Commander Inspiration: Chun-Li's Instant Kicks
“Magictating” is defined as getting into the zone with your Magic the Gathering collection--thinking, planning, organizing, reminiscing about past games, and imagining future games. It is a combination of hard thinking about the game and calm meditation, reveling in the joy it brings you.
This deck tech is here to help you through constructing an interesting and fun build for a spell-slinger deck. This deck is built around Chun-Li, Countless Kicks, and we do actually have a way or two to make her kicks truly countless! This is an interesting and fun Commander to build around.
This deck is designed with cheap interaction and the ability to leverage Chun-Li's multi-kicker attack trigger into some interesting win conditions. Overall, this deck loves to slow-play the Countless Kicks by using cheap interactive spells to keep the heat off, and then drop a powerfully multi-kicked Chun-Li to start kicking out tons of extra re-cast spells. Meanwhile, the deck has only a few other creatures in it to act as “secret Commanders” that can also carry the deck to victory through the gross value they offer. If you manage to stick any of these with Chun-Li on the battlefield, then you shouldn't have much trouble wiping up the rest of the table.
The secret Commanders include Talrand, Sky Summoner, Archmage Emeritus, Monastery Mentor, and Vega, the Watcher. Talrand and Mentor crank out plenty of tokens to help us go wide (and tall with the Mentor), while Archmage and Vega let us just draw more and more fuel for our deck to just keep going and going. While Chun-Li, Countless Kicks is only three mana, we should never be casting it at that base price. We always want to multi-kick her, so that we can exile those cheap spells sitting in our graveyards and start attacking people for some serious spell-slinging value. I love that Chun-Li exiles those spells with “kick counters” on them. It's fun in that it lets us still cast those spells after we've had to recast her; it's also punny in that when we kick her over and over, her “countless kicks” are still being counted from multi-kickers. Moving on, we can probably expect to cast Chun-Li, Countless Kicks around three or even four times a game. Ideally, we want to cast her maybe twice, as the Commander tax steals away two spells we could've gotten for free.
If you haven't realized by this point that you have to pay to cast those copied spells, well, I'm sorry—you have to pay the mana for those copies. This isn't some broken Narset or Golos deck. I guess that news may be a kick in the…er…let's focus on what we can do to build up that multi-kicker instead!
The deck needs to compensate for the need to cast a deceptively mana intensive Commander by having some acceleration. Sadly, we're playing the two worst colors for this. Luckily, we can get by using some mana rocks. You can adjust your power level to taste and collection, so I won't expect you to be jamming a Mana Crypt and Jeweled Lotus, but if you've got them, then by all means feel free to swap those in. Ideally, we need colored mana to make Chun Li work (her kicker cost is colored mana). That's why I've tried to lean into maximizing our colored mana rocks. While we get to jam some mana rocks there's also some solidly synergistic artifacts we can leverage for some amazing value and damage potential. These include excellent cards like Twinning Staff, Sphinx-Bone Wand, Sentinel Tower, and Aetherflux Reservoir. Those are some seriously sweet cards for a spell-slinging deck that actually lets you cast all those copied spells. One last side-note card would be Isochron Scepter. It's a cute card for a deck that's stacked with instants. Meanwhile, you'd be seriously remiss if you didn't also find room for the best protective equipment such as Swiftfoot Boots, Mask of Avacyn, Champion's Helm, Lightning Greaves, and Whispersilk Cloak. Ideally, you'll want to lean more toward the hexproof ones, as we have some shenanigans to abuse with Chun-Li, Countless Kicks once we start up her kicking engine.
The rest of the deck is really just a ton of instants. Well, not simply any old instants. You can spice this to your tastes, and I have a few favorite spells and interactions for you to try out. The beauty of this deck is that it actually plays much differently from a Golos or Narset deck—we don't just slam ridiculous sorceries at instant speed, play them for basically free or actual free, and break the game wide open. Instead, we can utilize these small instant spells to create some tempo in the early game, then we can leverage our Commander into giving us access to all those spells again, and hopefully use card advantage and tempo to crack a few people to death by going wide or tall. Our cards are designed to help keep us alive long enough to live the dream. We can afford to pick off things as one-for-ones because we plan to reuse all those spells again and again. That plan should eventually bury the table in value. Meanwhile, we just might have mana open to cast the rest of our interaction to help stop any plans they might have to disrupt our spell-slinging Voltron that is Chun-Li, Countless Kicks.
Now, I'm going to assume for this paragraph that you've managed to exile these spells with kick counters on them. That means that you get to cast them every combat (provided you have the mana available). This means that when you cast both Fated Retribution and Boon of Safety together you get to wipe out everyone else's board as you attack. Sure, that's a chunk of mana, but it's still an option for late-game clean-up. Akroma's Will works well with this too. Usually we will have that spell mastery box checked pretty early on. Infiltrate let's you attack into anything you'd like and not worry about Chun-Li dying. This allows you to get access to all those other spells she's exiled as well.
There's plenty of sneaky ways to keep Chun-Li from dying in this stack of instants. You get to use one of those along with whatever removal or draw spell you need to keep your deck cooking. Once you pair up Chun-Li with one of the other creatures in the deck, then you can use all the extra spells you cast to start really kicking the competition into oblivion. Additionally, you might want to consider that I've built in a few little combos to have a little mini-game “win” during the battles you have. Liquimetal Torque and an artifact destruction spell allow you to destroy any non-land permanent on the board (maybe even gain life off it too with Divine Offering). I included some cycling cards to keep the cards flowing and give yourself plenty of multi-kicker targets early on. Cantrips are grossly powerful when they become reused off Chun-Li's trigger. I know this reads a bit like a bulleted list, so perhaps a “working” decklist should suffice you to be on your way in short order? With no further ado, here's the list, and I hope you enjoy the fun little synergies I put in there.
Oh, and perhaps the single most powerful spell in the deck with Chun-Li, Countless Kicks is Shadow Rift — grants unblockable and draws a card for one mana…every single turn…and you get access to anything else you multi-kicked. May the kickers, kicks, instants, and the cards be ever in your favor!
