Hello and welcome to Commander Bites!

Today we are going to be taking a look at Glava, Five-Advents Mage!

Glava is a seven mana 5/5 that whenever you cast a permanent spell with X in its mana cost or activate an ability with X in its activation cost that isn’t a mana ability, you may have the value of X become 5. Do this only once each turn.

Game Plan

I will admit that I initially misread Glava when they were first revealed and thought that they affected any X spell or ability and not just for permanent spells and activated abilities. While that did adjust how I viewed this Commander, there are still plenty of interesting things we can play around with.

While Hydra’s are the first choice in what creatures will benefit the most from this, there are still plenty of other cards we can consider putting in the deck.

Support

Since we can only use Glava’s ability on permanents and activated abilities, we can look at a number of cards that can work well with this.

Lattice Library enters with X study counters on it and when it enters and whenever we cast our first spell with X in its mana cost then we create a 0/0 Fractal creature token with a number of +1/+1 counters on it equal to the number of study counters on it. Which means for two mana we can have a consistent way to make 5/5 Fractals whenever we cast an X spell.

Mana Bloom enters with X charge counters on it and we can remove a charge counter from it in order to add one mana of any color once each turn and at the beginning of our upkeep if there are no charge counters on it then we can return it to our hand.

Invasion of Ikoria can work really well for us because it let’s us look for a non-Human creature in our library with mana value X or less and put it onto the battlefield, of which we can find a Yeva, Nature’s Herald in order to be able to cast our green creature spells as though they had flash.

While not a creature that has X anywhere, Nexos can be a very valuable creature for us in the early game because it gives our basic lands the ability to tap for two colorless mana that can only be used for X spells, which is great for when we need to cast our other X spells after using Glava’s ability.

Glava works especially well with cards that have multiple X’s in their casting cost like Marketback Walker, Hangarback Walker, and Walking Ballista so that they can enter with five +1/+1 counters and be used to draw a bunch of cards, make a bunch of Thopter tokens, or deal a good bit of damage.

Activated abilities are where things get a bit trickier because you do need to know how certain rules interactions work. For example, I thought that cards like Magus of the Candelabra or Candelabra of Tawnos if you have one would work very well with Glava.

Turns out, since you target the lands when you declare the effect, the X cost would be the initial X cost you put in and not replaced by Glava’s ability. So if you put in one mana and target one land, your X cost will be replaced to become five, but you will have already declared your target and cannot choose more retroactively.

It would work with abilities like Vivien’s Arkbow which allows you to look at the top X cards of your library and put a creature with mana value X or less from among them onto the battlefield or Karn’s Sylex to exile it to destroy each nonland permanent with mana value X or less.

Glava also works very well with something like Unbound Flourishing, which has it whenever you cast a permanent spell with a mana cost that contains X, you double the mana value of X and whenever you cast an instant or sorcery or activate an ability that has X in its mana cost or ability activation cost, then you can copy that spell or ability.

And if worse comes to worse, you still have Helix Pinnacle to act as an alternate win condition since you can put five tower counters on it on each player’s turn and when you have 100 or more tower counters at the beginning of your upkeep you win the game, which when combined with Unbound Flourishing can approach very quickly.

Setbacks

This is a weirdly technical deck to pilot, despite it being fairly simple to understand in concept.

Your X creatures are going to be fine in casting them, however it is only once each turn and unless you have a way to enable your creatures into gaining flash, it is going to be fairly slow rolling in getting your board set up as you would like.

It also doesn’t help that Glava is seven mana, and despite us being in green where there is the best ramp available to us, we still will need to spend a lot of the early turns ramping into Glava into making sure that we can get what we want.

Which leads to this deck being much more fragile than I would like, because while we get a massive discount on X creatures, them now becoming one or two mana, we can only gain the benefit of Glava once each turn and while there are plenty of ways that allow us to cast creatures as if they had flash, then those become targets for our opponents to get rid of.

Glava has more moving parts than one would initially think for a Commander that makes it easier to cast your big X permanent spells.

Bracket Rating: High 1, Low 2

With everything that Glava needs to work, it makes it difficult to recommend them for higher brackets.

I wanted to put it in higher brackets, but the more I looked and thought about it, Glava needs a lot of work in order to get the most out of them, even in a casual context.

They were never going to be in contention for cEDH or bracket four, but at the very least I had aspirations of them being bracket three viable. However, they are better served in lower brackets, where the games are slower and interaction is lighter in order for them to properly flourish.

I am willing to be wrong here, and I would love to be wrong, but as things stand, Glava is a solid lower bracket Commander that can get your Hydra’s out cheaply and have them be a solid size to be an aggressive green creature deck that benefits from +1/+1 counters.

Thank you for reading, see you all next time.

Peace,

From, J.M. Casual