The Commander
Flying
Whenever you cast a Spirit or Arcane spell, target player reveals their hand and discards all cards with that spell's mana value.
Guide
Gameplan
Cast cheap Spirits and Arcane spells to repeatedly trigger Infernal Kirin, forcing opponents to reveal their hands and discard every card matching the spell's mana value, grinding the table down to topdecks. You play a mono-black control/hand-attack game, stripping resources while your evasive 3/3 flyer and recursion chip in for the win. The key is spreading discard across multiple mana values to maximize cards stripped.
Strengths
- Targeted, repeatable hand disruption that hits all opponents over time and dodges hexproof since it's a 'reveal and discard' effect, not a counterspell
- Mono-black gives access to powerful tutors, recursion, and reanimation to rebuild card advantage
- Evasive flying body that can carry equipment or pressure life totals
- Punishes durdle/combo decks that hoard answers and combo pieces in hand
Weaknesses
- Effect is symmetrical only in usefulness against players who keep full hands; empty-handed opponents take nothing
- Narrow tribal/Arcane card pool means many Spirits are weak filler outside of Kamigawa staples
- Discarding by mana value is inconsistent—you rarely strip everything, and opponents can dump hands early
- Mono-black struggles with enchantment/artifact removal and lacks card-draw burst compared to other colors
- Slow clock; can fall behind to fast combo or wide aggro before the engine matters
Key Cards
- Sickening Shoal — Free Arcane spell you can cast by exiling a black card, triggering Kirin without paying mana.
- Peer Through Depths — Cheap Arcane spell that digs for more Spirit/Arcane triggers while forcing a discard.
- Goryo's Vengeance — Arcane reanimation that triggers Kirin and lets you abuse big black reanimation targets.
- Patron of the Nezumi — A Spirit that drains life on opponent discards, turning your Kirin triggers into a kill engine.
- Kira, Great Glass-Spinner — No—skip; instead lean on cheap recurring Arcane like Kodama's Reach analogs.
- Cabal Ritual — Ritual mana to chain multiple Spirit/Arcane casts in one turn for repeated discard.
Upgrade Path
Add mana acceleration (Dark Ritual, Cabal Ritual, fast mana rocks) so you can chain multiple Spirit/Arcane casts per turn for compounding discard. Include free Arcane spells (Sickening Shoal) and recursion (Eternal Witness analogs in black like Phyrexian Reclamation) to keep triggers flowing, plus discard payoffs (Bone Miser, Liliana's Caress effects) to convert hand attack into direct damage. Tighten the curve with efficient mono-black tutors and removal to find your best Spirits and protect the engine.
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
- ▸Beating down with the flying Kirin plus other evasive Spirits while opponents are hellbent
- ▸Drain payoffs like Patron of the Nezumi or Megrim-style discard punishers converting Kirin triggers into life loss
- ▸Reanimating an oversized threat to close out a resource-starved table
- ▸Grinding everyone to topdecks then resolving an unanswered bomb
Archetypes
- Stax / Hand Disruption — Kirin's discard trigger functions as a recurring Mind Twist that suppresses opponents' options.
- Spirits Tribal — The commander rewards flooding the board with Spirit creatures, each casting triggering discard.
- Reanimator — Black reanimation and Arcane spells like Goryo's Vengeance pair discard disruption with a big-threat finish.
- Control — Strip hands, recur threats, and grind to a slow inevitability with mono-black removal.
Combos
No combos found for this commander on Commander Spellbook.
Related Commanders
Same color identity (B), by popularity.
