New Capenna Commander: 7point Highlander Set Review

 

"What the fuck Luke, New Capenna was ages ago?". Yes, yes I know. I haven't even looked at this set before lol.

If you cast ~ for two mana and draw a card that's a good rate.

~ triggers at the beginning of each end step, so if you can make tokens at instant speed he gets a lot better; perhaps with Gilded Goose or Tireless Tracker, I'm sure there's plenty of ways.

~ is an elf, so he could potentially go in a tribal deck. Historically elf decks have been known to splash white for Mirror Entity to turn Wirewood Symbiote into an elf so that you can reset it for infinite mana.

The initiative mechanic is very popular and produces treasure and skeleton tokens, so even if you don't draw a token producer, your opponent may provide one!

Not really playable but I wanted to mention a cool combo:

Turn1 Magosi, the Waterveil

Turn2 ~

Turn3 Out of the Tombs

Turn4 upkeep trigger Out of the Tombs, attack with ~ putting an eon counter on Magosi, infinite turns.

Nesting Grounds plays ~'s role much better because it isn't a fragile creature, but Highlander combo is all about redundancy.

I can see this in monoU where your removal options are very thin. It's like a Fateful Absence except it's vulnerable to enchantment removal and blink effects. When you're monoU though, you're running a lot of counterspells, so your chances of countering such effects are higher.

Split second is pretty sweet. I can't think of any abuse for it, but occaisionally it'll get you some extra value, e.g. you can hit Mother of Runes, or clue Walking Ballista before it pings you.

Pretty interesting. The opponent doesn't get their creature back if ~ leaves the battlefield, which is unusual. It's relatively easy to remove a shield counter from a creature, therefore I only really like this in decks with lots of proliferate cards.

Bad against Jace, the Mind Sculptor and Terfi, Time Raveler, but I think the risk is worth it. If you can grant haste then your chances of attacking greatly improve.
Best in decks that can discard it but hardcasting it is acceptable too; And obviously you'll want some juicy artifacts/instants/sorceries in your graveyard, e.g. Magma Opus. Tinker decks could use ~ as ~ can cast both Tinker and fat artifacts that you discard.

Very weird card. Could possibly work in a UB Tolarian Academy deck where you naturally want to run Xcost creatures like Walking Ballista, Stonecoil Serpent and Hangarback Walker; and you also want to run Academy Ruins and Volrath's Stronghold to trigger Imotekh, the Stormlord. Ballista is the best here cause you can cast it and sac it at will for the lands to put it on top in response to an opponent's creature spell. You might also run Sensei's Divining Top; it's not the most efficient use of points, it's good with ~, has good artifact synergy, especially with Mystic Forge.

You would run Brainstorm too of course.

Strong in an affinity for artifacts deck. Depending on your colours you max-out your affinity creatures:
Myr Enforcer
Sojourner's Companion
Chiss-Goria, Forge Tyrant
Chromescale Drake
Ethersworn Sphinx
Broodstar
Thought Monitor
Qumulox?

Unfortunately gets switched off by Null Rod, but I think the power is worth the risk.

I don't think delve creatures will work with ~ because you eat your graveyard when casting the first one, which makes the second one much worse. Therefore you can't run enough of them to reliably crew the Jolopy.

Another Containment Construct.

It basically gives all your spells madness. Survival of the Fittest can search for it and from there you can cast whatever you discard to Survival. Artificer's Intuition is similar except it can't find ~.

~ lets you cast things you discard to Lion's Eye Diamond.

Lot's of value with any recurring looter like Dack Fayden or Jace, Vryn's Prodigy.

This is a very exciting card. Before this set came out Tim Hughes messaged me about it, and I agree it's super powerful. No one has tried it yet but I'm going to.

To get a better idea of ~'s power it helps to imagine that it doesn't have the loot ability.

You fill your deck with good cards that incidentally discard and ~ becomes mega value for just 1mana.

Imagine turn1 ~, Mox Diamond into Smuggler's Copter or any decent permanent with a discard ability. Arguably Mox Diamond is the enabler in that scenario, but even if you have a weaker curve, e.g. turn3 Liliana of the Veil/Dack Fayden/Royal Scions, you get all those 2/2's for 1 mana.

Turn1 ~ + cycle Street Wraith is nice. 

~ can be found with Urza's Saga. 

You can find ~ with Artificer's Intuition and then have ongoing 2/2's and tutor.

If you can reliably remove creatures from your graveyard, e.g. with reanimate effects or graveyard removal, then ~ is strong. Especially if you can do it for zero mana because that allows you to curve into ~ and still get a trigger. It also makes you more likely to get a trigger on your opponent's turn too. That would be another level of power. You would need to work pretty hard on building your deck to maximise ~ to get there though.

Maybe a deck which tutors for Bloodghast with Entomb and Unmarked Grave and runs a bunch of sacrifice effects; the Bloodghast returning would giv eyou the ~ trigger.

