(Mannichi, the Fevered Dream | Art by Martina Pilcerova)

Technically Playable - Mannichi, the Fevered Dream

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

When I started playing Magic (what must have been about 10 years ago now) I was very much a mono-white player. Not entirely because I got an Elspeth, Sun's Champion from one of my early drafts, but it certainly helped.

As I pivoted to playing Standard a little more competitively I was introduced to the glory of mono-red through Goblin Rabblemaster and Stoke the Flames.

My all time best event I went 5-0 at a GP main event that I didn't even want to play in before losing three rounds and dropping because I was no longer in the running for day two of the event.

Since those early Rabblemaster-filled days I've been a huge fan of red decks. Mono-Red, Jund, Rakdos Reanimator, I love them all.

It was also around this time that I was introduced to my one true love Daretti, Scrap Savant and I decided that I was absolutely going to build a deck for every single mono-red commander.

Fast forward to today and sadly between playing the game less often and not being able to keep up with releases, I no longer have that dream, but the endless hours looking at the mono-red EDHREC page have stuck with me. So when I saw Mannichi, the Fevered Dream was the commander for this article I was overcome with nostalgia.

Can't Block This!

Mannichi's main goal is to make a bunch of creatures have huge toughness, get them through unblocked and then switch their power and toughness for some solid damage.

This would be really easy to do if you were in blue and had access to skulk-enablers and cards like Tetsuko Umezawa, Fugitive to ensure you could get your low powered creatures through.

Unfortunately these types of effects are not as common in red, but they do definitely exist.

The best of these is probably Break Through the Line as it is repeatable and unlike cards like Goblin Tunneler and Pathmaker Initiate it doesn't need haste to be usable.

In the same vein Subira, Tulzidi Caravanner, is also a great fit here and while it is susceptible to a wider range of removal, it also has the upside of an ability that can potentially fill up your hand if you decide not to switch any of your creatures power and toughness after the blocking step has passed.

The Best Defense is a Good Offense

But just getting your creatures through isn't enough. Swapping a Wildfire Eternal's power to four is good but it's not enough to win in a game of Commander, so we need to beef up those numbers.

The goal here is to beef the creature's toughness up without getting their power too high so that we can still use our Break Through the Line effects to ensure our creatures connect.

Luckily, there's an Equipment (or loads of Equipment) for that. Probably the best option is Slagwurm Armor, this card effectively gives your creature six extra power while not making it untargetable by the unblockable effects that we are running.

Similarly but with smaller numbers are Accorder's Shield and Cathar's Shield, which are free to cast and give +0/+3 with the downside of being expensive to equip, so you may want to consider something like an Armory Automaton or a Brass Squire to help.

We also have access to some creatures that are great at this by default. Dancing Scimitar becomes an unblockable 5/1 flier that can easily remove planeswalkers, or with Slagwurm Armor can deal 11 damage to a player each time it attacks.

Similarly, Ensouled Scimitar can become a Dancing Scimitar or give another creature the +1/+5 buff.

Equipping an Ensouled Scimitar to a Dancing Scimitar gives you an unblockable 2/10 that ends up dealing 10 damage while still remaining a legal target for any of your unblockable buffs.

We can also go a little larger on the scale with creatures like Earth Servant who can deal huge amounts of damage thanks to being in a mono-red deck but trade off the ability to be unblockable for that raw power.

The Modern Horizons 3 Commander decks have also given us Inversion Behemoth, a back up to Mannichi's ability and a solid beater that can still be made unblockable with Break Through the Line.

One small benefit of this is that because it says "any number", you can pick and choose the creatures whose power and toughness you want to change at the beginning of combat. This means you'll never accidently punish yourself by forcing all of your own creatures to change before you make them unblockable.

I Just Think They're Neat

As well as our hard hitters and our unblockable-enablers there are a lot of small interactions with Mannichi's ability that make a lot of cards you might never think of playing in Commander into real powerhouses.

One of the best ways to play Mannichi is with the wide array of weak power, higher toughness double striking creatures in the game. The way to balance double strike in Draft is to make the creature quite weak but with a reasonable toughness to survive combat. This makes Mannichi great by allowing you to swap the power and toughness around to make them deal a ton of damage.

Cards like Two-Headed Cerberus and Raging Redcap are suddenly viable but the best of the bunch is definitely Efreet Flamepainter, a 4/1 after Mannichi's ability that also allows you to play instants and sorceries for free, an absolutely amazing card that probably doesn't get the love it deserves in a format for of 10 mana spells.

This strategy also makes one of my all-time favorite underrated cards, Prophetic Flamespeaker playable as well. The big benefit of the Flamespeaker is access to trample, this means that if you are blocked you can still swap its power and toughness to try to get damage through to be able to trigger its effect.

This in conjunction with the first strike part of double strike means you can potentially kill an opponent's creature and trample over on both of the strikes giving you a swing on the board and in card advantage.

There are also some really powerful cards that can quickly win you the game, as long as you're willing to put some effort in. Ogre Menial is an incredibly powerful creature that with some of the Equipment I talked about above, can easily one-shot an opponent. The issue is ensuring you get its power above zero to ensure it doesn't die when you activate Mannichi.

I've already mentioned Efreet Flamepainter above but Wildfire Eternal and Dreadhorde Arcanist also work extremely well at getting instants and sorceries out of your hand for free.

Being able to make Wildfire Eternal unblockable and then playing something like Soulfire Eruption or even something like Chandra's Ignition can quickly close out a game that's stalled.

Lastly is Baeloth Barrityl, Entertainer, for two mana Baeloth lets you goad everything that isn't a huge beater, giving you some instant speed protection from those pesky tempo decks that may be able to kill you before you can get set up.

I've really enjoyed this nostalgic walk down memory lane, looking at some of the sweet new cards that are great with Mannichi as well as reminders of the old but gold ones from when I've brewed this deck in the past. I have loved writing this article so I hope you enjoy it just as much.

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

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