Loading commander data
Kess, Dissident Mage
Legendary Creature — Human Wizard
Flying Once during each of your turns, you may cast an instant or sorcery spell from your graveyard. If a spell cast this way would be put into your graveyard, exile it instead.
3 / 4
$4.81Buy on TCGPlayer
“Spellslinger who casts instant/sorceries twice by replaying from graveyard.”
Midrange
Intermediate
Combat damage, Combo
Spellslinger, Graveyard, Storm
Strategy
Kess, Dissident Mage is your passport to casting spells twice—once from hand, once from the graveyard. The core gameplan is filling your graveyard with cheap, high-impact instants and sorceries, then replaying them for free each turn. This turns one-time effects into repeatable engines: cantrips become card draw, burn becomes chip damage, and interaction becomes resilient removal. You're essentially building a spellslinger deck that rewards self-mill and graveyard synergy.
Your engine runs on cheap cantrips, efficient interaction, and repeatable value. Cards like Murktide, Ledger Shredder, and Scribbling Mystic turn your spell-heavy gameplan into card advantage. Pair this with storm-lite payoffs and you're drawing cards, making tokens, and controlling the board simultaneously. Win conditions fall into two camps: chip away with evasive spellslinger damage (Kess swings through the air), or go deeper with combo lines that leverage instants and sorceries for infinite value.
Strategy generated by Tapped Decks AI. Not affiliated with Wizards of the Coast.
Key Synergies
Budget Build
Skip expensive cantrips like Murktide and Dress Down; replace with Thought Scour, Unholy Heat, and Counterspell for similar graveyard fill and interaction on a budget.
Most-Played Cards
Ponder
Frantic Search
Faithless Looting
Brainstorm
Preordain
Storm-Kiln Artist
Archmage Emeritus
Windfall
Goblin Electromancer
Gitaxian Probe
Dark Ritual
Toxic Deluge
Inclusion = % of Kess, Dissident Mage decks running this card. +lift = percentage-point boost over the format average.
Community Decks
No public decks for Kess, Dissident Mage yet.
Build a Deck →Be the first to publish one — Commander-tier members can share decks with the community.
Art Variants
Explore More Commanders
Build a deck with Kess, Dissident Mage
Our deck builder picks the 99 other cards for you. Two minutes to a complete, balanced list.
Build a Deck with This Commander →Card data via Scryfall