The Rukarumel Conundrum

[Vessiliana]

For reference, Rukarumel, Biologist

I am trying, with equal parts futility and desperation, to make my Rukarumel deck work. For the sake of argument, let's assume she has the mana-base to cover what I want and need because, barring the ABUR duals in Jodah, I can get her what she needs on that score. The problem is I am stuck trying to figure out what to do with her abilities. I really like her as a card and concept, and I thought that maybe she would be a good Commander for the Knights deck I am always trying (and failing) to build. But when I started putting the cards together, I just looked at them and went, "Nope, that is a pile. It will roll over and die."

But I really want her to work. Is there a way to make this work with changelings? What about adding, say, Knights and Zombies? What would that look like? A bunch of generic knights and some zombie lords, calling Zombie on Rukarumel? I also like Merfolk. Would Knights and Merfolk work better? I am just paralyzed by Rukarumel, and I don't like Slivers, per se, so I don't want to lean into that angle, though I suppose she does not really want to do that anyway!

[Mookie]

Rukarumel, Biologist seems like a needlessly complicated commander. The intuitive build is to choose a creature type (like knights) that has strong tribal support but may be lacking on card pool. It doesn't make sense to use her as an elf or zombie commander because it's already possible to play a deck with only those tribes... but if you want to make, say, a sphinx deck with Unesh, Criosphinx Sovereign, then you may run out of options quickly. Rukarumel means you have an Arcane Adaptation / Conspiracy in the command zone, so you can run your Reclamation Sages and Mulldrifters while still triggering your tribal synergies, without needing a bunch of changelings with no useful abilities.

...however, I feel like this plan is somewhat flawed. Sure, your random creatures become sphinxes / squirrels / whatever... but Rukarumel doesn't do anything to buff your chosen type either. Morophon, the Boundless seems like the superior commander for random typal decks without a 5C commander - just run some changelings.

If I were to build Rukarumel, I would make a hybrid deck to take advantage of her Sliver text - depending on the board state, you can make all of your Slivers into your chosen type, or vice-versa. Imagine running a Sliver // ninja deck. You can choose 'Sliver' and give your ninjas buffs with Cloudshredder Sliver, or you can choose 'Ninja' and get Yuriko, the Tiger's Shadow triggers off your Slivers, depending on the board state. If you are running Conspiracy or another type-shifting effect, you can even have it both ways (and some redundancy in case Rukarumel gets killed seems like a good idea anyway). This way, you effectively get to run a giant pile of Slivers to buff your chosen type, which seems like a nice upgrade over Morophon + a bunch of changelings.

tl;dr: Rukarumel seems like a nice way to fill out a typal deck that lacks a deep card pool. Instead of needing to run Mothdust Changeling / Universal Automaton / other underpowered changelings, you can run Slivers and take advantage of their strong lord effects to buff (or be buffed by) your chosen type.

[Dunadain]

You can check out my attempt (link in signature). But yeah, she's a puzzle.

[Vessiliana]

Thank you to both of you! So it seems like my best bet, if I wanted, say, Knights, is to run Knights and Slivers? Call Knight with Rukarumel and just fill out the knight lacks with slivers? Or else just attempt something altogether different...
She is indeed puzzling!

[ISBPathfinder]

Honestly, I don't think its really even a competition if I was going to make that commander I would do it with elves. The reason I say elves is that slivers have some great top end selective cards and elves already have ramp and draw elements to them. I am not sure that it makes for a good elfball deck but if I was thinking of a second tribe to pair slivers with it would be something that I could ramp and draw with and that points me back to elves.

Now....... does this commander make a better elfball deck than other elfball concepts? No freaking clue.

[Mookie]

Thank you to both of you! So it seems like my best bet, if I wanted, say, Knights, is to run Knights and Slivers? Call Knight with Rukarumel and just fill out the knight lacks with slivers? Or else just attempt something altogether different...
She is indeed puzzling!

Yeah, that's my suggestion. Choose your favorite 15-20 Knights until you start having to play cards you don't actually want to play. Then, pick your favorite 10-15 Slivers to fill out the rest of your creatures. Throw in a few Conspiracy effects for redundancy. I'll note that Sidar Jabari of Zhalfir and Syr Gwyn, Hero of Ashvale exist (and are arguably better knight commanders)... but on the other hand, Rukarumel lets you run stuff premium lords like Cloudshredder Sliver, Harmonic Sliver, and Crystalline Sliver to buff your knights, which seems strong.

[DirkGently]

Calling knights while playing a mix of slivers and knights means that your slivers will benefit from the knight tribal synergies, but your knights won't benefit from the sliver synergies. So you're still not playing a full 2-tribal commander because the tribal synergies are only shared in one direction, not both.

