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Trostani, Explosive Lifegain

Commander / EDH GW (Selesnya) Lifegain Tokens

jajkannarr

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Land (37)

Sorcery (7)

Planeswalker (1)

Creature (23)

Artifact (10)

Commander (1)

Commander: Trostani, Selesnya's Voice

Instant (13)

Enchantment (8)

Maybeboard

Instant (3)

Creature (2)

Enchantment (1)

This is my pet deck Trostani, Selesnya's Voice! This is a lifegain focused deck and it is very good at doing that! This is definitely more of a mid-power deck that packs a punch in the late game and I love how it plays. I understand lifegain isn't the strongest archetype but it is my favorite and can be quite difficult to deal with. Please enjoy the decklist and the rest of my description of the deck!

The Basics

This deck focuses on the first ability of Trostani, Selesnya's Voice by gaining life equal to the toughness of creatures as they enter. This helps gain some steady lifegain throughout the game, but as the decks title describes this deck aims to gain an absurd amount of life and fast. The fastest way to gain life in the deck includes Serra Avatar and Soul of Eternity to essentially double your life total. There are also a few cards in the deck that can allow us to create tokens of creature like Mirrorpool and Bramble Sovereign to gain continuous value or continuously double your life total. The aim of the game is to use your life total as a way to cushion yourself into the late game where this deck thrives. It is a very mana hungry deck so the early turns of the game are also a great time to ramp into late game plays.

How the Deck Wins

This deck wins through mainly combat or another lifegain based win conditions.

Combat with the deck is fairly simple as you swing with your creatures and try to chip away at your opponents. There are a few cards in the deck that help us win through combat. Cards like Garruk's Uprising help give our creatures trample, primarily Serra Avatar and Soul of Eternity, Nykthos Paragon or Blossoming Bogbeast with a large source of lifegain will also help my creatures have enough combat power to take my opponents out. Less likely but also an option includes the good ole one sided board wipe and a large grouping of creatures. This can happen with indestructible effects like Avacyn, Angel of Hope or Flawless Maneuver with a board wipe or with Ajani, Strength of the Pride to exile everything and swing in for the win.

The lifegain based win conditions of the deck include Felidar Sovereign, Aetherflux Reservoir, and Angel of Destiny. Felidar Sovereign simply states "At the beginning of your upkeep if you have 40 of more life you win the game" so this is a potential way to win the game. The downside to this card is everyone sees it coming and rarely lasts to your next turn. So to get around this we have a sneaky way to get it into play on opponents end step. With nine mana or mana and creatures to tp into the convoke we can cast Chord of Calling on our opponents end step to have a significantly higher chance of it making it to our upkeep. Like most lifegain decks the next wincon is Aetherflux Reservoir. Simply having over 50 life allows this card to at any moment to wipe a player out of the game. Once your life total is above 150 you are capable of wiping out the table. Having 200 or more life allows you to wipe the table and hold an extra 50 damage in case there are any responses from your opponents. The final wincon is Angel of Destiny. After gaining the necessary life this card allows you to attack an opponent and if it has not died the player that the angel attack looses the game. This will only take out a single player but is a very fast way to take a player out with little drawback and little effort.

Also important to include the infinite life combo in the deck. While this doesn't win the game it does make it hard to loose to non-infinite combos or other win the game effects. This combo is Archangel of Thune and Spike Feeder. This is a fairly easy combo with Spike Feeder having the ability to remove a +1/+1 counter from it for free to gain 2 life. This will trigger Archangel of Thune that says when you gain life put a +1/+1 counter on each creature you control essentially repleneshing the counter on Spike Feeder. This is also a cool way to make your board full of / creatures that can swing in to win the game. Especially with a card like Garruk's Uprising.

Single Target Removal

Creature removal spells in the deck include the usual Path to Exile and Sword to Plowshares for basic white exile removal.

A specific artifact and enchantment removal card choice in the deck is Aura Shards. My playgroup has a tendency to rely on artifact mana ramp, so if I can get this card to stick I can keep my opponents on par with me into the late game.

This next spot is for spells that deal with both as permanent or non-land permanent. The two cards that that fit into this category are Beast Within and Generous Gift. Both and fairly costly at 3 cmc but they are often used for the pesky normally difficult things to remove like planeswalkers and tend to sit in my hand.

