Art Is Pain: Commander Quickie

Commander Quickie: Kalain, Reclusive Painter

By Michelle Martin

Welcome to Foxy’s Proxys first Commander Quickie! This is a series where we just dip our toes into deckbuilding a little bit and take a quick look at a deck or commander that we’re excited to build and play. We might even throw a deck list in from time to time. This Quickie is brought to you by Kalain, Reclusive Painter! This card encourages a build around treasure tokens and +1/+1 counters as well as all the ways to take advantage of those things!

The Real Treasure Was the Friends We Made Along the Way

Ever since I first discovered the rush of creating tokens to sacrifice them to slow and steady wins, I have been hooked. I’ve made several versions of a sacrifice-based token deck, sometimes referred to as an aristocrats deck, and decided I would finally take a break from making creature tokens…and make treasure tokens instead.

Kalain, Reclusive Painter gave me the perfect avenue to make a deck that not only has an incentive to make treasure tokens, but an aggressive strategy to use them in. I added my own twist to this by finding ways to take advantage of those tokens being sacrificed to get powerful effects. Creating smaller, but hopefully consistent, engines to wear away opponents and taking advantage of red’s early game plays is what this deck is all about.

One Man’s Trash is Another's Treasure

The Ixalan block introduced a unique bit of ramp and mana fixing in the form of treasure tokens. Treasures give access to ramp for the colors in Magic that need a little bit more help in that area.

We start this deck with making sure we have a solid base of treasure token makers. Our priority is on whatever gives us the most for our mana. Pirate’s Pillage costs four mana but lets us draw two cards, and make two treasure tokens, which is everything this deck wants to be doing. These kinds of treasure traders can be taken advantage of by adding payoff cards like Marionette Master, Mayhem Devil, Disciple of the Vault and Nadier’s Nightblade. These cards make each instance of an artifact or token leaving the battlefield a chance to make a target opponent lose life. That’s straight out of the aristocrats deck handbook, with just a light splash of aggro.

We want to have lots of creatures that produce treasures, particularly ones that do it as they enter the battlefield, to help maintain our treasure stock. Creatures like Captain Lannery Storm and Plundering Barbarian not only offer treasures, but they’re also creatures for our commander to buff and turn into significant threats. We also have creatures that make treasures on combat damage like Hoard Robber and Grim Hireling. I’ve also included cards like Dockside Extortionist that gives us a treasure for each artifact and enchantment our opponents control when it enters the battlefield.

We will also take advantage of artifacts that encourage our natural red aggro and reward us with more treasures, like Goldvein Pick and Prying Blade. Hopefully, that will give us a steady and consistent source of treasure tokens, especially when they get some help from equipment like Whispersilk Cloak, making them unblockable.

Count On It

Kalain’s ability to buff a creature with as many treasures spent to cast it means that creatures that are already annoying are now able to be big monsters. For example, Krenko, Tin Street Kingpin is a three mana 1/2 that can turn its power into goblin tokens each time they attack. But with Kalain, there’s a very real possibility of this creature entering as a 4/5 and making five goblin tokens on its first attack.

With all these +1/+1 counters we’ll be putting on our creatures, we want to make sure we are getting the most out of them. Cards like Juri, Master of the Revue and Dreadhorde Butcher will turn all the counters we put on them into damage aimed at any target when they die. We’re also running some nice alternate win conditions, like Revel in Riches and Hellkite Tyrant, that work really well with all of our treasure tokens.