One of the biggest hurdles you need to overcome when building a Commander deck is the innate inconsistency of a singleton format. Some MTG cards let you circumvent this issue, however, like the multi-faceted Robaran Mercenaries. While it’s not great on its own, this creature can unlock some potent infinite combos with the right support.
Robaran Mercenaries MTG
While it does have a range of applications, the floor on Robaran Mercenaries is incredibly low. You need a legendary creature with an activated ability in play for this to be anything more than a four-mana 3/4 with Vigilance, after all. Even at lower brackets, this is a deeply unexciting proposition.
That said, with some legends to work with Robaran Mercenaries does come into its own. It’s naturally at its best alongside Commanders that rely on their activated abilities, like The Jolly Balloon Man and Empress Galina, to double up. You can take this even further by running activated ability doublers like Illusionist’s Bracers, Haste granters like Thousand-Year Elixir, and discount pieces like Heartstone.
Robaran Mercenaries can even nab abilities from legendary noncreature sources, too, provided you have ways to animate them. In Artifact decks like Sydri, Galvanic Genius, an animated The One Ring will let you draw cards without the downside. It’s also nice in Earthbending decks like Toph, the First Metalbender, where it can double up Earthbent lands like Lotus Field or Buried Ruin.
Cunning Combo Lines
There should be another decklist here for one of the combos, whatever isn’t in the first section.
While Robaran Mercenaries is nice as a booster for your other legends, it really comes into its own as an infinite combo enabler. With Kiki-Jiki, Mirror Breaker, for instance, it can create infinite token copies of itself. Since Mercenaries is a valid nonlegendary target, and each copy inherits Kiki-Jiki’s ability, this combo effortlessly sets up Impact Tremors wins.
In a Sultai deck, Robaran Mercenaries can also make you infinite mana alongside Selvala, Heart of the Wilds and Fain the Broker. With all three creatures in play, Mercenaries will have access to both Selvala’s mana production and Fain’s untap effect. So long as one creature has six power, you can tap Mercenaries for six mana, then untap it to make a net profit, enabling Walking Ballista wins.
For a funkier combo line, you can pair Robaran Mercenaries with Ioreth of the Healing House to untap another legendary creature infinite times. By tapping Mercenaries for Loreth’s second ability, you can untap Loreth and any other creature before Loreth untaps Mercenaries. This opens up tons of win conditions, such as pinging the table to death with Reveka, Wizard Savant.
A Specialist Hire
Overall, as powerful as Robaran Mercenaries can be in dedicated combo brews, it’s not a card that can slot in just anywhere. Unless you’re consistently putting out legends with relevant activated abilities, it’s simply too weak for many decks. This likely explains the card’s low play rate, which, according to EDHREC, is barely over 3,000 decks.
While this lack of popularity makes sense to an extent, Robaran Mercenaries still feels fairly underrated. The good news about this, at least, is that picking up a copy is incredibly easy. With near-mint copies of Robaran Mercenaries selling for just $0.24 on TCGplayer, it’s well worth picking up a copy.
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