Because the cards from the tribe that you name won't get benefits from any other tribes you might be running, I don't think it makes sense to make a 2-tribal build, at least not with an even split. You want to maximize the number of creatures than benefit from her ability, which means you probably want to run a relatively small number of the creatures from the tribe you name - but you want those creatures to be particularly high-impact tribal effects to maximize the effect. The rest of the creatures could be their own tribe, or could be non-tribal. I don't think there's any compelling reason they ought to be tribal, but of course you can if you want to.

Personally I think the best fit for this is: Rebels, i.e. Ramosian Captain. A single rebel can tutor the perfect creature into play, at instant speed, for a single additional mana. That's going to make a huge impact for a pretty small number of slots. And then the rest of the creatures can be whatever you like. Elf tribal, silver tribal, or just general good creatures. You're almost certainly going to want at least some of the latter, to improve your tutor options. Having creatures with ETB counterspells, ETB removal, ETB protection, etc will give you a ton of powerful flexibility that isn't really possible without rukarumel's effect. Plus they can search up each other, to give you an escalating ability to do all of the above. Giving knight tribal bonuses to some slivers is thinking much too small imo.

[Mookie]

...actually, I'll amend my recommendation to agree with @DirkGently - I do think Rukarumel is best as a 2-type deck, but you can choose any two types. I do think Slivers are a good pick because of the sheer depth of effects they can grant, but you don't have to run them. It's probably best to have one of the types be your primary focus (i.e. knights) and one be the support (i.e. slivers or rebels), then choose the support type for Rukarumel so the knights all get the benefit of the strong support cards you're running, but it may be correct to choose your other type occasionally.

Rebels do seem reasonable as a single-type deck because the support they offer (tutoring) is so strong. They also don't get much benefit from Morophon, the Boundless and don't otherwise have any potential support in the command zone. I'm not sure what other types I would consider for a single-typed Rukarumel deck - what other types have really strong support, a shallow card pool, no legends, and don't want to be running changelings? I guess wraiths (Nazgûl) have already been mentioned, but I would need to think about other options.

[DirkGently]

@Mookie Assuming you plan to always pick the same type when playing Ruka, playing another tribal (i.e. knights when you plan to name rebels for the tutor synergy) is definitely an option, but at that point the commander doesn't provide any specific benefit to that tribe. It makes as much sense as running knight tribal with Kenrith, the Returned King or Garth One-Eye, or some other non-synergistic 5c commander. If you want to do it, do it, but don't do it because you think she mechanically incentivizes it.

If you do plan to flip-flop in terms of which tribe you name then that would mean you're incentivized to support 2+ tribes, but I do think it's a fairly weak choice since it's only a 1-direction synergy. Better imo to just build a normal tribal deck where every creature synergizes with every other creature 100% of the time, plus you can run a commander that gives a additional synergy with that tribe. You'd need to have some really strong cross-synergies to justify the extra complexity of balanced 2-tribal imo (outside of just doing it for funsies, ofc).

As far as slivers specifically, it's worth noting that Ruka's additional synergy with that tribe specifically is pretty minimal, despite saying "sliver" on the card twice. It does mean that sliver tokens you create will receive the tribe you choose, but there aren't very many sliver token producers for that to matter. The fact that she makes sliver tokens does provide some incentive to make an X/sliver tribal deck (while planning to name X for Ruka), since then the sliver tokens will receive the benefits of the sliver tribal effects in addition to X tribe, but her token-making ability is pretty weak so I don't weigh this very highly. It is worth remembering that the specifics of her ability do make it significantly weaker with token-producing effects which are common to other tribes, i.e. if you're trying to build knights + elves (naming knights), then any elf-token producers won't synergize with knight tribal effects, nor knight tokens if you name elves, which is an additional weakness of 2-tribal builds since most tribes use token production.

This isn't really a problem when you're building rebels, incidentally, since the rebel synergy only applies to cards in deck. And another note - rebels can easily search up Mirror Entity even without Ruka on the field, which can enable any other tribal synergy you want to do.

Honestly this kinda makes me want to build Rebel Ruka. Looks like rebels are about 1/20th of the EDHrec Ruka brews so it's much rarer than it ought to be, imo.

[yeti1069]

Could do 5c morph naming "assassin" with Etrata, Deadly Fugitive as the secret commander. Get to run all the best morph cards and morph support cards, Missy, and go all in on Etrata's ability + other assassin synergies, but...that's probably 200 cards.

[Vessiliana]

Thank you, everyone! I am taking all these suggestions into consideration and looking at my collection ... and secretly wondering if I should just do UG Merfolk. 😢