Legends Legends - Sol'kanar the Swamp King

The time has come! We've waded through enough six-mana vanilla legends that we can move on and play something fun again! This time around, we're digging into Sol'kanar the Swamp King. We basically never see a commander with a landwalk ability these days; the last legendary printed with a landwalk effect was Hazezon, Shaper of Sand and his thematic desertwalk effect, and before that not since Chatterfang, Squirrel General. 

How can we build around Sol'kanar to get the most out of his swampwalk effect? Today, on Legends Legends, we take on The Swamp King on his home turf.

General Thoughts

Sol'kanar the Swamp King is a five-mana 5/5 with swampwalk - already a better rate than any of the Legends uncommons. In addition, whenever a player casts a black spell, Sol'kanar gives you one life. That's not a whole mess of value, but we can definitely lean into both of those abilities easily in EDH.

Obviously, Sol'kanar excels into other black decks, which works out great in this format. It's few and far between where you sit down for a Commander pod and no one's running black. On the off chance that you end up at a table of entirely Talrand, Sky Summoner and Krenko, Mob Boss players, we can use a number of spells and abilities to change our opponents' lands into swamps, or change Sol'kanar's swampwalk to match their land types. All we have left to do is to swing in with our swampwalking commander and his minions and we'll have this game sealed up!

Playing Black in Blue and Red

Really, this Sol'kanar the Swamp King Commander deck is a mono-black deck masquerading as a Grixis deck. For instance, a handful of our spells exist to change the types or colors of our opponents' cards to better suit Sol'kanar. Dream Thrush and Spectral Shift are our two best ways to warp the board's colors. While Dream Thrush is our only repeatable source for this effect, Spectral Shift has the added utility of changing the color of a spell or permanent instead of just changing a basic land type. This is useful in the edge cases where your opponent tries to storm off with their Niv-Mizzet, Parun deck, and you change Sol'kanar's effect to trigger off of red spells instead.

If we need a more permanent solution to swampification, consider Blanket of Night, Contaminated Ground, and Evil Presence. Each of these enchantments changes the landscape to a boggy mess, miring all who would dare oppose us. Cyclopean Giant is a creature that can make a land a swamp when it dies, as well. 

I want to call out three more cards in this section: Thrull Wizard, Dash Hopes, and Withering Boon make our nearly mono-black deck feel like we're still in Grixis, giving us access to counterspells our opponents won't see coming.

Big Swamp Energy

We won't stop once we've got all those Swamps down. We'll press our mana advantage and use Caged Sun, Gauntlet of Power, and Crypt Ghast to double up on our total amount of available black mana, perfect for dumping into our wraths or a massive Consume Spirit/Exsanguinate. 

Cabal Coffers, Cabal Stronghold, and Magus of the Coffers add some much needed consistency to this effect.

We're running Burnished Hart and Liliana's Shade, to fetch Swamps out of our library, as well as Liliana of the Dark Realms herself. 

Once we've accumulated all that black mana and damaged our foes repeatedly with our Dread Presence on their way in, we'll dump it into creatures like our Dirtwater Wraith or Misery's Shadow to make them into honest-to-God threats. Additionally, that big mana makes it easy to cast our high-CMC cards, like Pestilence Demon, Ancient Brass Dragon, and Corrupt. It'll keep our Breeding Pit in play so we always have a chump blocker or something to sacrifice to our Hecatomb.

Finally, if we can keep the mana up for our Dash Hopes or Withering Boon to deal with a board wipe, we should use Kormus Bell to turn our 20 Swamps into fighting men ready to do the evil bidding of Sol'kanar, so long as that bidding is to attack for one damage each.

Life Gained, Life Loss

With all that mana, you bet your butt we're casting a lot of black spells, and each one of those will trigger Sol'kanar and gain us one life. One measly life doesn't seem like much, but we can use other triggered effects in tandem with Sol'kanar to turn this middling effect into a game-ender.

