Meria taps artifacts for mana and card advantage. It’s clearly red-green, but it does so in an unusual way. The Commander is a ramp piece. Play less ramp and focus on the Meria game plan.

There are three major ways to play this commander: Equipment, Stax, and Cheerios.

Equipment can be tapped for mana to pay for costs. This is a pretty simple concept, and you can tune it up or down based on the equipment you include. It is open-ended. I love this play style.

Stax decks can tap their artifacts to negate their downside. Winter Orb is the main player here. If you want to be less cruel, you can instead play “fair” artifacts that only work when they are untapped. Howling Mine, Blinkmoth Urn, and Genesis Chamber are cute effects that work wonders with Meria.

Combo Meria plays more like Jhoira and Urza decks. We can spend our mana on combo wins, storm spells, or big beaters. I’m fond of Aeve, Progenitor Ooze, Hunting Pack, and Stormscale Scion. You can use these huge threats to keep the pressure on multiple players.

Regardless of which variant you play, be sure to include some artifacts that untap themselves for extra value. Traxos, Scourge of Kroog, and Battered Golem are amazing picks!

What I love about Meria is her modality. You can swap out a handful of cards to make the deck more or less powerful based on your meta. Replace the storm spells with equipment. Or replace your Stax pieces with Howling Mine style effects for a less polarizing experience.

Tocasia is a powerful card selection engine. All creatures including Tocasia have vigilance and can Surveil 1.

She is a great option for an artifact reanimator strategy. We cannot play Goblin Welder-style effects, but we do gain access to honest artifact reanimate effects. Abuelo’s Awakening, Against All Odds, and Argivian Restoration, are all fair, but powerful effects. Combine this with some token generation and Tocasia will help you find what you want when you need it!

There are some great “becomes tapped” synergies you can include too for extra value. Quest for Renewal lets us untap all our creatures. Drumbellower and Seedborne Muse give us some extra redundancy.

Unctus, Grand Metatect gives us an extra card selection for tapping our creatures!

Tocasia’s second ability gives some redundancy if the game goes long. 10 mana worth of artifacts could be game-ending. Once she is exiled, we can return her to the command zone to do it all over again.

Kinzu is a great choice if you love powerful abilities in your creatures. If you care more about the text box than the statline Kinzu is for you.

We can run this commander in a whole host of ways. I like her in aristocrats strategies. Play Fleshbag Marauder, sacrifice it, and make a 1/1 copy with Kinzu. Sacrifice the copy. Your opponent’s boards are now much smaller. All that death will make a Blood Artist or Zulaport Cutthroat happy.

You can take your pick of notable death triggers. But, for some extra value, consider cards with “Evoke”. Shriekmaw and Grief are worthy includes.

Remember, Kinzu’s copies have toxic 1. This means a light proliferate strategy is viable. Ichor Rats and Blightbelly Rats can quickly run up the poison.

If you prefer higher impact, look to Gray Merchant of Asphodel and Massacre Wurm. Direct damage and card draw will keep you ahead of opponents!

Niv brings a new format to the spellslinger archetype. Focusing on two color spells makes Jegantha a great build-around.

The Ravnica Commands and Strixhaven Commands are an excellent option. Primary Command, Witherbloom Command, and Boros Charm offer flexibility and power. Flexibility is the goal. So much choice means we always have the right card for any situation.

With all these multicolored spells, let’s focus on some synergy pieces. General Ferrous Rokiric, Tome of the Guildpact, and Hero of Precinct One make even small spells relevant.

We should also not forget Niv-Mizzet is a big dragon. Hexproof from monocolored is relevant. Swords to Plowshares, Bitter Triumph, Beast Within, we can shrug it all off. This makes Niv an awesome Voltron commander. Dragonfire Blade equips for free and gives +2/+2.

Agatha is a timebomb. You wait, bide your time. Assemble a board of relevant abilities, then Agatha lights the fuse.

Activated abilities cost X less to activate, where X is her power. Her second ability grants haste, trample, and +1/+1.

Agatha needs two pieces to pop off.
1. Power the turn she arrives in play
2. Abilities worth discounting

Power her up with Hero’s Blade and Bard Class to get the discounts started. Larger buffs like Beast Master Ascension are great too. Drillworks Mole is uniquely powerful in Agatha. It gets a discount while improving Agatha’s discounts.

The abilities you choose to leverage are what made the deck yours. You’ll want a selection of abilities that close out games. Bhaal’s Invoker is a draft-chaff card that becomes a machine gun once Agatha is big enough.

If Agatha reaches eight power Silvanus’s Invoker is a great wincon. It untaps a land and turns it into an 8/8. One big Agatha can animate all our lands in one swoop! Bonus points if you control a land that produces more than one mana. You can continuously tap and untap it for infinite mana! The Invoker could already do this with a Gaea’s Cradle and a big board. However, Agatha now makes this possible with a bounce land!

Agatha does not reduce the cost of abilities to zero. We still need some mana. Svella, Ice Shaper, and Magus of the Candelabra are fantastic options. They can ramp us, every turn thanks, so we never fall behind.

