The Tolling of Saraneth and Astarael

Commander / EDH Aristocrats Cleric Combo GW (Selesnya) Humans Infinite Combo Reanimator Sacrifice Toolbox Weenie

herpdederp92

Creature (30)

• 1x Angel of Glory's Rise
• 1x Ao, the Dawn Sky
• 1x Avacyn's Pilgrim
• 1x Birds of Paradise
• 1x Cataclysmic Gearhulk
• 1x Cathar Commando
• 1x Esper Sentinel
• 1x Eternal Witness
• 1x Extraction Specialist
• 1x Felidar Guardian
• 1x Flumph
• 1x Gluntch, the Bestower
• 1x Grand Abolisher
• 1x Haywire Mite
• 1x Heartwood Storyteller
• 1x Inquisitor Exarch
• 1x Karmic Guide
• 1x Mage's Attendant
• 1x Moorland Rescuer
• 1x Perilous Myr
• 1x Radiant Solar
• 1x Ranger-Captain of Eos
• 1x Reaper of Flight Moonsilver
• 1x Renegade Rallier
• 1x Reveillark
• 1x Skullwinder
• 1x Starved Rusalka
• 1x Sun Titan
• 1x Veteran Explorer
• 1x Welcoming Vampire

Enchantment (7)

• 1x Aura Shards
• 1x Evolutionary Leap
• 1x Fecundity
• 1x Greater Good
• 1x Oath of Druids
• 1x Smothering Tithe
• 1x Survival of the Fittest

Land (32)

• 1x Canopy Vista
• 1x Command Tower
• 1x Emergence Zone
• 1x Field of the Dead
• 1x Forbidden Orchard
• 5x Forest
• 1x Fortified Village
• 1x Geier Reach Sanitarium
• 1x High Market
• 1x Mikokoro, Center of the Sea
• 1x Nykthos, Shrine to Nyx
• 1x Overgrown Farmland
• 6x Plains
• 1x Scattered Groves
• 4x Snow-Covered Forest
• 2x Snow-Covered Plains
• 1x Sungrass Prairie
• 1x Sunpetal Grove
• 1x Temple Garden

Artifact (11)

• 1x Altar of Dementia
• 1x Altar of the Brood
• 1x Ashnod's Altar
• 1x Birthing Pod
• 1x Blasting Station
• 1x Mesmeric Orb
• 1x Phyrexian Altar
• 1x Pyre of Heroes
• 1x Relic Vial
• 1x Skullclamp
• 1x Sol Ring

Commander (1)

Instant (11)

• 1x Beast Within
• 1x Chord of Calling
• 1x Excise the Imperfect
• 1x Force of Vigor
• 1x Noxious Revival
• 1x Oblation
• 1x Path to Exile
• 1x Silence
• 1x Swords to Plowshares
• 1x Teferi's Protection
• 1x Veil of Summer

Sorcery (8)

• 1x Ascend from Avernus
• 1x Austere Command
• 1x Eldritch Evolution
• 1x Jailbreak
• 1x Sevinne's Reclamation
• 1x Storm of Souls
• 1x Tempt with Discovery
• 1x Wrath of God

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Maybeboard

Creature (13)

• 1x Arena Rector
• 1x Boonweaver Giant
• 1x Elvish Mystic
• 1x Fauna Shaman
• 1x Knight of Autumn
• 1x Llanowar Elves
• 1x Luminous Broodmoth
• 1x Mentor of the Meek
• 1x Outland Liberator  ^Flip
• 1x Protean Hulk
• 1x Restoration Specialist
• 1x Sakura-Tribe Elder
• 1x Selfless Spirit

Enchantment (4)

• 1x Carpet of Flowers
• 1x Martyr's Bond
• 1x Pattern of Rebirth
• 1x Sylvan Library

Instant (3)

• 1x Enlightened Tutor
• 1x Generous Gift
• 1x Nature's Claim

Artifact (2)

• 1x Arcane Signet
• 1x Spawning Pit

Land (4)

• 1x Dryad Arbor
• 1x Horizon Canopy
• 1x Inventors' Fair
• 1x Windswept Heath

Sorcery (2)

• 1x Finale of Devastation
• 1x Tragic Arrogance

Planeswalker (1)

• 1x Vivien on the Hunt

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Hello! I'm a longtime commander player, and this is my aristocrats combo deck built around Saffi Eriksdotter. This deck is my attempt to break the color pie by building a reasonably competitive aristocrats deck without any black or any red. No Reanimate, no Blood Artist, no Viscera Seer, no Goblin Bombardment, no Impact Tremors. It's been fun and challenging to build and playtest over the years.

All suggestions are welcome!