The first and most glaringly obvious inclusions in this category are Sanguine Bond and Vito, Thorn of the Dusk Rose, plus Defiant Bloodlord and the brand-new Enduring Tenacity. These spells hit the field at a variety of different times, and they'll only get better the more we can stick. Pipsqueak versions of these effects are present in Starscape Cleric and Marauding Blight-Priest. Really, we want as many of these static pingers on the field as possible: we want to deal three or more damage for every one life we gain. 

Well of Lost Dreams is amazing lifegain synergy for any deck without access to white. It gets us that much-needed draw power to keep our hand full while also giving us an excellent outlet for all that extra mana we're generating.

Witch of the Moors is our main recursion effect, but the consistency with which we'll trigger it makes me feel alright with it as our only source.

Just in case Sol'kanar the Swamp King's effect alone isn't enough, we're running two more sources for a similar effect in Staff of the Death Magus and Demon's Horn. We've also got additional sources of lifegain in Whip of Erebos, Gray Merchant of Asphodel, Bontu's Monument, and Syphon Soul.

What do we do with all that extra life? Spend it, of course! We don't have to go over cards like Bolas's Citadel and the havoc it can cause, but also consider how many cards we'll be able to draw with our Greed when we have 100 life and 100 black mana available.

Other uses for our huge life total include, but are not limited to, using it as a buffer for our symmetrical board wipes, like Crypt Rats and Pestilence Demon.

Drowned in the Swamp

So, how does this deck actually win? There are a few options.

The first, and arguably easiest, is a commander damage win from Sol'kanar. Most players are running black (this is a fact, don't look it up), but even if they're running mostly nonbasics, we can still give them a Swamp with any number of Evil Presences or Dream Thrushes present in our library. We can slap Shade's Form on Sol'kanar to speed up the clock on our opponents, potentially getting each player in one swing.

We've also got no shortage of life drain effects that'll happen fairly passively for us throughout the game. By just building up to Sol'kanar with Enduring Tenacity, Marauding Blight-Priest, and Starscape Cleric, we can churn out value from our commander's static ability while we focus on protecting him.

Finally, we can always use any of our big, thematic beaters to Timmy our way to victory. Swampwalking Wrexial, the Risen Deep can potentially cast some black spells from our opponents' graveyards (triggering Sol'kanar and all of our life-drainers), and Pestilence Demon and any of our Shade creatures make excellent dumps for all of our extra black mana. Of course, I don't have to explain how Exsanguinate and Corrupt play into this deck.

Mana Base

This deck needs to hit a swamp every turn at least, so we're running a critical mass of 37 lands, 20 of which are basic Swamps! This is a great chance to pick your favorite Swamps from across your MTG career and stock your deck full of them. 

Besides our 37 Swamp and Swamp-adjacent lands, we're running the standard package of mana rocks, minus most of the multicolor ones you'd typically find in a Grixis deck. This means we have Sol Ring, Arcane Signet, and Charcoal Diamond, but no Signets or Talismans. Take a closer look at the deck list and you'll see why: the only red pip in our entire deck's converted mana cost comes from Sol'kanar the Swamp King himself, and there are a mere five blue pips from Dream Thrush, Wrexial, the Risen Deep, Spectral Shift, and Mask of Riddles. 

Sol'kanar the Swamp King Decklist

Budget

This deck has an estimated cost of about $293. That's on the expensive end for a Legends Legend, so let's take a look at some budget options.

Ancient Brass Dragon is the most expensive card in our deck, followed shortly by Cabal Coffers. The former is just a big, expensive rare I have lying around, and can easily be replaced with something as simple as a Grave Titan for a top-end beater. The latter is a little harder to go without, but we could swap in an Expedition Map and use it to find Cabal Stronghold every time.

Wrap Up

Sol'kanar the Swamp King is one of my favorite Legends Legends yet. He's a hilarious surprise when he hits the field and is followed by an Evil Presence or Contaminated Ground, and he inspires looks of awe and confusion as he runs out a Kormus Bell for some reason. 

How do you like Sol'kanar? Should this deck run more red spells? How would you build around the newer Sol'Kanar the Tainted? Also why is "'Kanar" capitalized on the new card, but not so on the old one? What gives! Let me know in the comments!

As always, thanks for reading!