(Aminatou, the Fateshifter | Art by Seb McKinnon)

Technically Playable - Aminatou, the Fateshifter

Welcome to Technically Playable, where our mission statement is "Every commander is Technically playable" (the best kind of playable). The way this works is every article will have a commander generated using EDHREC's random button, I'll talk through the card and then write about how we can build around it!

This week's random commander is

I'm an enormous fan of planeswalker commanders, with Daretti, Scrap Savant being my oldest, favorite, and most foiled-out deck that I own. I feel like planeswalkers add an extra layer of complexity to the game but I can also see why people dislike them in Commander (length of turns, lack of ability to interact, etc).

For this article, I'm going to look at Aminatou, the Fateshifter as a control deck that focuses on Aminatou's ability to repeatedly benefit from entering/leaving the battlefield effects.

Flickering Control

Exiling something in play and returning it (also known as "flickering") has been a really popular playstyle since the dawn of Commander as a format.

The early Derevi, Empyrial Tactician deck even introduced everyone's favorite Rhino Roon of the Hidden Realm birthing the age of flickering becoming a common mechanic. This was soon followed by Brago, King Eternal thus ushering in the true age of flickering any permanents for an insane amount of value.

My favorite way to play a "flicker" focused deck is to play it as an incremental advantage engine with control elements. This has become stronger over the years as spells have become less powerful and creatures with enters effects have become more and more impactful.

Value

Value is the idea of generating more than one card's worth of effects from something that you play. For example, playing Phyrexian Delver is good value because you get both the Delver itself and then a second creature for five mana.

There's a number of different cards that generate different types of value. In Esper (), you will often get some kind of card draw or draw and discard, reanimation effects like the aforementioned Phyrexian Delver, and even ways to rebuy spells or creatures from your graveyard to your hand.

The one thing you don't often get in these colours is ramp, which makes cards like Solemn Simulacrum even more valuable in shells like this.

Card Draw

When it comes to card draw from creatures, there's one creature that rules the roost, and that is Mulldrifter. The flexibility of the evoke cost if you just need to draw early in combination with the ability to play it for its full cost to keep a 2/2 flier around has always made it a desirable pick in creature-based decks that need some kind of draw.

What really makes it shine in decks like Aminatou that want to be flickering cards is the ability to evoke it and then before resolving the sacrifice clause of evoke, you can target it with an instant speed flicker like Eldrazi Displacer or Momentary Blink to not only draw from the evoke but also return it to play, draw a second time and then keep the creature afterward.

However in proper Modern Horizons fashion, we were given something to challenge Mulldrifter for its throne: Nulldrifter. While it does cost two more mana to hard cast, it's twice the size of its elemental predecessor and comes with annihilator 1.

While the difference between five and seven mana is a lot, Nulldrifter still has the same evoke cost as Mulldrifter meaning if you are looking to flicker it or use something like Not Dead After All to return it to play, you're paying the same amount of mana.

Lastly is a new card that plays the role of our repeatable card draw engine, Dour Port-Mage. What makes this frog so powerful is that it says "leaves the battlefield", meaning every single time we flicker (which is moving a creature from the battlefield to exile) we draw an additional card.

This means our commander's second ability not only gives us the value of whatever enters or leaves trigger the creature we target has but also gives us an extra card. Dour Port-Mage also provides a little utility in its ability to return a creature to its owner's hand.

While expensive, this allows us to replay our utility and value creatures if we don't manage to get any cards that flicker while also providing some protection if opponents try to remove them.

Other Value

While card draw is particularly powerful in Commander it also provides us with resources to generate value in other ways. It will come as no surprise to anyone who has read my articles before that I'm a huge fan of interacting with my graveyard, be that using spells with flashback, reanimation effects, or even ways to return cards to my hand to protect them from my opponents Tormod's Crypt effects.

This extends to Aminatou too. I think that the previously mentioned Phyrexian Delver and the new Metamorphosis Fanatic are amazing options to allow you to replay any creatures that may have died previously.

In a similar vein, while less efficient for your mana, you can also run Overlord of the Balemurk which can return creatures or planeswalkers to your hand. This can be game-changing towards the end of a longer game if Aminatou has died a couple of times and the commander tax is above what you can pay by allowing you to put her back into your hand to replay for cheaper.

In terms of helping to control the board, we have a lot of options for creatures to flicker. Probably the best is Ravenous Chupacabra since it has no limitations however Nekrataal is the original version of this effect.

If you're looking to also get some kind of benefit from your removal you can also run Noxious Gearhulk to gain a little incremental life or even Witch Enchanter or Loran of the Third Path if you need to remove some tricky enchantments or artifacts or even the expensive but impactful Luminate Primordial as a reuseable Swords to Plowshares

Our biggest issue in Esper is keeping up with the green player's mana. For this we can use Solemn Simulacrum as a catch-all with no restrictions on what lands we can get (outside of it being basics only) but if we want some redundancy and extra options the new Beza, the Bounding Spring allows us to create a lot of Treasure to ensure mana parity with any players ramping faster than is as well as being able to cushion our life total, create some Fish tokens to block and in the rare case that someone has more cards than us it also lets us draw a card.

