Krark, the Thumbless was one of our top picks to build around when we first saw the cards in Commander Legends. We got even more excited when we realized it had Partner, and just how perfectly it works with Sakashima of a Thousand Faces.
Of course, with any partner creature you have complete flexibility to design it with the colors that you choose. If you’d like, you could take the red elements of this article and apply them to whichever other partner creature you prefer. But we find the interaction (and color combination) between these two so perfect that we found a ton of cards to use with them. We’ll separate them into little “packages” to make it easier for you to pick and choose which effects will fit your playstyle (and that of your play group).
It’s worth noting that if you choose to go deep on the coinflip mechanics (like we will in this article), Okaun, Eye of Chaos and Zndrsplt, Eye of Wisdom are two great inclusions in the maindeck that can then serve as a secondary pair of Commanders if you ever want to switch it up for a game or two.
The first thing we looked at for this deck was Krark’s Thumb and ways to tutor for it. During this search, we also found Twinning Staff, so we committed to the theme of finding these two key artifacts. Krark’s Thumb is really what lets us go crazy with Krark’s ability, so it’s worth committing to having this in play in as many games as possible.
Next we dug deep to find all of the possible coinflip interactions that are worth considering. You can build from this list anywhere from super powerful to silly, and often both.
Sakashima lets us completely ignore the Legendary rule, so let’s consider our options for running even more cards that can copy Krark. More weight should be given to instant and sorcery versions. We’ll want to make sure we don’t expose ourselves to point removal if someone killed our only Sakashima and thus forced us to legend-rule a bunch of copies of Krark.
Since we’re already halfway insane, let’s see what are options would be if we want to try to just copy Krark’s Thumb as well. Worst case scenario, these can all just copy a random mana artifact or something.
OK, we’ve gone heavy on enablers for our wacky Commander combination, now let’s finally get into some instants and sorceries to copy. The Storm keyword seems like an easy place to start, since the “downside” of Krark returning the card to our hand now becomes an enormous upside.
Let’s go ahead and enable these Storm cards (or any type of big turn) with a bunch of rituals:
This package contains our list of “generally good” spells to copy or that work well with convoluted stacks that involve copying spells and replaying them.
Since we’re so heavy on the “playing instants and sorceries matters” theme that is so prevalent in this color combination, there’s several more generally powerful cards we can consider.
Some playgroups frown upon too much taking of extra turns, but if yours doesn’t then here is a list of several you could include.
Some number of cheap cantrips are a logical inclusion, since they qualify as spells to copy with Krark and help us find our key pieces.
Mana ramp is as important as ever in this deck, so we’ve included some of the good ones. We also want to make sure to have a high enough density of these to go with our artifact subthemes from above.
Lastly, we’ll leave you with some of the notable lands for this deck that don’t break the budget.
Thank you for reading! We don’t even know where to begin to cut this down to 98 cards, so we hope you have better luck than us!
