(Jolrael, Voice of Zhalfir | Lorenzo Mastroianni)

Technically Playable - Jolrael, Voice of Zhalfir

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 Jolrael, Voice of Zhalfir.

Among the deluge of recent releases was March of the Machine: Aftermath. Widely considered a horrible product because of the five card packs, there are some absolute bangers in this set when it comes to cards for Commander. Land destruction is a pretty taboo topic in Commander and most playgroups won't have any in their decks. This means that any land-based decks are really well-positioned at the moment as the social contract protects your key deck pieces without any need to run cards in your deck to protect them.

Jolrael has two very relevant abilities that work amazingly in tandem with each other. The first ability turns one of your lands into a creature at the beginning of combat, with flying and power and toughness equal to the number of cards in your hand. This isn't forever though and that land stops being a creature at the end of your turn. While this doesn't allow you to go super wide, it does protect your creatures from sorcery speed removal.

The second ability allows you to draw a card whenever a land creature you control deals combat damage to an opponent. This fills up your hand to make your land creatures larger. This also draws you into everything else you need to make the deck tick - card draw spells to make your creatures even bigger and control magic to protect your lands from instant speed removal.

Throwing Hands

Card draw is really important in Commander, but when you're relying on your hand size being as big as possible it becomes exponentially more important. And if there is one thing I like, it's making huge creatures. And if there is one thing I like even more, it's making huge creatures even huge... er.

Since it's such an integral part of a Jolrael deck, I'm going to break down card draw into two sections:

1. Incremental & repeatable draw, designed to keep your hand full
2. Explosive, splashy draws, to make your hand & land creatures humongous

Incremental Draws

Whenever I build a deck, I always use a trick that my friend taught me. This breaks my card draw into two really distinguishable camps:

1. Cards that slowly draw you cards over time.
2. One-off card draw that draws a huge number of cards with the intention to have a huge turn.

Incremental draw is really important, as it allows you to consistently have resources and be able to interact with other players on their turns. This is even more vital when you're playing blue. You will of course know the famous (or infamous) cards that do this like Rhystic Study and Consecrated Sphinx. But these only scratch the surface of a massive iceberg of incremental card-draw permanents. Since there are so many, I'll just name a few of my personal favorites:

Rites of Flourishing gives you a bit of a two-for-one in that it will draw you an extra card every turn and allow you an extra land drop. This will be important for some of the cards I'll talk about later. There are some other turn-based draws as well, like Well of Ideas and Howling Mine but these only draw you one, or two additional cards. And only on your turn...

Enter Landfall cards. Tatyova, Benthic Druid, Aesi, Tyrant of Gyre Strait and Tireless Tracker. While you can only play lands on your turn, with cards like Evolving Wilds or any of the fetch lands (and yes, we will be playing all of the off-color fetches that can get Islands or Forests) to draw cards off of our lands. Tireless Tracker also gives you Clues that you can crack over time to draw cards.

Explosive Draws

But Jolrael isn't a Control deck. We're looking to turn creatures sideways, and we want those creatures to do 40 damage. And as we know from earlier in this article, the size of the creatures that Jolrael makes care about the size of your hand. Obviously, we want Reliquary Tower and Thought Vessel to keep our hand massive, but we also want to make our hand not just one or two cards larger but exponentially more so. I love modal double-faced cards (MDFC), and they could have an article to themselves, but Sea Gate Restoration is perfect for what we want to do, doubling the size of our hand will also double the power and toughness of the Bird that Jolrael makes and allows us to make some giant fliers to beat up our opponents with.

We don't need to deal with just drawing equal to our hand size though (mostly because there aren't many cards that do that) because we can also use Jolrael's Birds as a way to double our hand size. Since the Bird's power & toughness are the same as your hand size you can use cards like Greater Good and Rishkar's Expertise will therefore allow you to exponentially increase the size of your hand allowing your next bird to be much bigger.

Lastly is what I consider to be Simic's bread and butter. We're drawing cards and we're ramping and that gives us access to amazing X-costed spells. We obviously want to go over the top here as well with Nyxbloom Ancient and Virtue of Strength but I digress. Finale of Revelation is probably the best since it also gives you no maximum hand size, but Blue Sun's Zenith is also amazing since you shuffle it in. With the number of cards we're drawing here, you'll be able to use it multiple times in a game and will quickly make your hand larger than your library.

