(Gluntch, the Bestower | Olivier Bernard)

Technically Playable - Gluntch, the Bestower

Welcome to Technically Playable, where our mission statement is "Every commander is Technically playable" (the best kind of playable). The way this works is every article will have a commander generated using EDHREC's random button, I'll talk through the card and then write about how we can build around it!

This week's random commander is Gluntch, the Bestower

Gluntch is a friendly little Jellyfish, with a catch. The smart designers at Wizards of the Coast didn't want everyone to get a benefit from this little guy so they decided to only give it three modes. This lets you team up with your allies to take down the biggest threat at the table by handing out +1/+1 counters, treasure tokens, and even card draw. All for the good of the table.

There are a lot of ways to go about building Gluntch so let's look at what I consider the three main ones:

Full-On Group Hug

Group Hug decks are a bit of a contentious topic in the Commander community. Some believe that if you're going to join in a game without the express intention of trying to win you're going against the spirit of Magic: The Gathering as a game. Other people think it's absolutely hilarious to turbocharge everyone's decks so that they get to do the stupid over-the-top plays that make Commander an awesome format. While I can see the opinion of the people in Camp A, and don't necessarily disagree with it, I find myself squarely in Camp B and think Group Hug decks are completely and utterly hilarious and that their games are almost always made better for it. That being said, I do think that is the case for decks that are all-in on Group Hug as a strategy, if you're playing Steel Golem in your Zedruu the Greathearted deck I'm sorry to say that you're not playing Group Hug.

Gluntch makes for an amazing Group Hug deck. It has access to a lot of the best Group Hug cards like Rites of Flourishing and Dictate of Karametra and let's all be honest it's pretty funny for the Gluntch player to target everyone but themselves with Gluntch's ability. The great thing about the best Group Hug cards is that many are colorless. Howling Mine and Ghirapur Orrery are in 91 and 90% of Gluntch decks respectively because of this strategy. Being in Selesnya also gives access to Selvala, Explorer Returned, a card designed for the original Conspiracy set and therefore meant to be played in multiplayer environments.

Personally, if you want to play a "true" Group Hug deck I wouldn't recommend anything oppressive that gets you too far ahead, then it becomes less like a hug and more like extortion, but if you're looking to get more resources to hug everyone even more Smothering Tithe and Smuggler's Share are great cards to make sure you have the resources to play your Gate to the Aethers and of course to keep yourself alive with Fogs and Teferi's Protections when your opponents decide they don't want the free goodies anymore.

If you're someone who likes winning I think that this is probably not the best version of Gluntch for you but if you're looking for something a little less powerful, something you can play when you just want everyone at the table to have fun or if you're introducing new players to Commander and want something that could be really fun for them to play against this is a great option.

Counters

If there's anything Selesnya is known for as a color combination, it's creature tokens and counters. Unfortunately, Gluntch only gives us one of these but of the two it's the one I'm personally a bigger fan of. Having a huge board can be fun but it quickly becomes unwieldy and difficult to track. On the other hand, playing the minigame "How many dice can you stack without them falling off when you attack" is always fun, no matter what.

There are a few things we need to look out for when building around counters:

The first is ways to put counters onto our creatures. A lot of decks focus too much on how to multiply their counters and end up stuck with no way to get them onto creatures in the first place. We're lucky because Gluntch puts counters on creatures themselves. But, relying on one card (even our commander) is not an ideal situation to be in and there are plenty of great cards that provide us with counters. One of my favorites, and also keeping with our Group Hug theme, is Orzhov Advokist. Providing us with both counters for our creatures as well as potential safety from our opponents shows why this card is such a popular one among slow, white decks that want to keep themselves healthy in such a creature-heavy format. This also extends to Noble Heritage although that only works when your commander is in play and cannot put counters on itself but it does also protect you from being targeted meaning you can't get randomly hit by a topdecked Crackle with Power.

But just putting counters on creatures to make them bigger doesn't really cut it anymore, they need to be unmanageably big. For that, we want to try to have as many cards that give us additional counters, or even double the number we put onto our creatures, in play as possible. In terms of adding additional counters, I find that Botanical Brawler and Conclave Mentor are two of the best options for Selesnya. They both do a really good impression of Winding Constrictor being two mana creatures but they also have bonus effects if you choose to make them the creature you stack counters onto in the form of lifegain from the Mentor and trample from the brawler.

While these seem like small additions, the ability to save yourself from lethal damage or even to create a big threat with trample can come in handy in tight spots where you're forced to use them as the vehicle for the counters. When it comes to doubling counters of course Doubling Season is a given but it's still around $50 on a lot of sites so using something like Lae'zel, Vlaakith's Champion which is around $2.50 (1/20th of the price) is equally as good. And just like the mentor and the brawler, Lae'zel can also function as a great target for counters when necessary.