Last updated: 08/22/2023

Title Show

The title is a reference to Garth Nix's Abhorsen series. I liked the idea of comparing Saffi to Sabriel, a girl with necromantic powers who would rather live a normal life but is forced to help quell an uprising of the dead. It seemed appropriate to me.

Why Saffi is a Strong Commander Show

I can (and am about to) write a lot about this subject, but TL;DR Saffi Eriksdotter is good because she's cheap on mana, she combos with a ham sandwich, and she's a unique commander few people play.

So, there are a lot of Aristocrats commanders in this game of Magic. Everybody from Teysa Karlov to Sidisi, Brood Tyrant to Judith, the Scourge Diva to Varina, Lich Queen to Ghave, Guru of Spores to Shattergang Brothers to Nethroi, Apex of Death to Marchesa, the Black Rose to Marath, Will of the Wild to Xyris, the Writhing Storm... There's an endless list of commanders that want to a) make a bunch of small creatures and b) kill those creatures for fun and profit and triggers. And I do mean endless.

In a metagame oversaturated with available Aristocrats decklists, how can a commander possibly stand out as being unique, let alone the "best?"

Well, there are a few criteria to meet. First and simplest, we'd want a commander that's cheap and comes out early, since that will always put us ahead in the game. Saffi, 2-drop, check. Aside from edge cases, they don't come cheaper.

Next, we need to get some sort of value from our commander. Aristocrats decks are all about setting up value engines and managing resources. Typically we either want a commander that gets us more creatures e.g. Elenda, the Dusk Rose or Alesha, Who Smiles at Death, or else we want a commander that gives us card advantage e.g. Yawgmoth, Thran Physician or Korvold, Fae-Cursed King. Some commanders cover both halves pretty well, but Saffi mostly helps with the first half of the equation, since we can block with a creature twice, get its ETB/LTB abilities twice, sacrifice it twice... It's a small but clearly valuable effect.

Finally, we have to stop and ask if the commander we've picked does a good job of participating in a deck's win conditions and closing out a game. For example, Meren of Clan Nel Toth is a massive value engine, but she doesn't really do anything by herself; she just flops free fatties like Sheoldred, Whispering One onto the battlefield and lets them close the game instead. Conversely, Jarad, Golgari Lich Lord is pretty worthless up until the point he sacrifices something huge and instantly kills everyone. And despite being cheap and non-worthless early, Saffi also is a huge late-game threat, as anybody who's ever seen a Pattern of Rebirth resolve can attest.

Okay, so Saffi checks all the boxes for a decent Aristocrats commander. But there's still one more question to ask: Is the deck going to be unique? Is it going to do something interesting that makes you want to play it again and again, or is it just going to be a generic pile of goodstuff?

Well, I can answer that question for Saffi. By this point in my primer, I've named off 16 other commonly played Aristocrats commanders without repeating myself once. (Like I said, endless.) And every single one of them had either red or black in their color identity.

This poses a unique deck design problem. If we can make 40 creatures enter the battlefield, our opponents die to Impact Tremors or Purphoros, God of the Forge. If we can make 40 creatures die, they are killed by Blood Artist or Zulaport Cutthroat. And practically every Aristocrats deck wins via some variation on those strategies.

But not ours. We're Selesnya, a guild known mostly for aggro and lifegain and not playing around alternate wincons. So it's time to get creative, and break out some fairly unique deck tech.

You should play this deck if:

--You like dorks and bears and other such riff-raff.

--You like running dorks and bears in the command zone.

--You like feeding dorks and bears to Altars.

--You think Saffi should have fed Hans to the Lhurgoyf.

--You like the idea of breaking Selesnya by building a combo deck in aggro colors.

--You are up for the challenge of replacing staples like Blood Artist with jank garbage like Perilous Myr.

Also, full disclosure, this deck has a spiritual predecessor. Decklist in case you're interested:

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Bourgeois Fungus

Commander / EDH herpdederp92

SCORE: 3 | 2 COMMENTS | 523 VIEWS | IN 1 FOLDER

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My Top Three Cards You've Never Seen Show

As you might imagine, this deck does in fact put some super jank creatures onto the battlefield every game. Given its propensity to sit across from (and occasionally beat) cEDH decks, I often get meta-slave players asking "What the heck is THAT?"

So here's the top three WEIRD weird cards this deck plays, in order of importance:

3: Inquisitor Exarch Admit it, maybe you've seen Relic Vial legitimately played before, but never Inquisitor Exarch. It's not as good as Grand Abolisher at enabling Vial kills, but of course we can also loop the Exarch itself to kill people, so it serves multiple roles.

2: Starved Rusalka An absolute piece-of-garbage card from the original Ravnica block, Rusalka is still the closest thing this deck can get to a Viscera Seer. The one mana per sac sucks but it's very helpful to have a sac outlet tutorable by Ranger-Captain of Eos.

