Commander’s my jam right now. Thanks to the recent arrival of Fate Reforged, we have a cycle of weird-but-interesting commander options. Specifically, they’re monocoloured legends with offcolour activations, allowing your colour identity to expand beyond the main base cost, but still allowing the legends to be exceptionally easy to cast.
The one that’s been in my mind lately is Daghatar, particularly because his interaction with Hardened Scales. Hardened Scales is a fascinating card when you recognise how many things it impacts. It hits Evolve, it hits Graft, it hits Outlast, it hits Bolster. And Daghatar suddenly reads ‘2GGGG: Put a +1/+1 counter on pretty much anything.’
This isn’t cheap, but it does happen at instant speed, and it can happen in other peoples’ end-steps. Fucking with combat is a very useful power, let me tell you.
In this case, though, Daghatar’s colour identity is weirdly split between green and white and black. Normally when you make a commander deck, you can’t use the hybrid colours or halves of a split card whose colours fall outside of your identity even if they are spells you can cast. This means that a Daghatar deck, despite being Green-white-black in colour identity, can’t run Spitting Image (boo). When you make a Daghatar deck, however, you can build it to be two-colour, running the hybrids of the other colour.
That’s not too exciting, but it does interest me. Particularly it means that Gleancrawler can hang out in a white-green or white-black deck. It means the Ready half of Ready/Willing can go into a GW deck. It also means Pyrrhic Revival and Debtor’s Knell can slot into GW and Privileged Position can slot into a WB deck.
I’ll be thinking more on this as I acquire the other commanders. Daghatar is dirt cheap – eight cents. But Alesha is closer to three dollars. We’ll have to see what we see when we get to her.