Board Wipes

This deck is fairly light on board wipes with mainly 3 and I am currently looking into adding a fourth. The first two board wipes in Wrath of God and Vanquish the Horde. Fairly normal choice for board wipes and is best played with protection backup with cards like Avacyn, Angel of Hope or Heroic Intervention.

The second board wipe is the spicy board wipe for the deck. This being Ajani, Strength of the Pride. The 0 ability on the planeswalker exiles all creatures and artifacts the opponents control. This allow a one sided board wipe and can lead to a win in most cases. This is also a super cool card in my meta with a lot of artifact ramp. This ability does have a downside being that you must have 15 or more life than your starting life total (aka 55). This makes it so that this board wipe really only works as a win contions and not as a way to wipe the board when your opponents are leading.

Card Draw

This deck has a very interesting and difficult card draw and card advantage package. This is because it either works very well or I draw dead and end up with no cards in hand. The reason this package is difficult is because it requires casting and resolving creature spells and having other cards in play to draw. There is one sole card draw spell in the deck and that is Harmonize This is a fairly generic card draw spell for green. Another recent include for the deck includes Esper Sentinel. The other cards are more difficult like; Well of Lost Dreams requiring me to gain life and pay mana to draw, Zendikar Resurgence requires casting a creature, and Garruk's Uprising or The Great Henge requires creatures to enter the battlefield. Another card that fits into this categorie includes Lifecrafter's Bestiary. Thee cards allow me to draw a lot of cards but require me to do other things and occasionally leave me empty handed. I have thought of considerations for other inclusions of card draw in the deck but, so far I have come up empty handed.

Card Advantage

There are the 2 main cards I wanted to put out there in the deck that are used as "card advantage" in the deck. The first being as mentioned before Lifecrafter's Bestiary. This allows a scry on your upkeep to help draw out of dud cards faster. The next card is a very interesting one that I do not see used very often. The card being Cream of the Crop. When a creature enters the battlefield you get to look at the top X cards of your library where X is that creatures power. You then take that card and leave it on top of your library and put the rest of the cards on the bottom. While slow on a lot of the cast trigger draw cards in the deck, it does work well with Well of Lost Dreams. It is also just bad enough that it almost never gets removed from play, so when I play it I generally get the most value possible out of it.

This deck runs a basic round grouping of protection spells to ensure our key cards stay on the field. These basic cards include Heroic Intervention, Flawless Maneuver, and Teferi's Protection. These are all the basic Selesnya protection effects, but the deck also runs a few other cards that will help. The first being Blacksmith's Skill. This is sort of an odd card in the deck but I like to use it as a dual option of one white mana spells with cards like Path to Exile. The next important card is Eerie Interlude. This is a great card in the deck for the use of protection as well as the enter the battlefield effects on some creatures. Primarily Trostani's ability of course. Another card to include as general protection is the classic Lightning Greaves. A great protection equipment that hopes to stay on the board and be used amongst many creatures in the deck. The deck also focuses on creatures so another different way to have protection is through Dauntless Escort. I like this because it not only works as protection but it also pushes my opponent to wait on board wipes while I further my board state and prepare to play into the late game where the deck is at it's strongest.

The strengths of this deck include slower strategies like stax and control. This deck can carry and get out of control in the late game and if I can get the the late game with everyone else also fighting to gain advantage I have a good chance. Heavy creature removal can be difficult especially if the targets hit your key pieces. A stax heavy or life drain style decks like Syr Konrad, the Grim as I can gain the life back that I loose and there are a lot of things I can do under heavy stax or a board lock.

Bad Matchups

With this deck gaining a ton of life, normal aggro decks may have a difficult time against this deck. That's where these two deck archetypes come into play as a weakness. The first deck type is combo decks. It doesn't really matter how much life we gain against combo decks because they just go infinite and there isn't much we can do about it. This deck does play decent removal, but not many things that interact on the stack like most combo decks require. I have considered adding cards like Silence and Angel's Grace to counteract these decks but I am unsure it that is the route I would like to go with the deck. This is something I will continue to think into as time progresses. The other deck archetype is voltron style decks that win through commander damage or infect. This is of course a weakness to the deck because with a normally large life total, there is nothing I can do to counteract commander damage and infect. The deck does have a few things that can help like Maze of Ith and Glacial Chasm to help prevent some of this damage. There is also some artifact and enchantment removal in the deck for voltron decks.