We can also include cards that fulfill both of these roles. While there are lots of options, I think that Ozolith, the Shattered Spire is a cut above the rest. It allows you to add additional counters to creatures by activating its ability and also adds one more whenever you would put any counters on them. All of this wrapped up in a two-mana artifact is not only great value for the mana, but at around $10 it's also not going to break the bank. That explains why it is in 56% of Gluntch decks. Plus on top of all of that, if you don't need the extra counters you can always cycle it away for the card you do need.

But even with all these counters on your creatures, you might still struggle to win games. Commander is full of interaction, both spot removal and board wipes, so being able to get the most out of every +1/+1 counter is vital to closing out those victories. And boy do counter synergies have some great payoffs. Of course, Commander wouldn't be the format it is without card draw, it's vital to keep your hand full and the pressure on. Dusk Legion Duelist is an obvious candidate but has the drawback of only happening once each turn. There is an alternative though, one I probably wouldn't talk about if Gluntch weren't the commander of this deck, Generous Patron. Just like Selvala, Explorer Returned, Generous Patron is also from a multiplayer-focused set, Battlebond. Generous Patron can trigger multiple times in a turn but has a slightly different caveat, that the counters you place must be on another player's creature. This is amazing in Gluntch as it allows you to put a counter on another player's creature with the end-of-turn ability, get the benefit of drawing a card, and then still target yourself with a second option allowing you to get tons of value. This isn't as ideal as if you could draw by putting counters on your own creatures but does give you a really good way to get more out of Gluntch.

In terms of payoffs, we also need to look at ways to win the game and while making a big creature and attacking with it is one way we also want to mitigate against just losing to a single copy of Swords to Plowshares. Herd Baloth is a card I didn't know existed until I wrote this article, and honestly one I think should be in way more than the 1% of decks that it is in. Most +1/+1 counter decks focus on the strategy of going tall but using Herd Baloth to also build a board that can go wide is important to prevent any issues of getting shut down by single-target removal or things like Maze of Ith. But the win conditions can be more than just making creatures. One of my favorite endgame goals for counter decks is Hamza, Guardian of Arashin. This legendary Elephant is a solid, cheap payoff that lets you play a lot of your other cards for really cheap. If you are casting Hamza for two mana you're also able to cast Craterhoof Behemoth for three immediately afterward or you can even use the cost reduction on a creature like Kurbis, Harvest Celebrant to enable huge X cost creature that can provide enough utility to keep you and your board alive to win the game.

Draw-Matters

The last type of Gluntch deck I want to briefly cover is one with a "draw-matters" theme. A deck that draws a bunch of cards and types to leverage that advantage to win, normally through cards that have effects that trigger on draws. Some of the cards I would run in this deck I've already talked about. We can leverage some of the Group Hug pieces like Rites of Flourishing and Howling Mine to gain allies at the table while also making the effect asymmetrical with cards like Smothering Tithe. I also think that Generous Patron is an absolute must because it turns Gluntch into an end step Divination.

But you didn't read this whole article just to read about the same cards again. This version of Gluntch does look a little like the Group Hug one, purely because those cards are some of the most efficient ways to draw multiple cards consistently. However, we can also use some old classics to help us get over the finish line. Thanks to all of the permanents like Anvil of Bogardan we're able to consistently cycle lots of cards at the beginning of our turn. This makes Psychosis Crawler a huge threat and one that would be able to easily close out a game in two or three turns.

Empyrial Armor and Empyrial Plate also allow us to take advantage of Gluntch having flying, something that often goes unnoticed. These cards let us turn this pacifist Jellyfish into a gladiator, wielding our huge hand size to deal lethal commander damage. Since we will be using Gluntch to draw it's pretty unlikely we will want to give ourselves treasure so we can use Viridian Revel as a way to get some more cards. This is generally a pretty okay card with Gluntch but if your opponents use any other artifact graveyard strategies (including tokens like food, clues, and junk) the impact of this card skyrockets and it even says "may" on it, allowing you to avoid losing to drawing out your deck.

As usual, there are amazing Universes Beyond cards that work in this deck that have flown under my radar since I have just bought all the prisons from those sets and have not edited them at all. Sergeant John Benton is like a Selesnya Xyris, the Writhing Storm. By himself, he will probably draw you a few cards (and get you some Smothering Tithe triggers) but when you add on the Empyrial Plate an option to equip this can quickly get out of hand. John Benton also synergizes really well with Alms Collector, allowing you to still draw en masse but reducing your opponent's draw down to one (and one for you).

I also looked into treasure as a deck archetype for Gluntch, since it can create Treasure tokens but realistically it didn't really look that interesting. The only cool interactions I saw were with Fangren Marauder an old Pauper card that saw sideboard play when Affinity was still in the format. But the only real payoffs were Aetherflux Reservoir or Felidar Sovereign. So I figured I'd leave that archetype for now and maybe if there are better green artifact cards in the future it might warrant revisiting.

As with all Technically Playable articles, this was a very quick look at Gluntch as a commander and a few of the cards that can really make a deck with Gluntch as the commander tick.

Let me know in the comments below if you play Gluntch, if you want to build a Gluntch deck, or even if you just enjoyed this article!