Not Every Subtitle Is A Pun, Here Are Some Alternate Win Conditions

So you make a giant 40/40 Bird and attack the player to your left, they're playing the worst color and Swords to Plowshares. What are you going to do? Probably cry. You also lose immediately to Maze of Ith (to which you'd probably cry too). Well, there is another way! Luckily, blue loves drawing cards and Wizards of the Coast realized that, so they made a bunch of ways to win off of drawing cards.

The biggest of these is Psychosis Crawler. It's a big beater based on your hand size, but with the added benefit of draining each opponent every time you draw a card. This is probably the least fun in my personal opinion, since there's no way to play around the drain effect. If you want something that will have a little more play around it at the table, you can also (or instead) run Ominous Seas which instead of just draining your opponent allows you to make some 8/8 Krakens for every eight cards you draw. Psychosis Crawler isn't the only creature that gets bigger with your hand size though.

The best non-Psychosis Crawler versions of these creatures are Body of Knowledge which draws you more cards when it takes damage allowing you to block and draw or attack indiscriminately into board states to fuel your hand some more and the new Duggan, Private Detective who has a very cool fight-esque ability that I wish could target players.

But drawing cards isn't our only way to win. Our deck is, at its core, a land-focused deck. I've played a few decks in the past that use different land-based strategies like Anthousa, Setessan Hero who are more focused on making land creatures to beat all of your opponents. While Anthousa is more likely to go wide naturally than Jolrael, you can still grab some of the cards from Anthousa. Sylvan Awakening and Kamahl, Heart of Krosa to turn your lands into an army.

But these are all very small creatures, and you'll need to use land anthems to make them big enough to survive to the next turn. Sylvan Advocate, the old standard staple, is fantastic in this role, but also equally susceptible to removal than a card I'd never heard of until I made Anthousa, Earth Surge. Until recently this card was... very bad, but we've had more and more cards that turn lands into creatures making this quite a good anthem for its mana cost.

The added benefit of turning lots of lands into creatures, instead of just the one per turn from Jolrael allows her to do the job of a budget ($0.49 on CardKingdom according to EDHREC) Ohran Frostfang or Toski, Bearer of Secrets. The deck has a lot of other value lines you can go down, including Slogurk, the Overslime to get value out of any lands that die, Jolrael, Mwonvuli Recluse to make the most of drawing multiple cards a turn and even your classic landfall payoffs like Scute Swarm and Rampaging Baloths to back up your Simic ramp packages.

That's "Free" Real Estate

No real estate in Commander is free (except your one land per turn) but what makes Jolrael's Bird lands much better is the type of real estate you use. The colloquially named "man-lands" are really good as they normally add extra keywords like hexproof from Lumbering Falls, ward from Hall of Storm Giants, or even indestructible from Darksteel Citadel and Cascading Cataracts these give you built-in options to protect your creatures from instant speed removal. While I played it before Hall came out I found Darksteel Citadel particularly powerful in my old Noyan Dar, Roil Shaper deck. If you want to be really brutal you can also use Inkmoth Nexus (currently in 17% of Jolrael decks) to set up some sneaky infect kills with the haste from Jolrael's ability.

If the birds aren't a big enough draw for you, you also have access to the Dark Depths combo with Thespian's Stage to create a huge indestructible flying monster. These utility lands are really easy to grab with all of the access to land tutors that green has. One card that I feel is underrated is Nylea's Intervention since it allows you to search for as many utility lands as you want/need while, for Jolrael in particular, also filling up your hand since you can only play one of these lands a turn.

Just like with the card-draw cards, these are a huge variety of utility lands, with as many options are there are deckbuilders. This gives each player a ton of opportunities to tweak and playtest Jolrael's landbase for their own personal tastes and playstyles. I personally jam Maze of Ith into any deck that needs to play the long game, and I also think that Glacial Chasm is great in this deck since you can use something like [Greater Good[/el] to remove it as necessary when you are ready to close out the game.

As with all Technically Playable articles, this was a very quick look at Jolrael, Voice of Zhalfir as a commander, and a few of the cards that can really make a deck with Jolrael as the commander tick. I'd probably fill the rest of the deck out with generally good Simic cards like Cultivate and Kodama's Reach to ramp and your usual interaction package of Counterspells and removal such as Reality Shift.

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

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.