"TIMEOUT!" Ok, everyone huddle up! We're late in the 4th quarter here and we're ready to close this game in style. Core 21 pre-releases tomorrow (there's still time to preorder your booster boxes and pre-release kits!) and we're going to celebrate that by doing 3 more of these quick hitters today. The first up is a strangely fun and unique Commander that is going to do some crazy fun things - Niambi, Esteemed Speaker!
While Niambi's first ability is a great way to protect a creature or gain some life to stay in the game, we're going to focus this build around her second ability: discarding legendaries and ultimately reanimating (bringing back creature cards from the graveyard directly to the battlefield) powerful, often angel, creatures. So how are we going to about doing this? The X's and O's of this quick hitter are fairly straight forward - 1) fill our graveyard with 2) powerful creatures that we will then 3) reanimate. There will be a lot of room in this build for customization and adding cheap, fun legendaries (check out Dominaria legendaries to start). Alright, let's get to it!
Thought Scour ($0.37), Mind Sculpt ($0.25), Taigam's Scheming ($0.09), Frantic Search ($0.39) and Careful Consideration ($0.23) are all going to do an amazing job in the early turns filling our graveyard, filtering our card draw and straight up drawing us cards. These 5 cards will help us set up our reanimate engine early in the game so we can start to take over games quickly. But what are we hoping to put into our graveyard?
Akroma, Angel of Wrath ($0.94) and Reya Dawnbringer ($0.86) are both legendaries that can be discarded with Niambi's ability. Akroma is a tough angel that is very difficult to get rid of and Reya will allow us to continually reanimate creatures out of our graveyard during each of our upkeeps. Angelic Skirmisher ($0.58), Dawnbreak Reclaimer ($0.46) and Emeria Shepherd ($0.81), while not legendary, are powerful creatures that once on the battlefield will continue to bring back more creatures or give our creatures added ability keywords. So now that we know what creatures we want to reanimate, how are we going to go about doing it?
White offers a lot of very good reanimate spells, but they come at a cost. Luckily, Commander has a lot of ways to ramp in early turns so making sure your deck has access to ramp in the form of artifact mana rocks will be key. But these reanimate spells offer a lot of bang for their mana cost. Miraculous Recovery ($0.12) is the best of the bunch being instant speed, but Breath of Life ($0.31), Resurrection ($0.14) and Defy Death ($0.22) are all very powerful in their own right. So get to reanimating! With this quick hitter close to being finished, our MVP is now going to make an appearance:
Body Double ($0.54) is just an incredibly versatile all-star in this deck. It can act as an additional, but better, version of a reanimate spell turning itself into a copy of a creature in our graveyard. OR it can become an even more powerful creature in one of our opponents' graveyards. The versatility of this card makes it a unanimous MVP in the deck.
The best part of this quick hitter is the price, all 15 cards are under $1 and come in at a whopping total of $6.31!
What I love most about the legendaries of Core 21 is that they all feel unique and diverse for cards of their color and that makes them so fun to build decks around. Niambi, Esteemed Speaker is no different!
I hope these articles are providing a creative deck building spark for you! I'm excited to play against all these fun decks soon and even build a few of them myself!
Stay Super,
Tim