Hello and welcome to Commander Bites!

Today we are going to be talking about Georgiou, Terran Emperor!

Emperor Georgiou is a six mana 4/6 that makes it so that you don’t lose the game when you are at 0 or less life and at the beginning of your end step you lose 3 life and draw a card, then if your life total is 0 or less, create ten 1/1 red Officer creature tokens.

Game Plan

Emperor Georgiou plays heavily into a play style of black that isn’t often all that good in Commander and that is using your life as a massive resource to gain advantages and using a low life total to your advantage.

Death’s Shadow decks from Modern are where this idea truly blossomed, but those decks have lost their potency over the years due to power creep. What Emperor Georgiou wants is us to pay a ton of life to gain a ton of advantage until we hit 0 and where we can be much more aggressive.

Support

Since we want to use life as a resource in the extreme, any cards that allow us to do so will be in high demand.

For a massive loss of life, we can use Cruel Bargain which for three mana let’s us draw four cards at the cost of losing half of our life rounded up. Another way we can use half of our life as a resource is Murderous Betrayal which can let us pay two black mana and pay half of our life to destroy target nonblack creature and that creature can’t be regenerated.

If you want a much slower way to have you lose your life, then we can get into the realm of something like Black Market Connections which at the beginning of our first main phase we choose one or more options between losing 1 life to create a Treasure token, lose 2 life to draw a card, or lose 3 life to create a 3/2 Shapeshifter token with changeling.

We can also use it in an some what offensive matter with something like Keen Duelist where at the beginning of our upkeep you and target opponent each reveal the top card of your library and you each lose life equal to the mana value of the card revealed by the other player and you each put the card you revealed into your hand.

There are also plenty of cards that let us pay a huge chunk of life like Phyrexian Processor which when it enters we pay any amount of life and then for four mana and tap we can make an X/X Minion token onto the battlefield where X is the amount of life we paid.

We also need some contingencies in order to make sure that we don’t los all of our life before we can get Emperor Georgiou in play, and Lich’s Mirror can be used as a way to hold us up for a bit where if we would lose the game, instead we shuffle our hand, graveyard and permanents we own to our library, draw seven cards and go to 20 life.

As far as how we win, if us gaining a massive army of Officers is not looking to be the ideal plan, then we can use some tricky cards to help us out. Repay in Kind is a card that makes each player’s life total become the lowest life total among all players, and if we are below 0 life like we want to be, then that will help us win the game.

Or if we are at a low enough life total when we use Repay in Kind but not 0, we can also use Bond of Agony, where as an additional cost we pay X life and then have each other player lose X life, which can help seal the deal.

Setbacks

This deck is a massive glass cannon deck, where we will be working to gain a lot of advantages at the risk of losing a lot of life.

Aggressive decks are going to be the bane of our existence, whether they be creature heavy or burn heavy, we are at major risk of losing a ton of life before we get Emperor Georgiou in play.

There is also the fact the Emperor Georgiou is fragile in that they have no inherent protection and even if we were to play something like Not Dead After All, if we are at 0 life and Emperor Georgiou dies, we lose due to state based actions when the revival effect is on the stack.

Not only that, but even if we could bring Emperor Georgiou back from the graveyard, exile based removal does squash that form of protection unless we have Kaya’s Ghostform.

We also have to consider that Emperor Georgiou is six mana to cast, which is a lot of mana and for a deck that is losing a ton of life all at once, if we can’t set up a board to keep ourselves protected until we get to Emperor Georgiou in play, we are going to be struggling for a bit.

Any incidental life loss that our opponents deal is going to add up along with us using our life to draw cards, make bodies, etc. that we need to be very mindful when to deploy our spells or lose much quicker than we would like.

Bracket Rating: 2

I think that Emperor Georgiou is an interesting Commander to play around with, but may struggle against higher powered decks.

Against the right opponents I think that Emperor Georgiou can provide a neat side game where your opponents are trying to get rid of the Emperor before you start paying an obscene amount of life to win you the game, but you are at risk of losing against decks that can remove your Commander or go wide token decks that can deal an immense amount of damage where you need to do everything to keep Emperor Georgiou in play or you will lose the game. High risk and high reward.

Thank you for reading, see you all tomorrow!

Peace,

From, J.M. Casual