Alesha Tokens
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Concept
Alesha is a fast combat-centric commander in a color combination that supports cheap aggressive with various ETB and LTB effects. We seek to capitalize on the ETB and LTB triggers by focusing on token generation to "cheat" additional bodies in-to, and then out-of, play. Additionally, we'll be packing a lot of cards to halve life totals to make killing people with incidental damage more viable.
How It Wins
Putting extra bodies into play to trigger Purphoros, God of the Forge and sacrificing creatures to Goblin Bombardment with drain effects like Blood Artist and Zulaport Cutthroat in play is a large portion of our offensive power. Beyond this, cards like Cathars' Crusade, Elesh Norn, Grand Cenobite, and Death Match position our wide-token strategy to overwhelm our opponents.
Card Selection
Alesha, being a toolbox-style commander, lends herself to a more diverse set of utility cards that we can break down into several categories: Token Generation, Sacrifice Outlets, Entering/Leaving Battlefield Triggers, Ramp, Removal, and Draw. We have two additional categories for this Battle of the Brews list, Good Stuff and Hate, because of the unique nature of the Alesha vs Alesha vs Alesha matchup in which we'll be facing off.
Token Generation
The bulk of our triggers will be generated from these cards when they create additional bodies for sacrifice fuel.
- Angel of Invention creates a small army of servos, anthems our tokens, and is recur-able via Alesha due to the low base power.
- Siege-Gang Commander/Pia and Kiran Nalaar create a wave of creatures and allows us to sacrifice tokens to shock, which could be very relevant in our matchup where our opponents are playing Alesha as their commander as well.
- Noosegraf Mob is a who's power is abnormally low when in the graveyard, allowing us to cheat this 5/5 into play with Alesha.
Sacrifice Outlets
- Goblin Bombardment gives us an instant-speed response to opposing combo pieces and, when supplied with a enough bodies, a way to control the flow of the game.
- Ashnod's Altar turns our creatures into mana so we can chain explosive plays together quickly since it will be important to compete against the fast combos that we can expect from the Johnny and Spike lists.
Entering/Leaving Triggers
- Purphoros, God of the Forge deals a ton of damage in multiplayer matches and can be expected to finish off players if not dealt with quickly
- Cathars' Crusade pumps our newly created tokens and can easily pump Alesha beyond parity with our opponent's Alesha's giving us free-reign to attack with impunity.
- Blood Artist/Zulaport Cutthroat trigger on death to drain opponents which, when working in tandem with ETB effects, attacks, and life-halving damage triggers, should put opponents on the short bus to oblivion.
- gravepact is another method to interact with our opponents at instant speed, hopefully allowing us to disrupt their creature-centric combos with abilities on-the-stack.
Ramp
- Boreas Charger makes an appearance as a hybrid Rampant Growth/Gift of Estates effect. Our opponents, who are also playing Alesha, may not be ramping enough for this creature to consistently hit our land-drops, but the use of a few bounce lands can allow us to subtly manipulate our land count to ramp ahead.
Removal
- Ravenous Chupacabra and Duplicant are our premiere "recur-able by Alesha" removal-on-a-stick creatures.
- Rakdos Charm is especially powerful in this specific matchup as we can expect some infinite-creature combos and graveyard synergies that can both be wiped out with this cheap two-mana instant.
- Death Match is a fun pet card that I've always wanted to run. It creates an environment that is extremely hostile to creatures which benefits us because we expect to play more creatures per-turn on-average than our opponents and make them have to play around cards as mediocre as Mogg War Marshall
Draw
- Mentor of the Meek is always a huge player in token strategies and is more-so in Mardu.
- Imperial Recruiter and Recruiter of the Guard synergize hugely with Alesha since we don't plan on running very many things over 2 power, and many will also have 2 or less toughness.
- Painful Truths gets a trial run as a 3 mana Ancient Craving
- Skull Clamp turns our creatures into draw so that we can out-last our Mardu opponents in our matchup.
- Twilight Prophet gives us another non-combat vector-of-attack to keep our opponents digging for answers, all-the-while being a recurrable flier with card-draw.
Good Stuff
This category is a set of cards we can expect to see in each of the decks that fight in the matchup. They're simply must-plays in Alesha, so don't be surprised when you see each of us with these in play at the same time!
- Reveillark and Karmic Guide are reanimation BFFs and Reveillark's restrictions closely mirror Alesha's so you expect this card to much stronger in this deck.
- Gray Merchant of Asphodel has claimed many EDH lives and the added benefit of being recurrable by Alesha makes this one a no-brainer.
- Buried Alive and Entomb function like tutors when fired off before Alesha's attack-step. Expect these cards to be played frequently and have huge impacts to the gamestate.
- Panharmonicon quite possibly is in each of our decks since we're going to be recurring the same set of creatures for extra value. Presumably, the most value you get out of your creatures are from their ETB triggers, so I can imagine each of us running Panharmonicon to push it up to 11.
Hate
Here are some meta-specific cards that I chose to run. These cards are specific to the Alesha vs Alesha vs Alesha matchup within reason. We collectively agreed to not run things like Rest in Peace and Leyline of the Void so that we could showcase each of the decks to some degree. Instead we agreed to use narrower hate cards or one-and-done disruption effects that don't completely lock a deck out of the game indefinitely.
- Harsh Mentor punishes other strategies for using cards like Kiki-Jiki, Mirror Breaker and other activation-centric combo pieces.
- Containment Priest hoses infinite-creature recursion cycles, which I imagine both of my opponents will be utilizing.
- Blind Obedience also restricts combat-centric Kiki-Jiki combos, but also has a lot of upside when we plan on attacking with our Alesha each turn (and expect the other players to keep Alesha back on defense to focus on combo-ing off).
- Remorseful Cleric is a recurrable Bojuka Bog. Seems like a no-brainer for Alesha vs Alesha vs Alesha. Actually, I bet my opponents are running this one as well, and probably should've put this in with the other "Good Stuff" cards.
Timmy Special
Lastly we have a few cards that don't necessarily synergize with the token strategy, but I couldn't bring myself to shelve them.
- Master of Cruelties is one of those quintessential GAWT'EM cards to sneak into play during combat. When recurred with Alesha during combat, his trigger changes their life-total to 1 when transitioning from declare-blocks to combat damage and allows Alesha to deal the final blow regardless of what their life total was before combat.
- Raving Dead and Virtus the Veiled both have similar effects, albeit less devastating and hilarious. Simply halving peoples life-totals, however, is enough to put them into range of Purphoros or Blood Artist kills.
- Tree of Redemption is a slower alternative, but represents another threat that needs to be exiled.
Postmortem
Far from an exciting decklist, the fans asked for a Alesha Battle of the Brews, and this is the Timmy list I was able to cobble-together. The deck is a little light on token generators, but can operate by recurring some of the utility creatures available in the deck. Overall, it feels like it lacks focus in a single direction and is in need of fine-tuning for more diverse matchups.
Competitive
Optimized
Focused
>Casual<
Jank
Gameplay
You can watch this deck in action in The Trinsiphere's Alesha vs Alesha vs Alesha Battle of the Brews episode.
