Commander Deck Tech: Jon Inericus, Shattered One

Hello people! How about taking advantage of the festive holidays for a good game of Commander, with a picturesque gift-themed deck?

The great antagonist of the games in the Baldur's Gate franchise, Jon Irenicus, Shattered One was featured in Commander Legends: Battle for Baldur's Gate. This card's ability allows one of our creatures to be presented to one of our opponents once per turn.

Anyone who has played against a Zedruu the Greathearted knows how much misfortune a little gift can cause!

Chaos archetype decks are famous among multiplayer Magic formats. These decks are built with the goal of making board choices as confusing and complex as possible.

From this effort were born several strands that add unexpected and unique elements, Jon Irenicus, Shattered One is among the strand of "Forced Combat".

Forced Combat

Creatures granted by Jon Irenicus, Shattered One should attack whenever possible, which can disrupt the plans of certain opponents and incite combat between opponents, causing loss of important pieces, disrupting combos or reducing resources.

Rapid and widespread life reduction can be seen as part of a Group Slug. Our advantage is scaled based on the number of opponents: the more opponents, the greater our gains.

The Forced Combat strategy's biggest weakness comes if your opponent has a force of creatures you can't deal with that are aimed at you, but we rely on Jon Irenicus, Shattered One: the creatures are forced through by Goad, which prevents our gifts from turning against us.

Some of the aspects of Blue {U} are wit and creativity, characteristics that make up mischief, which, although not an attribute remembered when we think of blue magicians, is an important part of the identity of the color.

Within this prism, we have Jon Irenicus, Shattered One and a few other cards:

Its particularities begin when we Goad the creatures, a minor sub-theme of color identity, and we control their departure from the battlefield through sacrifices, aptitude from black {B}, in addition to drawing cards. An exquisite design by the color pie.

The Commander's choice permeated its possibilities in Chaos and Theft themes, aiming at donating or exchanging creatures, and being a festive deck, we thought of a reduced budget perspective, avoiding cards with greater financial investment.

Within the restrictions, the best option was to center the game on the commander and creatures that had heavy counterparts like Demonic Taskmaster and Flesh Reaver — thus arriving at the classic Stompy, strategy based on creatures with excellent relationship between mana cost and offensive power, with the perfect leader for the task on Jon Irenicus, Shattered One.

Our goal is to distribute gifts dynamically, populating our opponents' boards with threats and gracefully advancing our game through additional draws.

On opening turns, we aim to set up a table that contains a threat in creature form to develop the plan on the commander's entry turn. This can be achieved in several ways: from reanimations with creatures or spells, or even casting threats directly. The use of clones allows us to replicate our most dangerous creatures, doubling the "fun" for our opponents.

Winconditions

Our creatures are our main wincondition, taking advantage of our opponents' "willingness" to attack with them.

We control the board through removals in the form of sacrifices, using cards like the duo Liege of the Pit & Lord of the Pit, as we reduce the opponents' life totals — being Wretched Anurid and Ebon Drake perfect for this purpose.

Evil Eye Lock

Evil Eyes are disturbing creatures, I can't imagine why they aren't horrors, yet we only have five cards with the Eye type in Magic, only two of them being named Evil Eye.

Both with a common ability that says "Non-Eye creatures you control can't attack.", which allows a lock through some auras of a specific cycle: the Vows.

The creature enchanted with a Vow cannot attack the enchantment's controller, and when enchanting an Evil Eye we cannot be attacked by any of the opponents' creatures in the vast majority of the time.

Card Advantage

We have a powerful draw tool in the command zone, its triggered ability generates a good card advantage, as each of the creatures in the deck is a potential draw generator.

Highlights

Modify Memory is a creature swap that goes unnoticed by its intimidating mana cost, however granting control of a key creature from one player to another that takes no advantage of its effects disables up to two targets and draws three cards.

Another use is to move your creatures controlled by different opponents and perform tactical rearrangement, it's especially strong since you also draw three.

Accelerators

Ramp is not one of the great strengths of the Dimir combination. However, we have solid options among the artifacts we can mention Midnight Clock and some good creatures as we will see in our highlights.

Highlights

The Spellshaper are a cycle of creatures that have activated abilities that replicate powerful spells at the standard cost of discarding a card plus the cost of the spell. We use several of them in this deck, but two of them are powerful mana sources

Dreamscape Artist is a Harrow in the blue identity! Few cards can be stranger and stronger than this Spellshaper. Bog Witch is a Dark Ritual at the cost of a card, which will probably be reanimated.

Interactions

The interaction group is the great strength of colors, efficient removals, bounces, sacrifices, trades and much more. To define a highlight, let's choose a card that doesn't have an equal mentioned up to this point in the article.

Highlights

Overtaker is the Spellshaper that replicates Ray of Command, a spell that diverges from all other blue ways of stealing creatures from opponents, as it untaps the creature, grants it haste and return until end of turn, much like most red spells such as Act of Treason does.

However, the biggest highlight is Silumgar's Command, which allows perfect control of the board state, after all it destroys threats, returns permanents, deals with planeswalkers and counter spells: a summary of everything that appreciates.

Reanimations

Reanimations are a subtle form of acceleration, by discarding cards for other effects we circumvent the high costs of our bombs and gain a clock prematurely.

Highlights

Among the necromancers in this deck, Apprentice Necromancer is by far the strongest of them — we can speed up the game a lot with this card, since its ability and mana cost are very cheap. The creature we played when donated with our commander cannot be sacrificed, so the damage done by this creature is huge.

Jon Irenicus, Shattered One is a faithful representation of the brilliant criminal mastermind of the main antagonist of the Baldur's Gate franchise, manipulating the board with his undercover agents using opponents to accomplish his dark goals.

Moving on to a more offensive approach, we have a suggestion from the following list:

Jon Irenicus, High Power

We can easily move on to a really sordid list where we take the game to the highest level. In this construction, we opted for a Farm line, drawing as many cards as possible in the shortest possible time, recovering gas over and over again until we managed to fit in a consistent victory.

I hope you found some interesting ideas to improve your deck and celebrate the holidays in a lively and fun table. Thanks for reading and happy holidays!

Any questions or suggestions, I'm available in the comments.