I feel like there isn’t enough discourse encouraging people to play Fangren Marauder. This card is absolute gas in the current Commander ecosystem and I feel like whether you actually build your own deck to maximize it or not, this strapping young lad will provide many happy returns. He’s just the perfect Shrek for this specific moment in Commander history.
I think it can be hard to see the practical value in this card without first contextualizing the effect Smothering Tithe has had on the format. It’s easy to see just how powerful it is, but it’s biggest contribution to how we all play the game lies in how it re-contextualized game objects in general. We’ve always had creature tokens, sure, but nothing in terms of artifact tokens that were produced on such scale. It seems as though Smothering Tithe was the first real and true offender in terms of cards that just spew non-creature game objects onto the battlefield, and I think the reception to it opened the floodgates for other cards to follow suit. Treasures are the biggest offenders here, receiving the most support as something of an evergreen mechanic now, but Modern Horizons 2 really pushed things in a whole new direction by linking them up with Food and Clues.
As if a proliferation of support for these already existing tokens wasn’t enough, we are now welcoming a new bouncing baby boy in the form of Blood tokens in Crimson Vow. To be clear, I’m broadly glad these sorts of tokens exist, as they do a really great job of opening things up in commander for cards that otherwise might be a little too narrow (Rampage of the Clans comes to mind as something I’ve exploited in the past), or provide some interesting build-around options. However, they just have a habit of showing up in your everyday average Commander games, built around or not. That, Dear Reader, is something you can plan for.
Whether sacrificed, destroyed, or just plain activated, these artifact tokens are taking an active role in any game where they show up, and they are showing up way more often with a lot more working in their favor. So now, you can respond proactively in deck-building with Fangren Marauder. Life-gain cards without additional riders or game effects may seem off-putting at first, but the returns with this thing are pretty massive. Did your opponent use a single treasure token when casting their spell? You gain five life. Did your opponent, perchance, think they’d be able to combo you out with a Marionette Master? Think again, dummy! Maybe they’re just playing some honest Magic and sacrificing a clue to draw a card. Well, you still get to gain five life (which is a lot!). No longer do you have to build your own deck to maximize the ‘Rauder — now your opponents can do all the work for you (and they definitely will).
When you take common artifact token synergies alongside the fact that people just love sacrificing actual factual artifact cards, I find it hard to conceive a pod where this thing isn’t worth a card slot. At the end of the day, your opponents are going to have to kill you somehow, and Fangren Marauder is becoming more and more capable, completely by it’s lonesome, of hedging out damage and life loss to accomplish that goal. Plus, you get to feel smart for metagaming against literally the entire format rather than your pod. We can start a club and refer to ourselves as the Fangren Maraudorks. These are perks.
But this case has me wondering about other seemingly “sideboard-esque” cards, particular those that really just have turned into things with minimal fail-states and increasing main deck appeal as the format broadens and the scope of the powerful things shifts. Tell me your secrets! What are the other cool narrow things that are actually not that narrow?
commander, dear reader 