The Tyrant's Tapdancing Trout - Kumena EDH Primer

Commander / EDH Counters GU (Simic) Merfolk Value Engine

Acsos

Lands (36)

• 1x Academy Ruins
• 1x Bant Panorama
• 1x Botanical Sanctum
• 1x Breeding Pool
• 1x City of Brass
• 1x Command Tower
• 1x Detection Tower
• 1x Evolving Wilds
• 1x Exotic Orchard
• 1x Flooded Grove
• 1x Flooded Strand
• 2x Forest
• 1x Ghost Quarter
• 1x High Market
• 1x Hinterland Harbor
• 7x Island
• 1x Lumbering Falls
• 1x Polluted Delta
• 1x Reliquary Tower
• 1x Rogue's Passage
• 1x Simic Growth Chamber
• 1x Temple of Mystery
• 1x Terramorphic Expanse
• 1x Unclaimed Territory
• 1x Warped Landscape
• 1x Waterlogged Grove
• 1x Windswept Heath
• 1x Wooded Foothills
• 1x Yavimaya Coast

Protection (4)

• 1x Cauldron of Souls
• 1x Creeping Renaissance
• 1x Kopala, Warden of Waves
• 1x Lightning Greaves

Tap Better (3)

• 1x Cryptic Gateway
• 1x Cryptolith Rite
• 1x Opposition

Interaction (11)

• 1x Arcane Denial
• 1x Beast Within
• 1x Counterspell
• 1x Krosan Grip
• 1x Lullmage Mentor
• 1x Nature's Claim
• 1x Negate
• 1x Reality Shift
• 1x Surgespanner
• 1x Swan Song
• 1x Vodalian Mage

Card Draw and Tutors (10)

• 1x Benthic Biomancer
• 1x Cold-Eyed Selkie
• 1x Fallowsage
• 1x Forerunner of the Heralds
• 1x Guardian Project
• 1x Merfolk Looter
• 1x Merrow Harbinger
• 1x Sage of Fables
• 1x Scroll Thief
• 1x Seafloor Oracle

Ramp (8)

• 1x Arcane Signet
• 1x Kodama's Reach
• 1x Mox Amber
• 1x Nature's Lore
• 1x Simic Cluestone
• 1x Simic Signet
• 1x Sol Ring
• 1x Stonybrook Banneret

Evasion (3)

• 1x Deepchannel Mentor
• 1x Herald of Secret Streams
• 1x Merfolk Sovereign

Other (1)

• 1x Wake Thrasher

Commander (1)

Utility (11)

• 1x Deeproot Elite
• 1x Deeproot Waters
• 1x Drowner of Secrets
• 1x Grimoire Thief
• 1x Merrow Reejerey
• 1x Mistcaller
• 1x Rootwater Hunter
• 1x Rootwater Thief
• 1x Seasinger
• 1x Stonybrook Angler
• 1x Thada Adel, Acquisitor

Untap More (6)

• 1x Curse of Bounty
• 1x Intruder Alarm
• 1x Merrow Commerce
• 1x Murkfiend Liege
• 1x Quest for Renewal
• 1x Seedborn Muse

Win Conditions (6)

• 1x Illusionist's Bracers
• 1x Kiora's Follower
• 1x Magistrate's Scepter
• 1x Simic Ascendancy
• 1x Vorel of the Hull Clade
• 1x Wanderwine Prophets

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This is intended to be a 75% build of Kumena, Tyrant of Orazca. If you've not heard of a "75% deck", the basic idea is that it's a deck that can fit well into any playgroup: it's strong enough to win against more powerful decks with tight play and a bit of luck, but not so strong that weaker decks don't stand a chance. You can read Jason Alt's fantastic article on the principle here: https://www.coolstuffinc.com/a/jasonalt-021314-building-a-75-commander-deck

The deck is a Merfolk tribal deck that revolves around tap/untap shenanigans with subthemes of +1/+1 counters and combat damage triggers coupled with evasion. I played a lot of merfolk in Standard with the introduction of Ixalan block, and wanted to translate that type of deck into EDH. I first built this deck for just $25 as part of a budget commander challenge with my playgroup; this list is heavily inspired by that one but significantly upgraded. This is by far my most-played EDH deck to date and I've found it to be just as fun to pilot the hundredth time as it was the first time, so I figured I would put the list out there for other people to try as well. This list is by no means optimized and my goal at the moment is not to make it as competitive as possible (see the link above); I would, however, greatly appreciate general feedback and any suggestions that synergize with the deck's themes and make it more fun to play.

