(Martial CoupMartial Coup | Art By Diego Gisbert Llorens)

Winner Winner, Chicken Pinger

Hello, and welcome to Archetypes of Imagination, the series in which Cooper Gottfried builds decks based on popular Commander archetypes. I'm jumping in to help Cooper out with this edition as we talk about one of my favorite ways to win games and annoy your opponents: pingers!

Today I'll be using Scryfall's tagging system and EDHREC's Tag pages to build a deck around the theme of Pingers. These are permanents that routinely deal small amounts of chip damage to our opponents either as activated or triggered abilities.

Sometimes they come stapled onto a creature like the classic, color-pie-breaking, Prodigal SorcererProdigal Sorcerer. Often they're in the form of triggered abilities on enchantments like the wonderful Impact TremorsImpact Tremors.

Most players will have one or two pingers in a deck, offering small amounts of chip damage to slowly turn the game in their favor, but oftentimes these Pingers will be one of many rewards for doing what their deck does. Playing lots of lands, drawing lots of cards, or (most commonly) playing noncreature spells:

A Deck By Pingers, For Pingers

Today we want to make a deck that doesn't just benefit from playing pingers, but is built around them specifically, and for that end, we're enlisting a friend from Universes Beyond to help us.

Ghyrson Starn, KelermorphGhyrson Starn, Kelermorph is an Izzet () Tyranid Human that cares about sources we control doing exactly one damage to any target. Whenever one of our cards does one damage, Ghyrson will jump in to help out and deal two damage himself to the same target.

Ghryson is incredibly powerful as a commander for a few reasons. First of all, he doesn't care how you do your single bits of damage. You could play a burn spell, hit someone with a 1/1 token, or of course have one of our myriad pinger effects trigger. Every time he'll add two more damage on top.

Secondly, Ghryson isn't just adding two damage on top of what's already there, like Torbran, Thane of Red FellTorbran, Thane of Red Fell might. He's actually doing that two damage himself. That means we can load him up with Auras and Equipment that benefit us whenever an attached creature does damage.

And lastly, Ghyrson is a "whenever" trigger. No, "only once per turn" or "one or more". He's going to trigger on every single instance of one damage we create. That means cards that deal mass amounts of one damage like End the FestivitiesEnd the Festivities will generate an absolutely huge amount of triggers.

Which Ping is Right?

There's a few different ways in which we can trigger our pinger effects. We could just have a board full of creatures with activated abilities, forming a gun wall against our opponents. That would be pretty on theme for a Warhammer 40K commander.

We could also focus on slinging spells for our triggers. Use effects like that of Firebrand ArcherFirebrand Archer and try to storm off on our turns with a load of cantrips, dealing a tonne of damage to our enemies.

To get as much benefit as possible from our commander's ability however, I think we're better off leaning in another direction. For this build we're going to try and flood the board with tokens, largely Goblins. With a wide board we have three different ways in which our board can dish out single points of damage:

Impact Tremors Effects

Most often we'll be hitting our opponents with a lot of Impact TremorsImpact Tremors-style effects. That is, whenever a creature enters under our control we'll deal one (three!) damage to each of our opponents. There's a few different cards available in red that give us this effect, including Tremors itself.

Once you get a few of these on board, even just a couple of creatures entering can cause some serious problems for your opponents. With three on the board, we're dealing three damage to our opponents every time we have a creature enter. With Ghyrson on board as well, that damage triples. Nine damage per Goblin we make? Absolutely rotten stuff.

The absolute queen of this effect, and one that'll provide us both with the tokens we need to make and the tremors effect that we want to trigger, is General Kreat, the BoltbringerGeneral Kreat, the Boltbringer.

Not only does she have the Tremors-style effect stapled onto her, but she's also going to make us a new Goblin token every time we attack with at least one of our pre-existing Goblins.

Attack Triggers

There's not quite as many of these cards in our deck, but a few things exist in red that reward us for attacking with low power creatures. Raid BombardmentRaid Bombardment for example triggers whenever we attack with a creature with power two or less.

We can't always swing out with our board, especially when we need to hold up blockers, but cards like this effectively give us a second hit of Impact Tremors whenever we attack. Albeit, only targeting the player we're attacking.

Combat Damage

Finally, for each of our 1/1 tokens that hit something we get one final bit of single point damage for Ghyrson to add two on top of. Nothing flashy here, basically everything that hits for one, now hits for three! On top of any other fun bonuses we can get from Ghyrson's Equipment and Auras. Speaking of, let's talk about that.

Kitting Out Ghyrson

There's a load of different goodies we can fill our deck with to get added benefit from Ghyrson's repeated triggers. With enough tokens on board and pinger effects in play, these should trigger quite a lot to boot. First of all, we should make sure we have a bit of card draw online. CuriosityCuriosity is a perfect fit to pop onto our commander.

Now, whenever we deal a single point of damage from any source, Ghyrson will add some more on top and also draw us a card. Importantly, this is also a may trigger. That'll save us from accidentally decking ourselves whenever a million of our triggers hit the stack.

Next up, let's make Ghyrson even more lethal. Gorgon's HeadGorgon's Head will case any creatures he hits to drop like flies, even if the initial three damage wasn't enough to take them down, by adding deathtouch to the damage he deals. We can also gain life from every instance of his ability with something like ShadowspearShadowspear, or combine those two effects with the nasty Basilisk CollarBasilisk Collar!

With deathtouch online, we can perform a one-mana board wipe with our commander by casting an End the FestivitiesEnd the Festivities-style spell. Ghyrson sees all the single points of damage and follows them up with two points of deathtouch damage, killing pretty much everything in sight whilst your board stays untouched.

Kill/Steal

Wiping our opponents' boards is of course hilarious, but we can be even funnier with Ghyrson's ability. Using this bizarre old card that I'm sure will be very familiar to those with a paticular fondness for pinging:

That's right, for and the cast of a Tectonic HazardTectonic Hazard, we can deal three damage to every creature our opponents control and then take control of every creature that survives. After that they'll be wishing you board-wiped.

If each other players' board is big enough, this can quite easily win a game, but don't worry, we've got even more options to mess with our opponents. For even cheaper, Sigil of SleepSigil of Sleep will activate whenever we trigger our Tremors effects and then add insult to the injury by bouncing creatures back their owners' hands.

Ending the Game

There's always a few games where one person in your pod gains such a ridiculous amount of life that it's effectively impossible to take them out of the running. This isn't necessarily a deck that wants your games to go long, and lifegain can really slow it down. We definitely won't be swinging in for commander damage any time soon, so we'll need some kind of backup plan.

Introducing Grafted ExoskeletonGrafted Exoskeleton, a card that will likely make you the biggest threat on the board as soon as you declare its cast, but also one that will likely win you the game very quickly if your opponents don't have a response. Giving Ghyrson infect will effectively make five triggers of Impact Tremors game over as he deals his damage in the form of poison counters. Ten of those and it's game over for the bearer. No matter how high their life total!

Build it Yourself

This deck is sure to gain some ire from those who play against it. Whilst it does rely a lot on the commander being out, the core shell of Tremors effects and Goblin spamming should be plenty strong on its own. If you want to give it a go, you can find a rough decklist I've put together below. Feel free to change it to suit your play style and power level!