Hello and welcome to Commander Bites!

Today we are going to take a look at The Reaper, King No More!

The Reaper is a three or six mana 3/3 with when it enters you put a -1/-1 counter on each of up to two target creatures and whenever a creature an opponent controls with a -1/-1 counter on it dies, you may put that card onto the battlefield under your control only once each turn.

Game Plan

The idea of The Reaper is that we spread -1/-1 counters onto creatures our opponents control and then reanimate the ones that we like so that we can help develop our board. A good chunk of our game plan is to get the -1/-1 counters on creatures our opponents control.

What we also need are ways to get rid of the creatures that have the -1/-1 counters on them in an expedient way so that we have as many options as possible of which creatures we can take from our opponents, ideally at any time we can.

Support

What the deck needs most are ways to continuously get -1/-1 counters on creatures and luckily for us there are several ways we can make that happen.

Blowfly Infestation makes it so that whenever a creature dies, if it had a -1/-1 counter on it then we can put a -1/-1 counter on target creature. So even if we cast something like Scar on a small creature to put a -1/-1 counter on a small creature, we can set off a chain reaction to kill a bunch of smaller creatures by essentially passing the -1/-1 counters onto them, they die and then another creature gets the -1/-1 counter.

Everlasting Torment can also be a way for us to get a good number of -1/-1 counters on creatures because it prevents players from gaining life, makes it so that damage can’t be prevented and all damage is dealt as though its source had wither, making it so that our opponents attacking and blocking helped facilitate our -1/-1 counters.

In a similar vein, Massacre Girl, Known Killer makes it so that creatures we control have wither and whenever a creature an opponent controls dies, if its toughness was less than 1, we draw a card. This can be an extremely potent form of card advantage if we kill a bunch of creatures with -1/-1 counters.

To add onto that, there is also something like Hapatra, Vizier of Poisons which puts a -1/-1 counter on a creature whenever they deal combat damage and whenever we put one or more -1/-1 counters on a creature then we create a 1/1 Snake creature token with deathtouch.

Speaking of, we need ways to kill our opponents creatures that have the -1/-1 counters, not just through the counters themselves. Vhati il-Dal is a creature that can tap to make target creature’s power or toughness 1 until end of turn, which is perfect to use against a bigger creature to kill it through even just one -1/-1 counter.

Atomize helps by doing double duty since we can destroy target nonland permanent and then also proliferate, which means that we can get rid of something that either has no -1/-1 counters or can’t get those counters while also proliferating something that does have -1/-1 counters to potentially get rid of it as well.

Sudden Spoiling can also be a great surprise card to play against your opponents since it makes it so all creatures target player controls lose all abilities and have base power and toughness of 0/2 until the end of turn, which can deal with a lot of problematic creatures at once, especially after casting a Black Sun’s Zenith with X being two to give that many -1/-1 counters to all creatures.

Even with Black Sun’s Zenith being symmetrical, we can use something like Eventide’s Shadow as a way to gain a ton of advantage since we can remove any number of counters from among permanents on the battlefield and then draw cards and lose life equal to the number of counters removed this way.

Setbacks

With -1/-1 counters getting some more recent support, we do have better access to some tools that we didn’t have before, but there are still some major hurdles to contend with.

The biggest hurdle that we face is that +1/+1 counters is a very popular strategy and since having a +1/+1 counter and a -1/-1 counter on a creature cancels them out, we need to outpace the +1/+1 counters which can be pretty difficult since that archetype is much more well supported.

Not only that, but there are cards that incidentally give +1/+1 counters to creatures like Snakeskin Veil, which is a common enough protection spell that gives a creature hexproof while also giving them a +1/+1 counter in the process.

The other major hurdle to deal with is that The Reaper’s ability to take a creature is once per turn, which would not be that big of a deal since we have the option to take whichever creature, but the once each turn can be a bit difficult if we can’t kill a creature right away.

It also doesn’t help that some of the more repeatable ways to get -1/-1 counters happen to be symmetrical, which is not ideal for a Commander that has 3 toughness that needs to be on board in order to get the most out of their effect.

Our deck may also have some struggles against decks that aren’t playing creatures and are leaning more towards control through cards that are much more enchantment or artifact focused, and while we can deal some incidental poison counters, that isn’t the focus of the deck and we can only hope we are also playing against more creature heavy decks to deal with the opponents who aren’t playing creatures.

Bracket Rating: 3

I think that The Reaper is a solid deck that has to deal with the fact that there is not as much support as they would like.

The fact that there was any support in recent sets is excellent for the deck because otherwise The Reaper would have been a hyper niche strategy in its own deck, and there are still a lot of ways to get those -1/-1 counters on things. While the +1/+1 counter decks will be the biggest hurdle, I think that The Reaper can weather the storm against a number of other deck archetypes and still do decently.

Thank you for reading, see you all tomorrow!

Peace,

From, J.M. Casual