Reasons You Should Play This Deck

You should play this deck if:

• You want a deck that can play well with just about any group at just about any level.

• You like playing cards that synergize well together and create effects whose sums are greater than their parts.

• You like having lots of options on your turn.

• You like having lots of options on your opponents' turns.

• You like drawing cards.

• You like variability between games.

• You like decks that are built around their commanders.

Reasons You Shouldn't Play This Deck

You shouldn't play this deck if:

• You want the most competitive EDH deck you can find.

• You want a straightforward, linear strategy.

• You don't like swinging with creatures or doing combat math.

• You want a deck that doesn't rely heavily on its commander.

The Commander

Kumena, Tyrant of Orazca is a powerful and versatile card. A converted mana cost of 3 makes him easy to cast (and recast if needed), and his activated abilities are the engine that powers our entire deck. We'll discuss his abilities in more detail in a moment, but first it's important that I point out that Kumena's abilities do not include a tap symbol. This means that you can tap Merfolk to activate them even if those Merfolk have summoning sickness. This is incredibly useful, as we'll be playing multiple Merfolk each turn and Kumena can put them to use right away. They are also activated abilities, which means that we can use them at instant speed. This lets us wait until the last moment to decide which ability to use.

His first ability lets us tap another Merfolk to make Kumena unblockable for the turn. This lets us chip away at opponents and can make winning with commander damage a viable strategy if Kumena gets big enough. More importantly, however, this lets us tap our Merfolk individually. Fallowsage, Surgespanner, and Grimoire Thief all trigger when they become tapped, and Quest for Renewal needs creatures to become tapped before it comes online. Kumena's ability lets us get these triggers without having to swing our tiny fish into bigger blockers.

His second ability is truly the essence of this deck, and it's beautiful in its simplicity: tap three untapped Merfolk you control to draw a card. Including Kumena himself, we run 33 Merfolk in this deck, as well as Deeproot Waters and Lullmage Mentor that make additional Merfolk tokens. It is almost always going to be the case that the best use of these fish is to draw cards. With how cheap our Merfolk are, you will often have two other Merfolk on board when you cast Kumena, which means he can start drawing cards as soon as he comes down. With six merfolk on board you're drawing two extra cards per round. Combine that with Seedborn Muse or Murkfiend Liege and all of your Merfolk are untapping every turn. One extra card per round becomes four, and two extra cards becomes eight. Still not enough cards for you? Play Intruder Alarm and every Merfolk you cast can draw you more cards! The more cards you draw, the more Merfolk you can play, and the more Merfolk you can play, the more cards you draw, and the more cards you draw...well, you can see how this might get out of hand fast.

Kumena's third ability lets us tap five Merfolk to put a +1/+1 counter on each Merfolk we control. Having to tap five Merfolk is definitely harder than just tapping three and in most cases we'd prefer to draw a card than get the counters, but this ability still has its uses. +1/+1 counters can help beef up our fish if we need blockers against another creature-based deck and can also offer some protection against direct damage spells. As mentioned above, it can also make commander damage a threat as Kumena gets bigger. It's possible to win through straight combat damage as well, though I find by the time I have enough untaps to have 5 or 6 counters on my Merfolk that I'm probably about to win anyway. This ability does synergize nicely with Cauldron of Souls, as the +1/+1 counter will remove the -1/-1 counter given by Persist, which lets you keep bringing your Merfolk back when they're destroyed (as long as they survive the -1/-1 counter, ie have more than 1 toughness).

Clearly, the ability to use our Merfolk to draw cards is the most important ability here, but Kumena's other activated abilities give us flexibility in our gameplan and lead to variation between games, which keeps this deck interesting.

