Mirko, Obsessive Theorist (Ultra Pro playmat) | art by Heonhwa

Under surveillance…

Hello there! Welcome to EDHighlights, the mini-series where I build decks for the year's most popular commander for each color combination. As 2024's set releases have finished, I'll take a look at the most popular releases from the past year.

Here, I talk a bit about each of the most popular commanders, and build a deck for them with a little twist to keep things interesting.

I've built a deck for each mono-colored commander (you can find those at this link), and I'm now moving on to the two-color commanders.

We'll be continuing our look at two-color commanders this week with a Dimir deck, and our first precon face commander so far!. This deck will be led by… Mirko, Obsessive Theorist!

This is, surprisingly, our third commander from Murders at Karlov Manor. Truly, I would not have expected this set's commanders to have gotten so much love from the community.

And, as some of you doubtless already know, this is actually Mirko's second card. The underpowered Mirko Vosk, Mind Drinker released over 10 years ago in Dragon's Maze as part of the “guild champion” cycle.

The version of Mirko is certainly much more powerful than the old one, and it's certainly interesting to see how Magic design can represent the same Vampire so differently across these two cards.

Luckily for us, we're working with a more powerful, more modern version of this high-ranking Dimir guild official. Let's see what new Mirko can do!

Lively Dirge

Mirko is a 1/3 Vampire Detective with flying and vigilance for 3 mana. Interestingly, Mirko is one of just 46 non-colorless creatures in the Dimir color identity that has vigilance! I'll leave the ScryFall shenaniganry to DougY, though, and keep talking about our Commander.

Whenever we surveil, Mirko gets a +1/+1 counter. And, at the end of each of our turns, Mirko puts something with less power than he has onto the battlefield from our graveyard with a finality counter on it.

Mirko's reanimating ability is pretty strong, even with its restriction. While it should be relatively easy for us to cheat out a lower power value creature Copy Catchers, getting bigger creatures onto the board is a harder task.

What if, hear me out, we didn't have to get our own big creatures onto the board? What if we could let our opponents do all of the work?

I think that sounds like a great plan, so that'll be this deck's twist. In addition to the classic Dimir graveyard tomfoolery that can be expected out of a Mirko deck, this deck will include a high number of 0-power clones that we can reanimate with ease.

Who are the agents of the Dimir?

So, why are clones good in this deck? And which ones are the best out of the 18 in the deck? Those are great, pointed questions and I'm so glad you asked them.

Clones are great, in general, because they're essentially an extra copy of the best thing on the board. If we happen to have the best creature on the board, great! We've broken Commander's singleton rule. If one of our opponents has the best creature on the board, great! We've probably paid less mana for a copy of that creature than they did. Either way, we're happy.

But, in a Mirko deck specifically, clones get even better. Most of them have 0 power/toughness, because they enter as a copy of another creature and grab their power/toughness, meaning they can be reanimated by our commander the turn it comes down without any extra work.

But, not all clones are created equal, so let's talk about the best ones. We're looking for clones that do more than, well, Clone. Although it's a classic, it's been outclassed recently.

A lot of clones can provide removal, which is a really nice benefit for any Commander deck. Wall of Stolen Identity can lockdown a powerful attacker, but unfortunately can't attack itself. I still think this is a great tradeoff, as our opponent will usually care more about their creature's ability to attack than we care about our clone's ability to do so.

Next up is another “soft” form of removal, Mocking Doppelganger. Goad is a fun way to control the board in Commander, and having that stapled on an on-rate creature clone is pretty nifty.

Last but certainly not least is Evil Twin, which can straight up kill the creature it copied after one turn rotation. 

Next up are what I'll term “utility clones,” ones that have extra, non-removal centric benefits. Modern Horizon 3's Copycrook is one of my favorite cards from the whole set. It can fill our graveyard, filter our hand, and gets progressively more threatening as the game goes on.

I'm also a fan of Pirated Copy, and not just because of the punny name. Stapling a beefed-up saboteur effect on a clone is really, really good. This may just be the best clone in the whole deck. And, no clone-centric deck would be complete without a way to get around the legend rule, like Sakashima of a Thousand Faces.

This can let us copy our commander if we're so inclined, and it lets us make multiple copies of any other legendary creature that seems particularly appealing.

Assume every conversation is on record

But, unfortunately, we can't make the whole deck out of clones. To maximize Mirko's effectiveness, we need ways to surveil, payoffs for that surveillance, and maybe even some generic graveyard nonsense.

First, let's talk about ways to surveil. Although Ravnica: Clue Edition had less than 50 new cards, a few of them are particularly intriguing. Dimir Strandcatcher is one of them, acting as a repeatable surveillance engine and a card draw engine. Plus, it can hit the board just one turn after our Commander.

I love cards that contribute to a good curve-out! Also from Ravnica is the terrifying Doom Whisperer This big guy can fill our graveyard on demand, and will grow Mirko each time we choose to do so.

And, there's Gossip's Talent. This card does it all, giving repeated surveil triggers, making creatures unblockable, and even getting rid of those pesky finality counters.

There's also a collection of creatures that surveils when they enter, and are totally cool with being put in the graveyard. The best among these is Unshakable Tail, which surveils once every turn, makes Clues, and can come back from the graveyard as needed.

This is a great card, and feels purpose-built for the deck (because it was! It came in the original Revenant Recon precon). Aside from that little gem, there's a collection of spells that let us surveil while gaining either board control or card advantage. Pile On is a (usually) free removal spell that just so happens to have “Surveil 2” tacked on as an added rules text bonus.

Given the number of creatures this deck has, we'll usually be casting it for free. There are other pieces, from cantrips to lands, that let us take the game actions that every Magic deck wants to, but surveil while doing so.

Pauper-legal Sinister Sabotage is a great example, acting as a bog-standard counterspell that surveils along the way.

There's nearly 30 ways to surveil in this deck, but there's other ways to fill the graveyard too. My personal favorite is Ledger Shredder. It's a flying threat that inevitably gets bigger and provides card advantage/selection (depending on your definitions of the terms) over the course of the game.

There's also a small collection of Entombs to fill the graveyard in a more precise manner. Given that Mirko can reanimate something on each of our turns, Entomb often means that we're putting the creature directly onto the battlefield at our end step.

And, if we've got mana to spare, there's Syr Konrad, the Grim. He can mill every player at the table with his activated ability, and ping our opponents for a lot of damage as the game goes on.

Most thought the Dimir had been wiped out. This suited the Dimir perfectly…

And, to skirt the restriction that finality counters put on our gameplan, there's a few ways to get rid of them. Soul Diviner can turn those counters into cards, Fain, the Broker can turn them into Treasures, and Heartless Act is a kill spell that can remove counters in a pinch.

With the decklist thoroughly inspected, here's it in its entirety:

Improvisation is for those who failed to prepare.

That's all for this week! Thanks for reading to the end. There are two cards that I wasn't able to talk about during the earlier sections of the article, and I'd like to bring them up here. Thoughtbound Phantasm and Dimir Spybug are fantastic cards in this deck.

When Mirko is inevitably removed from the board, these two little guys can act as great backups. They both grow when we surveil, and Dimir Spybug even has some built-in evasion. In longer, grindy games, these two creatures will really shine.

I'll see you all next time, when I look at the year's most popular Rakdos commander!