New Dimir Persistent Petitioners Commander Is Even Better Than it Seems

Last updated on November 6, 2025

Persistent Petitioners | Illustrated by Jason Rainville

Can you even call yourself a Magic player if you've never been milled out by Persistent Petitioners? And can you even call yourself a Persistent Petitioners player if you've never milled someone into a Gaea's Blessing? Rites of passages, the both of them.

Someone at Wizards R&D wanted to show the rule-breaking Petitioners some love, and printed a new mill/advisor commander directly into Avatar: The Last Airbender‘s Jumpstart set. Bruvac the Grandiloquent, you've got a competitor.

The Royal Advisors Have Arrived

Twinsies! Lo and Li, Royal Advisors aren't actually the first typal commander for advisors, since The Archimandrite beat them to it, but this new Avatar legend is the first time MTG has printed a commander that seems specifically tailored to Persistent Petitioners. You could argue that Bruvac the Grandiloquent is still the better, more reliable commander, but Lo and Li expand what the Petitioner archetype is capable of.

For one, this is a 2-color commander, one that could run black mill and discard support like Dark Deal, Tergrid, God of Fright, and/or Phenax, God of Deception. Surprise surprise, adding a second color gives you more options, and you can always run Bruvac in the 99 of Lo and Li, but not vice versa.

Second, Lo and Li staples discard synergy onto the mill package. Funnily enough, it's actually the only advisor in all of Magic that uses the word “discard” in its textbox, but you could lean into discard strategies independent of the advisor text, or ignore the discard part of the card altogether and focus on milling. For what it's worth, people discard all the time on their own, whether that's cycling, looting/rummaging, or wheeling, so you'll probably pick up incidental triggers along the way.

Quick note on the trigger here: Lo and Li will only trigger once per instance of cards milled, but the discard trigger isn't restricted in the same way. If you Windfall and your opponents discard a total of 10 cards, the ability will trigger 10 times. Similarly, the mill effect can trigger once per opponent milled. Either mode of Fractured Sanity will trigger Lo and Li three times.

And finally, you've got an activated ability that mills a player for four cards. You can read that as mill four and pump your team, and you can do that for every 3 mana you can spend. Six mana nets you eight milled cards and two +1/+1 counters on all your advisors, Lo and Li included.

Persistent, Indeed

Bruvac the Grandiloquent | Illustration by Ekaterina Burmak

You might've already stopped and questioned why you'd want +1/+1 counters as your payoff in a mill deck. It's not like people running Persistent Petitioners decks have ever really resorted to combat as a means of winning. But diversifying your threats and wincons can be pretty useful.

Imagine you have four Petitioners in play. You could mill someone for 12 cards, maybe 24 with Bruvac in play, or you could activate all four with Lo and Li in play and put four +1/+1 counters on all of your creatures. In most scenarios, that's going to be a faster clock than trying to mill a collective 250ish cards from an entire table. Lo and Li, Royal Advisors gives you a different avenue of attack, literally.

It also makes up for one of the biggest weaknesses of Petitioner decks, and that's how friggin' squishy they are. A bunch of 1/3s aren't holding much back, and people are definitely attacking the mill player, warranted or not. Propaganda can only buy you so much time, but pumping your Petitioners at this rate can hold people off long enough to actually set up a mill win. Or, you know, you could go on offense and aim for the advisor beatdown plan. Honestly, with a single Ghoulcaller's Bell activation turning into a permanent Overrun, that's probably the preferred plan.

This also gives you an out to people running a stay Eldrazi titan, or other anti-mill tech. Advisors can't mill someone out? Turn that mill into a kill and bash them with your dudes instead. It's definitely a unique angle for a mill commander, making it more of an aggro-mill strategy than the hard control mill decks or combo strats you're probably used to.