cEDH Commanders With Activated Abilities
Welcome back, readers! With the Mox Masters Invitational on the horizon as well as a host of other large cEDH events being added to the calendar by the day, it is worth expanding on the metagame shift I covered in the latest State of the Metagame article; namely the rise in commanders featuring value-oriented activated abilities. The primary decks that fall into this category that have seen massive increases in stock recently are Kinnan, Bonder Prodigy, Tayam, Luminous Enigma, and Sisay, Weatherlight Captain.
Longtime staples, like Thrasios, Triton Hero and Kenrith, the Returned King, are in the conversation as well, but are more well-established entities in the format and have actually lost a bit of their position in the format to these newcomers directly. Let's dive in!
What's So Special about Having an Activated Ability, Anyway?
Respect for costly activated abilities that can be used over the course of many turns is ironically best developed through Limited play. Low power level games tend to lead to high amounts of excess mana later in the game after all cards have been exhausted but the deck has not been powerful enough to end the game. Given that cEDH is an extremely high-powered format, especially when compared to Limited, it seems like an odd pairing for the expensive activated abilities of commander creatures to be impactful in cEDH.
This manifests in plenty of discussions around the abilities too, where activating Thrasios, Triton Hero is mocked as a four-mana investment to only earn one card. When you're working with cards like Necropotence and Ad Nauseam in the same format, four mana for one card hardly seems like a deal.
What changes the dynamic is the cost to have access to the effect. When you don't have to invest a card in your deck, hope to draw it, and then finally cast it, having access to Thrasios, Triton Hero as a thing to do if you have exhausted all your other spells and have a bunch of the ubiquitous cEDH mana laying around with nothing to spend on, the deal is much more enticing, so while I do not believe it's comparable or recommended to put Spectral Sailor in your decks, having a thing to spend mana on in games that end up with everyone low on resources at almost no cost has proved to matter in games.
What puzzled me, however, was the recent rise in dominance of decks that aren't solely interested in having a mana sink laying around in case of emergency, but decks where activating the commander is the entire gameplan! Effects like Kinnan, Bonder Prodigy where you pay seven mana to maybe hit a specific card type and advance your board hardly seemed like the best way to spend seven mana in a format as expansive as cEDH after all? So what changed to make this powerful? The answer has to do with the specific objectives of the rest of the decks in the average tournament cEDH pod.
The Rise of Stack-Based Interaction
During the infancy of cEDH tournaments, I spent a chunk of time exploring why linear, mostly uninteractive, low-color decks were seeing so much success. After all, everyone told me Tymna, the Weaver + Kraum, Ludevic's Opus was the best deck in the format at the time, but still, decks like Godo, Bandit Warlord, Magda,Brazen Outlaw, and even Yeva, Nature's Herald were winning events! It didn't add up.
While I believe there were a lot of factors at play at the time, chief among them was the lack of decks seeking to interact with their opponents' win attempts. Many players were showing up with decks looking to execute their gameplan as quickly as possible with as much built-in resiliency as possible in order to blow the doors off the rest of the pod while dodging interaction. While this can work some of the time and in small doses, it doesn't work long-term, and over the couple years since that observation we have seen the presence of those strategies wane away in favor of colorful, highly interactive decks finding success instead.
For commanders featuring powerful activated abilities, even at a slightly higher cost, this is the ideal scenario. Building decks that are interested in compounding upon the high density of interaction that shows up and winning the game one activation of your commander at a time only works when the majority of the decks at the table are at a standoff, with hands full of interaction, primed to shoot down anything resembling a win attempt.
As the cEDH metagame has developed to respond to the fast linear decks by packing as much cheap and effective interaction to disrupt them as possible, the value of being able to win the game outright without casting any spells is increased dramatically, to the extent we see a dramatic shift in favor of decks constructed this way.
The New Sheriffs In Town
There have been many iterations of Thrasios and Kenrith decks looking to leverage this phenomenon in cEDH since they've been legal, and both cards are colorful enough that you will see them show up in cEDH pods still, but the commanders finding the most success recently feature activated abilities that present advantages in the format of card advantage as well as mana advantage. In the case of both Tayam, Luminous Enigma, and Sisay, Weatherlight Captain, the activated ability stapled on provides not only card advantage by adding a permanent on the board of some kind, but also provides mana advantage by putting the selected permanent directly into play without casting it, rebating you some amount of mana from the activation you would otherwise spend casting the card if it was drawn instead.
In the case of Kinnan, Bonder Prodigy, the mana ability is actually separate entirely from the activated ability, which has a massive sticker shock at seven mana, but with Kinnan's static ability pumping up all the mana sources you play in your deck anyway, the seven-mana pricetag is a bit misleading and actually costs you a much lower amount. Each of these decks snowball their advantage by activating their commanders repeatedly in a game of cEDH, all while not casting a single spell that can be interacted with by opposing counterspells.
In fact, the blue decks among the trio, Sisay and Kinnan, can leave large amounts of mana untapped and use the threat of activation of the commander to mask the interaction you might also have access to and put opposing prospective winners in a bind being unsure what to play around.
For nonblue variations, like Tayam, simply proactively putting a few stax elements into play can often slow the game down enough to allow Tayam to be cast and activated, with the activated ability of Tayam in particular providing a little extra insurance against removal that could otherwise remove your stax pieces.
Gotta Keep 'em Activated
For as long as tournament cEDH pods are heavy on stack-based interaction and going far past the early turns of the game, decks like these are going to continue to see massive success. The most obvious response, at a glance, is to actually regress your deck choice back to the philosophy we saw a couple years ago: simply winning as fast and resiliently as you can. As long as you're the interactive deck with the weaker engine, you'll continue to struggle against these decks placing powerful, albeit relatively slow, engines in the command zone. Alternatively, you can try to bring more efficient answers to these engines at large, but you're only allowed to play with one copy of Cursed Totem, so this may not yet be possible.
Being able to punish the slow setup of these decks is difficult on your own, however, as the play patterns that got us to this point involved other decks stopping win attempts while these slower decks spent their mana casting their commander and starting to activate them. There needs to be a much broader shift than a single person, and we may be in for a long winter full of control strategies if cEDH tournament pods continue to contain the density of stack-based interaction we have seen over the last few months.
Where do you think the cEDH metagame is headed next? Let me know in the comments, and thanks for reading!
