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I'm the reason people hate Child of Alara

Commander / EDH Bracket 4 Competitive Control Counterspell Gate Lands Multiplayer Sacrifice Scapeshift Theme/Gimmick

Cowmmunist

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Land (38)

Disruption (9)

Removal (5)

Ramp (17)

Tutor (14)

Sac Outlet (11)

Combo (3)

Commander (1)

Commander: foil Child of Alara

Recursion (14)

Utility (12)

Card Advantage (7)

WinCon (3)

Hello! and welcome to the reason I don't have any friends, and the reason everyone I know **_hates Child of Alara_**

So I had come across this deck How to Lose Friends and Infuriate People for <$99, and since I had all the cards for it already I decided built it and start running it in my playgroup. But the more I played it the more I found myself wanting to increase the power level of the deck, and so here we are. The deck primarily controls the board state with Child of Alara through sacrifice effects (exclusively at instant speed!), and then we try to ramp out all our gates so we can go for the Maze's Endfoil win condition. I have been playing this deck now for many years and over time I've gotten significantly more consistent at running it, and I have been tweaking it little by little here and there to keep it current with my playgroup, and make sure people know their permanents are not safe.

This is going to be a brief overview of one of the core philosophies I keep in mind when building any deck I play, or when helping other's build their decks. This is none other than the 8x8 Theory. I won't go too in depth here because there's not much to the idea and is already explained on the 8x8 blog, but if you're lazy like me it's simply this: pick 8 things you want your deck to do, like card draw, removal, ramp, and maybe sac outlets etc. Then choose 8 cards for each of your 8 categories (for those counting that's 64), and finally throw in a good selection of 35 lands and BINGPOT! You now have a generally consistent deck with all the effects you want/need!

I personally start with the 8x8 when I start a deck from scratch because choosing 99 cards is kind of tough for my ADHD brain to focus on. So splitting it up really helps me, and if you really want to get into the math involved as to why this is good enough to take into account when building a deck you can use a Hypergeometric population calculator to see that if you start with 99 cards in a population (your deck), set your sample size (your starting hand) to 7, and if you have 8 successes (1 of your 8x8 categories) you have a 45.6% chance of having 1 or more of those cards in your opening hand.

I would like to wrap up this section by stating that I am not associated with the 8x8 theory and I am not a mathematician, and I use the 8x8 as a starting point. A set of guidlines, and not a set of rules. But these tools help me and I have even set custom categories in the decklist so you can see all that the deck tries to accomplish, and which cards I think fit that category. Some cards can do more than one thing, and that's great. You might have noticed I run light on removal in the 99, and that's because generally things just blow up from child dying all the time anyways. This deck relies heavily on being able to out-ramp your opponents to gain advantage while also progressing towards our win condition. And so with essentially 16 ramp spells in the deck your odds of starting with at least 1 in your opening hand is 72.1% (not bad).

As with most decks, you're gonna want some lands in your opening hand. But this is a 5 color deck, so almost always you're going to be looking for a source to green mana to cast a ramp spell, or perhaps enough mana to cast one of our colorless ramp choices like Sad Robot, Navigation Orb, or Expedition Mapfoil so we can start building up our colors to cast Child.

If our colors are looking fine, you're going to want to start looking for a sac outlet, and preferably one that is present on our lands as we can use it repeatedly. However, if you're getting afraid of the board state don't feel bad resetting the board state with a spell, and preferably with a draw spell to refill our hand. Most of our spells have sacrifice as an additional cost, which leaves our opponents no opportunity to respond to us sacrificing Child, and in turn tends to keep our spells rather cheap since normally giving up a creature for a spell is considered a downside. But for us all of our spells tend to also say "destroy all nonland permanents, they cannot be regenerated"

Once you feel stabilized you have 2 routes to winning the game that you can take:

1) If we can get 10 different gates out we can win with a Maze's Endfoil activation. This can be done very efficiently with Scapeshift. If you have 9 other lands in play you can just tap all your lands to fill your mana pool, sacrifice however many lands you need to get at least 9 gates (Maze's end can grab the 10th), and then spend 3 of your mana from your mana pool for the Maze's Endfoil activation.

2) Commander damage is one of my favorite ways to win, and we have 2 ways to boost Childs strength. We can get out Xenagos, God of Revels and swing twice at each opponent. Child is a 6/6 with trample for only 5 mana, and with Xenagos' beginning of combat trigger it gives Child haste and turns them into a 12/12. Then it is just a matter of swinging with Child. The other source costs a little bit of mana, but with a surplus of that you can use Basilisk Gate to really cause some damage. In the deck there are 12 gates, so by itself Basilisk Gate can make Child an 18/18 with trample. if you get Xenagos out at the same time you can hit a max p/t of 36/36. It's pretty sweet.

704.6d In a Commander game, if a commander is in a graveyard or in exile and that object was put into that zone since the last time state-based actions were checked, its owner may put it into the command zone. See rule 903, “Commander.”

903.9a If a commander is in a graveyard or in exile and that object was put into that zone since the last time state-based actions were checked, its owner may put it into the command zone. This is a state-based action. See rule 704.

903.9b If a commander would be put into its owner’s hand or library from anywhere, its owner may put it into the command zone instead. This replacement effect may apply more than once to the same event. This is an exception to rule 614.5.

The gist of these rulings is that prior to June 7, 2020 we were able to choose whether or not to send Child to the graveyard and blow up the board, or to the command zone, and not blow up the board. Now with the above rulings anytime Child dies from play, the death trigger will blow up the board regardless of where you send it. It now always triggers. This is really important to keep in mind when playing, and if you're like me you sometimes forget because the ruling is still so recent.

So now you know a little bit more about the deck and some of the card choices, but if you scroll through some of the comments you can find some more questions and answers from me about different things. If you find you have a new/more contemporary question or recommendation please drop a comment and let's talk about it! **_Make sure you include cuts with your suggestions!_** I am always open to new ideas and increasing my Knowledge Pool.

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Updates Add

It's time for an update! — June 24, 2025
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I am in the process of updating this list and rewriting the primer!

updates coming soon! — May 1, 2024
Edit
Really loving the latest version of the deck! — July 8, 2022
Edit
Some card updates and testing :) — June 16, 2022
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97% Casual

Competitive

Revision 21 See all

(4 months ago)

-1 Abjure main
-1 Altar's Reap maybe
-1 Arcane Lighthouse maybe
-1 Assassin's Trophy maybe
-1 Capsize main
-1 Cataclysm *list* main
-1 Cavern of Souls maybe
-1 Command Beacon maybe
-1 Eiganjo, Seat of the Empire main
+1 Fierce Guardianship main
+1 Fool's Demise main
+1 Gatecreeper Vine main
+1 Gond Gate main
-1 Harrow maybe
+1 Intuition main
+1 Louisoix's Sacrifice main
-1 Mnemonic Wall main
-1 Noxious Revival main
+1 Open the Gates main
-1 Otawara, Soaring City main
and 27 other change(s)