Part of what interested me to build the deck was that I see the most popular cards on EDHrec are the other start your engines cards. Which seems obvious at face value---Samut costs 6, so why not playing something like Starting Column to get going earlier, so that you're already on max speed by the time she comes down?
Well, I think this is a mistake for a couple reasons. One big one is that there aren't very many non-garbage SYE cards, which makes it a difficult plan to make consistent without loading the deck with crap. Even the decent ones are mostly dead cards when drawn late. Cutting them reduces the number of dead draws. But even more importantly is that having a SYE card isn't enough---you also need to be able to actually get through for damage. Having a T1 Amonkhet Raceway doesn't do anything if you don't ALSO have a cheap creature to start getting damage through. So now we're forced to run a bunch of crappy SYE cards plus a bunch of weenies to get in for damage? And all that (plus getting to 6 mana) is before we can actually do anything useful with the commander? Yuck, what a mess.
Instead, this deck has a very simple plan. Get Samut out ASAP and just use her to get your engines online. So long as you have a good attack the turn you play her (and you almost always do), you'll immediately get to speed 2, and if you still have an open attack on the next turn, you'll be 3/4 of the way to max speed before even casting a spell.
As a result, instead of a clunky mess of weenies and SYE cards, we have a nice streamlined curve of t2 ramp → t3 ramp → t4 samut → t5 play some dumb crap that dominates the board. As far as payoffs, we've got a nice mix of big token production and draw to keep the machine going, and any ramp spells you haven't already cast can be played very efficiently with Samut on board. As a result the deck gets going pretty quickly, and basically never lets up, dropping bomb after bomb until the game ends.
Not something that's probably competing at B4 tables, since it's too slow and low on interaction for a T4/5 meta, but it's a hell of a bruiser at B3, which is probably the most you can expect for Samut. And it does have one combo win available off Sprout Swarm. Overall I didn't expect too much from this commander (in fact I rated her "bad" in my GBU review) but this has been a solid and fun deck.
Note as per SUAP rules, this was built on a $100 budget. With a higher budget it could definitely be made more powerful.
Samut
