Ok hear me out:
I know what you are all probably thinking: Why the hell are we using Ben-Ben? Like he’s neat and flavorful, but there are so many better commanders out there. I have but two justifications: the first is that my name is Ben, so he felt like a very cool and Meta commander to play. The second is that I like challenges, and Ben-Ben is far from easy to construct. My boi Ben is incredibly awkward, sorta like me: He has a really cool effect, but is in the wrong colors for it to be almost decent. He is also only a 1/1, which means he won’t stick around for very long. I’ve seen goblin tribal decks with him, but Krenko and Kikki are just way more effective. I’ve seen plenty of wacky and generally stupid decklists that justify using him because he is simply an oddball, but this decklist hopes to change that. Ben-Ben will no be known as that dumb red commander that does nothing, and Ben-Ben will reign victorious, if all goes according to plan.
First of all, notice that the commander himself tells the player what to do with him. “They hunted for him in the maze of warrens, often falling prey to his traps.” That’s a pretty good base to start with: manipulate combat and protect our board with some well-placed spells. I could, of course, be more flavorful and less effective by running Empty The Warrens or Maze of Ith, but they don’t really jive with our commander, so put those cards aside for an inferior deck.
To extend the combat manipulation “traps” we are laying, we have to take a look at Ben. Ben-Ben can deal damage to attacking creatures, so obviously deathtouch is super good with him. We can “ping” down our opponent’s attackers with a deathtouch-ed Ben-Ben, and even more interestingly, we can combine him with Thornbite Staff and essentially wipe everyone’s creatures every combat!
Now the only problem is winning and getting our opponents to actually attack us. The latter is easier to achieve in red, because we have Fumiko and Angel’s Trumpet. Our win conditions are pretty neat, so let’s take a closer look:
Mob Rule can hypothetically win the game. If our opponents are forced to attack and we can politic/scare our opponents into not attacking us, they could presumably build us a solid board presence. To exasperate this further, we can use cards like Silent Arbiter, Crawlspace, Tanglewire, and Smoke to slow the game down enough for us to create a manageable board state. I’ll be honest, I had a very hard time finding Mono-red win conditions so if y’all have any suggestions that’d be very helpful.
To conclude this essay about Ben-Ben are my “counter-arguments.” Things I can’t really address. One is win-conditions, but you already know about that one. Another issue is my lack of money to purchase actually good commander ramp. Sol ring is the best ramp we are going to get in these colors. The final few weaknesses are our lack of consistency (which could be remedied by having more options) and our difficulty dealing with non-creature-based commander decks. I don’t have any win conditions against those, and Mob Rule does nothing to those. If this wonderful community could help me out, that would be wonderful. Please comment, upvote, and help me out! Also check out my Prime Primer for Prime Speaker Vannifar, I need some help with that dude too!
