After winning LotusCon and a few other large cEDH tournaments recently, Kinnan, Bonder Prodigy has a solid claim to the title of best deck in cEDH, which is particularly noteworthy in a format where having access to more colors is generally seen as a substantial advantage.
Most strong commanders offer a source of card advantage or a source of mana advantage. Kinnan offers both while only costing two mana, so it’s not too surprising that Kinnan is strong, but Kinnan doesn’t just offer “a mana advantage,” it doubles most of your mana production, typically more than paying for itself the first turn it’s cast, and scaling quickly from there.
Kinnan allows you to keep hands that only make mana. In fact, those are the best hands, because there’s not much better that you can do with mana than activate Kinnan. This allows Kinnan to play huge numbers of mana sources and keep hands that don’t do anything without Kinnan, but are extremely explosive because of Kinnan.
Additionally, Kinnan itself is a combo piece, making infinite mana with Basalt Monolith, and it even also provides something to spend the mana on that directly wins the game as long as you can convert your colorless mana into colored mana, so Kinnan offers extra mana, something powerful to spend mana on, and an infinite combo all in the command zone and for only two mana. Now that I write all that out, it really doesn’t seem reasonable, and it should come as no surprise that Kinnan’s a great deck.
With all the hype there’s been around Tymna/Kraum in the past, I felt kind of irresponsible not trying it. Now that I’ve played a lot of games and a small tournament with my take on the deck, I’ve come to some conclusions about it.
The commanders are strong, and having tons of sources of card advantage is nice. I understand why Talismans are popular in the deck, since your commanders are expensive and don’t generate mana and you’re hoping to draw enough cards that playing one land per turn isn’t enough throughout the entirety of the game. The deck has a lot of good control tools and can draw enough cards to reasonably police a table, as long as it has some support–if every other player is just trying to win, it’s almost never reasonable for one player to reliably stop all three of them.
Where I’ve had issues with the deck is its ability to close a game. Now, this is also a criticism of my own build. I have fewer tutors and no Ad Nauseam, so it takes me longer to find the pieces required to present a win. However, the cost of fixing this is drawing more cards that don’t help play the early game before you’re ready to try to win, which makes you less likely to get ahead early and makes it harder to sculpt a protected win. Maybe the solution is to build the deck to attempt a win in riskier spots some portion of the time so that it’s easier to close when you want to, but mostly I just feel like it’s playing a worse game than Rograkh/Thrasios or Bruse/Thrasios.
What I’ve come to realize gets back to the title of this article. In general, there are a lot of commanders with activated abilities that don’t look that strong like Thrasios’s ability, or look like they’re just there to provide color identity, like those on Sisay, Weatherlight Captain or Najeela, the Blade-Blossom, but these abilities are much stronger than they appear.
The reason these abilities are so strong is that they increase the number of ways you can win–specifically, they convert making mana into winning. There are a ton of two card combos that make infinite mana, but very few two card combos that directly win the game. Tymna/Kraum has to lean heavily on Thassa’s Oracle because infinite mana doesn’t win the game for them, which means they’d need to convert a two card infinite mana combo into a three card combo with a mana sink to win, and three card combos are much harder to assemble and resolve.
When I heard about someone playing an Oona, Queen of the Fae cEDH deck originally, I was confused. How could this unplayable control finisher possibly be the Dimir commander of choice, what does it offer that’s better than a cheaper commander? The answer was that Oona can turn infinite colorless mana into a win. That’s the only thing it does that matters, but it’s so hard to win a game with a Dimir commander unless you Thassa’s Oracle combo that it makes sense to want a commander that can give you a reasonable backup plan.
Personally, this makes me want to get back to playing Rograkh/Thrasios, since I like the speed offered by Rograkh and the lethality offered by Thrasios, which has the advantage over other commanders with a built in mana sink that it doesn’t need to find a way to make colored mana, but I think there’s a chance that Kinnan is just a better deck. The biggest problem with Kinnan is that it has to play a bunch of big creatures, which are fine, but not really cards you want to draw. Basically I think Kinnan has a stronger command zone and slightly weaker library than Rograkh/Thrasios, though I think the decks are somewhat comparable.
I’m also a fan of Sisay. Sisay’s a bit slower because the commander itself doesn’t make mana, but in exchange you don’t even really need to make infinite mana, and the commander itself offers a huge amount of lethality, and you also get to play the best cards from every color. However, the advantage of playing the best cards from every color is somewhat mitigated by the number of cards you have to play to work with Sisay–it’s like Kinnan where you have to play a specific moderately large threat package to make the commander’s ability actually work, and you never really want to draw any of the cards you’re trying to play only by using your commander’s ability.
For now, I intend to even more highly prioritize having a mana sink that can win the game in the command zone, but I’m wondering if I should take another crack at Tymna/Thrasios.
Tymna/Thrasios feels like a deck that should be really strong, but the community just hasn’t figured out how to build because there are so many options and a clear direction doesn’t really present itself.
I first tried building the deck very early into my exploration of cEDH, and I built it as a Tymna deck with Thrasios for colors. Now that I have a better understanding of Thrasios, I’d build it very differently.
Without Dockside I’d lose access to some infinite mana loops, but I could still play Kinnan/Basalt Monolith, Devoted Druid with Vizier of Remedies/Swift Reconfiguration/Machine God’s Effigy, and Gaea’s Cradle/Eternal Witness/Snap at the very least.
I took a break in the middle of writing to build that deck, and it looks very different from my last stab at Tymna/Thrasios. I think I like what this deck’s doing. You get access to the aforementioned infinite mana combos as well as Thassa’s Oracle with Demonic Consultation and Tainted Pact with Silence/Ranger Captain of Eos/Grand Abolisher to protect it, so the deck should be very good at finding a win, and you also get all the good blue and white passive card advantage engines on top of Tymna and Thrasios.
You get good creature removal with Swords to Plowshares, Deadly Rollick, Gilded Drake, and Orcish Bowmasters, and while you don’t get Fire Covenant, Culling Ritual is probably better. Really, there aren’t a lot of decks that get to play Green/Black cards, and Deathrite Shaman and Culling Ritual are both incredible,so I’m happy to have a home for those.
I’ve avoided any tutors that put creatures onto the battlefield to allow me to play Containment Priest and Grafdigger’s Cage in anticipation of a rise in the popularity of Kinnan, which feels weird in a Green deck, but I think Eladamri’s Call and the black tutors give me enough ways to find my combos.
I think this deck both looks promising and really shows how I’ve come to respect the power of Thrasios and what that looks like in deckbuilding.
Sam Black (any) is a former professional Magic player, longtime Magic writer, host of the Drafting Archetypes podcast, and Twitch streamer. Sam is also a Commander Cube enthusiast, and you can find Sam’s cube list here. For anything else, find Sam on Twitter: @SamuelHBlack.