Magic: The Gathering Commander Focus: Clues, Affinity, & Nyla, Shirshu Sleuth

There's an endless joy to tuning your mana base in Commander. Whether you're a budget player getting those first fetch lands, learning White can ramp with Lotus Vale, or dredging the muck of Scryfall for any lands that sacrifice just to get Harold and Bob, First Numens online, the part we can focus the least on in Magic can be the most interesting. After all, you could jam purely basics or on-color dual lands and do just fine most of the time, given utility lands present a small but noticeable opportunity cost. As is so often the case in my deckbuilding journeys, though, that is a cost I am avid to pay. Another niche but powerful Land got its perfect Commander in Avatar: The Last Airbender, so we're joining Scooby and the gang this week to split up and look for clues at Havengul Laboratory // Havengul Mystery, turning the brand-new Nyla, Shirshu Sleuth into a formidable, repeatable Monoblack Affinity Commander. Maybe together, we'll learn what Fred's catchphrase is.

Credit: Wizards of the Coast.

"Lose X Life and Create X Clue Tokens"

For those of you that have been reading my Commander coverage for a while, Nyla might just resemble another option I've covered before: Gorex, the Tombshell. I built Gorex as a mana value-matters Commander and have had a ton of success with it as the Bracket 2 deck folks want to play against most, of my paper options, but even though Nyla explicitly cares about the very same she does less with the theme than her turtley peer. Both Commanders exile high cost cards from the yard, and have the chance to bring them back, but play in wildly different ways—it's because their payoffs are in opposite places. Where Gorex backloads his payoff, being that he can add up to 3 cards back to your hand, Nyla frontloads this by giving you an absolute mountain of Clue tokens, which require additional inputs to turn into value. If you occasionally add the card Nyla's tracking back to your hand, that's a small miracle, whereas a Gorex that doesn't manage to swing and die does effectively nothing. It's for this reason (and others we'll discuss below) that I've pushed Nyla to Bracket 3, where I am more than confident she'll be comfortable hanging with a tougher crowd. I mention all of this because while I have a type when it comes to Monoblack Commanders, even within that space the endpoint reached will look wildly different.

The real reason we're playing Nyla is to create more Clue tokens than can be managed responsibly, and play like Sui Black while we do so. First things first, we need expensive Creatures that can hit the bin early, and we don't really care about losing forever: Draft chaff Cyclers. Shardless Outlander, Shefet Archfiend, Gloomfang Mauler—these are all cards we treat as 2 mana cantrips that linger in the yard for Nyla to sniff out. If ever it comes time to cast one, we're in a truly bad spot; this is less true of a card like Sojourner's Companion, which fulfills both that role as well as being free following a successful Nyla trigger. We're ideally starting the game with Nyla creating 6-7 Clues, turning on a host of Artifact synergies and surging us ahead after a fairly overcosted 5 mana Commander. We're playing 11 total ways to get at least one of these big idiots in the yard to kick off, so in your opening 15, we're looking at an ~85% shot to see one from the get. That many clues from a single trigger is profound, and we're able to hedge tools like Krark-Clan Ironworks or especially Inspiring Statuary to leap ahead once we've started snooping around.

Zoinks, it's the Ghoul of Havengul!

Five seasons and a Shirshu.

Black doesn't have a hard time finding any one given card, but even though specific tutoring can push us towards a combo, we still need to participate in the grind game. While we do have a clear opening, there's still need to plan for the midgame, which is where we turn to the core value loop of the deck: Havengul Laboratory // Havengul Mystery, especially in relation to Nyla's interaction with Eternal Scourge. It feels like Nyla was made for Havengul, a card that's barely seen the light of day since being printed first as Hawkins National Laboratory in the Stranger Things Secret Lair. Nyla has you swimming in Clue tokens, and cracking them is easy in Monoblack, giving us a chance to recur any number of things from the Graveyard...including Nyla herself. Coupling the Mole Beast with an outlet for both Artifacts and Creatures, such as Umbral Collar Zealot or Phantom Train, you can bank Clues turn after turn, so long as there's a Creature with mana value 3 or higher to exile.

As has become a mainstay in this column, I owe deference to the honorable Eternal Scourge. Yes, being a 3 mana Creature we can cast from exile lines up perfectly not only with Nyla, but Havengul as well, producing the three Clues needed to flip it. Of course, we prefer to exile larger Creatures, but Scourge ensures we're never without an option in the midgame, and can continue to cycle Nyla throughout. Even beyond our Commander, if we bank some Clues this land becomes an incidental, costless Dread Return every cycle, so long as we can get rid of its reanimated friend before our next End Step. It doesn't even place a Finality counter or have limitations...it's just like having the world's funniest Sheoldred. Being in Monoblack means we were already prioritizing nonbasic Land tutors like the Maps, because there's always Urborg+Cabal Coffers to consider. What Havengul provides is a tertiary target for these fairly cost-intensive tutors, making them not only more worthwhile, but better at more stages of the game. If you could search for a reanimation spell your opponents likely pack minimal interaction for, why wouldn't you?

