Zhao, Ruthless Admiral Commander Deck Tech

Zhao, Ruthless Admiral | Art by Yuumei

Hello, fellow Fire Nation soldiers! I'm Brian, your usual host of Brew For Your Buck (BFYB), and I'm back with another preview deck tech! As I predicted when writing up Leonardo, this article is indeed about an Avatar card. Unlike Ninja Turtles, I am a huge fan of Avatar: The Last Airbender. It kept me company during the worst parts of my battle with COVID-19, and I'm trying to get my wife to watch it now.

I was always interested in the technology of the Fire Nation, and how a military that was seemingly so advanced compared to the other nations managed to get bogged down in a 100-year long war and still lose. Today we'll examine one of their leaders, and then some cards to include in a deck that will not produce the same result: Zhao, Ruthless Admiral.

Rakdos () Sacrifice is not a new strategy in Commander, though what's interesting is that Zhao also encourages us to go wide (have a lot of creatures). Since these strategies often revolve around sacrificing our own creatures, we'll need to strike an interesting balance between what we should sacrifice and what we shouldn't.

What Does Zhao, Ruthless Admiral Do?

Since Zhao is an uncommon, he's a pretty straightforward commander: Sacrifice permanents and pump our team, with a little firebending mixed in. This deck will definitely lean on the aggressive side, and with the right board state it can end the game pretty quick through combat damage.

We'll want to focus on creatures that bring other "rectangles" with them, including artifact tokens like Treasures or creature tokens we don't mind sacrificing.

Of course, self-sacrificing permanents are also useful. These types of cards will help pump our creatures, so we'll look at cards that scale relative to creatures' power and ways to grant the team evasion to translate that power into combat damage.

Key Cards for Zhao

Rectangles

We're defining rectangles in the Lords of Limited fashion: any expendable piece of material that can be used as a resource. Primarily these rectangles will be sacrificed to pump our team, but we may find some additional ways to use them. Creatures that bring rectangles with them are first priority, so cards like Voldaren Epicure, Greedy Freebooter, and especially Impulsive Pilferer are all great. Krenko, Tin Street Kingpin scales up the rectangles based on his power, a theme we'll be exploring some more below.

Black and red also have access to a bunch of ways to repeatedly make expendable creatures. Ophiomancer, Jadar, and Daring Piracy can give us rectangles to sacrifice turn after turn.

Another teaser for our power-matters theme: Anax, Hardened in the Forge. Our creatures' power can pretty quickly get over four, letting Anax churn out two tokens for the price of one. Totentanz does a similar impression, though with less upside.

Self-Sacrifice

Cards that are (or make) self-sacrificing permanents are also really good in this deck, since we can trigger Zhao without needing a separate sacrifice outlet. Pitiless Plunderer, Pawn of Ulamog, and Sifter of Skulls are all fairly obvious. Sacrificing creatures will get us more rectangles to sacrifice again, and they can be used for mana acceleration as well.

This is also a good spot for big card draw spells like Pitiless Carnage and Plumb the Forbidden, since we'll have a lot of chaff around to trade in for fresh cards. Plumb the Forbidden is especially good as an instant, since we can sacrifice a bunch of blocked creatures to pump the unblocked ones even further.

A new pet card of mine is Into the Pit. Assuming the top card of our library is a spell, this tacks on a sacrifice outlet and lets us churn through the deck as another card velocity piece.

Of course, we don't want to just completely disregard the typical sacrifice deck staples, so a few of the usual suspects can go in the deck as well. Some of these are just too good not to include, like Umbral Collar Zealot and Mayhem Devil, but I'd rather focus on the unique synergies that Zhao brings to the table instead of loading up on too many staples.

Power Matters

Up until now, this deck has looked like a pretty standard Rakdos sacrifice/aristocrats deck. We hit the holy trinity of fodder, outlets, and payoffs, but now is where things get really interesting. Once the sacrifice engine is online we can scale the power of our board very quickly and often for very little mana. We already included some cards that care about power mattering, and this is where I want to really focus for building the deck.

