While it was one of last year’s most popular and powerful sets, Avatar: The Last Airbender still packs plenty of hidden gems for those willing to dig. Lurking in the shadows of the set’s uncommon slot, for example, lies Long Feng, Grand Secretariat, a surprisingly potent MTG Commander option. With a ton of fair uses and combo lines in its arsenal, this underplayed legend deserves a lot more play than it’s currently getting.
Long Feng, Grand Secretariat MTG
To make the most of Long Feng’s counter-placing ability, you’ll want to run plenty of repeatable ways to create creatures. Tokens are fair game here, so generators like Bitterblossom and Pest Rescuer are great places to start. Similarly, recursive creatures, like Reassembling Skeleton, are hugely valuable, while Altar of Dementia lets you trade these bodies into counters.
Long Feng works with lands, too, which gives it applications alongside land sacrifice outlets such as Zuran Orb and Squandered Resources. You can also run land recursion effects like Crucible of Worlds here, as well as Exploration to push these synergies further.
Once Long Feng’s counter engine is chugging along nicely, you can start roping in cards like Hardened Scales and Winding Constrictor to double your value. Alternatively, you can use your abundance of counters to fuel synergy pieces like Emperor of Bones and Herd Baloth, and snowball into a go-wide value win instead.
The Great Combo Conspiracy
Solid as it is when played fairly, Long Feng, Grand Secretariat does its best work as part of various MTG combo lines. Paired with Basking Broodscale, for instance, it creates an easy two-card infinite mana combo. Simply put a counter on Broodscale to start, then sacrifice the token it makes for mana, placing another counter on it with Long Feng’s ability to repeat the loop.
If you’d rather go for a Storm win, Long Feng has you covered there too alongside Evolution Witness and Walking Ballista. Casting Ballista for zero mana will kill it immediately, letting you place a counter on Witness and use its ability to put Ballista right back in your hand. You can then rinse and repeat to win with anything from Aetherflux Reservoir to Tendrils of Agony.
Long Feng even lets you empty your entire deck with ease, in combination with Scurry Oak and Umbral Collar Zealot. As with the Basking Broodscale loop, this will let you make infinite sacrifices by placing a counter on Oak each time you sacrifice its tokens. With Zealot as your outlet, you can Surveil your whole deck away, setting yourself up for a Doctor Doom, Unrivaled win.
Lurking In The Shadows
As powerful and flexible as Long Feng is, it hasn’t seen much success in Commander as of yet. According to the EDHREC statistics, a paltry 870 players are running this iconic villain in the command zone. While it fares a little better in the 99, showing up in around 4,720 decks there, that’s still a poor showing for a legend of this caliber.
While the reasoning behind this neglect is unclear, it does mean that Long Feng is extremely affordable to pick up right now. Near-mint copies are available on TCGplayer for as little as $0.05 at present. At such bargain prices, Long Feng is an easy pickup, especially if you want a powerful budget Commander or competitive Pauper Commander to build around.
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