Today I am kicking off the next iteration in the Commander precon breakdown series. I last finished up Commander 2016, a set renowned for its four color commanders. Commander 2015 also brought us something new to experience, with experience counters. Each of the precon’s commanders had their own way of gaining these counters, and benefitted in various ways from them. We’ll start the series off with Daxos the Returned, the white-black enchantment-loving spirit maker, and Underworld Coinsmith, the star-eyed accountant from Nyx.
Underworld Coinsmith features the ability Constellation, something that triggers every time an enchantment comes into play under your control. Just like Daxos, we want to be running a fair amount of enchantments so as to get the most mileage out of our commander. While Daxos can spend mana to make an army of spirits, the Coinsmith can spend mana and life to bleed the table out.
Looking at the second ability of our commander, a similar card comes to mind. Pestilence is a Pauper favorite, commonly run with Guardian of the Guildless and Wall of Hope. Pestilence is also used here as a pseudo board wipe, as only the toughest of creatures can survive the damage. Since the Guardian has protection from monocolored, he is nearly unblockable and untargetable, and thus, unkillable, even by Pestilence. Wall of Hope is also used here to sustain our own life total while we sink mana into Pestilence.
Because our commander, and Pestilence both hurt us, we need to find ways to maintain our life total. Since white and black are both great at life gain, this shouldn’t be much of an issue. But what are some great life-gain enchantments? First up, we’ll be taking the cards that give lifelink, sort of. Two of these cards don’t give the ability lifelink exactly, even though it functions the same way. This means that we can double or even triple up on lifelink on a single creature for maximum gains.
Other enchantments that will be useful for us are one that can return themselves to our hand. We can then recast these, and gain a bit of life again. Most the enchantments that can bounce back to hand are variants of Pacifism. This is useful to prevent the most threatening creatures our opponents control from dealing damage, while boosting our life total and surviving the small hits.
Since we’ll be gaining large amounts of life throughout the game, I think we can safely include a few cards that require life as payment. Typically in a game of Magic, you want to keep your life total high; but remember, it is only the last point that truly matters. If we think of our life as a resource to spend, it opens up new directions for us to explore.
While we’re focused so heavily on enchantments, we should take a look at cards that can make good use of them. Our commander has the ability Constellation, so let’s see what other cards have it as well. And since most enchantments are non-creature spells, we can include a card or two that benefits from casting them.
Since we have a pile of enchantments to keep bouncing to hand and recasting, we can be extorting our opponents quite often. The more permanents we run that we can keep bouncing back to hand to recast, the more value we can generate throughout the game. As such, I think we should run a fair amount of spells that can flicker and bounce our cards.
So what other cards can utilize the bounce house fun? We obviously want cards that have enter the battlefield abilities, but which ones are the most valuable? I would argue that card draw and removal effects are the most valuable. Luckily, in black, we have a high amount of both readily available to us.
I think the last card type to talk about should be from the Coinsmith’s home plane, Theros. There, we were introduced to a new mechanic, Bestow. Bestow only appears on enchantment creatures, so these cards will be triggering our commander, while providing bodies or auras. Something I like about bestow is that if the enchanted creature dies, then we get the bestowing creature in play. This doesn’t mean the creature comes into play though, it just changes from enchantment only to an enchantment creature.
Well, I feel there isn’t much left to discuss about this Coinsmith. While I only talked about one direction you can take this in, feel free to explore the myriad other options available. Maybe you want to build spirit tribal instead (there’s around 80 spirits to pick from!), or something else I could never even think of. I hope to see you all again next time as we take a look at the necromancer Meren of Clan Nel Toth, and her PDH counterpart Golgari Guildmage!
-Nate
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