BlackLegendary Creature — Demon SpiritKagemaro, First to Suffer
Mana value5Rank#17,509
The Commander
Kagemaro's power and toughness are each equal to the number of cards in your hand.
, Sacrifice Kagemaro: All creatures get -X/-X until end of turn, where X is the number of cards in your hand.
Guide
Gameplan
Kagemaro is a mono-black control/aristocrats commander that doubles as a repeatable board wipe. You hoard cards to grow Kagemaro into a beater and to make his sacrifice ability a one-sided-ish wrath, then refill and resilient-loop him back from the graveyard. Win by grinding the table out with removal, recursion, and a finisher while you out-card everyone.
Strengths
- On-command board wipe stapled to your commander that scales with hand size
- Mono-black gives access to the best tutors, recursion, and card draw in the format
- Wrath flexibility: kill small tokens with a tiny hand or sweep big threats with a full one
- Doubles as an evasive or sacrificial beater whose stats track your hand
Weaknesses
- Mono-color means no access to counterspells, blink, or out-of-color answers
- The wipe shrinks your own board and dumps your hand, costing tempo and card advantage
- Vulnerable to graveyard hate that stops recasting/recursion loops
- Needs a sizeable hand to be effective, so empty hands neuter both abilities
- No built-in evasion or protection, so Kagemaro can be chump-blocked or removed easily
Key Cards
- Reliquary Tower — Removes the maximum hand-size cap so you can stockpile cards to fuel a massive Kagemaro wipe.
- Necropotence — Floods your hand with cards, simultaneously pumping Kagemaro and powering up his -X/-X sweep.
- Sword of the Animist — Adds explosive ramp, though more importantly any draw engine turns Kagemaro into a giant threat and wrath.
- Phyrexian Reclamation — Cheaply returns Kagemaro to hand after sacrificing him, enabling repeatable board wipes.
- Black Market Connections — Refills your hand each turn, keeping Kagemaro large and your wrath threshold high.
- Bolas's Citadel — Lets you play off the top of your library so you keep cards in hand to feed Kagemaro and grind value.
- Crypt Ghast — Doubles your black mana to power tutors, recursion, and repeated Kagemaro casts.
Upgrade Path
Add fast mana and ritual ramp (Dark Ritual, Crypt Ghast, Cabal Coffers) to cast and recast Kagemaro repeatedly in a turn, and lean into recursion engines (Phyrexian Reclamation, Volrath's Stronghold) for loops. Tighten the card-advantage core with Necropotence, Black Market Connections, and no-max-hand-size lands so the wipe is always lethal-sized; finish faster with Gray Merchant of Asphodel or Exsanguinate. For higher power, fold in an aristocrats payoff package or a quick black combo so the wipes buy time toward a deterministic kill.
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 the table out with repeated wipes and recursion, then close with a large Kagemaro or finisher
- ▸Aristocrats drain via Blood Artist/Zulaport Cutthroat after a Kagemaro mass-sacrifice
- ▸Beat down with an oversized Kagemaro or a tutored evasive threat like Gray Merchant of Asphodel
- ▸Combo finishers such as Exsanguinate or a big drain spell after ramping out
Archetypes
- Control — Kagemaro is a reusable wrath that punishes go-wide and creature decks while you out-draw the table.
- Aristocrats — Sacrificing Kagemaro plus mass death triggers fuels payoffs like Blood Artist and Zulaport Cutthroat.
- Reanimator — Mono-black recursion lets you keep returning Kagemaro and other threats for repeated value and wipes.
- Hand-size matters — Cards that reward or care about a full hand synergize directly with both of Kagemaro's abilities.
Combos
No combos found for this commander on Commander Spellbook.
Related Commanders
Same color identity (B), by popularity.
