The Commander
: Draw a card, then discard a card. Put a quest counter on Arcade Gannon.
For Auld Lang Syne — Once during each of your turns, you may cast an artifact or Human spell from your graveyard with mana value less than or equal to the number of quest counters on Arcade Gannon.
Guide
Gameplan
Arcade Gannon turns your graveyard into a second hand, tapping each turn to loot and stack quest counters that unlock progressively larger artifact and Human recasts. Early on you filter to dig for pieces and dump fatties; mid-game you recur cheap value engines, then graveyard-cast bombs for free card advantage. You grind the table out on raw resources while a White-Blue control or blink shell keeps you alive.
Strengths
- Built-in card filtering plus recursion makes you incredibly resilient to spot removal and counterspells.
- Quest counters scale your recast ceiling, so late-game you can cast huge artifacts and Humans from the bin.
- Loots fuel reanimator and graveyard payoffs while smoothing draws.
- UW gives access to the best control, blink, and protection in the format.
Weaknesses
- Painfully slow start — the first several turns are pure setup with no board impact.
- Heavily commander-dependent; repeated removal of Gannon stalls the whole engine.
- Quest counters reset to zero each time he leaves, making the recast clause unreliable under pressure.
- Limited to artifacts and Humans, so the recursion is narrower than generic reanimation.
- Graveyard hate shuts down the entire value plan.
Key Cards
- Solemn Simulacrum — A Human-adjacent... actually a colorless artifact creature you can loot away and recast for value and ramp.
- Stoneforge Mystic — A cheap Human you can recur to repeatedly fetch and cheat equipment into play.
- Emry, Lurker of the Loch — Doubles your artifact recursion and self-mills to stock the graveyard for Gannon to recast.
- Skullclamp — Cheap artifact that turns your spare Humans and tokens into a card-draw engine and is easy to recur.
- Teferi's Protection — Saves Gannon and your counters from board wipes, protecting the engine at instant speed.
- Restoration Angel — Blinks Gannon to dodge removal and reuse him, while being a recurrable Human-flier.
Upgrade Path
Add protection (Swiftfoot Boots, Heroic Intervention, Teferi's Protection) so Gannon survives and keeps his counters, since losing him resets everything. Tighten the curve toward cheap, high-value artifacts and Humans you actively want to recast, and add self-mill or discard outlets (Faithless-style loot, Frantic Search) to stock the bin faster. For higher power, lean into an artifact combo finish or Stoneforge/Urza package and back it with strong UW interaction like Swords to Plowshares, Cyclonic Rift, and Mystic Remora.
Core Cards
The most-played cards for this commander, built from aggregated deck data (the Mythic Graph). Build public decks to seed it.
Win Conditions
- ▸Grind opponents out of resources, then win with a recurring threat or finisher like a Human beatdown.
- ▸Assemble an artifact/Stoneforge package and beat down with cheated equipment.
- ▸Combo or value-engine into overwhelming card advantage and a single big payoff like Approach of the Second Sun.
- ▸Repeated value creatures (Solemn, Stoneforge, ETB Humans) snowball into board dominance.
Archetypes
- Value Control — Gannon's looting and recursion grind out incremental advantage behind UW counters and removal.
- Artifacts — His graveyard-cast clause and looting recur artifacts repeatedly for an engine-heavy build.
- Humans Tribal — He specifically recasts Human spells, rewarding a tribe of efficient utility creatures and lords.
- Reanimator/Self-Mill — Looting feeds the graveyard so you can recur or reanimate the threats you discarded.
Combos
- Arcade Gannon + Coretapper + Magistrate's Scepter
→ Infinite turns, Lock
- Wan Shi Tong, All-Knowing + Library of Leng + Intruder Alarm + Arcade Gannon
→ Infinite ETB, Infinite creature tokens, Infinite self-discard triggers
- Arcade Gannon + Tolarian Kraken + Nadir Kraken + Ashnod's Altar
→ Infinite draw triggers, Infinite looting, Infinite self-discard triggers
Combos via Commander Spellbook.
Related Commanders
Same color identity (UW), by popularity.
