(Katilda, Dawnhart Martyr | Art by Manuel Castañón)

Technically Playable - Katilda, Dawnhart Martyr

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

This version of Katilda is another one of those Commanders that feels really split between what it wants. On the one hand, you want some Spirit synergies, but on the other, you want to load up on as many enchantments as you can.

And while they both buff Katilda you don't want to split yourself too much on the synergies between them. No one wants a handful of Spirits with only enchantment payoffs.

In the Spirit of the game

Spirits are inherently a fairly aggressive creature type. Since a lot of them fly, they get around the issue that some other, lower to the ground, creature types like Goblins and Soldiers struggle with.

Spirits still gain the lords that other types get in the form of Drogskol Captain (which also provides hexproof, completely bonkers) and Supreme Phantom while getting cards like Selfless Spirit to keep their board healthy and Shacklegeist which helps to lock down boards that threaten you like Dragons and Demons.

Unfortunately Katilda is only white, so we're not able to run a lot of the good cards in the same way a deck like Millicent, Restless Revenant or Ranar the Ever-Watchful might, so we need to find other ways to make our Spirits dangerous in the same way.

Luckily, there are now 6,802 white cards legal in Commander (of which 163 are Spirits), so we have some to work with.

With only 143 decks of their own Oyobi, Who Split the Heavens may seem like a weak card, being a 3/6 for seven mana, but let's be honest.

In Commander, you often have seven mana by turn four or five, even in white, and Oyobi is incredibly powerful in any deck that cares about Spirits, and doubly so with a card like Katilda that needs as many Spirits as possible.

Effectively, what Oyobi does is make each Spirit you cast double up the power and toughness that it gives to Katilda while also creating a sizeable flying body that can help to keep you alive while you keep the pressure on with Katilda's commander damage.

Mono-white Spirits don't get cheap lords like Drogskol Captain, but that doesn't mean they get no lords at all. Gallows Warden and Spirit of the Spires are both half a lord, only buffing toughness while Long-Forgotten Gohei and Celestial Crusader act as lords closer to the kinds you expect in a kindred deck like this.

Additionally, white also gets Drogskol Reinforcements. While not a traditional lord, Drogskol Reinforcements gives all of your Spirits melee, which allows each one to get a max of +3/+3 as long as you are consistently aggressive, something this deck wants to be doing anyway.

And, of course, you need to be able to close out games. Chipping down your opponents with an array of cheap fliers often gets you there, and even though it isn't a Spirit, Priest of the Blessed Graf does give you access to a consistently large board in part thanks to the lack of ramp that often plagues mono-white decks.

Being able to make a lot of flying threats works perfectly with the deck's best finisher (and it's not even really close either) Moonshaker Cavalry.

Often heralded as the mono-white Craterhoof Behemoth, and for good reason. Giving all of your 1/1 fliers +x/+x for each creature you control and also give any non-fliers the evasive keyword as well will very often be enough to close out a game, even against the most resilient board states.

An enchanting alternative

But Katilda doesn't just care about Spirits, it also cares about the number of enchantments that you have. This version of the deck focuses much more on getting an evasive or a hard-to-kill threat, like Geist of Saint Traft, and using that to close out games.

Katilda is one part of this strategy but you can only enchant its disturb side once it's already died. Instead, we want to use cards like Ethereal Armor and All That Glitters to emulate the effect without the keyword.

The main issue with these Aura style decks is that you can easily run out of gas because they are so cheap to cast, and if you stack them onto one creature that then dies, you quickly lose them all.

To get around this we can use Mesa Enchantress, Sram, Senior Edificer and the new(ish) Enduring Innocence to keep our hand full and then you can use Mantle of the Ancients to return any Auras should your creatures die.

We can also quickly stack up our enchantment count in other ways. Ondu Spiritdancer is a really powerful option that allows you to copy the first enchantment you cast each turn.

This can very quickly get out of hand by copying something like Sigil of the Empty Throne to fill the board with angels or Soaring Lightbringer to make a ton of enchantment birds every time you attack.

You can also use this defensively by making copies of Ghostly Prison or Sphere of Safety to keep you alive until you can meet the critical mass of enchantments needed to either lock down the board or make Katilda into a one-shot machine.

If you decide to go down the Aura route, you can also run Light-Paws, Emperor's Voice, and Pearl-Ear, Imperial Advisor. Both of these cards have amazing synergy with Auras by giving you either card advantage in the form of raw card draw or the ability to search for silver bullet Auras, as well as (in the case of Pearl-Ear) making all of your enchantments cheaper.

This can lead to some really powerful turns by giving you access to cheap versions of Eldrazi Conscription, Mammoth Umbra, and the new Tempest Technique to finish a turn off after casting a ton of cheap Auras.

Por que no los dos?

But of course, you don't need to just go for one or the other. There are plenty of Spirits and enchantments to go around, and surprisingly, a lot of them synergize really well with each other.

One of the effects that seems to be very prevalent is creating Spirit tokens based on the number of enchantments you have. Hallowed Haunting was one of the earlier cards to do this and remains one of the more powerful.

Hallowed Haunting plays similarly to Sigil of the Empty Throne by giving you creatures whenever you play enchantments. The main difference here is that each of these Spirits is a mini Katilda, Dawnhart Martyr that grows based on your number of enchantments.

If you can play this on turn four and then play six more enchantments, you end up with six 7/7s, each with flying and vigilance, a board that needs to be wiped.

In a similar vein, Duskmourn gave us Ghostly Dancers an enchantment specific Eternal Witness that also gives you a 3/1 flier every time an enchantment enters the battlefield.

This important part here is that unlike Hallowed Haunting and Sigil of the Empty Throne it says enters instead of cast  meaning if you run it alongside anything that makes enchantment tokens like Soaring Lightbringer you can make a huge board very quickly.

There are also some Spirits that double up as enchantments. A lot of the bestow cards are Spirits, this means you can benefit from both the Spirit and enchantment synergies. Indebted Spirit gives you a really cheap option to bestow as well as having afterlife, creating another Spirit when it dies.

While it does synergise well Indebted Spirit is, however, pretty low on the power level of these kinds of effects. For this deck in particular, Eidolon of Countless Battles really pulls double duty by effectively being a second Katilda that you can equip to it if needed to halve the number of creatures and enchantments needed to get to that magical 21 commander damage.

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

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