Atla Palani, Nest Tender
has always been my favorite commander. I built her a few years ago, thinking that this would be quite weak in comparison to other decks. That's only part of the truth in my opinion.
This commander obviously has some big downsides. First of all, it's only a 2/3, which make her vulnerable to the smallest removal spell such as
Lightning Bolt
. The other weakness make the other even more critical: the whole deck is revolving around her, and she will ALWAYS be focused when she hits the table.
But when she manages to trigger and do her little "omelette", things can get really nasty, as big creatures can spawn out of nowhere. Even when gigantic monsters hit the battlefield, you don't necessarely have the board control. One little wrath, and it is basically over.
So here's the deal:
1/ Protecting our commander at all costs
2/ Finding a way to trigger Atla's hability as soon as possible
3/ Making sure the creature that will spawn from our eggs LOCK the board and are invulnerable to boardwipes
4/ Having some ramp and top of library control to replace big creatures from our hand on top of our deck or playing them without the help of Atla
Protecting Alta
Rule number one when playing Atla: she is your queen, you absolutely need to protect her at all costs. Most of the time, your lady won't last one turn if you have nothing to protect her as soon as she hits the battlefield. Most of time, I'd rather wait turn 6 (with some ramp) to play her and equip her with
Commander's Plate
or enchant her with
Gift of Immortality
or
Shield of the Oversoul
Luckyly, the format is still slow enough to allow us to wait, even if we might need to take a few hits during those firsts rounds.
The deck contains some other ways to shield Atla, such as
Lightning Greaves
or
Deflecting Swat
and card:Flawless Manœveur.
Triggering Atla's hability
Okay, this is quite an easy part. Atla can make her own eggs, but she also triggers when any other egg dies such as
Roc Egg
, and also on Shapeshifters like card:Mirror's Entity or
Taurean Mauler
. The eggs in these decks all have CMCs below 4, as you want them to come on board before Atla. While playing this deck I slowly removed from the list some egg cards, as I realised that once protected, Atla can easily make enough of them on her own, and having to much of them in the 99s increase the chances of revealing them on Atla's trigger, and we don't want that.
Eggs can die on wraths, they can block (watch your opponent keeping their 6/6 trample away from a 0/1 because they don't know what can possibly come ^^) or they can be sacrificed to a bunch of artifacts or enchantments. This is clearly the best option, because it is the most flexible way to trigger her ability. So we got stuff like like
Ashnod's Altar
or
Phyrexian Altar
to make our little "omelettes".
I also play a lot wraths, as they are really worth playing when you got one or two eggs to trigger, even if they kill our queen in the process (note that if Atla and an egg die at the same time, the trigger works). If you can combine a wrath with THE unknown card of the deck
Shields of Velis Vel
, you can basically take the game on this.
Taking the board over
Now that we have our trigger on the stack, we want to take the board over once and for all. The easiest way to do this is to have un-targetable or indestructible creatures. The goddess ready to protect your queen is obviously
Avacyn, Angel of Hope
. But you also have
Archetype of Endurance
or
Shalai, Voice of Plenty
to help you build a stable and powerful board. Other creatures in the list protect themselves with indestructible such as
Ulamog, the Infinite Gyre
,
Blightsteel Colossus
or protections card:Emerakul, the promise end. You also have
Void Winnower
or
Worldspine Wurm
: the first one make a lot of spells unavailable to disrupt you and the second one is somewhat worse when killed.
Ramp, Library Control and other stuff
There is tables that won't let you trigger Atla at all. Maybe that players know that she's a dangerous beauty, maybe that they were traumatized of the previous games they played against you (I made some of my friends acquire some pretty serious PTSDs with this deck). So we need a plan B, that is obviously less efficient than the original, but you'd be surprised how many games you can win like this. While our opponents focus on disrupting Atla, we can basically just ramp and put our creatures on board the old fashion way. Nothing really fancy here, classic ramp spells such as
Three Visits
,
Kodama's Reach
, or
Arcane Signet
.
In addition to those cards, I added some cards to control our library's top. It can help draw some critical pieces we need such as a sacrifice engine or a protection for the queen.
Scroll Rack
,
Sylvan Library
and
Mirri's Guile
are some classics for this purpose.
Conclusion
So you have it. A competitive build for a fun commander, designed for multi, fun to play and to play against. The "hazard" part makes all the fun, and make each game unique. Because you are unable to control the power you put on board, you can sometimes end up 1v3 turn 5 because you "accidentaly" made an Ulamog come on board...
This is NOT a budget build as you can see, but the price can be reduced and is quite reasonable in comparison to other CEDH decks.
This list can be modified to suit your budget and tastes, but I really think that the idea must stay the same: I have been playing the deck for a while, and I'm quite sure this is the most optimized version.
Thanks for reading, and have fun with the queen.
