MTG Commander of the Week: Syr Konrad, the Grim
Check out a new featured Commander to add to your build list! This week features Syr Konrad, the Grim, a knight who’s here to El-drain your opponent’s life.
Welcome Planeswalkers and Praetors to our new series about the best casual experience in Magic: Commander. For the uninitiated, Commander is a semi-casual format for Magic: the Gathering. You use a deck of 100 cards led by a legendary creature, aka, your Commander.
Aside from basic lands, you are only allowed one copy of each card in the deck. Moreover, you can only include cards in your Commander’s “color identity” or artifacts. Each color and color combo has a unique playstyle and a wealth of mighty generals to lead your deck to victory. EDHRec.com is an excellent source for Commander info and can give you ideas to build your next Commander deck or tune an existing one.
The Commander
A knight from the plane of Eldraine, Syr Konrad is the textbook Black card. He has higher power than toughness, he’s a bit expensive, and his abilities revolve around the graveyard and loss of life. Whenever a creature hits the graveyard from ANYWHERE, or leaves the graveyard, each opponent takes one damage. That means not only death does the damage, but recursion, too. Just to make sure you get that ability off, has a secondary effect that allows you to force the table to mill a card, potentially giving you reanimation fodder, draining your opponents’ libraries, and dishing out a bit of damage.
Featured Cards
This card is the whole package: it’s cheap, it fills your graveyard, and it empties it at the same time. For the low price of one Black mana, you can bin a creature to return a different creature to your hand. That means 2 damage as long as Konrad is on the field.
If you have enough mana, you can cycle this over and over again until your opponent is defeated. Once that cycle starts, your opponents really will be living a Tortured Existence.
This one is a bit of a double-edged sword, but it’s well worth the papercut. Angel of Suffering protects your life at the cost of cards from your library. However, every time your library empties, Konnie is going to throw out some heavy damage. If you just HAPPEN to have a Living Death, you can make the cost a non-issue, and Angel of Suffering can keep bringing the hurt with barely any crack back.
MTG is ever-changing, with new busted and broken cards rising to the top. Check back in next week for another featured Commander.
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