1: Reaper of Flight Moonsilver Did you know there's exactly one mono-white creature that is a free sacrifice outlet? A reasonable chunk of logic behind this deck's construction is that self-mill not only enables cards like Sun Titan to fetch altars, but also sets up delirium for Reaper.

Our Fine Selection of Ham Sandwiches Show

The good news is that Saffi is particularly good at setting up combos. In fact, it would be very legitimate to say that she goes infinite with a ham sandwich. (Pretty sure they're printing one in Wilds of Eldraine...)

While there are plenty of ways for other cards in this deck to reanimate each other indefinitely, the main lines always involve Saffi, and they're constructed in an obvious way: Sacrifice Outlet + Saffi + Ham Sandwich + some obscure trigger that kills players

HAM SANDWICHES THAT BRING AN EXTRA FRIEND BACK WITH SAFFI:

Reveillark (brings one extra bear)

Moorland Rescuer (brings a bear and any 0/X jellyfish)

Angel of Glory's Rise (brings any number of human dorks)

Any one of these three "power reanimators" can generate a quick kill via Perilous Myr or similar

HAM SANDWICHES THAT CARE ABOUT MANA VALUE:

Sun Titan (the big fat guy, probably our deck's biggest value bomb)

Renegade Rallier (the cheapskate's Sun Titan)

Extraction Specialist (... flea market titan?)

Sun Titan and Rallier can pull back Altars from the graveyard. Rallier and Specialist are both legal cards to get off saccing Saffi to a Pod or Pyre of Heroes.

EXTRA SPICY HAM SANDWICH NAMED KARMIC GUIDE:

Karmic Guide

Often a great card to tutor with a thick graveyard, since there's no restriction to what Guide can reanimate.

Solving the Win-Condition Problem Show

Okay, so we've all been at the table before. Some lunatic starts durdling around with an Ashnod's Altar for fifteen minutes, sacrificing twenty tokens and casting five Living Deaths, and then they finally announce, "Okay, I've got it! Loop Reassembling Skeleton a million times using this ham sandwich, and play Blood Artist to kill you all." Sounds familiar? Of course it does.

Well here's the problem. Without black or red, we've got nothing like Blood Artist. We can kill and reanimate creatures pretty darn easily, but winning the game with death triggers? In Selesnya? ...How?

The answer, my friend, is various insanely janky plans that fall into three general groups: Damage, Mill, and Esoteric Nonsense

CARDS THAT CREATE DIRECT DAMAGE KILLS:

Blasting Station The most valuable wincon in the whole deck since it does the sacrificing by itself

Perilous Myr Good Reveillark looper

Inquisitor Exarch Good Reveillark looper

Relic Vial Vial sits next to Grand Abolisher as a Zulaport Cutthroat.

Radiant Solar Often a fairly dead draw, but looping through Lost Mine of Phandelver does in fact kill opponents with damage, and Solar gives you a plan to pitch & reanimate itself. If there were any "take the Initiative" cards cheaper than a 3 mana 3/3, I would play them instead.

CARDS THAT MILL OPPONENTS TO DEATH:

Altar of Dementia The second-most-valuable wincon, since it again does the sacrificing by itself

Altar of the Brood As close as we can play to Impact Tremors

We are also running kill switches in the form of Mikokoro and Geier Reach to make sure we can kill opponents through anti-mill answers like shuffle titans.

ESOTERIC NONSENSE STRATEGIES:

Phyrexian Altar By generating infinite colored mana, we can cast Saffi forever to loop any other creature, text or none. This would let us lock out opponents by (for example) sacrificing Eternal Witness 100 times, casting Beast Within each time, turning all their lands into beasts and then casting a Wrath.

Felidar Guardian Technically, looping kitty-cat alongside a Reveillark lets us generate infinite colored mana the exact same as Phyrexian Altar. There are also some neat lines with the cat and Birthing Pod, but usually they just dig into a previously mentioned wincon.

Ao, the Dawn Sky Ao is in here more for the primary trigger, since we can dig 14 cards deep looking for altars with him & Saffi. But Ao could also be used to pump our whole field +20/+20 or bigger to look for a combat damage win.

I might as well use this part of the primer to list off the free sacrifice outlets that can be used to loop the Saffi-Ham Sandwich nonsense and make these wincons go off.

JANKY SAC OUTLET LIST:

Greater Good (card draw)

Ashnod's Altar (mana)

Reaper of Flight Moonsilver (on a stick)

There are plenty of other costed and/or single-use sac outlets, but the above are the ones that loop.

