King Kenrith's Too Many Combos

It's Brawl Wednesday once again my dudes, and you know what that means: it means Wizards still hasn't made Brawl and everyday event! And to celebrate we are tackling a FIVE color deck today, with what I believe to be the most busted commander available right now: Kenrith, the Returned King. That card is a goddamn HOUSE, and honestly you don't need much more than have it survive for the card to find yourself winning the game. So that's why we are going to focus the deck around two really stupid combos!

Our king fears nothing so we have two very silly absolute win conditions in this deck. First, we have Happily Ever After, which alongside Niv-Mizzet Reborn, our many multicolored spells, and our ability to gain a lot of life with our commander, can help us straight up win the game on the spot. Planewide Celebration is a cheeky way of getting the requirements on Happily EVer After to Trigger, as it can both heal us and put a permanent with all 5 colors on the board. I have been able to get this win off more times than expected, though usually people just concede when they see it coming a few turns away from it. Second we have the infinite mana combo, consisting of putting Gauntlets of Light on a Faeburrow Elder or Incubation Druid while our Biomancer's Familiar is on the field. This will allow us to tap our creatures for 3 to 5 mana and untap them for only 1 white, producing infinite mana. At that point the simplest way to win is by forcing our opponent to draw every single card in their deck plus one using Kenrith's blue ability. Leyline of Abundance is worthy of note to be able to make Paradise Druid and Leyline Prowler to produce infinite green mana if equipped with the gauntlet, though quite slowly.

The mana fixing:

Five-color decks let us play with many powerful toys, but they have one glaring weakness and that is the mana. Luckily, one of our combos requires a mana dork to be in play so we can just stuff the deck full of them. We have Gilded Goose, Incubation Druid, Leyline Prowler, and Faeburrow Elder as our multicolored mana dorks, which are key to making the infinite mana combo work. We also run the two Simic mana dorks in Maraleaf Pixie and Gyre Engineer because those happen to be two very important and heavily featured colors in the deck, plus they can be found with Niv-Mizzet Reborn. In terms of mana rocks we have Arcane Signet because it is excellent and Chromatic Lantern as a way to easily fix all our colors.

Drawing What We Need - Part 1:

Because we have some rather important pieces to this deck we need proper card selection. The most straighforward is Drawn from Dreams, the best card selection spell in blue. We then get a little funky with Niv-Mizzet Reborn. He can be a piece to our combo but most importantly it can dig ten deep into our deck in search of dual-colored cards. If there is a dual-colored card in this deck that is worse than a single-colored would be for its effect, it is definitely because of Niv. Due to that we run a Discovery // Dispersal, which also helps by counting as both instant and sorcery in our graveyard for Happily Ever After, and [[The Royal Scions, who can give our Faeburrow Elder the ability to tap for 2 more mana if in play.

Drawing Part 2 - The Wish Package:

Because we can run any color we damn well please, I figured it would be quite fun to run the wish package. For that we have Wischlaw Talisman and two planeswalkers that synergize with it in kinda gross ways. Both planeswalkers are also able to be found by Niv. It's simple: with Teferi we can bounce our Talisman back to our hand before the opponent can activate it, it's not uncommon to wish for Teferi, bounce back the Talisman, then wish for more stuff if you're not under too much pressure. Ashiok, Dream Render is good to shut down Prime Speaker Vannifar and Golos, Tireless Pilgrim stategies, reanimation strategies, as well as shutting off the Talisman for our opponent. It's incredibly fun to play with this toy, and it will save you from a world of hurt by finding our answers.

Dealing with the Opponent:

This deck is a little bit too cute to completely ignore the opponent, so we have some specific answers. Veil of Summer and Dovin's Veto are mostly here to stop stupid Mass Manipulation turns or those incredibly unfun Nicol Bolas, Dragon-God decks from breaking up our combo completely. The combo is very fragile and it will be very rare to play it entirely from hand, so having ways to keep in from being destroyed or stolen can be very helpful. If things go bad, we have some of the best removal we can find. Bedevil gets rid of most of the threats we care about, while Mortify can deal with creatures and enchantments, giving us access to single-target kills on most permanents that could be giving us trouble. Kaya's Wrath, Time Wipe, and Solar Blaze are our board wipes, and Casualties of War can swing a game quite hard if it is able to at least 3-for-1. All of these removal pieces can also be found by Niv-Mizzet, which is a bonus.

Plan B:

Sometimes, things don't go well. We don't find our card selection, our combo has been broken up, our commander has been countered and removed... the list goes on. For that we have the super-mega-unfun backup plan of Field of the Dead with Golos, Tireless Pilgrim. We have more than enough lands to activate it, and our deck runs a multitude of tapped lands and gates (as well as 6 basics) to make it work with Circuitous Route. Escape to the Wilds also helps push this gameplan further, as well as giving us a way to look deeper into our deck if necessary.

Lands:

G A T E S

OH MY GOD WHAT HAVE I DONE?! The manabase for this was a nigthmare but I ended up happy with how it is set. We run 2 forests, 2 islands, and 2 swamps to give us early access to those colors. For guildgates we run every single one except for Rakdos and Boros guildgates but I'm not super sure that's correct. We count with no other utility lands other than Field of the Dead and the Temple of Malady, Temple of Mystery, and Temple of Triumph for their scry abilities. For the rest we have Command Tower, Fabled Passage and shock lands Breeding Pool, Hallowed Fountain, Overgrown Tomb, Sacred Foundry, Stomping Ground, and Temple Garden to make sure we get our Green, Blue, and White mana for the deck mostly. But hey, on the bright side: the deck runs 26 lands! Whoop whoop!

In all seriousness this deck is quite solid, and the commander has a lot of potential to carry you. Make as many changes as you're comfortable, maybe remove the Happily Ever After combo, and you're likely to have a VERY powerful deck. The best way to build Kenrith in my opinion is to just give him all the support you can. The infinite mana combo works great with him so i'd keep that one.