The Roller Coaster of Life

One facet of Nyla worth touching on is something I alluded to earlier, that this deck plays pretty fast & loose with your life total. Our expected opener involves losing 7 life on turn 3 or 4, and our core value loop costs an additional 3-7 per rotation; even in a 40 life format where it's frowned upon to rush someone down without good reason, this amounts to smoking in a fireworks factory. Luckily, Black as a color has a number of ways to both buoy our life total and dance on that most seductive of razors' edges, so we can keep creating Clues. One of the best cards for Nyla is Battle at the Bridge, tapping our Clues to not only remove a Creature, but recoup the life lost. If we're looking to gain life over time, meanwhile, there's Marionette Apprentice, and optionally Al Bhed Salvagers. I'm not actually that high on these cards, given we're more keen to hold onto our Clues than get rid of them en masse, but in a pinch these likewise translate our junk back into life. Finally, there's Obsessive Pursuit, which does seem made for this deck, arriving in Avatar alongside Nyla. On a turn where we're crunching through our Clues, after having tapped or used them to draw, Pursuit can buff up one of our Creatures, sending it in with Lifelink for a massive life swing. Conveniently, this mode also turns on when 3 Clues go away, much like Havengul.

That being said, we're not just here for lifegain—Nyla urges us to life more dangerously, as we take huge chunks out of our life total throughout a game. This comes in the form of The Golden Throne & Stunning Reversal, each of which allow us a last-chance opportunity to lose more life than we have left, and try desperately to win. This comes up most often when we need to keep digging with Clues while already at low life, or are pushing for a victory by creating & sacrificing 15 Clues via Shadow of Mortality & Persuasive Interrogators. In that latter example, the lifegain needed to make a line like that self-contained is so high that no single card could make it happen without considerable input. Therefore, it makes more sense to dodge a game loss, than to skirt around it. In testing, I also just found you can sort of just case Reversal semi-fairly and gain life using one of the cards you drew, so keep in mind that it's closer to a 4 mana draw 7 than it appears.

Would You Do it for a Scooby Stax?

This list is fairly removal-light, but that's actually for a good reason: We've swapped the slots that would normally be wipes to include a hefty package of everyone's favorite subtheme, stax. I mean stax here in the truest form, placing literal Smokestacks, and its cousin Descent into Madness, front and center. Stax in the modern lexicon means something a little different than it used to, often referring to the Winter Orbs & Collector Ouphes of the world. Classical stax is instead about slowly draining resources, and forcing opponents into uncomfortable gamestates while we produce enough random trash to get rid of, breaking parity on shared effects. It was, in essence, the original aristocrats...it just made the opponent also play aristocrats. In our case, the reason Nyla lends herself to stax comes down to the fact that we're often making more Clues than we know what to do with. Where an opponent might need to start sacrificing Creatures or valuable mana rocks, we're just going to rid ourselves of tokens that already existed only as hypothetical advantage. Drawing a card with a Clue is about as good as sacrificing it while we watch opponents agonize over which permanents are worth keeping.

These cards won't get you into heaven, either.

There are some people who say that cards like the Smokestack twins (Go watch Sinners) or Tangle Wire fall under the purview of 'mass mana denial', called out as verboten in Brackets 2 & 3. To this, I say: You guys need to make more garbage. We aren't ever forcing them to sacrifice their mana, or tapping down lands, we're merely suggesting that to be preferable to getting rid of their Commander for the third time this game. If someone is permanent-light, they're probably interaction-heavy, and then the problem corrects itself. Unlike the modern conception of stax, these cards don't slow the game down, they actually accelerate it, by allowing us to hedge our advantage on permanent count against opponents. We can even Sculpting Steel one of these options, doubling down on the pain. Especially noteworthy as well is the recently-unbanned Braids, Cabal Minion, who has a homecoming here as a Smokestacks on a body; in the Command Zone she can be oppressive, with Black's rituals, but feels fair in the 99. If ever these become too much for us to handle, we can always sacrifice them prior to our Upkeep, given they're Creatures and/or Artifacts, but by that same token you need to be careful with Descent as it's significantly harder to get rid of. That being said, once we cover the list itself, look out for ways to enjoy this list while swapping out stax pieces—I understand they can be contentious, and there's more to Nyla than just fodder.

Tracking Down a Win

We've covered the opening line of making ~7 Clues, and our midgame value loop and its counterpart in the stax package, but how does the deck actually win? As I alluded to in our section on lifegain, there's both a known and novel path to victory here. Starting with the cool one, Persuasive Interrogators turns 5 sacrificed Clues into one dead opponent, so if we can amass 15 in one go, we're able to sacrifice them and push for the win. Nyla satisfies this, either by amassing Clues in bundles of 3-7, or in one beautiful go with Shadow of Mortality. Not only is Shadow fairly accessible, with cards like Entomb, but if it ends up in hand it's eminently castable, given we burn through life like kindling. This actually speaks to a subtheme of cards we have that are shared with Gorex, in the form of mana value based acceleration. Soldevi Adnate, Sacrifice, & Illuminor Szeras all provide plentiful Black mana to go with the colorless generated by the likes of KCI and Statuary. While our curve might look a bit wonky, keep that in mind.

