Daily Dominaria Deck Tech: Master and Commander Ramirez

Every workday while the set is new, Insight is taking a quick look at one deck featuring the latest additions from Dominaria United. The "Legends Retold" concept gives several iconic characters a well-deserved update. One of them is Ramirez DePietro, the original Dominarian pirate.

old/young and new/old

One old and young, the other new and old


Long before Ixalan had Pirates wrangle Dinosaurs, even years before Mercadian Masques and Portal first printed the word on a type line, there was . As you'd expect from a teenager, this Pirate was hard to summon and not particularly helpful. Fortunately his older self, again as expected, has learned a few tricks and is far more useful. is the tribal commander we did not know we wanted. The newest version of Ramirez allows us to steal other player's cards just by dealing damage with our Pirates.


ramirez depietro ramirez depietro, pillager

Pillaging and Plundering Unopposed

Settling in blue and black give us the best evasive Pirates. Either they have flying like , , and , or they have an unblockable ability like and . flies itself and also generates Treasure. We can even give our Pirates evasion with , , or . To complete our crew, we hire a few "fake" Pirates such as and clones such as , , and .

To stay on theme, we can equip our Pirates with some weapons that help them get in and trigger Ramirez. and help us ramp by either untapping our lands or searching for a basic. Sword of Hearth and Home can also help us flicker our commander to get more Treasure. turns any equipped creature into a menacing Pirate, meaning we can make a creature we stole from our opponents join our crew synergize with our overall strategy. Since our Pirates will likely hit our opponents, we might as well generate more value for us with cards like , , and .

Pirate's Loot

To help us cast the cards we steal, our commander gives us two Treasure tokens each time it enters the battlefield. Ramirez does not have the "you can use mana of any color to cast exiled spells" effect like does. So we need to make sure we save our Treasure for the cards we steal. This can be abused by flickering Ramirez, which is also a subtle form of ramp in Dimir. We can do this with cards like , , , and . Alternatively, we have to run mana producers that can produce all colors such as , , , , , and .

The Deck


Master and Commander Ramirez
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