ruvisiting ruhan

Alright, huddle up, Ruheads™. I think the time has come to put The Big Guy front and center once more. I don’t think that there has been a set in recent memory just as good for Our Large Adult Son as Kamigawa: Neon Dynasty. I admit, to my great shame, that I am something of a fair-weather friend here — Ruhan is probably the commander that I build and disassemble most frequently. I’m a simple guy that likes to turn my Ruhan sideways, and it’s tough to want to do that when I’m encouraged to do boring nonsense like tutor up my Sword of Feast and Famine literally every game because it’s the best thing to always be doing. That all said, there are some super sweet cards in Neon Dynasty that change the calculus on Ruhan pretty substantially. Having just put together a new iteration of The Galoot, Himself, I’m going to go over some of that stuff here, in the form of a list of the OFFICIAL TOP FIVE BEST RUHAN CARDS IN KAMIGAWA: NEON DYNASTY FOR SMASHING, IN ORDER.

5. Komainu Battle Armor

Equipment have always been a bread-and-butter element of my Ruhan decks, and they always will be. There are just so many great equipment cards out there, and with such a variety of ways to suit up Ruhan for whatever flavor I’m looking to achieve. In my experience, many folks will default to the Swords of X and Y, on account of them being so powerful, but jamming all the most powerful stuff is boring and lame and unbecoming of a Sir like Ruhan. Komainu Battle Armor is simply a better card — to be clear, not necessarily more powerful, but better. My love of reconfigure aside, it’s the intersection of the menace and the on-hit goad trigger that brew up something special. Making Ruhan hard to block and preventing an opponent from sending creatures at us shores up two pretty big holes in any Ruhan-centric game plan. The ability to race with our big creature is important, and the nature of Ruhan attacking random players can make that difficult. Buying time with goad is some handy flavor text here, and I expect it to be a difficult enough card for our opponents to evaluate that I don’t expect it to be as much of a lightning rod as the aforementioned Swords that are stupid and no one likes. That, and it also plays awesome alongside Assault Suit.

4. Anchor to Reality

Ruhan having access to blue in his color identity is a big factor in what sets him apart from other commanders that care about equipment. It’s a color that I love as an accent — whereas it can be pretty annoying for some folks at the forefront of any deck, playing as a support color here to our, ostensibly, Boros deck gives a lot of depth and range to the strategy. Anchor to Reality is a great example of this. I love to run more of a toolbox approach to my equipment suite, and the addition of reconfigure cards allowing this to grab a creature is super cool. Whereas I’m pretty low on tutors as a part of linear packages, I think that they do have some merits if you’re looking to be more adaptable than always pulling the same best thing every time. Anchor to Reality makes me want to go back and put more work into specific, robust lists of equipment to include in the deck, much in the same way as Sunforger sparks a lot of inspiration in terms of constructing interactive card packages. Being able to drop an equipment directly into play is huge, and I think the cost is low enough to where that sort of thing will matter a lot in real games, rather than having to wait for more mana-intensive cards like Godo, Bandit Warlord or Stonehewer Giant.

3. Raiyuu, Storm’s Edge

It wouldn’t be a return to Kamigawa without some good old-fashioned Samurai support. This time around, however, in recognition of the fact that there are just not a lot of Samurai out there and to broaden the scope of application, Warriors (RUHAN) get to come along for the ride. Attacking alone is not a huge ask, and the range of payoffs is pretty wide. Raiyuu is certainly the biggest and splashiest; the only thing better than randomly attacking one players is randomly attacking two players. This thing is certainly efficient enough on it’s face, and has the luxury of triggering on the turn it comes down. If it somehow is able to stick around, things can really kick into high gear. Something else to consider with these Samurai/Warrior designs in a deck like this is that if Ruhan, God forbid, bites the big one, we can suit up any other Samurai or Warrior to carry the torch. A nice little consolation prize that doesn’t take much to enable on the deck building side.

2. Selfless Samurai

Piggybacking further on the cool Smaurai/Warrior payoffs, we get this. So sure, this is not as overtly powerful of a payoff as Raiyuu, Storm’s Edge, and that’s fine! This is sort of the inverse — whereas Raiyuu may be a very powerful offensive piece, Selfless Samurai is a very powerful defensive piece, which I tend to value a little higher for a commander like Ruhan. Again, this card is easy to trigger, and diversifying our buffs to Ruhan across game pieces is really important. In particular, lifelink is such an important piece of the puzzle in terms of pacing the game and structuring our board position. When we want to maximize our smashing, we have to also maximize our ability to not just be dead on the backswing. Padding our life total in Ruhan-sized chunks is dope.

Additionally, just serving as an on-board piece of protection for Ruhan is pretty crucial. The lifelink aspect of the card is the main draw for me, personally, but any card that pull double duty like this is worthy of some very serious consideration.

1. Cloudsteel Kirin

This thing is some galaxy-brain shit and inspired a new Ruhan build like a Goddamn bolt of lightning. Let me break this down. First, simply, this is an enormously powerful effect to have printed on a creature that you can equip to another creature, and it also just gives the creature flying as well. Ruhan loves to fly, and also never lose. Having it be tutorable as an equipment is busted, but the reconfigure cost is high, as it should be. I suppose, once I boil it down in my head, there is an interaction with this card that I yearn for with every fiber of my being. One of my pet cards, as far back as I can remember, is Magnetic Theft. it’s always been a super cool, niche way to yoink an equipment from an opponent briefly, or cheat an equip cost or timing rules. It just has a lot of utility, though somewhat narrow. They even printed Resolute Strike in Zendikar Rising, which functions similarly if used with a Warrior (read: RUHAN).

Being able to attach Cloudsteel Kirin at instant speed is huge game. At a basic level, it seems like the ability to not lose the game at instant speed is powerful and very cool. Not to mention that with these reconfigure cards, being able to attach them at instant speed allows them to dodge creature removal. With Cloudsteel Kirin specifically, these interactions with Magnetic Theft feel like cheating, but not in the kind of way that pushes a game off the rails. It feels mechanical, clever, and powerful, which are things that I really value not only in the design aspects of this card, but also the play patterns. Breathing new life into a long-lost pet card is just a plus.

Don’t let the fact that I’ve only discussed five cards here mislead you into thinking that there aren’t so many more awesome things in this set across a great range of power levels. In my current Ruhan list, I think I have something like ~15 Neon Dynasty cards, which simultaneously feels absurd, and too low. This set is great. Go smash.