Commanding Respect: Temmet, Vizier of Naktamun

No Ifs, Ands, or Tuts

Welcome back Commander fans to Commanding Respect, a bimonthly column on obscure commanders to command your Commander deck with. This week, we turn to a remarkably recent Legendary Creature, the most recently-printed commander in my (five) articles to date: Temmet, Vizier of Naktamun!

I completely understand why Temmet flies under most people's radars. Usually, tokens are used in go-wide strategies, overwhelming your foes with superior board presence. Curiously, Temmet wants you to go <em>tall</em> with your tokens. He would much prefer that you take one token, suit it up with some fancy gear, and send it unblockably into th fray. I was content to ignore King Tem (as he is known to his friends) up until former Magic Creative Team member Melissa Li gave me an idea: Germs! And I don't mean bacteria. I mean the 0/0 tokens created by Equipment with Living Weapon. All Living Weapon Equipment generate a 0/0 Germ when they enter the battlefield, then equip themselves to the Germ and keep it alive. What better way to combine tokens and voltron? Let's get to the deck!

Sick Duds, Dude

We begin, then, with the germ-covered artifacts themselves. A small confession: most Living Weapons are Bad™. Somewhere, you need to pay for the versatility of a creature that can also be equipped to another creatures, and that payment comes in the mana cost or equip cost. This hasn't stopped me from including a chunk of Living Weapons, of course. Our three strongest examples are Bonehoard, Scytheclaw, and the ever-famous, Legacy-playable Batterskull. With a commander who grants evasion, Scytheclaw is a devastatingly-easy path to halving an opponents' life total.

If we're going all in on Living Weapon, then it only makes sense that we commit heavily to equipment themes. Let's start with some of my favorite equipment in all of Magic: the Swords of [blank] and [blank]. This cycle is a quintet 3-cost artifacts that grant protection from two colors plus a combat damage trigger that relates thematically to the colors it gives you protection from. Unfortunately, this means that only one of them functions with our commander, but it's a doozy: Sword of Feast and Famine, which untaps our lands on a combat damage trigger. While we're on the topic of equipment staples, Umezawa's Jitte is practically a planeswalker in artifact form. Finally, to eke out more value from any of our equipment, but especially our Living Weapons, there's Masterwork of Ingenuity, an excellent card made even better by the fact that it can be searched for with Trinket Mage.

Most turns, I expect that we'll be attacking with very few creatures (often one). Those creatures (once made unblockable by Temmet) will rarely bite it during combat, but we'll still want plenty of protection to combat spot removal. Darksteel Plate, Lightning Greaves, and Swiftfoot Boots all fulfill this role in slightly-but-meaningfully different ways (notably, don't put Lightning Greaves onto your only creature if you have other things to attach to it).

White equipment decks have access to a wide range of tutors, many of which can place equipment directly onto the battlefield to account for caring about a narrow range of cards. Our Jitte pairs perfectly with its banned-in-Modern cohort Stoneforge Mystic. Higher up the mana curve, Stonehewer Giant performs much the same functions, with the added oddity (the addity?) of being able to attack and then surprise-equip himself with your favorite weapon. Other equipment-matters cards cheat not mana costs but equip costs: so long as we control three of more artifacts, Puresteel Paladin reduces the cost of equipping to zero.

Token Offerings

Most standard tokens produced by Magic cards are nothing to write home about. 1/1 Soldiers, 2/2 Birds, even 3/3 Beasts... none of these are particularly exciting when your aim is to make one of them unblockable and smack an opponent upside the jaw. For most of our more-interesting tokens, I'm looking at spells that make token copies of existing creatures. Some of them do it every turn (e.g. Followed Footsteps). Some do it in one massive burst (e.g. Clone Legion). Some do it in flexible quantities (e.g. Rite of Replication). Rite is, notably, one of the few cards I will lump into my "win conditions" category despite it being dependent on there being another card of value on the field. It turns out that five copies of even a decent creature is enough to take over a game.

Other Temmet staples are the handful of cards that make big, splashier tokens. Phyrexian Rebirth is one of the few instances of these cards that I've included in this particular list (to make more room for our probably-not-as-good-but-still-pretty-fun Germs theme). Another is Mirror-Sigil Sergeant, partially because he's awesome and there are <em>very</em> few decks that he makes sense in, so I can't pass up the opportunity to use him efficiently here. A card not in this list that might be worthy of your consideration is Feudkiller's Verdict, which only conditionally generates a token but has a decent shot at fulfilling that condition.

Fight Me One-on-One

In line with our expected game plan of often attacking with a single creature, I've included a solid Exalted subtheme. Exalted is a triggered abilility (usually on creatures) that grants +1/+1 when one of your creatures attacks alone, and many Exalted cards have a bonus additional ability that also triggers on a creature attacking alone. Sublime Archangel is one of the biggest Exalted threats to drop, and a great finisher for when we somehow manage to have a boardstate with many tokens. Ardent Plea is an enchantment with Exalted that likely gets us one of our smaller pieces of equipment onto the battlefield. Sovereigns of Lost Alara is, in my opinion, the neatest card in this theme, since they act as a repeatable aura tutor.

Now that we've discussed a neat aura search effect, we reach the obligatory Bryce-makes-a-package section of tonight's program. Those Sovereigns open the door into an entertaining package of auras, and frankly, this deck underutilizes their awesome potential. The bulk of our package is covered in three cards (and no, I don't intentionally build decks full of threes– it's just the easiest way to present multiple cards in an article format). Spectra Ward grants protection from all colors and acts as nearly-all-purpose protection and evasion. The aforementioned Followed Footsteps is perfect for producing extra copies of powerful creatures. Shielded by Faith is another instant of single-creature-protection with the flexibility to move it around as-needed.

Evasive Maneuvers

Thank you for joining us on another installment of Commanding Respect to give this little cleric his time in the (second) sun. As we are currently embroiled in an impressive Unstable spoiler season, perhaps our next installment could be a silly new silver-bordered legend...

But we'll cross that bridge when we come to it.

Want to suggest a commander for future Commanding Respect articles? Find me on Twitter, or find my work on edhrec.com! And remember: you can command any deck you want, as long as you command respect.