Kambal, Profiteering Mayor Commander Deck Tech
Kambal, Profiteering Mayor by Andreas Zafiratos
Flood the board with hordes of tokens and carefully navigate politics and parlor tricks with Kambal, Profiteering Mayor! Thunder Junction is filled with renegades, but every Western needs the long arm of the law, or so Styx says. We might not be collecting bounties, but we are making deals and sweetening them throughout the game, always taking for ourselves just a little bit more than we give. Get ready to make and break deals and hearts by sharing tokens and pain!
Kambal's Core Engine
With a commander like Kambal, there are going to be lots of tokens flying around, which can lead to board stalls. As such, we need to build in a similar vein to the Riku modal deck, valuing synergy over power. This is the sort of deck that requires a critical mass of similar effects. There are already plenty of Orzhov tokens commanders, so this deck needs to lean heavily into Kambal's ability to give ourselves the tokens we give others. Just about every card in the deck shares one or more tokens, enabling our board to snowball out of control while dividing the shared tokens between opponents, so our board always ends up bigger.
The Hunted creatures from Ravnica, Hunted Horror and Hunted Lammasu, represent some early multiplayer designs that play in an exciting way. The Hunted cycle, including spiritual successor Hunted Bonebrute, provides a tantalizingly powerful creature to the caster and powerful defensive creatures to an opponent in order to check the creature's power. Kambal gets around this, however, by giving us the same defensive tokens!
In addition to individual creatures that provide tokens when they enter the battlefield, we have some token-producers that provide bodies to opponents as a triggered ability. Combat Calligrapher makes Inklings for those who attack other players, while Benevolent Offering makes Spirits for opponents. While these are excellent political cards, incentivizing action elsewhere and providing tangible rewards, they're much better when we get those tokens, too.
Kambal Win Conditions
Our win conditions, for the most part, are extensions of our core synergies. Akroan Horse provides waves of tokens to opponents, and therefore us, and Mondrak, Glory Dominus multiplies the tokens further, getting out of hand really quickly. Cards that multiply effects get very nutty very quickly, like Mana Flare and Furnace of Rath, some of my personal favorites.
The multiplication gets exponential when we give multiple opponents tokens at the same time! When Haunted Angel dies, it gives tokens to each opponent, and Alliance of Arms can escalate quickly when it tempts opponents, as can Awaken the Erstwhile. The more that our opponents feed those effects, the more benefit they get, but we get multiple times that, as we get our original benefit plus whatever opponents get.
The beauty of the deck comes out with cards that provide "armies in a can": a big board with minimal investment. Plague of Vermin is a fun mini-game, creating a poker-like betting process and rewarding players for betting life with Rats. What they don't realize is that those Rats aren't carrying them to victory, they're escaping the sinking ship, as we get both tokens and life totals going down. Infernal Genesis is another exciting card, as each flip creates bodies equal to the converted mana cost of the flipped card. For a former pro like me, it's a card that evokes the Nassif vs Chapin "don't look, just flip it" moment from the World Championships!
Mana Spells
As a two-color deck, we don't need much mana fixing. Where the deck needs help is moving between stages of the game. As a result, our ramp mostly helps go from the mid game to the late game. Cards like Keeper of the Accord help to catch us up to green decks, while Bucknard's Everfull Purse provides tokens and passes around the table. Those tokens around the table synergize with our commander and give extra value.
Dowsing Dagger is an intriguing mixture of a card that synergizes with our commander and a card that ramps us. We give an opponent the Plants, get some Plants for ourselves, then attack a different player, flipping the Dagger into a potent land.
Removal
As a synergy-laden deck, Kambal wants a bit more removal than the average deck. After all, the outlaws of Thunder Junction need to be kept in line. Our removal results in the creation of tokens, which our commander then copies. Angelic Ascension, in particular, makes a large flying beater. This is usually a pretty nasty downside, but we're giving people creatures, so we can always just Angel-ify a nonthreatening token we gave someone and turn them into an ally, so their Angel is kind of our Angel, too!
Fateful Absence is a less-potent removal spell, but it's one of the few that turns a permanent into a token while also turning removal into card draw. As mentioned, we don't have to remove other players' cards; we can always remove the tokens we give them. This gives us the flexibility to play as controlling as we want to.
Repeated removal, like Transmogrifying Wand, can be a bit oppressive. We can mitigate this by gaining our own advantage off of the Oxen we sling around. Controlling the distribution of tokens makes it so we have a say in what Kambal copies, as he only copies the first source of token production on a given turn.
Draw/Advantage
One of the coolest cards to come out of the friends forever series is Wernog, Rider's Chaplain. I've never actually played with a friends forever commander, but I do love the idea of distributing Clues all over the battlefield, and Wernog is an amazing political card. It's also a single source of the Clues, which all come out at the same time.
Firemane Commando is an intriguing new card, rewarding us for attacking, as well as opponents for attacking each other. This provides incentives for breaking the board stalls that tend to form when giving everyone lots of permanents. Flumph is kind of the polar opposite: a defensive creature that rewards players for testing the waters and provides safe attacks for players looking to turn cards sideways and find a landing spot for combat-triggering commanders.
As a whole, the deck is looking to accrue advantage over the course of the game, building its own board by building up others. After all, if the criminals of Thunder Junction can assemble gangs, why can't the mayor rustle up a posse?
