Hello and welcome to Commander Bites!

Today we are going to be taking a look at Kuroki, Thief of Talents!

Kuroki is a five mana 4/4 with menace and at the beginning of your end step, target opponent may draw four cards and if they do, then you look at that player’s hand and you may cast a spell from their hand without paying its mana cost and if they don’t then you put two +1/+1 counters on Kuroki.

Game Plan

Kuroki is an interesting version of theft because it can combine some elements of a group hug deck at the cost of your opponents either getting a ton of cards or making Kuroki into more of an aggressive threat.

What we need to do is make the most use out of Kuroki’s effect and have other ways to get cards into our opponents hands that we want to play rather than what they happen to have at the time.

Support

Since this is takes elements of group hug, we need to have ways to make that work in our favor.

Having our opponents draw more cards can be a risk, but something as simple as a Howling Mine can be beneficial because it let’s each player draw an additional card at the beginning of their draw step. Font of Mythos drives this even further by having is so that each player draws two additional cards during their draw step.

We even have access to a wheel effect with Dark Deal, which has each player discard all cards in their hand and then draw that many cards minus one.

Since we are working with a lot of draw effects, we can also work with a lot of draw punish effects. Scrawling Crawler is one of the best cards for this because it makes each opponent lose 1 life whenever they draw a card and we also have it so that at the beginning of our upkeep everyone draws a card.

If you happen to have access to it, Sheoldred, the Apocalypse is also an amazing card for this deck because whenever you draw a card you gain 2 life and whenever an opponent draws a card they lose 2 life. This has been getting more expensive over time, so if you want a cheaper version of a similar effect you can also use Underworld Dreams where it deals 1 damage to an opponent when they draw a card.

Another neat card to consider is Head Games, where you have target opponent put the cards in their hand on top of their library and you search their library for that many cards, then you put those cards in their hand and then shuffle their library. This way you can find the cards you want to cast and then hand off some additional lands to bulk out their hand so they have no interaction.

You can also copy that effect or Kuroki’s ability with Lithoform Engine, which can copy target activated or triggered ability with the ability to choose a new target for the copy for two mana, copy target instant or sorcery with the ability to choose new targets for three mana, or for four mana you can copy target permanent spell.

One such spell you may want to copy is Strionic Resonator so you have two additional ways to copy target triggered ability we control with the ability to choose new targets for the copy.

As a capstone we can also play Price of Knowledge, which has it so that all players have no maximum hand size but at the beginning of each opponent’s upkeep they are dealt damage equal to the number of cards in their hand, and with the other hand hate cards we have access to, we can get our opponents into a nice range where Kuroki can swoop in to finish things off.

Setbacks

This is a very fragile deck, needing a lot of things to go right in order to be at its most effective.

First off, you need to make sure you have the ways to punish draws in play, then you need to make sure that Kuroki stays on the battlefield, then you need your opponents to agree to draw four cards or you’ll attack them as soon as possible, then you need to know which opponent is likely to have a strong hand with cards you want to use, then choose the best card you can to cast and hope it doesn’t get countered.

There are a lot of points of failure where this deck can go sideways, and what’s more you’re also having your opponents draw a bunch of cards, which means they are much more likely to draw an answer to Kuroki.

This is where the politics of playing a group hug deck can interfere with the theft part of the deck. If a board wipe needs to be played in order to prevent an opponent from winning, then you may need to play that board wipe. Sometimes an opponent doesn’t have the best cards in hand, sometimes they have cards you can’t use because they don’t help you, and sometimes people won’t let you cast spells and will risk taking damage from Kuroki.

When playing on the psychology of a Commander like Kuroki, you need to be keenly aware that people will more likely take the less bad option then the worse option, and if that means you’ll attack them, they will make sure to have at least two creatures to block so that becomes irrelevant.

Bracket Rating: High 1, Mid 2

I think that Kuroki is a neat take on a theft Commander, however there are a lot of things that are going against them in order to become a Commander that can win consistently.

When Kuroki works as intended, a lot of shenanigans are sure to occur. Some fun moments casting an opponent’s seven plus mana spell that would have won them the game is a fun story, but more often then not you’ll be casting a draw spell or a mana rock or a decent sized creature, and that’s if your opponents let you do so in the first place.

Thank you for reading, see you all tomorrow!

Peace,

From, J.M. Casual