Kumena Merfolk Tribal EDH Deck Tech
By Serena L.
Hey guys! It’s Serena back, this time taking another dive into Commander!
As you may have noticed, I’m a big fan of Lyrical Monasterio and Bermuda Triangle in Vanguard, so we’re gonna submerge ourselves into an upgraded “Explorers of the Deep” precon deck from the Lost Caverns of Ixalan. To start off, Explorers of the Deep is a merfolk kindred deck in blue and green, and also has some nice +1/+1 counter synergies. While the preconstructed version uses Hakbal of the Surging Soul, I’ve cut that card entirely. The commander we’re going with is Kumena, Tyrant of Orazca, which enables our combos a lot easier, including some game-ending infinites.
While we do run a fair number of lords like Merrow Reejerey, Merfolk Sovereign and Vodalian Hexcatcher, our main combo has us having our commander with Intruder Alarm and Deeproot Pilgrimage. The combo works by having Kumena or Drowner of Secrets tap some of a Merfolk to activate any of their abilities, which will then cause the Pilgrimage to trigger, generating us a merfolk token, which in turn triggers our Alarm, causing all creatures to untap. If we’re using the Drowner, that should leave each opponent milled out. With Kumena we have a few different options. You could draw your whole deck to get to whichever wincon from there we want or you can roll in with an infinite army of infinitely large merfolk tokens with any extra turn spell like Savor the Moment or Time Warp.
Since your opponents are likely to catch on to what you’re trying to do there, or have ways to go nuts on their own, we have a robust interaction package, with things like Royal Treatment, Tamiyo’s Safekeeping, and Tyvar’s Stand for single target protection, onto thing Inspiring Call and Ripples of Potential for something more widespread, all the way to counter effects like Tishana’s Tidebender, Lullmage Mentor, Thwart, and Foil to stop them entirely. We also have Svyelun of Sea and Sky and Kopala, Warden of Waves to make it harder to use Murder on our merfolk.
For other +1/+1 counter synergies, we will start with Simic Ascendancy, which doubles as a wincon. On top of that, Hardened Scales and Branching Evolution increase the number of counters we get. Deeproot Elite, and Tributary Instructor generate even more on top of Kumena and Singer of Swift Rivers gives our merfolk shield counters. Zegana, Utopian Speaker and Benthic Biomancer both draw us more cards and Zegana also can give our creatures with counters trample!
Other kindred cards we have include Vanquisher’s Banner and Kindred Discovery to power everyone up and draw cards, Merrow Commerce to let us untap more, Stonybrook Banneret to reduce our casting costs, Roaming Throne and Reflections of Littjara to increase our merfolk’s triggers and also make more tokens. We also have some ways to give our creatures evasion with Aquatic Incursion, Mist Dancer and Master of the Pearl Trident.
You can find my deck list on Moxfield. Next time we’re going to have to solve the case of who murdered all of our opponents, so make sure to have your deerstalker caps and magnifying glasses ready! Until then, this is Serena, signing out!