The Ancient One is a mixed bag of abilities. For two mana, you get an 8/8 that cannot attack or block unless you have eight permanent in your graveyard.

The huge body is worth the low cost. I would highly recommend Fetchlands here. You can begin to fill your grave very quickly. Cycling effects, Troll of Khazad-dum can fix our mana while filling our graves.

The Ancient One‘s second ability can fill our graveyard in the early game, or mill an opponent later on. This is a great mix of abilities. We can attack one player’s life total and another player’s library.

Leverage this ability to work in a reanimator package. Discard a big monster, mill an opponent, and reanimate it. The Ancient One attacks on all fronts!

Kos brings us a mix of red-white aggro, forced combat, and removal all in one. Double strike and vigilance are a great set of keywords to have!

Pick your favorite Sword of This and That for extra triggers! They all trigger when you ‘deal combat damage’. Sword of Truth and Justice is particularly potent. Swing with Kos, he is a 4/6. First strike damage, he gets a counter and proliferates. He is now a 6/8. Regular damage happens. You’ve dealt ten damage, kos is now an 8/10. That opponent is dead to commander damage next turn!

Moving to his second ability, we see the real power of Kos. When he enters or attacks, we suspect a creature. If that creature was already suspected, we exile it instead. A suspected creature has a menace and cannot block. Suspect does not go away. Once something is suspected, it stays like that!

This ability plays a double role in the deck. We can suspect the opponent’s creatures to help Kos get in for damage. Our opponents are now compelled to attack. If the creature cannot block, they might as well do something with it! But, they can’t attack us because Kos has double strike. They’ll almost certainly lose in combat. So they attack our opponents. They do our job for us!

On some occasions, we might want to make Kos suspect himself! For example, if a creature has hexproof, and we are unable to suspect it. Giving Kos menace helps us get in! Be careful with this strategy. Remember, suspect does not go away at the end of turn. You could be opening yourself up!

Vraska is a different style of theft commander. Whenever an opponent’s creature dies, we can pay one mana. If we do, it comes into play tapped under our control. The “downside”, it loses all other card types and becomes a treasure. If you steal a Gigantosaurus, bad news, it’s no longer a 10/10. But, most people are playing cards with powerful abilities! Vraska lets us take those cards, make them our own, and get value!

I love Vraska for her dynamic power level. It all depends on your opponent’s deck. This also means the deck is always different. You will never see the same board twice! Did your opponent just play a Fleshbag Marauder, pay one mana to return it to play under your control, and force everyone to lose another creature. Dream big, kill an opponent’s Vorinclex, Voice of Hunger, and you now have an artifact version of that effect.

At her worst, Vraska lets you spend stray mana and store it up as a treasure. Whenever a creature dies, pay one, congratulations you now have a treasure. This lets Vraska pay for future theft effects, or ramp into your next spell!

You’re going to want ways to kill creatures. Stock up on removal spells, and ideally recursive removal options. Viridian Longbow attached to Vraska is a nasty combo to keep the board clean!

Glarb has gotten a lot of attention outside of the casual space! He is an amazing cEDH Commander. This doesn’t mean you cannot play him casually, too. Allowing you to play lands and four cost spells off the top of your library leads to a ton of virtual card advantage.

Firstly, in cEDH Glarb is an amazing Doomsday Commander! We did a whole article on Doomsday a couple weeks ago. Check it out here!

For those not in the know, Doomsday exiles your deck and graveyard. You choose five cards to “become” your library and can be placed in any order! This makes for a fast win with Thassa’s Oracle.

Norin gives a unique form of card advantage to a red deck. When a creature you control becomes blocked you may exile it. You can play that card from exile this turn.

Norin puts your opponent in a difficult situation in combat. The ball is always in your court. Let’s say you attack with a Fury. If the opponent does not block, they’re taking a chunk of damage. If they block Norin triggers. At this point, you can choose to exile the creature.

If combat is favorable, you do not need to exile the creature. If Fury is going to lose in combat, you can just exile and recast it! This gives you a weird form of protection, and a chance to double up on enter-the-battlefield triggers.

Casting from Exile has great synergy pieces too. Iraxxa, Empress of Mars, Passionate Archaeologist, and Nalfeshnee come to mind!

Tinybones guarantees no game will be the same. Whenever an opponent discards a card you exile it with a “stash counter”. On your turn, you can play cards with stash counters. For four mana each opponent discards a card.

If Tergrid was too strong for your table, Tinybones is a low-to-the-ground version with huge potential. Tinybones gives you the flexibility to steal lands to keep your mana flowing. Tinybones can play a toolbox role by stealing any card type.

One other advantage of Tinybones is the hash counters. If Tinybones dies, those exiled cards will retain those counters. Whenever you get around to re-casting him, you will still have access to all those cards you exiled previously! This can make setting up for a big turn incredibly powerful. Maybe you exile a huge threat early in the game. You can recast Tinybones and immediately have an answer ready to go. Perhaps you exiled a counterspell, you now have access to countermagic in mono-black!