Hello and welcome to Commander Bites!

Today we are going to be taking a look at Choco, Seeker of Paradise!

Choco is a three mana 3/5 that whenever one or more Birds you control attack, look at that many cards from the top of your library. You may put one of them into your hand and then put any number of land cards from among them onto the battlefield tapped and the rest into your graveyard. They also have a Landfall ability of whenever a land you control enters, Choco gets +1/+0 until end of turn.

Game Plan

The interesting thing about Choco is that if you look at them carefully, they have three strategies tied together. First you have the obvious Bird synergies which tie directly into Landfall synergies in that if we attack with a lot of Birds, then we can get a lot of lands into play.

The third and more subtle synergy is that the cards that don’t get into your hand or battlefield go into your graveyard instead, which adds an additional dimensionality to the deck that we can mess around with a bit. The primary game plan is Birds and lands, but if we can add a bit of graveyard synergy then we are really cooking.

Support

Being three colors gives us a lot of options for Birds in order for us to make the most use of Choco’s ability to dig through our deck for lands.

This is evident through Chocobo Racetrack, which has a Landfall ability of making a 2/2 Bird creature token that gets +1/+0 whenever a land we control enters. So not only does the Landfall trigger work well with Choco in combat, but also these tokens.

Murmuration is a slower way to gain more Birds because at the beginning of our end step we make a 1/2 Bird named Storm Crow for each spell we’ve cast this turn, but it also provides an anthem for Birds by giving them +1/+1 and vigilance.

Watcher of the Spheres gives creature spells with flying a one mana discount and whenever another creature with flying enters under our control then Watcher of the Spheres gets +1/+1 until end of turn, Hermes, Overseer of Elpis makes a 1/1 Bird with flying and vigilance whenever we cast a noncreature spell and can scry 2 whenever we attack with one or more Birds, and Tawnos, the Toymaker can copy Birds and Beast spells we cast that are also artifacts in addition to their other types.

Jackdaw Savior can actually work really well with Choco’s graveyard ability because whenever it or another creature we control with flying dies, then we can return another target creature with lesser mana value from the graveyard to the battlefield.

Judge’s Familiar is a solid early bird we can get into the graveyard early on because we can sacrifice it to counter an instant or sorcery spell unless its controller pays one mana, Harrier Strix to tap target permanent when it enters and a way to draw a card and discard cards, and even Skycat Sovereign to give our flying creatures another anthem.

A fairly niche bit of tech we can take advantage of is Soulcatchers’ Aerie, which makes it so that whenever a Bird we control is put into our graveyard from the battlefield, we put a feather counter on it and all Birds get +1/+1 for each feather counter on it.

As far as making use of the graveyard we have cards like Conduit of Worlds, which lets us play lands from our graveyard and we can tap it and choose a nonland permanent from our graveyard and cast that card, but only if we haven’t cast any other spells this turn and we can’t cast any more spells this turn.

Sevinne’s Reclamation let’s us return a target permanent with mana value 3 or less from our graveyard to the battlefield and copy it if it was cast from the graveyard since it also has flashback for five mana, Battle Screech to create two 1/1 white Bird creature tokens and a flashback cost of tapping three untapped white creatures we control, or even Echo of Eons have everyone shuffle their hand and graveyard into their library and draw seven cards.

Setbacks

The interesting thing about Choco is that a lot of the shortcomings that would come from one of the three strategies, can be mitigated a bit by one of the other strategies.

That’s also where the problem lies, in that when you are trying to combine two strategies, you can generally make them work well together, but adding a third can definitely make things a bit awkward because you need to dedicate more space to that third strategy.

It also doesn’t help that we need to have our Birds attack in order to gain the benefit of Choco, which means that we always need at least one Bird to attack. We will always gain some sort of benefit from it, either getting an additional land, a card in hand, or a card in the graveyard, but if we can’t keep our Birds in play then things just get more and more difficult.

What’s more, Birds have a lot of anthems and ways to boost their power and various forms of evasion, however a lot of them are attached to creatures and while there are noncreature spells that work well with Birds like Dazzling Denial, Lofty Denial, and Airborne Aid, most of the cards we want need to be on the battlefield.

We are playing to the board in a somewhat aggressive strategy with our Birds needing to attack and some of them getting bigger via Landfall triggers, so board wipes are especially cruel to us and any tax effects hurt us even harder.

Bracket Rating: 3

I do think that overall Choco is a solid deck that can perform very well. It is a reasonably popular Commander and even through that getting the pieces to assemble the deck are pretty cost effective.

I didn’t delve too deep into the Landfall strategies here because a lot of them do run fairly identically, but there are plenty of ways to make use of Choco just being a Landfall Commander to win via Commander Damage.

With Choco being a high mana value and being typal reliant I don’t think that Choco can get too much higher into the brackets, but I do think that you can build a generally good Choco deck without too much issues and also fairly budget friendly as well.

Thank you for reading, see you all tomorrow!

Peace,

From, J.M. Casual