The Commander
Menace
Ward—Pay 9 life.
Whenever Nine-Fingers Keene deals combat damage to a player, look at the top nine cards of your library. You may put a Gate card from among them onto the battlefield. Then if you control nine or more Gates, put the rest into your hand. Otherwise, put the rest on the bottom of your library in a random order.
Guide
Gameplan
Nine-Fingers Keene is a Gate-matters Sultai midrange/combat deck that ramps and fixes with Gate lands while grinding incremental advantage. Connect with Keene each turn to flood the board with Gates and eventually draw a huge chunk of cards once you hit nine Gates. Use that mana and card advantage to take over the late game with bombs and combat.
Strengths
- Built-in card advantage and Gate ramp on combat damage, snowballing fast
- Menace plus high-life Ward make Keene hard to block and hard to remove
- Sultai colors give the best removal, ramp, and card draw in the format
- Gate synergies provide free fixing and incidental value across the whole deck
Weaknesses
- Heavily reliant on connecting with the commander to generate value
- Many Gates enter tapped, slowing early tempo and making lands clunky
- Ward only protects against removal, not board wipes or sacrifice effects
- Can be a durdly, fair deck that struggles against fast combo and stax
Key Cards
- Maze's End — Win-the-game payoff once you assemble enough Gates, which Keene digs toward.
- Gond Gate — A Gate that fixes any color and feeds your Gate count and synergies.
- Gatebreaker Ram — Grows with your Gate count and gives trample, turning Gates into a threat.
- Guardian of the Gateless — Punishes blockers and rewards your wide Gate-based defenses.
- District Guide — Tutors a Gate to hand, smoothing toward the nine-Gate threshold.
- Rogue's Passage — Guarantees Keene connects to trigger her card advantage engine.
Upgrade Path
Add more fast mana and connect-enablers (Rogue's Passage, equipment like Whispersilk Cloak) so Keene reliably deals damage early. Lean into the Gate count with District Guide, Plaza of Heroes-style tutors, and Maze's End as a deterministic win, while adding efficient interaction (Cyclonic Rift, Fierce Guardianship) to protect your engine. Trim slow tapped Gates that don't add to synergy and prioritize ramp that ensures you hit your land drops to reach nine Gates faster.
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
- ▸Maze's End activation after assembling ten Gates
- ▸Beating down with Keene plus Gate-scaling threats like Gatebreaker Ram
- ▸Out-grinding the table on card advantage and resolving large finishers
Archetypes
- Gates Matter — Keene actively tutors Gates onto the battlefield and rewards reaching nine for massive card draw.
- Sultai Midrange — Her colors and value engine support a grindy ramp-into-bombs gameplan.
- Voltron — Menace and Ward 9 make Keene a resilient carrier for evasion and pump to push damage.
- Combo (Maze's End) — Stacking Gates enables a Maze's End win once the count is high enough.
Combos
No combos found for this commander on Commander Spellbook.
Related Commanders
Same color identity (BGU), by popularity.
