Just like that, after months of hype, preview season for Avatar: The Last Airbender is at an end. While it’s always a bittersweet time, this set is looking particularly well-crafted and powerful, so the brewing phase can’t come soon enough. Wizards made sure to leave us some excellent parting gifts, too, with some of the most interesting cards in the set revealed in the last couple of days. Among these cards is Joo Dee, One of Many: a sneaky-good uncommon that enables all manner of MTG combos.
Joo Dee, One Of Many MTG
Much like Zhao before it, Joo Dee, One of Many is a huge win on both the mechanical and flavorful fronts. For one black, you get to Surveil and make a new Joo Dee, in exchange for any artifact or creature you control. In a regular deck, this is a decent value play. Cashing in Clues or Treasures for extra 2/2s with deck filtering capabilities is a very nice deal.
What really makes this card interesting, however, is the self-contained loop it creates. Since you make the token before you sacrifice, you can offer up Joo Dee to itself. Combined with some key pieces, this can enable a huge range of infinite combo lines. The Surveil ability comes in clutch here, too, since it allows Joo Dee to dig for the other cards you need outside of your combo turn. Most combo pieces lack this kind of utility, so it’s a big mark in the card’s favor right away.
Setting Up The Loop
In order to go infinite with Joo Dee, One of Many, you need to set a few things up first. Most important among these is a Haste granter. Each new Joo Dee you create will have summoning sickness, so in order to keep using its ability, you need to get around that.
Traditional Haste granters like Anger and Enduring Courage work fine here if you’re in red. Alternatively, you can use cards that grant Haste specifically for abilities, like Thousand-Year Elixir or Tyvar, Jubilant Brawler. If you can keep Joo Dee alive for a turn, you can also use Thornbite Staff to get continuous untaps instead. This is a trickier, more mana-intensive option, but an option nonetheless.
The other major hurdle you need to overcome is the one black mana cost of Joo Dee’s ability. There are a few different ways you can do this, the simplest of which is Pitiless Plunderer. Each time you sacrifice a Joo Dee with this out, you’ll get a Treasure that lets you pay the cost of the next one’s ability. You can also use lesser-known black enchantment Carnival of Souls here, but you’ll need to pair it with a Blood Artist-type creature to avoid dying from the damage.
Reaping The Rewards
Once you’ve got an endless loop of new Joo Dees dying and entering, you need a way to capitalize on that to secure your win. There are several different routes you can take here.
Perhaps the most obvious is to leverage the infinite enters/dies triggers this loop creates to burn your opponents out. If you execute the loop with a Blood Artist or Impact Tremors-type effect in play, you’ll just win on the spot. If you opt for Tyvar as your Haste granter, you can even bring a Blood Artist or Agate Instigator out of your graveyard free of charge on the combo turn.
Alternatively, you can rely on cEDH favorite Thassa’s Oracle. Each Joo Dee activation lets you Surveil, so infinite Joo Dee activations let you put your whole deck in the graveyard. Once you do, you can either cast Oracle or reanimate it with Tyvar for the win.
These interactions are likely only scratching the surface of what Joo Dee, One of Many is capable of in MTG Commander. Avatar has a lot of nice combo cards in it, but this humble uncommon may be the most flexible of them all.
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