The Flickerers

I've talked a lot about cards that are great to flicker, but what cards should be doing that? Soulherder has become a mainstay in this deck archetype since it was printed in Modern Horizons showing up in 57% of all flicker-centric decks. But Soulherder isn't the only one that can repeatedly flicker our permanents.

Teleportation Circle and Thassa, Deep-Dwelling are also incredibly powerful options for flickering creatures every single turn, with Thassa even having the benefit of built-in protection.

These cards are great for their consistency, triggering every turn, but there are some of-off cards that are powerful for other reasons. Ephemerate is amazing value at only a single mana and allows you to cast it the next turn for free with rebound. Restoration Angel is another card that has been around for 12 years but is still showing up in lists thanks to its flexibility with flash and the fact it can be flickered itself as part of a combo or can be returned to hand with a card like Dour Port-Mage.

For me though, Felidar Guardian will always be an iconic flickering card, not just because of its use in Standard are part of an infinite combo with Saheeli Rai but also because it can target any permanent, making it part of about a million combos.

As well as the cards that flicker each turn and when they enter, we also have a few that can be activated. These are very useful when you reach the mid and end of games as they are powerful top decks after board wipes that allow you to rebuild your hand and board by using up all of your mana on activations.

The two that I find best are Eldrazi Displacer and Mistmeadow Witch. While they are quite expensive abilities, three and four mana respectively, they also don't have to target your own creatures meaning you can use them to get value out of your own creatures or use them to exile your opponent's creatures to remove them from combat if they attack you, or you can use them to remove your opponent's tokens completely.

Bonus Round!

One of the reasons why flicker decks have become so popular is down to the sheer number of ways you can create additional triggers from your creatures. For Aminatou decks, there are a few that I would be doing you a disservice if I didn't mention. The most important, and arguably most powerful in a deck like this, are Panharmonicon and Virtue of Knowledge.

By allowing you to double up on any entering triggers that your creatures have, you can easily outpace opponents by drawing and ramping significantly more than them giving you a significant advantage in terms of resources creating a gap that is almost insurmountable.

The newer Panharmonicon, Roaming Throne should also get a mention here. While it's not a kindred deck, there are likely to be some creature types that you see more than others (like Elemental and Wizard) that have powerful enter-the-battlefield abilities.

However, what makes Roaming Throne particularly good is the fact it is a creature allowing you to repeatedly exile and return it changing the creature type associated with it to whatever you have in hand at that moment, this makes it a very flexible card but not as innately good as Panharmonicon.

Lastly is Oath of Teferi a powerful enchantment in its own right but in this deck, it serves a very specific purpose. While it doesn't double up the abilities of our creatures by itself it does work in conjunction with Aminatou, the Fateshifter to allow us to flicker multiple permanents.

This not only allows us to get additional value from our enter triggers but also any leave the battlefield triggers while also working in conjunction with cards like Felidar Guardian to create the core of a lot of the combos that Aminatou decks use to end game.

Winning the game

I always like to end these articles with a section on win conditions. While playing Commander is of course very fun, there has to be an end at some point and no one likes to be stuck in the limbo of a neverending game.

For this deck in particular I think stealing your opponent's creatures is a powerful way to win the game as it not only allows you to build up a bigger board than your opponents, but also prevents them from attacking you with their creatures.

Agent of Treachery is definitely the most powerful option as it allows you to permanently gain control of them, unlike cards like Mind Flayer. However I also feel that Hostage Taker is also a great choice, acting as an Oblivion Ring effect as well as allowing you to cast the card that you have exiled.

But that's not enough theft for me. I don't just want the creatures that are in play, I want everything! Sepulchral Primordial and Diluvian Primordial allow this by giving you access to the creatures, instants, and sorceries in an opponent's graveyard.

Why play your own deck when you can play everyone else's? By flickering these, it'll mean you can play both your own cards and everyone else's giving you effectively a 400-card deck.

While these are all very good win conditions for Aminatou, I would also recommend looking at Commander Spellbook as a source of potential combos for your commander decks. For Aminatou, I think this is one of the best combos the deck can use to end games on the spot:

You can simply use the infinite mana to play your entire deck or you can use the infinite enter-the-battlefield effects to mill everyone with Altar of the Brood.

As with all Technically Playable articles, this was a very quick look at Aminatou, the Fateshifter as a commander, and a few of the cards that can really make a deck with Aminatou as the commander tick.

Let me know in the comments below if you play Aminatou, the Fateshifter, if you want to build a Aminatou, the Fateshifter deck, or even if you just enjoyed this article!

Read more:

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Paul Palmer

Hey there, I'm Paul. I've been writing about magic for a really long time. I love to write about obscure commanders (one of my really early articles back in 2015 was about Skeleton Ship) and how you can make decks around them work, no matter how unplayable they are. I love Gruul, I love Mountains and I love casting Lightning Bolt.