Decks Speed

The next weakness of the deck is its speed. This deck has a high average cmc and hope to ramp a lot in the early game. This in turn makes the deck do nothing substantial until turn 5-6 and start gaining lots of life. With the growing power creep of the format, starting to get into your gameplan on turn 5-6 is when a lot of decks is aiming to win the game, so this deck has a hard time keeping up. I have been working on trying to lower the average cmc and put more effective pieces in the deck for the early game. I love the old style of magic where everyone can drop 6-8 drops every game and this deck is built to play in those old metas. I love how it plays if it makes it to the late game, so it is hard to adjust the deck to the new setting.

The

A large weakness of the deck is acuiring the double green and double white to cast Trostani as early as possible. I have made a lot of choices in the deck and to make everything else work I had to settle for a few too many utility lands that made casting Trostani an issue occasionally. There is a couple ways that try and use the colorless mana in attempts to cast Trostani. These being Sungrass Prairie and Selesnya Signet. These both use the colorless and filters it into a and a . Alongside these two there is also Wooded Bastion that can help filter my mana into the colors I need to cast Trostani. I occasionally will still have an issue but for the most part I have other play I can make or ways to get around the color shortage. But I would suggest in building this deck that you heavily consider the casting cost when building the mana base and ramp package for the deck.

This deck is for the most part exactly what I am looking for. To keep up with the format I may add a few things to help speed the deck up like Utopia Sprawl / mana dorks, or spells to counteract the changing meta to help against combo decks by adding Angel's Grace and Silence.

Content goes here

This deck is fully blinged out! From the beautiful older bordered foils to the incredible invention and expeditions there is a lot of bling to enjoy. This is in no way a flex on my opponents but instead of a way for me to further enjoy my favorite deck. The bling is completed with a beautiful alter of Trostani, Selesnya's Voice done by Revelan's Light alters. The remaining cards that are not foiled in the deck are all cards that do not have a foil printing like Savannah and Emiel the Blessed. I look forward to the future of potential printings of these cards in foils in secret lairs, judge promos, and in future sets. I am also considering getting alters of the cards besides Savannah to give those cards some extra bling. I know it isn't the same as seeing these cards in person but I hope you enjoy seeing the foils and other bling!

This deck is based off of the very first magic deck I ever built. This deck was a Selesnya 60 card casual deck that focused on lifegain and stomping with large Wurms and Angels. This was a very bad but fun deck and it was my first experience of learning to deck build. This list was around 120 cards and almost singleton because there were so many cards I wanted to play and try out.

I eventually converted this deck into a commander deck and it definitely wasn't good. This deck played many of the same cards as the last deck including angels, wurms, and single use lifegain spells. As I built other decks I learned further how to build better decks and take advantage of my commander, so the deck started to go through a lot of changes to test out what I wanted the deck to do.

This deck has gone through almost every realistic deck type possibility for Trostani. It has been: Wurm Tribal, Angel Tribal, Small Tokens, Large Tokens, Lifegain, Lifegain with tokens through cards like Soul Foundry and Mimic Vat, Lifegain Combo, and Prison. It was very fun going through the process and learning how a bunch of new cards worked for Trostani and finding out what worked best and what was the most fun to play. The final product of the deck as a Lifegain theme ended up having a lot of cool cards and interactions from the other builds like Glacial Chasm from the Prison build, Angel of Sanctions from the angel build, and the Archangel of Thune and Spike Feeder from the combo build.

This deck has a long history behind it and it shows in the way the deck is played and built. This may not always be the best to play or build the deck but it means a lot to me and I really enjoy playing it.

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96% Casual

Competitive

Date added 5 years
Last updated 2 years
Legality

This deck is Commander / EDH legal.
Rarity (main - side)

27 - 0 Mythic Rares

41 - 0 Rares

12 - 0 Uncommons

7 - 0 Commons
Cards 100
Avg. CMC 3.57
Tokens Ajani's Pridemate, Beast 3/3 G, Copy Clone, Elephant 3-3 G, Horse 5/5 W
Folders Decks, Mid Power
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