Win Conditions

One of my favorite things about this deck is that it has a lot of ways to win that are all viable. The one I find myself using the most often is an infinite combo that has Kiora's Follower equipped with Illusionist's Bracers to give us unlimited untaps and mana. While the Follower's ability normally can't cause it to untap itself, Bracers allows you to change the target of the copied ability to the Follower; thus, the original ability untaps another permanent while the copy untaps the Follower, letting you repeat this as many times as you like. With infinite untaps, Kumena can draw our deck and give us infinite +1/+1 counters. We also run Rootwater Hunter as an additional outlet for this, giving us infinite pings.

There is a second, more tedious infinite combo with Vorel of the Hull Clade and Magistrate's Scepter. Once the Scepter has three counters on it, we can use Vorel to double those counters, then take an extra turn by removing three of them, leaving three counters on the Scepter to rinse and repeat.

We also run Simic Ascendancy, since we can generate a lot of +1/+1 counters. This will definitely make you a huge target since it won't trigger until your upkeep, but it's possible to put the required twenty counters on it in a single round with something like Seedborn Muse letting you activate Kumena's third ability four times in a round.

Wanderwine Prophets can close out a game if it manages to hit somebody, as you will almost certainly be putting more than one Merfolk onto the board each (extra) turn, letting you fuel the Prophets for as long as you need.

As mentioned above, it's also very possible to win with commander damage, as Kumena can generate a lot of +1/+1 counters and make himself unblockable. Straight combat damage is also an option with enough +1/+1 counters.

Card Categories and Individual Choices

Untap More

Most of the cards in this deck either tap for an effect or let other cards tap for an effect, so we want to make sure we can untap as much as possible to maximize those effects.

• Seedborn Muse is the undisputed champion here. With her on board, you're getting 4 times the untaps! The amount of advantage this generates is immense, so she's worth investing resources to protect.

• Quest for Renewal and Murkfiend Liege don't untap your lands and artifacts like Seedborn Muse does, but your creatures are your primary resource in this deck anyway, so they're still incredibly effective. Keep in mind that Kumena can tap any other Merfolk at any time, so getting the counters needed to activate Quest for Renewal is pretty easy even if you can't swing.

• Intruder Alarm can snowball fast in this deck. Most of your Merfolk are cheap and Kumena is going to keep your hand filled, so it's not unusual for Intruder Alarm to give you an extra three, four, or five untaps just on your turn. With Kumena and a couple of Merfolk on board, every creature that your opponents put into play can draw you a card. This also synergizes well with Deeproot Waters, giving you two untaps for every Merfolk you cast!

• Merrow Commerce only gives us one extra untap per turn, but we can do a lot with that. Keep in mind that it also has the Merfolk subtype, so it can be used to activate Kumena's abilities.

• Curse of Bounty is a fun card. It can give your opponents an incentive to attack players other than you while also letting you profit off that decision. On your own turn, you have enough evasion that you can trigger this with almost no risk to your creatures and get an extra untap. You can technically also play this card on yourself if you know you're going to be attacked anyway. It will give your creatures a pseudo-Vigilance (since if you're attacked they'll untap before you have to declare blockers), which lets you use their tap effects and still have blockers up if needed.

Tap Better

While most of our creatures can tap on their own and Kumena can make good use of the ones that can't, we run a few cards that give us more options for our taps.

• Cryptolith Rite is probably the most useful of these cards, as it lets your creatures tap for mana. Keep in mind that this gives your creatures an ability with a tap symbol, so summoning sickness applies here. Even still, this can help you ramp early and be able to cast all of the cards you're going to draw with Kumena. This combined with Intruder Alarm can essentially let you cast your Merfolk for free.

• Cryptic Gateway lets you use your Merfolk to get more Merfolk onto the board. This ability doesn't cast the Merfolk from your hand, so it can get around counterspells. Unfortunately, this also means you won't trigger Deeproot Waters, though things like Intruder Alarm will still trigger.

• Opposition is a downright nasty card. I've considered cutting it because of how oppressive and un-fun it can be to play against, but have kept it in only because you can control what's being tapped down (and therefore how oppressive it is in practice). Even with just a few creatures on board and no extra untaps, Opposition lets you preemptively stop attackers that you couldn't otherwise deal with and reduce the effectiveness of lands like Cabal Coffers. This card becomes exponentially more powerful with untappers like Seedborn Muse; on each opponent's turn, you can tap down a number of artifacts, creatures, or lands equal to the number of creatures you control (which is usually a lot) before your opponent has even drawn their card for the turn, and then do the same to the next player on their turn. Even if you don't have enough creatures to tap all of their lands, the disparity in resources can quickly become too great for your opponents to overcome.

