The Commander
Guide
Gameplan
Shao Jun is an Izzet artifact-aggro/combo commander who chips opponents to death with Rope Dart while threatening evasive commander damage. You flood the board with cheap artifacts and mana rocks, then repeatedly tap pairs of them to ping all opponents for 1 each. Meanwhile Leap Strike makes her a safe attacker—flying and first strike on your turn let her connect or trade up profitably for 21 commander damage.
Strengths
- Two clocks at once: incremental Rope Dart drain plus evasive, hard-to-block commander damage.
- Cheap 3-mana body that's hard to profitably block on your turn thanks to flying and first strike.
- Artifact-heavy shell naturally ramps, fixes, and enables explosive combo turns.
- Rope Dart pressures the whole table simultaneously, great in multiplayer and against go-tall opponents.
- Access to blue's card draw, counters, and red's burn/untap effects.
Weaknesses
- Rope Dart only hits 1 per activation—without an untap engine the clock is painfully slow.
- Heavily reliant on her staying on the battlefield; she's a small body off your turn (no flying/first strike) and prone to removal.
- Artifact-matters shell folds hard to mass artifact destruction (Vandalblast, Bane of Progress).
- Voltron plan dies to a single unconditional removal spell or chump-block math without protection.
- Color identity lacks reliable creature recursion and life gain.
Key Cards
- Unwinding Clock — Untaps all your artifacts every turn, doubling or tripling your Rope Dart pings each cycle.
- Aphetto Alchemist — With its untap, you can re-tap artifacts for repeated Rope Dart activations and combo enablement.
- Clock of Omens — Lets you untap artifacts to fuel additional Rope Dart triggers and recover key rocks.
- Voltaic Key — Cheap, repeatable untapper that adds extra Rope Dart activations and powers mana engines.
- Sword of Fire and Ice — Turns Leap Strike's evasion into protection plus extra damage and card advantage on a connecting Shao Jun.
- Thousand-Year Elixir — Untaps Shao Jun and grants pseudo-vigilance synergy while doubling as an artifact untap enabler.
- Inspiring Statuary — Improvise lets your artifacts cast spells while staying untapped to feed Rope Dart.
- Reckless Fireweaver — Each artifact you make pings opponents, stacking another aristocrats-style drain on top of Rope Dart.
Upgrade Path
Prioritize cheap untap effects (Voltaic Key, Aphetto Alchemist, Clock of Omens, Unwinding Clock) and low-cost artifacts so Rope Dart scales from a trickle to a flood. Add an infinite or near-infinite untap line—Aphetto Alchemist plus a way to copy or untap it—to convert Rope Dart into a deterministic kill. Round out with fast mana (Sol Ring, Mana Crypt, Mox Opal), protection (Lightning Greaves, Swiftfoot Boots), and efficient Izzet interaction to defend 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
- ▸Repeated Rope Dart activations via untap engines to drain all opponents to zero.
- ▸Evasive commander damage with equipment and Leap Strike for 21.
- ▸Artifact-payoff pingers (Reckless Fireweaver, Marionette Master) closing out alongside Rope Dart.
- ▸Combo loops generating effectively infinite artifact untaps for a one-shot table kill.
Archetypes
- Artifacts (Affinity/Improvise) — Rope Dart and the whole shell are built around amassing untappable artifacts to tap in pairs.
- Voltron — Leap Strike's flying and first strike make Shao Jun a reliable equipment carrier for 21 commander damage.
- Combo — Untap engines plus mana rocks can chain Rope Dart into a large or lethal table-wide drain.
- Spellslinger Tempo — Izzet card advantage, counters, and burn protect the gameplan while she chips away.
Combos
No combos found for this commander on Commander Spellbook.
Related Commanders
Same color identity (RU), by popularity.
