MTG Commander of the Week: Brallin, Skyshark Rider

Check out a new featured Commander to add to your build list! This week features Brallin, Skyshark Rider, who swoops in to take a bite out of 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

Brallin is an interesting Commander, focused on both a cycle/chaos theme and making you…Sharks stronger. Every time you bin a card, you get to buff Brallin and ping your opponent. While this isn’t a lot of damage for a discard, it can make Brallin fairly powerful after just a few cycles.

Should you also include any sharks (we’ll get to that in a second), you can give one trample, helping it sink its teeth into your opponent rather than their creatures.

Featured Cards

You can’t have Brallin without his faithful companion, Shabraz. Shabraz fills in the slightly odd spaces left by Brallin’s abilities and gives your deck access to Blue and White. Shabraz snags the other side of cycle, giving you life and buffing Shabraz whenever you DRAW a card. Plus, you can give one of your Humans (probably Brallin) flying, combining evasion with punch. These two get on like a house on fire and should never be found apart.

To get the most out of this duo, you want to be discarding AND drawing cards. Change of Fortune is a great Wheel alternative without the hefty cost, and you get a similar effect. The more full your hand is, the better the payoff will be.

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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Author: Clint Lienau

From North Carolina to Texas and back to North Carolina again, Clint lives the life of a traveling artist. An avid gamer, writer, actor, pyrotechnician, and general nerd, he has finally turned his love of EDH into a career. When not busy being a clueless cowboy, Winterfell Bannermen, or whatever else acting life throws at him, he enjoys reading folklore from around the world, writing narratives for his Wargaming armies, or running D&D 5e games as a professional DM. Look for his storytelling podcast, By the Dancing Fire, or find him on Twitch at FeybornPhyrexian, where he produces MTG content.