Legends Legends - Hunding Gjornersen
All good things must come to an end: we've taken a nice vacation into the three-color rares of Legends with Sol'Kanar the Swamp King, so we must now descend back into the unplayability of the two-color uncommon legends. Today, we're brewing around the legendary Human Warrior Hunding Gjornersen. He's as charming a companion as one could hope for, so we're looking to build the most pleasant Commander deck we possibly can to highlight his good nature and general agreeable personality. This can only mean one thing: group hug!
General Thoughts
Hunding Gjornersen is a six-mana 5/4 with rampage 1. This deck probably won't make much use of poor Hunding. While he's a fairly strong body, he won't close out games on his own, and we need the slots we'd otherwise spend on cards to buff Hunding for our group hug mechanics.
Instead of turning Hunding into a beatstick, we're playing up the charming company he provides by building around a group hug theme. Giving our opponents lots of draws and disincentivizing them to attack us is our path to victory: before they know it, they've drawn out of their decks completely or haven't been able to stop our impending Approach of the Second Sun. This pod is all fun and games and hugs until Hunding Gjornersen hops down to end it. Let's dive in!
Both Charming and Terrifying
Many of you have built a group hug deck before. You know that it requires a certain balance between cards that help you and cards that help your opponents. In this Hunding Commander deck, we're primarily benefiting our opponents by letting them draw cards. This is a tried-and-true group hug tactic, as it's guaranteed to speed up the game.
Two standards for blue group hug draw include Kami of the Crescent Moon and Dictate of Kruphix. Howling Mine and Ghirapur Orrery help, too, with the Orrery also helping everyone filter those lands out of their hands and onto the battlefield. Well of Ideas takes these common extra-draw effects and one-ups them to keep us on top of the advantage hierarchy.
Even our counterspells will compensate them for their loss with more cards in the form of Arcane Denial.
We're also running a handful of the gift mechanic cards from Bloomburrow. Starfall Invocation takes the place of a traditional board wipe, and Dawn's Truce is our stand-in for a Teferi's Protection.
Once we've filled everyone's hands, let's help them cast spells with Victory Chimes and Spectral Searchlight. If they need colored mana, we can always make An Offer You Can't Refuse.
Finally, the classics Prosperity and Minds Aglow might be mid on their own, but when we combine them with our draw synergies, they'll go nuts.
Playing for the Draw
Don't play to win, play to draw! Okay, actually, we're playing to win by drawing a ton of cards. With either of our two powerhouses [card]Consecrated Sphinx[/el] and Smothering Tithe in play, all those extra cards our opponents draw will be much more valuable for us in the long run. Trouble in Pairs keeps our foes from getting too crazy with those extra cards. Wedding Ring also helps with this.
While we don't have many offensive capabilities in this deck, we can make ourselves a very unappealing target by dropping two or more from our Propaganda, Ghostly Prison, and Windborn Muse cards. We'll use Fog Bank and Wall of Shards in tandem with Perch Protection and Dawn's Truce to keep us alive after a few attacks inevitably break through.
Nice Guys Finish First
The eternal question for all pillow-fort-adjacent group hug decks remains: how does this deck actually win? In Hunding's case, we have a few options.
The first and probably most common with this deck will be through combat damage with a horde of creatures that depend on our hand's size to win. Whether they're Teferi, Temporal Pilgrim's Spirit tokens or Body of Knowledge or just a huge Twenty-Toed Toad, we have several options for making huge creatures to threaten the table with.
The other options require some specifics: with so much access to card draw, we have an opportunity to pull off a Triskaidekaphile victory if we can swing it. In a similar vein, we can use all that card draw to cast our Approach of the Second Sun a second time without waiting seven turns to draw into it (note that you can use Mystical Tutor to pull it from the seventh-from-the-top position to the top at instant speed to seal a surprise victory!).
Finally, since we're such an unappealing target for attacks, both Azor's Elocutors and Felidar Sovereign's alternate win conditions are relatively easy to achieve, especially if we have a lifegain player within Wedding Ring distance.
Okay, and I guess we can swing Hunding Gjornersen around, but his real impact on the board without a Blackblade Reforged attached to him is middling at best and straight-up detrimental at worst.
Mana Base
White and blue aren't the fastest mana-producers on the color wheel, so we've had to devote a not-insignificant portion of our library to mana rocks. Besides our 36 lands, we're also running 10 whole mana rocks. The standard package of Commander ramp is here plus Pearl Medallion and Sapphire Medallion, which help us reach those high-CMC spells like Emergency Powers and Approach of the Second Sun.
Budget
The approximate total for all the singles in this Hunding Gjornersen Commander deck should run you about $300. That's gotta be one of the steepest decks yet for Legends Legends, due in no small part to our Consecrated Sphinx, Smothering Tithe, and Trouble in Pairs. Let's take a look at some budget options for these Commander staples.
Monologue Tax is heralded as the poor man's Smothering Tithe, and I think that's a fair assessment. In this deck, where we plan to give our opponents as many cards in hand as possible, it's not unfeasible to think we can see a similar amount of advantage generated from both of these enchantments.
Consecrated Sphinx is a little harder to replace here. We just get so much value off of this creature, it can feel bad to swap it out for something a little more basic like Aeon Chronicler, but another form of draw payoff, like The Watcher in the Water or Nadir Kraken, could serve just as well.
Decklist
Wrap Up
Is this deck a bit of a stretch for Hunding Gjornersen? Maybe. Is it undeniably a group hug deck with several win conditions that it can easily tutor for with Mystical Tutor and Noble Benefactor? Yes! While this may be less thematically resonant than the other Legends Legends, this Hunding Gjornersen group hug deck shines as a testament to the charming companions in our lives.
How would you build around Hunding Gjornersen? Is there a way to make his rampage effect matter more in an Azorius deck? Let me know what you think in the comments!
Thanks for reading!