Utility

Some of these cards synergize well with our gameplan or are here to combat specific decks that I tend to face in my playgroup.

• Deeproot Waters is probably the only one of these cards that I wouldn't suggest cutting for something else. It triggers on cast, which means that you're more or less guaranteed a Merfolk even if your opponents counter the original creature spell. It also doubles the effectiveness of Intruder Alarm and gives you more Merfolk to use with Kumena or cards like Cryptolith Rite or Opposition. I've also found it useful against cards like Grave Pact; that card is bad news for us, but depending on the circumstance we can sometimes pump out enough bodies to outpace the opponent that played it.

• Drowner of Secrets and Grimoire Thief can shut down tutors like Mystical Tutor that put cards on the top of your opponent's library. Keep in mind that Grimoire Thief can't activate itself like Drowner can.

• Mistcaller is pretty narrow in scope, but can stop cards that let your opponents put things directly onto the battlefield.

• Rootwater Hunter is a secondary outlet for the Kiora's Follower/Illusionist's Bracers combo if for some reason infinite mana and card draw can't win you the game. It can also be useful at picking off planeswalkers or some problem creatures when combined with Merrow Commerce or (even more effectively) Intruder Alarm.

• Rootwater Thief is exclusively here to break up combo decks. Nab your opponent's Laboratory Maniac or Aetherflux Reservoir before they become a problem. If your opponents aren't running combos, you can use this to pull board wipes from their decks, since those tend to be bad for us. Thada Adel, Acquisitor can do a similar job, or she can help you further your own board state by pulling things like mana rocks.

• Seasinger lets you take any creature you want from any opponent with an Island. This is made better with the inclusion of cards like Aquitect's Will and Quicksilver Fountain, though my meta has enough blue players that I haven't found a need for these cards. Seasinger is a bit of a nonbo with all of the extra untapping we do, though we can still steal creatures on our opponents' turns to keep them from swinging at us.

Protection

As I discuss in the Weaknesses section, we're prone to board wipes and we rely a lot on Kumena. Lightning Greaves and Kopala, Warden of Waves make it a bit harder for our opponents to pick off our valuable Merfolk, while Cauldron of Souls can keep us from getting wiped. Remember that Kumena can put +1/+1 counters on our Merfolk, which will cancel out the -1/-1 counters and let us keep using the Cauldron. Creeping Renaissance lets us grab all the creatures that end up in the graveyard and reuse them (and do it a second time, if necessary). There's definitely room for more of these kinds of cards if you find yourself facing lots of board wipes.

Ramp

Nothing special here. Most of these were cards I had on-hand at the time and will probably be replaced soon by better versions. Don't forget that Stonybrook Banneret reduces the mana cost by for each of the two creatures types; a Merfolk Wizard like Drowner of Secrets would therefore cost less to cast.

Card Draw and Tutors

Not much special here either. Guardian Project is great in this deck with how many creatures we have. Of the Merfolk here, I find myself drawing the most cards off of Fallowsage, since there's lots of ways to tap him. Benthic Biomancer can loot a few cards if you're using Kumena for the +1/+1 counters, too.

You might notice that I don't have many of the tutors you'd expect to see in blue, especially artifact tutors that would let us find combo pieces more easily. This is by design; our deck draws a lot of card as it is, so including artifact tutors like Fabricate or Whir of Invention alongside the Merfolk tutors (Merrow Harbinger and Forerunner of the Heralds) would mean that our Kiora's Follower/Illusionist's Bracers combo would become our primary gameplan almost every single time. If that's the kind of deck you want to play, by all means you can include those tutors. I've chosen not to because I enjoy the increased variability of the deck without them and feel that increasing the consistency of that game-winning combo would make this deck too powerful to still be considered a 75% deck. I've kept the Merfolk tutors in the deck because they can also be used to find our utility Merfolk when we need specific answers, but if you find that the combos in this deck are still too consistent for your liking, you could remove the Merfolk tutors as well (or just remove the combos!).

