(Tura Kennerüd, Skyknight | Art by Donato Giancola)

Technically Playable - Tura Kennerüd, Skyknight

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

At 47 decks on EDHREC Tura Kennerüd, Skyknight fits perfectly into Technically Playable territory. This article is going to focus on the card's most popular playstyle.

Cantrips

The Cantrips

A "cantrip" is a really cheap spell that often has a weak effect but it also replaces itself by drawing a card, some good examples are cards like Opt and Peek.

If you narrow the search to just single mana instants or sorceries that replace themselves you end up with 60 potential options, of these Brainstorm, Ponder, Preordain and Gitaxian Probe are probably the most powerful.

It's important to remember while they seem like they'd be good cards for card advantage, cards like Careful Study and Frantic Search while very powerful in their own right are technically card disadvantages as you end up with one less card than before you cast it.

The goal of this deck is to cycle through as many cantrips as we can to create a huge board of Soldiers that you can use to win the game. While we've already seen the best of the cantrips above we're also going to need to run some that are, not so great. Making sure that these "not so great" cantrips are still useful is incredibly important.

Twisted Image is great cantrip that allows you to sometimes double it up as a removal spell against creatures with zero power. While there aren't that many you can still hit some powerful cards like Birds of Paradise, Blood Artist, and Devoted Druid. As a bonus, if you have a wall deck in your playgroup you can get a lot of value out of it.

Getting more value out of the cantrips in this deck is really important since they don't do a whole lot. Visions of Beyond and Whispers of the Muse are good examples of this. If you're early in the game Visions of Beyond is a one mana cantrip but later in the game, it came tun into Ancestral Recall, a card so powerful it's banned.

On the other hand, Whispers of the Muse is good early for the same reason, being a cantrip, however, it becomes really good later in the game if you draw too many lands as its buyback gives you the ability to replay it multiple times.

While this ability is expensive if you have Tura Kennerüd, Skyknight, or any other card that cares about casting spells in play you can get a bunch of extra value even with its high cost.

Here I've only looked at one mana cards, what I would consider "cantrips" but there are a lot of options if you include higher mana costs. You can use this scryfall search to find instant and sorcery cards that cost between one and three mana and draw you at least one card (legal in a Tura Kennerüd deck).

The Payoffs

There are a lot of payoffs for this kind of Spellslinger-style of deck, and while a lot of them are designed for Izzet (blue/red) decks, there are plenty of options for us in the blue half of that.

These payoffs mostly give one of two different effects when you cast your cantrips, they either allow you to draw more cards or they create more tokens. Archmage Emeritus, while clunky and difficult to cast in a turn where you have mana up for other spells, does turn every spell that isn't already a cantrip into one.

Want to cast Counterspell and draw? Go ahead! The other card draw payoff that fits perfectly into this deck is Raff, Weatherlight Stalwart. While it doesn't draw cards by itself it can leverage all of the tokens that your commander (and the cards I'll talk about later) create into more card draw.

This is obviously very powerful, but isn't the only thing Raff does. I'm a huge fan of mana sinks in Commander because they give you a way to leverage all of your deck's ramp and any lands that you draw into additional effects.

Raff's mana sink ability is very good because not only does it turn your army of tiny tokens into bigger threats but also allows them to attack without tapping giving you the option to draw cards off of them later on when you cast any instants.

On the other hand, while drawing cards is great you do eventually need to win the game and this deck is already drawing a ton of cards. To do this we want stuff that synergizes with our commander in some way, so we can look at some of the cards that generate more tokens.

If you've ever bought a blue preconstructed Commander deck you probably have a copy of Talrand, Sky Summoner. While this is because the card is not in the upper echelons of power levels for the format that doesn't matter for us.

Our cards are so cheap we can quickly rack up an army of 2/2 fliers that can both protect you from your opponent's fliers but also give you creatures with some evasion to punch through their defenses when you want to win.

There are a lot of these kinds of cards such as Docent of Perfection, Poppet Stitcher and because of how many cards we can draw at instant speed even Prince Imrahil the Fair can create a lot of Soldiers, but arguably the most powerful card with this type of effect is Monastery Mentor. A staple of Vintage (yes the format that plays with Black Lotus), what makes Monastery Mentor so powerful is the fact that the tokens it creates have Prowess, this means your board can quickly grow to be extremely powerful after chaining just a few spells.

Tokens? Soldiers? Soldier Tokens!

Token-Matters

This deck makes loads of tokens so we want to make sure we take advantage of them as much as possible. Being able to give tokens keywords is a really important part of making sure you can actually get them through your opponent's board states to deal their damage. Aven Wind Guide is probably one of the best cards for doing this because it gives multiple keywords to your tokens.

Flying and vigilance are both very powerful keywords in Commander because they allow you to attack without much fear of losing creatures while also holding up blockers to prevent an alpha strike back from an opponent that may finish you off.

Aven Wind Guide also has Embalm, one of my favorite abilities in Commander as it allows you to play creatures early, use them aggressively or defensively, and not worry if they die because you can get them back later.

Keywords are one thing but being able to make your 1/1's be able to win you the game without needing 120 of them is a challenge in itself. For this, we need efficient ways to buff them.

Two of the best cards at doing this are Intangible Virtue and Prava of the Steel Legion. Intangible Virtue is by far the most mana-efficient way of buffing all of your tokens and giving them vigilance on top is just the cherry on the cake. Prava on the other hand while being a little more expensive gives you additional toughness (although only on your turn) and gives you another mana sink that lets you make tokens at instant speed.

And while we already have a huge number of ways to draw cards, it would be remiss of me not to mention Curiosity Crafter. This allows you to draw a huge number of cards when you deal damage with your tokens. In combination with Aven Wind Guide you can easily five or more cards while still being able to hold up your creatures as blockers.

Soldier-Matters

You don't just want to think about token-specific payoffs, you can also use some of the very powerful Soldier payoffs. Some of the most typical and powerful kindred payoffs are "lords", cards that give creatures of a specific creature type a buff. Being an aggressive archetype, Soldiers have a few really good lords at their disposal.

More recently they've gotten Yotian Tactician, Valiant Veteran and even Harbin, Vanguard Aviator. But if you look back at their older sets you also get some powerful cards like Field Marshal for first strike and Daru Warchief to make your other Soldiers cost less.

But buffs aren't the only way to benefit from Tura making Soldier tokens. There are a number of cards in different creature types that allow you to interact with those creatures to get some kind of benefit.

Skystrike Officer is arguably the strongest, allowing you to not only tap Soldiers to draw cards but also to create more Soldiers simply by attacking, and because the Officer itself has flying it's fairly easy to attack at least one opponent each turn unimpeded to make sure that you can consistently create tokens.

And again, looking back at older sets gives you some other really powerful options like Catapult Master. This card allows you to tap creatures, pay no mana to remove creatures from the board. While you do need five Soldiers to tap this can be a very powerful ability that you can use to either defend yourself or to help get your creatures through to finish the game.

As with all Technically Playable articles, this was a very quick look at Tura Kennerüd, Skyknight as a commander, and a few of the cards that can really make a deck with Tura Kennerüd as the commander tick. Let me know in the comments below if you play Tura Kennerüd, Skyknight, if you want to build a Tura Kennerüd, Skyknight deck, or even if you just enjoyed this article!