Rograkh, Son of Rohgahh
A commander that costs nothing to cast and puts a 0/1 on the table is a strange proposition, and the trick is that its value was never meant to live on the board at all. What a free, Partner-eligible legend actually provides is red color identity plus a command-zone body that fills half of a two-commander pairing without asking for mana or a card in hand. That is the whole appeal: pick a heavier partner as your real payoff, and this Kobold rides along as a body you can deploy the first time for zero. The zero cost is doing structural work that a higher rate never could; the initial cast is what is free, and once it dies the commander tax scales up like any other legend, so it stops being a no-cost body the moment you need it back. The keyword suite is aspirational at 0 power: first strike and trample do nothing until something raises the power, since a 0/1 deals no damage and dies to any block it makes. But that is exactly why they are stacked here. Once a pump lands, first strike, trample, and menace turn the free legend into a commander-damage threat that connects hard and gets through. Treating a commander's cost as a number to be minimized rather than maximized was a genuinely new idea, and the line of free or near-free Partner legends that followed traces directly to it: sometimes the most interesting thing about a commander is what it charges you.