As far as the other castable high-mana cards, Myr Enforcer & Sojourner's Companion both have Affinity for Artifacts, meaning if we can get our big 6-7 Clue opener online, these are functionally free, and can skyrocket our potential mana in future turns. Having high mana Artifact Creatures also matters for a different reason, as beyond the Interrogator line, we're also on the standard KCI+Myr Retriever+Scrap Trawler combo. This is a well-trodden line of play, but it's especially good here in that we can rip through the Colorless mana provided to crack Clues and draw into more gas. This is also viable by way of our largest Affinity Creature, Mycosynth Golem, which takes the place of KCI in this line. If we're looping that way, we can add in another sacrifice outlet and use that an infinite number of times, allowing us to Surveil the deck with an Umbral Collar Zealot.

Kinda getting a raging Clue right now.

We can access these lines through Hoarding Broodlord+Saw in Half, though funny enough it favors the Interrogators line because of how easy that combo is to execute, given setup. Although it sounds like a lot, setting up 15 Clues and a sac outlet is fairly pedestrian for Nyla, with her strength coming from the sheer density of trash on the board that is provided readily. There was a point within this list's testing that I was far more turbo, on all the Rituals available and even Imp's Mischief, kind of like cEDH K'rrik. That being said, the strength of the stax package slowed the list down for me, letting Nyla shine in more ways than just a burst of Clues, although remnants that have great synergy remain, like Overeager Apprentice. While not a part of any obvious win conditions, it's also worth pointing out Academy Manufactor, which turns the mildly entertaining 7-15 Clues into a literal second playmat's worth of grey tokens. The extra Food can help you survive, and Treasures not only dole out Black mana, but can represent a 2:1 for cracking Clues.

Example Decklist: You Shirshu Wanna Do That?

Beyond what's been covered, I just want to call out a few of the inclusions that are independently good, starting with Thran Turbine. For decades this has been a darling among cards that take some extra effort to fully make use of; here, it can not only give us the mana to crack a Clue in our Upkeep, but Cycle one of the big bodies earlier than expected, reserving mana to ramp or get ready to cast the first Nyla. Then, there's Demonic Junker, a profoundly silly removal piece that gets its full value here, being cast for {B} more often than not. This takes care of three problematic cards at once, though has issues being looped, as it's not always a Creature. Finally, I'd like to congratulate Nyla for being the single-best Commander I've ever played to enable Fomori Vault. That ability is as close to a soft tutor as one can get, with the amount of scrap left on the table from a few Enters effects.

Decklists are kept updated, and may change with set releases.

If you aren't a fan of stax (or have otherwise been asked to avoid it by your playgroup) , there is still a way to enjoy Nyla. This starts by adding Barricade Breaker, who serves a similar role here to Myr Enforcer. In a similar vein, Foundry Assembler, Refurbished Familiar, and even Priest of Yawgmoth as an alternate Adnate all do great work—you can absolutely bring this down to Bracket 2 by removing those harsher pieces, and leaning further into Affinity! As it stands with stuff like Smokestacks, however, this sits squarely in Bracket 3.

The Smooth Taste of Diet K'rrik

Rafater combines drawn-over renderings and digital backgrounds gloriously.

Decks that require careful management of their life totals are playing two subgames in Commander: The knife's edge of what constitutes 'too greedy', and the capacity one has to convince opponents not to kick you while you choose to fall down the proverbial stairs. Nyla is an intensely interesting case, because you go down so far, so quickly in the early game that she actually gives you the chance to play nice and coast a bit. So long as you don't do anything too scary, such as play a stax piece, this can put you way ahead, not unlike everyone's Monoblack darling, K'rrik. Unlike K'rrik, though, not only does Nyla not have a reputation, she's likely to be forgotten rather quickly as future sets come out. It's the ideal opportunity to practice managing expectations, and still get your kicks as someone interested in the play patterns of Yawgmoth's precious little boy.

This goes back to one of my most oft-repeated adages about Commanders: They don't need to be obviously good, just start with their text being unique. Nyla's big draw comes from being a burst Clue-creation tool, where most of her peers create them over time. Even though that last line is trinket text, more often than not, recognizing there's some heinous stuff to be done with that Enters trigger is the trick to breaking her wide open. If we look at her peers, like Lonis, Cryptozoologist or Morska, Undersea Sleuth, it becomes apparent that not only does Monoblack provide some unique space for Clues, but no other Commander makes as many, as fast as Nyla. That counts for something.

Despite that, I'm confronted with the fact that at time of writing this she's sitting at a cool 16 decks on EDHREC, with not even an r/EDH post covering her reveal. This Commander is doomed to obscurity, and even in spite of doing a deep dive and all this testing, the very article you're reading is but a drop in the bucket. To that end, she has the opportunity to be truly yours, dear reader. You won't find another Nyla player in a 100 mile radius, and she provides an open canvas for increasing big cycler density or swapping stax for more gas, depending on your needs. Although if you've gotten to this point I'd hope you might share the coverage, if you want to tell your friends that you've spontaneously cracked a hidden gem of ATLA, be my guest. I won't tell.

Until next time, Fred says 'Response?'.

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