As someone who just attempted to build their first Commander Deck from scratch, I must say: &#@*@#$!
This was not easy.
At all.
I started with what I thought would be an easy Tribal Elf theme and discovered there are hundreds and hundreds of possibilities... I went through Gatherer and just added every card that made even a little sense (33 pages of filtered spells, lands, and permanents that did not include creatures...) and when I was done I had over 315 cards with a combined cost over $900... I needed to refine what I wanted to do...
I started with just one build around card: Shaman of the Pack. I thought I was off to a really good start because it didn't take me long to find a perfectly matched general: Nath of the Gilt-Leaf.
I wanted to try building an aggressive creature heavy deck that could play and replay a lot of elves and tokens to repeat massive Pack damage, especially after board wipes. The two main cards that make this repeatable are
Haunted Crossroads
and Sylvan Messenger. As long as Crossroads stays on the board I can stack 5 creatures on top of my library at the end of my opponent's turn with Messenger as my first card draw. Then I can play it and draw the next 4 back to my hand and repeat the process. Nath of the Gilt-Leaf can create an elf token every upkeep, and hopefully force your opponents to top deck. I had a considerable amount of discard in here to capitalize on the ability, but ultimately I decided to take the deck in a different direction. I don't know how commander works in terms of sideboard, but if there is still the option of having one I would absolutely trade out 15 of the pump options for discard punishment like The Rack, Shrieking Affliction, Liliana's Caress, Duress, Hymn to Tourach, and even
Bottomless Pit
.
Anyway, since I decided to go with a more aggressive build I narrowed down many ways to get the job done with massive pump effects. One of the strategies was to include many creatures, enchantments, and spells that
Lure
to make sure sure as many creatures as possible hit their target with full damage.
Might of the Masses
and/or
Wirewood Pride
can end the game by targeting Nath next to any creature or effect that forces another creature to be blocked by everything.
One of the most potent setups is tossing Dragon Throne of Tarkir onto
Joraga Warcaller
and pumping him full of counters with
Immaculate Magistrate
and bonus damage with
Timberwatch Elf
. You can even untap Magistrate and Timberwatch using Quirion Ranger and Seeker of Skybreak to do both twice a turn. Now Joraga shares not only +X/+X for how many counters he has, but another +X/+X for his total Power from the Dragon Throne with every single other elf on the board.
Eladamri, Lord of Leaves
gives all of your elves hexproof, so unless they have some sort of instant speed board wipe everyone else in the game should be very dead.
Craterhoof Behemoth hiding underneath
Mosswort Bridge
can crash in to give everything another massive boost of damage and Trample, but Priest of Titania and Wirewood Channeler make it easy to just cast him from your hand. Imagine casting Craterhoof, then sacrificing to
Dark Triumph
to give everything +2 more damage, then bringing him back with either Exhume, Reanimate, Zombify, or even Life/Death for a second trigger of his pump ability for the board. Life/Death together would be truly amusing because all of your leftover land that isn't tapped (which actually could be all of it) would become creatures with a ton of extra damage and trample. Attack everyone ftw.
All that possible mana from Priest of Titania and Wirewood Channeler can go to great effect by casting a huge
Liliana's Indignation
,
Puffer Extract
,
Untamed Might
, or even
Suffer the Past
. Could end the game in one swing again.
The two backup win conditions that are totally viable but kind of dirty are Helix Pinnacle and Epic Struggle. Building up 100 counters can be done over a few short turns once you build up a good board, or even all in one turn if you are really left to do whatever you want. Epic Struggle can also be done all at once if you wait to cast it until you already have 20+ creatures. This will give your opponents one turn to wipe the board or remove it before you win the game.
Once you start staring at the deck list for several hours like I have, you'll start to see the other interactions I have set up. I am pretty happy with how well everything came together in the end, I must say again that this was not easy. I ended up taking out about 20 removal cards and about 10 board wipe options to go all in aggro since I have several ways to recover from board wipes, and Deathtouch available from multiple sources while attacking make the fist fight angle the easiest to capitalize on. I also have a pretty good amount of life gain. Like, a crazy amount actually. Retapping
Wellwisher
as many as 4 times in one turn can gain a gratuitous amount of life back. This goes the same for retapping mana elves like Priest of Titania, damage buffs from
Timberwatch Elf
, and +1/+1 counters from
Immaculate Magistrate
.
I never play with Planeswalkers, but Garruk, Apex Predator and Beastmaster Ascension are just too good. Not that it would ever happen, but the thought of each attacking creature just getting +10/+10 and Trample for being declared an attacker without doing any of the aforementioned tricks is just stupid.
Black ended up taking more of a back seat, but offers a lot of nice reanimation options, my favorite of which being
Deadbridge Chant
. I like the randomness of it. Pulling back a Craterhoof at random would be the best, but there are several other options to pull it back on target and then Chant could either get you back the Craterhoof or the reanimation card.
Lots of fun things going on, and for EDH I'm pretty sure that a from scratch deck being under $175 is very much on the budget side. Gaea's Cradle, for example, would be amazing in here but it would literally double the cost of the deck :)
Anyways, thanks for reading and be sure to let me know what you think of my first foray into EDH deck building. This was fun despite taking about 6 hours longer than I thought it would ;)
