Power Sink - Kykar's Swan Dive
December 7, 2023 by
Lenny Wooley 
Kykar, Wind's Fury | Art by April Prime
For the Birds
Welcome back to Power Sink, the article series where we take a look at the commanders at the top of the pecking order, and try to land somewhere different with them. This time we're getting down with Kykar, Wind's Fury.
Kykar rules the roost of Jeskai commanders on EDHREC, with 8,461 decks at the time of writing. It's easy to see why folks flock to this one. For the simple act of casting a noncreature spell, Kykar rewards you with a 1/1 flying spirit which you can sacrifice for red mana. This means you can fire off expensive spells much quicker than normal, provided you're casting cheap stuff in the early game. Noncreature spells tend to have some of the most powerful effects in the game and Kykar gives you the space to fill your deck with them by giving you blockers.
White, blue, and red are the colors to be in when it comes to what this commander wants to do. Red and blue have tons of impactful instants and sorceries, as well as payoff cards for casting them and the same can be said for artifacts. One could argue that white is the less helpful color here, but I think having access to the best token support and board protection spells is another feather in Kykar's cap. Let's take a look at the average deck to see what kind of fowl play folks are up to.
Kykar - Average Deck
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Kykar is far from the only card that makes tokens off of casting spells, and the average deck contains a flight of similar effects. Saheeli, Sublime Artificer, Third Path Iconoclast, and Monastery Mentor all make tokens off casting noncreature spells, while the likes of Talrand, Sky Summoner and Young Pyromancer make them off of your instants and sorceries. Even Kykar's mana ability can be replicated with Storm-Kiln Artist. Token doublers like Anointed Procession and Mondrak, Glory Dominus are in use here as well, so it's not hard to imagine a scenario where you make an army off of casting a single Brainstorm
Attacking with a token army isn't bad, especially when you're making fliers, but this deck is making use of Jeskai Ascendancy and Narset, Enlightened Exile to ramp up the damage output for simply doing what the deck wants to do. This is supplemented with direct damage effects like Guttersnipe and Fiery Inscription. Impact Tremors is where things really fly south for opponents if you managed to land multiple token makers beforehand.
With the addition of card draw engines like Archmage Emeritus and Whirlwind of Thought, this deck becomes an overwhelming value engine that rewards the simple act of casting spells. Of course, the average deck doesn't give you the whole story with any commander, much less one that casts as wide a net as Kykar. There are tons of powerful build paths for Kykar, including the Divergent Control cEDH deck which uses Divergent Transformations to exile spirits from Kykar to cheat Leveler and Thassa's Oracle into play to win on the spot since they're the only creatures in the deck.
Admittedly, the deck is currently considered outdated by the cEDH decklist database, but that still speaks highly of Kykar's potential. So how are we clipping this Bird's wings? We're into one of my favorite decks to come out of Modern, Seismic Swans. Adapting a Modern deck designed to beat one opponent at 20 life for a Singleton format with three opponents at 40 life is quite difficult, but I like to think I'm a talon-ted deck builder and I'm up to the challenge.
Swan Dive
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Two Birds with One Stone
For anyone unfamiliar, the gist of Seismic Swans is discarding lands to Seismic Assault, hitting Swans of Bryn Argoll and drawing you two cards, repeating the process until you have enough lands in hand to eliminate your opponent.
These are both fairly unique effects in the game, but luckily we have a few stand-ins. If we don't find Seismic Assault, Molten Vortex can do the same thing although it is limited by our available red mana. While we have to flip Invasion of Kaldheim to get the effect we really want, that's not an unreasonable proposition given our flying commander and tokens. Body of Knowledge is another "swan", though it doesn't prevent the damage done to it.
With so few of these cards available, it's going to be catastrophic to lose any of them. For that reason, we've got a suite of protection spells. Clever Concealment, Blacksmith's Skill, and Teferi's Time Twist are great for their ability to protect any permanent type. Counterspell, Negate, and March of Swirling Mist can also be used proactively to deal with threats. Finally we've got Boros Charm, because it saves everything and sometimes we can make that double strike matter.
I tend to avoid tutors in my decks, as they don't foster the sort of play experience I'm going for. For this deck, however, the experience I'm going for needs specific cards. To find our swans we can cash in one of Kykar's sprits with a Polymorph effect, which will find one of the two creatures in our deck, and put it into play. Enlightened Tutor can find our Seismic Assault or Proteus Staff if we haven't found a swan yet. Finally Long-Term Plans can find us anything we need, we just have to wait a few turns for it.
Considering the bloated life totals and extra opponents in the format, we can't really rely on drawing enough lands to take the game. We can use Trade Routes or Sunder to get back the land we've played back in hand. We can get those lands back with Crucible of Worlds or Planar Birth, or just shuffle them all back into our library with Elixir of Immortality. City on Fire and Fiery Emancipation triple our damage output, reducing the number of lands we need to throw at our opponents. We can also increase our card draw with Teferi's Ageless Insight and Thought Reflection. This is going to help find us find our Seismic Swan combo, and it's going to make that combo much more reliable once it's up and running.
As fun as this all sounds, the truth is that it's all fairly fragile. Relying on a few specific cards means we might not draw them, or our opponents might manage to slip removal past our defenses. While it does seem like all our eggs are in one basket, we've got backup plans. Impact Tremors is great early game to soften up the opposition when we make tokens, but it can be useful to close out the game as well. We can also put those tokens to work in combat by pumping them up with with Jeskai Ascendancy. Since our commander is also a sacrifice outlet, we we can readily make use of Vicious Shadows to deal with those players that just love to keep a full hand. Finally we can have Kykar grab Blackblade Reforged and threaten opponents with commander damage.
Leaving the Nest
In all honesty, I tend to shy away from brewing decks that lean on tutors like this one for my articles. I worry that it would be hard to sell a deck as "powered down" when you're tutoring for one or more pieces of your victory condition. On the other hand, they make some wild decks possible in a Singleton format and while I prefer variance in my decks, sometimes it's fun to play a deck where you can be certain to "do the thing" every time. That's all for now, but in the meantime, hop in the comments and tell me the strangest card they've ever tutored for.
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Lenny Wooley
Lenny has been in an on again off again relationship with Magic since Fallen Empires. He fell in love with Commander in 2010 when his friends forced him to build Niv Mizzet, the Firemind and has been with the game ever since. When he's not turning cardboard sideways or trying to justify using bad draft commons in EDH decks you can find him playing something from his massive board game collection or practicing the Brazilian martial art Capoeira. Follow Lenny on twitter @LennyWooley
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