Presenting as the Group-Hug Player & Table Police Show

UNDER CONSTRUCTION

Solving the Tutor Problem Show

NOTE: BELOW THIS POINT I STOPPED REWRITING THE PRIMER. READ ON KNOWING IT'S OUTDATED

So we're facing a pretty serious dilemma. Green is known for being strong at tutoring creatures, both to hand and to battlefield. But we don't need to tutor creatures, or more accurately we don't just need creature tutors.

See, the problem is that almost all of our good sac outlets are artifacts. It's much easier to win the game with a Blasting Station than without it. And how many cards in GW tutor artifacts? Aside from equipment tutors and horribly overcosted colorless cards, there are only two good options:

Inventors' Fair and Enlightened Tutor

(...and I still need to buy the latter for this deck)

So we've gotta get creative. By that I mean we've gotta dig through our deck by drawing a lot of cards. A lot. A LOOOOOOOT.

ALL OF THE CARD DRAW STUFFED INTO THIS DECK:

Sylvan Library

Fecundity

Guardian Project

Greater Good

Skullclamp

Trading Post

Beast Whisperer

Elvish Visionary

Mentor of the Meek

Runic Armasaur

Mikokoro, Center of the Sea and Geier Reach Sanitarium

Should I board in more card draw? Absolutely. I love drawing cards (who doesn't?) and it makes sense for this deck.

Of course, this is all entirely in neglect of the actual creature tutors we're playing:

Eladamri's Call

Eldritch Evolution

Chord of Calling (currently boarded in to replace Protean Hulk which was underperforming)

Survival of the Fittest (a card that is equally adept at sending creatures to hand and to the graveyard.)

Fauna Shaman (ditto on a stick)

Birthing Pod So every Pod deck has to have a Birthing Pod chain, and in this deck it's pretty simple: Saffi Pods into Renegade Rallier, which recurs Saffi, so instant wincon alongside an Altar. Alternatively, the Rallier or any 3-drop pods up to Felidar Guardian, which flickers the Pod and then Pods into Karmic Guide or Reveillark to assemble a different loop.

Control, Reanimation, Utility Show

As you may have noticed, this is a Selesnya deck. That means we have access to Reclamation Sage and Path to Exile. Therefore, constructing a good spot-removal package is not incredibly difficult.

BLAND, UNINTERESTING CONTROL PACKAGE:

Path to Exile

Swords to Plowshares

Beast Within

Oblation

Krosan Grip

Force of Vigor

Veil of Summer Because screw counterspells, right?

Grand Abolisher See above.

Aura Shards

Knight of Autumn

Caustic Caterpillar

Qasali Pridemage (I actually like the Cat and Caterpillar better than Rec Sage in this deck, since Saffi allows them to double-sacrifice at instant speed.)

Wrath of God

Shatter the Sky (we don't run much 4+ power but still strictly better than Wrath)

Dusk / Dawn

Cataclysmic Gearhulk Because we're happy to blow up the world more aggressively than most decks

Tragic Arrogance See above

Drannith Magistrate because this deck is okay with hatebears but doesn't want to run a lot of them, so Magistrate is a good high-value pick since it locks out commanders. (Definitely a flavor-of-the-month card, we'll see if he stays long.)

Martyr's Bond as a color-shifted version of Dictate of Erebos to stax the board down with edict effects. Always nice when our commander has a sacrifice ability.

In a deck based around sending dorks straight to the dustbin, it would be nice if we had good ways to dig them back out of the grave, right? I'm not gonna list all the combo dorks again, but here's all the ways we can reanimate dead cards:

Eternal Witness (duh)

Skullwinder

Dusk / Dawn

Sevinne's Reclamation (one of several cards I'm running to make sure I can reanimate artifacts)

Trading Post

Buried Ruin

Restoration Specialist (maybe overkill but I like her)

Emeria, the Sky Ruin Emeria is the important utility land I haven't mentioned yet. This deck is running pretty light on lands due to a cheap curve and lotsa mana dorks, but I've got a small package to make sure Emeria can come online. Tempt with Discovery goes for Emeria and High Market, and Collective Voyage and Veteran Explorer are both good ways to get lots of Plains into play.

Date added	3 years
Last updated	8 months
Legality	This deck is Commander / EDH legal.
Rarity (main - side)	7 - 0 Mythic Rares 50 - 0 Rares 22 - 0 Uncommons 4 - 0 Commons
Cards	100
Avg. CMC	2.93
Tokens	Beast 3/3 G, Dungeon: Dungeon of the Mad Mage, Dungeon: Lost Mine of Phandelver, Dungeon: Tomb of Annihilation, Goblin 1/1 R, Incubator, Phyrexian 0/0 C, Skeleton 1/1 B, Spirit 1/1 C, Spirit 1/1 W, The Atropal, Treasure, Wizard 1/1 U, Zombie 2/2 B
Folders	Ffun