First, cards that deal direct damage to opponents. Heartfire Hero, Flaming Tyrannosaurus, and Faerie Bladecrafter can all be the last creature sacrificed in a chain, doing massive damage, especially after a big combat step. Evereth, Viceroy of Plunder does double duty as a sorcery-speed sacrifice outlet, and if she happens to die during a combat in which Admiral Zhao attacked, we can use the mana from firebending to pay for her trigger.

Bonus points if we gave her lifelink and gained all that life back too.

Some creatures don't even need to die to deal the damage. Giggling Skitterspike just needs to attack, and Gau, Feral Youth just needs a card to leave our graveyard. Marionette Master makes a bunch of rectangles but can also drain opponents for more and more life each time we sacrifice an artifact.

Special shoutout to Vito, Thorn of the Dusk Rose who can also grant the whole team lifelink, and then drain the table accordingly.

The list goes on and on. Dragon Throne of Tarkir can make our team absolutely massive. Piñata cards like Nested Shambler, Threefold Thunderhulk, and Nadier, Agent of the Duskenel explode into a huge amount of creatures, either to go wide with or to sacrifice.

While we're at it, Elemental Mastery and Infantry Shield turn any creature into a piñata.

Finally, we have some support cards that care about creatures with high power. Mandate of Abaddon has got to be the best wrath in the game for this deck. Sacrifice a bunch of permanents to get our remaining creatures over a certain power threshold, then bam! One-sided board wipe.

Chandra's Ignition can wipe the board pretty easily and deal direct damage like we talked about before. Dragonhawk, Fate's Tempest is a pretty excellent card velocity engine once we have a large and in-charge board. Alesha, Who Laughs at Fate is a nice recursion piece for nearly any creature in our deck.

Evasion

Now to tie the room together. We can spin our wheels and play the sacrifice game all we want, but we're here to win. The best way to do that with a high quantity of high-powered creatures is to grant them evasion and turn them sideways.

My favorite of these is Homura, Human Ascendant, which thematically turns all of our creatures into Dragons. Thunderhawk Gunship brings rectangles and can jump our whole team into the air. So does Eldrazi Monument, which we should have no trouble keeping around when its upkeep trigger goes off.

Gameplay

The way I laid out the sections above is roughly how I consider the sequencing for Admiral Zhao to go. We'll spend the early turns setting up our board with rectangles ready to sacrifice. Once we have enough, we can cast Zhao and start attacking, pumping the team and doing damage to our opponents. We can amplify this by using our "power-scaling" cards, ideally maneuvering into a position where we have enough power to wipe out the opposition in one combat step. We help that along by using a supporting card that grants evasion to the team.

Opposing threats to watch out for are obviously anything that prevents sacrificing (Yasharn, Implacable Earth), or opposing Blood Artists that can trigger when our creatures die. It's hard to play against Fogs or other instant-speed cards that prevent damage, but be on the lookout for any of the permanent-based versions of those.

The deck is somewhat susceptible to board wipes, since we probably sacrificed a bunch of resources to get into a threatening position, but no worries: I threw in a few recursion effects for the final list.

Wrap Up and Mini-BFYB

Admiral Zhao looks like a strong uncommon commander, especially for players that like to play aggressive strategies. As is tradition with my preview deck techs, I'll include a mini-BFYB analysis for those of you looking to build the deck without breaking the bank. Fortunately, there aren't a ton of cards ($10+) that made it into the first cut of the list!

• Agadeem's Awakening ($25.71) --> Swamp ($0.00)
• Thunderhawk Gunship ($10.16) --> Junkyard Genius ($0.07)

Considering Zhao's rarity, a fun challenge might be to build a non-rare version of this list, and see just how powerful we can make it. In fact, that's what I planned to do with this article but some of the rares were just too much fun. Maybe in the future if we ever stop getting previews for new sets.

My final cut of the deck list is below, and I’d love to hear your feedback about my choices or cool tech you found for the deck. Let me know which cards or mechanics from the Avatar set you're excited about too! I've got a backlog of ideas for BFYB, but reader feedback might push something to the top of the pile.

Note: I didn't include any Game Changers to keep the price down and for the sake of being bracket flexible, but you can always use them to power up the deck.

Happy brewing, and I’ll see you next time!

Zhao, Ruthless Admiral Commander Deck List

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