The Most UNDERRATED Jund Commander | Gyrus, Waker of Corpses | $100 | Stream Highlight
Friends, today I'm going to show you one of my favorite underrated commanders in the format. While nearly all Jund Commander players flock to Korvold, Fae-Cursed King and Lord Windgrace, there's a super fun and honestly quite powerful commander chilling in the corner, and that's Gyrus, Waker of Corpses:
Gyrus is a a legendary hydra that costs XBRG and enters the battlefield with a number of +1/+1 counters equal to the amount of mana spent to cast it. You can cast it for just BRG and it'll enter with three +1/+1 counters, or you can spend more mana on it so it'll be even bigger. It's also important to keep in mind that additional mana costs like command tax still grow Gyrus, so if you recast Gyrus a second time for BRG plus 2 mana for its command tax it'll enter with five +1/+1 counters so it does mitigate the downside of command tax.
But the real big draw to this commander is its attack trigger: whenever Gyrus attacks, you may exile target creature card with lesser power from your graveyard. If you do, create a token that's a copy of that card tapped and attacking. Exile the token at end of combat. So this is pretty much a super efficient super aggressive reanimation ability: you don't need to pay any mana and the token enters already attacking. That's an insanely strong ability that is easy to exploit. Yes, the creature is exiled from our graveyard, and yes the token only lasts for one combat, but that's more than enough to get insane value out of this ability and win games.
So here's our game plan: we start the game ramping and filling our graveyard with creature goodies with the help of cards like Sakura-Tribe Elder, Satyr Wayfinder, and Golgari Grave-Troll. Then we cast Gyrus, attacking with him plus free copies of creatures in our graveyard, like Sepulchral Primordial to reanimate opposing creatures, Bane of Progress to wipe the board of artifacts and enchantments, or if you're feeling particularly cruel then reanimate a token of Rakdos the Defiler, which enters the battlefield already attacking so you skip the attack trigger that would've forced you to sacrifice permanents and go straight to that juicy combat trigger, which forces the opponent to sacrifice half the permanents they control, absolutely devastating!
The rest of the deck is filled with ways to get maximum value out of Gyrus: we can end the turn prematurely with Sundial of the Infinite to keep our tokens indefinitely, give Gyrus haste and protection so he can immediately attack with spooky boots (Lightning Greaves), and we can make permanent copies of the tokens we create with Gyrus by populating them with Selesnya Eulogist. There's a ton of synergy potential for this deck, but really Gyrus is so efficient that just casting and smacking people with Gyrus is often enough!
Here's the deck:
Join The Stream!
This game is a recording from my weekly stream, Wednesdays at 6PM EST (3PM PST) over on the Commander YouTube channel. You can check out the full recordings on the channel or even better, come watch the streams live and see me punt in real-time, plus I'm happy to answer any questions you've got!
Hey, are you interested in joining me on stream for some games? You're in luck because I'm always recruiting new blood to play with! Simply email me at tomer@mtggoldfish.com with the word "Stream" somewhere in the email title. Please include:
- If you are familiar with Magic Online and have your own digital decks
- If you are familiar with webcam EDH (via Spelltable) and have your own paper decks
- If you have voice chat and are comfortable chatting during stream games
- What name you want to be referred to as and preferred pronouns
I will then send you an invite to our Discord where I assemble future games.
