This clawesome deck focuses on using our commander Ayula, Queen Among Bears to control the board whilst growing herself or other bears, the deck then aims to win by bearing down on our opponents with an army of our ursine friends, or put our opponents to the grizzly fate of an infinite combo. Bear with me, I'll go into that combo later. The last and most reliable win condition is a voltron strategy to put a ton of counters on Ayula and win through commander damage with the unbearable might of our commander. Puns aside, this deck is a reasonably powerful, focused build that is fun to play and can often surprise our opponents with powerful synergies or even a somewhat reliable infinite combo. Without further ado; The game plan:
Game plan:
Early-game- The deck aims to ramp on the first few turns of the game and get Ayula down early, this is particularly important because the deck needs to outpace the control and combo decks that our deck is weak against.
Mid-game- Control the board with Ayula by fighting any problematic creatures on our opponents' boards. Use cards like Beast Whisperer and Guardian Project to keep up our tempo and play more bears. Good creatures to tutor in the mid game are Vigor, which lets our bears get even larger and is particularly good against deathtouch, Defiler of Vigor to act as cost reduction and help with a go-wide strategy, or Soul of the Harvest to keep our hand full.
Late-game- This is where our deck focuses on getting our bears large enough to start killing our opponents, giving them trample to get through blockers with Goreclaw, Terror of Qal Sisma or making them huge with a giant Finale of Devastation. The other combat-win that is a bit more reliable is using Ayula, Queen Among Bears to win through commander damage, getting her through with Rogue's Passage or by giving her trample. When playing against more powereful decks, and vanilla 2/2s just won't cut it, there is a reasonably reliable, if somewhat convolouted combo that the deck can pull off to finish off these games.
The combo:
This combo is in the deck because I personally wanted the deck to be able to play against some of the more powerful decks in my meta, but I usually don't tutor for it unless I am playing against these decks. There are a few variations of this combo that are more powerful, but I find this one has a good balance of reliability and not including random combo pieces that don't contribute to the rest of the gameplan. The main weakness of the combo is that the deck cannot tutor for Lightning Greaves or Swiftfoot Boots so we have to rely on card draw to get these.
The cards in the combo are:
To assemble the combo we need at least 7 power if using Selvala, Heart of the Wilds or at least 7 devotion if using Karametra's Acolyte (8 if using Swiftfoot Boots instead of Lightning Greaves). For the rest of the description I will only mention Lightning Greaves and Selvala, Heart of the Wilds but know that the combo works the same with the other options.
The combo is: Lightning Greaves + Selvala, Heart of the Wilds + Temur Sabertooth
For the combo: Tap Selvala, Heart of the Wilds for at least 7 mana and use 2 of this to bounce her back to hand with Temur Sabertooth Then use 3 of the remaining mana to cast her. Then equip Lightning Greaves to her to give her haste, activate her for 7 mana again, this nets us 1 green mana each time. Repeat this as many times as needed. This combo results in infinite green mana which this deck uses to bounce and re-cast a bear infinite times with Temur Sabertooth, giving us infinite triggers from Ayula, Queen Among Bears, threfore giving us infinitely large bears, and killing all of our opponent's creatures by fighting them, ending the game by attacking with these bears.
This deck has been great fun to play and build, and whilst it is not the most powerful deck I've ever made, it certainly overperforms and surprises, being able to hold its own against pretty much anything other than cEDH decks. Future upgrades would be fast mana like mana crypts that are a bit out of my budget range for now but I am reasonably happy with where I have got the deck for now.
