Knuckles' Money Advice

Posted on July 10, 2025

Hello Everyone! I'm Levi from The Thought Vessel, and today we are looking at a brand-new commander from the recently announced Sonic Secret Lair: Knuckles the Echidna. I was thrilled when the announcement came that a Sonic the Hedgehog Secret Lair was being released on July 14th. Knuckles caught my eye because it combines two cards that I am quite fond of in this game. Let's look at this commander and the supporting deck list.

The Commander

Knuckles is a perfect blend of Professional Face-Breaker and Hellkite Tyrant. Every time we connect a creature to a player, we get a treasure token. As an added bonus, Knuckles comes with double strike, so he'll be able to get this trigger twice. It's not as efficient as Professional Face-Breaker since it has the dreaded "one or more creatures" clause, but it can still make a lot of treasures. It's rare that our commander also comes with its own alternate win condition to aim for, but here we are! This list is capable of winning off this effect, but we also have a stronger plan A.

The Game Plan

This is what The Distraction Makers would refer to as an economy deck - and not just because we are dealing with treasure tokens. Our game plan is to make as many treasures and artifacts as possible to drown our opponents in value. In the event that the game goes on for long enough or we start running short on card advantage, we can also count to thirty to win through Knuckles's alternate win condition.

Notable Cards

We'll of course start with our MVC, Professional Face-Breaker. Professional serves as a second version of our commander that also lets us sacrifice treasures to impulse draw into more gas. Since Knuckles allows us to get two treasures thanks to double strike, it only makes sense to have more opportunities to exploit that ability. We also have a collection of strong treasure-producing dragons such as Goldspan Dragon, Cavern-Hoard Dragon, and Steel Hellkite. These are going to work as our muscle, whittling down life totals with flying damage.

In order to get these dragons into play, we have Magda, Brazen Outlaw to cash in five treasures for a Dragon or artifact. If dragons aren't the answer, we also have some nasty artifacts like Portal to Phyrexia and The Immortal Sun to swing the game in our favor. We can also use Kuldotha Forgemaster to get our artifacts into play. While we are making all these treasures, we might as well build up an army of Thopters with Stridehangar Automaton.

Ghirapur Aether Grid lets us use our treasures and artifacts without actually having to sacrifice them. Over a couple of turns of distributing damage, this enchantment can clear the board or even take a player out. Alchemist's Talent is everything we want in a card for this deck. On level one, we get two treasures; level two gives us 2 mana for our treasures instead of one; and if we can get to level three, we can start throwing damage around. It's great!

Gamechangers

Of the three game changers we are permitted at bracket three, we're playing with two of them. Deflecting Swat can keep our commander safe from removal to keep the treasure pipeline open - Knuckles is going to be a popular target. Since we'll have an influx of mana, we also need as many cards as possible. This is where our second game changer comes into play: The One Ring. This is probably the best card advantage engine we have available to us in Mono-Red. If we were to add a third game changer, I'd probably go with Ancient Tomb to help get Knuckles out by turn three. A close second would probably be Jeska's Will for the card advantage and ritual mana.

How Do We Win?

The deck technically contains one combo it can go for. Aggravated Assault combined with The Reaver Cleaver or another treasure producer like Ancient Copper Dragon can lead to infinite combats. This deck does play a lot of dragons, so winning with evasive attackers is on the table. We can also win with Knuckles counting to thirty or Hellkite Tyrant counting to twenty. In this deck, twenty is a very obtainable number - especially if Hellkite Tyrant is able to attack and steal some artifacts.

Taking Things to the Next Level

This particular deck is intentionally not playing some extra tutor cards like Gamble that can make the deck far more consistent. We're currently playing Magda, so it wouldn't be too difficult to pivot the deck into a Clock of Omens combo to win at instant speed. The combination of Mycosynth Lattice and Karn, the Great Creator could slide right into this deck to lock out your opponents and accelerate the alternate win con at the same time. Speaking of counting, we could also include Godo, Bandit Warlord with Helm of the Host for infinite combat steps - since we would have the treasure to get to the eleven mana required. We could even play Blood Moon since we're in Mono-Red. There are plenty of ways to spike this deck up.

Wrapping Up!

And that is Knuckles! I hope you enjoyed the list. Feel free to copy the deck, use it as a blueprint for your deck, or simply swipe some ideas. At the end of the day, it's your experience. Until next time, happy gaming!