Interaction

These are pretty basic, too: a few counterspells as general-purpose interaction, some artifact and enchantment removal, one permanent destruction, and one creature exile. Again, these are mostly what I had on-hand and the slots are highly customizable. Lullmage Mentor is nice because it can create more Merfolk for you, but I don't find that this happens too often. His second ability can be helpful in a pinch, but usually when you've got that many Merfolk on your board you're pretty much set anyway. Vodalian Mage is mostly a remnant of the original $25 budget list, though a Force Spike on a stick isn't a bad thing to have. Every once in a while someone will forget about him and tap out for something big, which can be amusing. Surgespanner is probably the best card in this category. Kumena can tap him down to trigger his ability, letting you keep problem permanents off the board. With Intruder Alarm and Cryptolith Rite he can pretty much clear the board.

Evasion

These cards are pretty self-explanatory. There's a lot more you could do here if you wanted to lean into effects like Bident of Thassa and Coastal Piracy.

Weaknesses

As mentioned in the introduction, this deck is not meant to be as competitive as possible; it's meant to be strong enough to beat powerful decks, but not so strong that it mops the floor with more casual decks and makes the game unfun for their pilots. As such, this deck has a couple of weaknesses that haven't been addressed and you should be aware of when playing.

First, we are susceptible to board wipes. Our creatures are our primary resource, so losing them hurts. We run a few counterspells, but beyond those our only answers are Cauldron of Souls to give our creatures Persist and Creeping Renaissance to bring creatures from our graveyard back to our hand. If your playgroup has a lot of board wipes, you might consider including more protection and recursion to make sure you can keep enough Merfolk on board. Personally, I'm considering both Heroic Intervention and Evacuation for this purpose. Interestingly, I've found that I can rebuild relatively well after a board wipe if I have a good number of creatures in hand and enough mana to cast them. Kumena just needs two other Merfolk to start drawing cards again, so while a board wipe will always set you back, if it's later in the game you might still be able to recover.

The second issue is how much we rely on Kumena to do just about anything. The card draw he gives us is central to this deck, so losing him to something like Darksteel Mutation or a Control Magic effect can cripple us. We run High Market so that we can sacrifice Kumena rather than lose him and we have some ability to bounce creatures and destroy enchantments with our interaction spells, but if you're not prepared for it, not being able to use Kumena can really put a damper on your day.

Customizing this Deck

Merfolk have been a part of Magic since the beginning and have consistently been one of the most popular tribes in the game. As such, there's been a lot of them printed over the years and that trend isn't likely to stop soon. This means you've got a lot of flexibility in which Merfolk you include. You could lean more heavily into the +1/+1 counter theme with things like Merfolk Skydiver or focus on combat damage with the various Merfolk lords like Lord of Atlantis and Master of the Pearl Trident. Maybe you like evasion and combat damage triggers; Mist-Cloaked Herald and River Sneak pair well with the likes of Seafloor Oracle. You could even squeeze in another infinite combo with cEDH's favorite Merfolk, Thassa's Oracle! While you'd conventionally use the Oracle with Tainted Pact and Demonic Consultation, cards like Thought Lash, Paradigm Shift, and Hermit Druid can all fill that role while staying within our colors.

There's room in the non-Merfolk spells for customization, too. Many of the spells I've included for interacting with our opponents were either cards I had on-hand or were chosen because they were less un-fun than some other (more powerful) options (the intentional exclusion of Cyclonic Rift is one example). You can swap out any of these cards for ones that better suit your meta and playstyle. You could also focus more heavily on the tribal aspect of the deck with things like Vanquisher's Banner, Door of Destinies, and Coat of Arms.

All of this is to say that this list isn't set in stone; there's plenty of opportunity for you to make changes and tune it to your liking!

Date added	5 years
Last updated	3 years
Legality	This deck is Commander / EDH legal.
Rarity (main - side)	2 - 0 Mythic Rares 46 - 0 Rares 25 - 0 Uncommons 18 - 0 Commons
Cards	100
Avg. CMC	2.84
Tokens	Beast 3/3 G, Bird 2/2 U, Manifest 2/2 C, Merfolk 1/1 U, Merfolk 1/1 U w/ Hexproof