This deck doesn’t look like Gishath’s at all. This list is about one thing: mana. Our commander is a mana sink, and we want to take advantage of it. How? By going infinite, of course.

There’s really no way around it—this is a combo-tastic deck. Zacama doesn’t have to use combos, but she slips so easily into that territory that it would be a shame not to explore it. Our commander’s new best friend may look familiar to those of you who bought the Feline Ferocity preconstructed deck: Temur Sabertooth.

Temur Sabertooth

With this and a mana-doubling enchantment in play, we can tap our lands for a boatload of mana, then cast Zacama. Zacama will untap our lands. Pay two mana with Temur Sabertooth’s ability to return Zacama to our hand, then tap our lands once again for a boatload of mana. Cast Zacama from our hand (getting around Commander Tax) and once again untap our lands. Lather, rinse, and repeat. We now have an engine that produces more mana than it spends, floating more and more mana and easily going infinite. (Anyone familiar with High Tide decks in Eternal formats will easily recognize this strategy!)

What do we do with all that mana? Unfortunately, Gishath’s activated ability doesn’t deal damage to players, so we can’t simply deal infinite damage to the rest of the table. Still, we have a couple options. First, Gishath can grant us infinite life. That won’t win the game on its own, but it will certainly make it much harder to lose. Second, we can enlist the help of some handy artifacts.

Stuffy Doll Aetherflux Reservoir

Stuffy Doll is bizarre in all the right ways. This little voodoo trickster converts any damage dealt to it to an opponent of your choice. We can channel our infinite pool of mana into the Stuffy Doll, which will take out one of our enemies. Then we can use Temur Sabertooth to bounce the Doll back to our hand, recast it, and name a new opponent. You’ll lay waste to your opposition in a matter of seconds.

Alternatively, we can convert all our extra life into damage via the Aetherflux Reservoir. Simply casting and recasting Zacama several times will cause Aetherflux Reservoir to give us a lot of life, and on top of that, we can gain a ton with Zacama’s ability. Fifty life is usually a high price to pay, but not for this Elder Dinosaur.

Frankly, we don’t even need to go infinite to make such good use of Zacama. Many cards such as Whitemane Lion and Ancestral Statue litter this decklist. These don’t go infinite like the Sabertooth, but they do still return Zacama to our hand, to be cast again to net even more mana. Even if we don’t make infinite mana, we can still guarantee that no one else has any creatures, artifacts, or enchantments.

This probably isn’t what most folks expected when they saw Zacama, but it’s easily the thing that makes her a unique commander. Don’t let all those Dinos in her Top Cards distract you; she’s far closer in strategy to Proshh, Skyraider of Kher than she is to Gishath. Etali, Primal Storm may be the “Primal Storm,” but this is the true Storm deck, casting an obnoxious number of spells in one turn and finishing the game in spectacular fashion.