uldaros Theorix!

Uldaros is a six mana 5/5 with flying and when they enter, if you cast him, exile up to one target nonland card of each card type from your graveyard. Copy those cards and you may cast any number of spells with total mana value 6 or less from among the copies without paying their mana costs.

Game Plan

The idea with Uldaros is pretty simple, but there are plenty of complexities that go along with it. We need to fill up our graveyard with a bunch of cards and we need to cast Uldaros in order to gain the benefits from him.

While we can fill up the graveyard fairly easily, the trouble comes in making sure that we can gain the benefits as often as we can, and since Uldaros requires us to have cast him, we need to find ways to do so without having him die, as he is already six mana.

Support

First we need to start with the easy part, and that is filling up our graveyard. Since we are in blue and black we can do that quite easily.

Ripples of Undeath is one of our best options for this because at the beginning of our precombat main phase we mill three cards, and then we can pay one mana and 3 life to put one of the milled cards into our hand. This means that if we need a land or a particular spell, then we can get it back for a fairly cheap price.

If we just want pure volume of cards to mill, then Glimpse the Unthinkable is the card we need because it has target player mill ten cards, Traumatize to have target player mill half of their library rounded down, and Singularity Rupture to destroy all creatures and then any number of target players each mill half of their library rounded down.

Milling ourselves is quite easy, but what we really need are ways we can make use of Uldaros without having to repeatedly casting him, and that answer is actually a lot easier than one would expect.

Clones are the answer to this predicament because while we lose out on keeping some of them in play because of the Legend Rule, we would still be able to gain the effects of them entering the battlefield, as long as they were cast, which Uldaros also happens to do with the copies.

Take Deceptive Frostkite as an example, where it enters as a copy of a creature we control with power 4 or greater except its a Dragon and has flying. It would enter as a copy of Uldaros, die to the Legend Rule, and then the enters trigger would occur, which someone who has better knowledge of the rules can inform me, would allow us to copy and recast the Frostkite again since it is in the graveyard at the time the effect begins to resolve.

If that is the case then we get an additional trigger from Uldaros ability, and if not then we can ignore it and use the ability for other cards. If we do have a clone creature in the graveyard like Phantasmal Image and Flesh Duplicate, we can only cast one of them at a time based on how the ability is worded, but one can still bring out the other when those abilities trigger.

Among the other kinds of spells we can cast, there is a wide variety of options we can choose from. With the clone effects being tied to creatures and ranging from two to four mana for the majority of them, we can go with cheap removal spells like Snap to bounce a creature and untap two lands, Release to the Wind to exile Uldaros to protect him from a board wipe, Profane Tutor for a free tutor, or Ashiok, Dream Render to prevent our opponents from searching their libraries and to mill our opponents and exile their library.

Speaking of mill, we do have a lot of mill spells in our graveyard, and since ideally we are casting a bunch of spells, that would help count for Brain Freeze’s Storm count, which means that if we mill our opponents enough, we can finish them off with a massive Brain Freeze.

Setbacks

We are heavily reliant on our graveyard, more so than a lot of other decks, which means any way that can get of our graveyard or even individual cards from our graveyard becomes an issue.

Having a bunch of ways to mill ourselves is pretty solid, however since we are aggressively milling ourselves we have to be careful to not over mill ourselves, which also means that if we happen to have an opponent that is playing a mill strategy themselves, we can both benefit and suffer from playing with them.

Carefully balancing mill can be incredibly difficult, especially if happen to mill a card that we would need to cast Uldaros in the first place. We do have access to some rituals to help out, but we are still not in the most ideal colors to ramp a six mana Commander quickly. If we mill out the few ramp spells we have, then there is only so much we can do at that point.

There also comes the struggle of finding the right combination of cards to cast, since you can only cast spells with a total mana value of six, which in our deck can be a good number of combinations, but if we milled a lot more lands than clone effects or spells at all, we can be stuck casting a couple of spells and then fizzling out.

That also means that this deck can be tricky to pilot for a new player, and decision paralysis can be a real issue that needs to be addressed. You would need to be sure that you are casting the spells you need and when you need them, and that can be a lot for someone who is not used to piloting a deck like this.

Bracket Rating: 3

I do think that Uldaros has a lot of potential as a deck, but can be a bit confusing for a newer player.

The game plan also becomes pretty linear once if you play the deck a lot, and while it becomes faster to play the more you do, it can also lead to some less than exciting games.

Uldaros is interesting as a Commander, and while I think that they are a solid Commander for bracket 3, I think that the restrictive mana cost can be a bit much for higher brackets, and while you can potentially scrape into a higher bracket, I think that the more interaction pieces that the higher brackets have stymy the deck significantly.

Thank you for reading, see you all tomorrow!

Peace,

From, J.M. Casual