One of the most important aspects of Commander is how quickly your deck can get out of the gate. Nothing does this job quite as well as fast mana, but not every piece of acceleration is necessarily a mana rock. Cards that reduce the casting cost of multiple cards, like Blood Funnel, can accelerate your deck far faster, so long as you can deal with their downsides.
MTG Blood Funnel
MTG Blood Funnel offers an extremely powerful upside for an equally devastating downside. Reducing all of your non-creature spells’ casting cost by two mana can accelerate entire strategies ahead of two turns, getting haymakers like Bolas’s Citadel into play early. That said, needing to sacrifice a creature to cast them is a hell of a downside.
Still, there are a fair few Commanders that can take advantage of Blood Funnel, even with its downside. The new Silverquill, the Disputant and Anhelo, the Painter, for example, want to include a lot of fodder to sacrifice for Causality anyway, making it a perfect accelerant. Similarly, Commanders like Saruman, the White Hand and Alela, Artful Provocateur who make token creatures when casting noncreature spells can sacrifice them. Judith, Carnage Conoisseur is particularly good here, since the Imps she creates turn into Shocks when they die.
Of course, if you want to solve Blood Funnel’s downside more directly, you can just make your noncreature spells uncounterable. Benevolent Geist, Chimil, the Inner Sun, and Hexing Squelcher all do this, allowing you to ignore the sacrifice clause entirely.
Once you’re done using Blood Funnel, some Commanders can turn it into a stax piece by giving it away to your opponents. Blim, Comedic Genius is the absolute best Commander for this, exchanging Blood Funnel for discard and extra damage. For Spellslinger opponents who don’t run a lot of creatures, a gifted Blood Funnel can shut down their entire strategy. Making things worse, the enchantment will counter most removal that an opponent can point towards it.
A Ridiculous Number of Infinites
While running Blood Funnel does require building around it, the card creates an absolutely ridiculous number of infinite combos. There are over 50 recorded combos for the card online, but, in fairness, many of them require four or more cards to use. Fortunately, there are a few combos that are a bit easier to assemble than average.
Guile and Blood Funnel is the simplest combo, allowing you to repeatedly counter any noncreature spell you cast infinitely. Since Guile’s replacement effect essentially allows you to cast a countered spell again, Blood Funnel can keep countering it over and over. You can build up an infinite Storm count this way, getting infinite value with any noncreature cast triggers like Third Path Iconoclast. Ironically, since Storm itself is a triggered ability, countering something like Tendrils of Agony over and over will net you infinite copies of it.
Noctis, Prince of Lucis can also take advantage of Blood Funnel with Aetherflux Reservoir, provided you have a noncreature artifact with mana value two or less in your graveyard. Thanks to Blood Funnel’s cost reduction, the artifact can be cast for free with Noctis’s ability. Once cast, Blood Funnel will counter the artifact, putting it back in your graveyard before it gets a Finality Counter. Once you’ve cast three spells, Aetherflux Reservoir will start netting you life gain over Noctis’s ability, letting you repeat the process infinitely.
The other three-card combos involve Dance of the Dead and a creature that can add enough mana to recast the card with its Buyback cost. Magus of the Coffers, for example, makes this combo infinite so long as you have five Swamps in play. If you have six or more, you’ll net infinite black mana this way, alongside infinite Storm, enters, and dies triggers.
Hard to Use, But Worth it
In the right deck, Blood Funnel can be one of the most potent accelerants out there, putting your entire game plan two turns ahead. While its downside can make the card hard to use, it’s still shocking how few Commander decks actually play Blood Funnel. Despite its potential, only 4,290 Commander decks use this card according to EDHREC.
Fortunately, because it’s so underplayed, Blood Funnel typically costs at most $2, making it a budget addition to try. So long as you can reasonably get around its downside, or are planning on donating it, this can make a surprisingly impressive impact on your Commander games.
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