Hello and welcome to Commander Bites!

Today we are going to be taking a look at Daxos the Returned!

Daxos is a three mana 2/2 with whenever you cast an enchantment spell, you get an experience counter and for a white, black, and a generic you put a white and black Spirit enchantment creature token onto the battlefield with the ability “This creature’s power and toughness are each equal to the number of experience counters you have.”

Game Plan

Daxos being an enchantment matters Commander is pretty interesting since there are a solid number of cheap enchantments and enchantment creature we can cast to start accumulating the experience counters and can be used to keep the board under control.

The idea of the deck is to get as many experience counters as we can with a good number of utility enchantments and then get some bigger and bigger Spirits onto the battlefield.

Support

We can start with some solid cheap enchantments and enchantment creatures to help us get the ball rolling.

Spirited Companion is pretty easy to put into the deck since when it enters you get to draw a card while also getting a cheap early enchantment creatures that can attack or block as you need. Another solid utility enchantment that we can get on board early is Seal of Cleansing, which we can sacrifice to destroy an artifact or enchantment.

Blind Obedience can make our opponents artifacts and creatures they control enter the battlefield tapped while also having extort for us to drain our opponents whenever we cast another spell or we can also use Authority of the Consuls to only have our opponents creatures enter tapped but when a creature our opponents control enter we gain 1 life.

We can also use Grim Guardian to great effectiveness because whenever they or another enchantment enters the battlefield under our control then each opponent loses 1 life, and since it is an enters trigger then the Spirits that Daxos makes will also trigger the Grim Guardian.

Aegis of the Gods gives us hexproof, Phyrexian Arena draws us an additional card at the beginning of our upkeep at the cost of 1 life, and Soul Snare can sacrifice itself in order to exile a creature that is attacking us or a Planeswalker we control.

There is also one of the better ways to protect ourselves if we have a large number of enchantments with Sphere of Safety, which makes it so creatures can’t attack us or Planeswalkers we control unless they pay X for each of those creatures where X is the number of enchantments we control.

We can also get to some of the more esoteric enchantments that provide some other forms of utility like Changing Loyalty, which has flash and replicate for two mana and is an Aura that makes it so when the enchanted creature dies we return it to the battlefield under our control. Using a selective board wipe like Split Up, which can destroy either tapped or untapped creatures, can give us some of our opponent’s better creatures.

Since the Spirits that Daxos makes are also enchantments, then we can use cards like Greater Auramancy to give those enchantments shroud while also giving enchanted creatures we control shroud, so if we want to keep Daxos safe with something like Kaya’s Ghostform which makes it so that when the enchanted permanent dies or is exiled it comes back to the battlefield, Daxos is safe from a board wipe or targeted removal at the same time.

As we reach the top end, we have access to something like Demon of Fate’s Design, which allows us once each turn to cast an enchantment spell by paying life equal to its mana value rather than casting it normally and can boost itself by letting us sacrifice another enchantment to give it +X/+0 until end of turn where X is the mana value of the enchantment.

While not an enchantment themselves, Ajani’s Chosen also works really well because whenever an enchantment we control enters we make a 2/2 Cat creature token and if it was an Aura that entered then we can attach it to the token. It works really well to make an even wider board with Daxos because it is an enters trigger and not a cast trigger to make the Cat token.

Resurgent Belief is a great spell for us to also have as a recursion piece because we can suspend it for two turns for two mana and then when we do cast it we can return all enchantments from our graveyard to the battlefield to take advantage of all the enters abilities that these enchantments have.

Setbacks

Our primary card type is enchantments which while the card type does have ways to get rid of a bunch of them, enchantments seem to be much more resilient than artifacts.

This doesn’t mean that we can’t be aware of mass enchantment removal because those cards also happen to often be tied to mass artifact removal as well as a modal option.

It can also be a bit difficult to get some of the experience counters in the early game because you need Daxos in play while also having man up to cast a cheap enchantment and to potentially protect Daxos while you’re at it.

What’s more, our interaction suite are essentially on board tricks that we can use to deal with something, but that comes with the downside in that your opponents know that you have removal on board and may either play around it, or force you to use it on a less than ideal target because they are going to try and remove it before you can use it on a much more effective target.

This deck is deceptively mana hungry because we need three mana to cast Daxos and three mana to activate his ability and the mana that we need in order to cast the enchantments that give us the experience counters that we need in order to make the Spirits.

Our colors will struggle a bit on mana because while white has access to catch up ramp and black has rituals, we struggle in being able to generate a consistent amount to be effective for more than one turn or immediately when we need it in a majority of cases.

Bracket Rating: 3

Daxos sits solidly in the middle in being a deck that can control the battlefield with a number of enchantments while still having a decent amount of access to removal and protection.

The deck will be slower than ideal since a lot of enchantments can only be cast on your turn the deck can struggle a bit against faster decks, but the benefit is that the deck has much more opportunities to stabilize and come back, especially with how hard it is to deal with experience counters.

Thank you for reading, see you all tomorrow!

Peace,

From, J.M. Casual