Is she shooting the pursued with her hand? It's like the artist originally drew a gun and then the got told that guns weren't allowed in the mobster story and had to edit it out.

Back to card strategy, this could be a win condition in a prowess variant. There are tonnes of creature based prowess payoffs like Murktide Regent, Dreadhorde Arcanist, Third-Path Iconoclast. These creature-based payoffs are the most powerful, but they are vulnerable to creature removal. If a metagame is heavy with creature disruption then ~ could be a good alternative to creature-based win conditions. 

The Initiative is a new, powerful and popular mechanic, and to compete with it, you either need a fast combo kill or creatures of your own. Therefore non-creature threats which make creaturees are a good option if you want resilience against removal.

~ is slow so you want plenty of counterspells to slow opponents down, especially combo opponents.

There's a lot of potential here. The effect is quite unusual and it's not a permanent, so it would be much better in a traditional 4-of deck, but that's not Highlander is.
Perhaps there's some weird storm deck which uses Xcost creatures with some combination of Glimpse of Nature, Beck // Call, Fecundity, Grim Haruspex, Song of Creation and Beast Whisperer.

Yet another unique feeling card. I can imagine this in a graveyard based deck which discards a lot, perhaps Survival of the Fittest and Hogaak, Arisen Necropolis. I think ~ would only earn it's spot in a metagame with lots of sorcery-speed cantrips.
If there were a couple Thassa's Oracle decks in your metagame then you could justify running Geier Reach Sanitarium and Lore Broken (sideboard) because ~ effectively negates the discard, and against Demonic Consultation + Oracle, you can kill them with the draw effect. Of course the opponent will likely see this interaction and not go for the win, but it's better than losing. Anvil of Bogardan is cute here too, but doesn't stop Demonic Consultation + Oracle.

Eat your heart out Stoke the Flames. Both ~ and Stoke are underplayed I reckon; Potentially zero-mana spells.

In case you were wondering:

So the max connive is 4. That's a pretty crazy high ceiling, zero-mana kill their creature or planeswalker, loot 4 and put a +1/+1 counter on your dudes.

Any swarming black creature deck should run ~.

Looks like some total jank, and it is, but! I can imagine a weird deck where you run some powerful 'no-cost' suspend sorceries:

Ancestral Vision

Crashing Footfalls

Restore Balance

Profane Tutor

Inevitable Betrayal

Then you jam your deck full of disruptive 1mana instant and sorceries to get immediate powerful payoff from ~.

You also run Codie, Vociferous Codex and Maelstrom Nexus to abuse the no-cost sorceries.

You could run As Foretold to actually cast the suspend sorceries if you draw them, but it's probably better to simply suspend them, since there aren't many, and As Foretold is bad if you don't have multiple.

Any extra treasure makers you can add to the deck help ~, you don't need many though.

You are unlikely to have ~ every game, so you need your treasure makers to be generally good cards. You also prefer for them to be noncreatures so you can cast them under Codie.

The initiative mechanic produces treasure, which is nice for ~. However, the existence of the initiative means that you need creatures of your own, ideally tokens created by instants and sorceries, so that you can cast them through Codie.

You would blitz-cast this 99% of the time. Loosely functions as 'create two 1/1's, deal 4 to an opponent or planeswalker and draw a card'. Strong aggro card. Good with token synergies. Decent human to hit of Winota, and the citizens even trigger Winota.

4/4 vigilance haste is a respectable card, but not enough to earn a spot without some nonsense; And there is definitely some nonsense going on: Eater of Days!
Note that you don't have to activate ~ before combat, you can do it afterwards so that Eater of Days can't attack. In the unlikely event that you won't win the game with two extra turns, you can activate ~ in their end step so that Eater of Days won't get exiled; That way you can untap and use removal to destroy it if you need more than two extra turns to win the game. 

This combo actually seems good. You can set it up on curve with Survival of the Fittest. 

...I just realised that it's even better with Leveler! And you can do it in their upkeep before they draw.

If you can somehow give ~ flash, hexproof or shroud, then the combo is more resilient.

Wow, ok I'm definitely making this deck.

Good sideboard card for Mishra's Workshop decks against aggro.

If you can somehow ignore defender, the ~ is huge. Let's do a Gatherer search:

Walking Bulwark

Assault Formation

High Alert

Arcades, the Strategist

Green Sun's Zenith

Bring to Light

You really want to be attacking turn4, so Green Sun's and Bring to Light are a little slow. Modern has a lot more redundancy, which allows the defender strat to exist. I don't think we're close in 7PH yet.

Sideboard for Hardened Scales decks.

Ok, another one down. Interesting that the New Capenna Commander set a lot more unique cards that the Neon Dynasty Commander set.

Overall I liked how the designers really tried to match the name, function and flavour in this set. With the exception of Bribe Taker, which is not playable and a huge flavour fail.

My picks for best cards of the set in rough power order are:

Currency Converter

The Beamtown Bullies

Lethal Scheme

Caldaia Guardian

Bennie Bracks, Zoologist

Skyway Robber