Hi Folks, welcome back. I haven’t written up a Commander Focus article in a little while, but some of the new legendary creatures from recent sets have really had my mind brewing up ideas, so we’re coming out of the gates swinging. If you haven’t read my articles before, I tend to take a budget oriented perspective on deckbuilding both for accessibility and a fun restriction. Today, we’ll be looking at a solid Bracket 2 build that can easily punch up into Bracket 3, and will only run you around 50 – 100 USD at the time of construction.
Author’s Note – I use the Mana Tithe tool to determine deck costs, as it pulls from what the cheapest possible deck you can get off TCGplayer market prices, and while this can be unrealistic since you may not always get cards at that price, it’s a good way to determine the floor for a deck cost if you’re willing to get beat up cards and shop around for the best deal. This deck was $47.86 USD through this tool at the time of writing, however it will only be ~$100 at most if you were to purchase all new cards from other sellers.
We’ll have a great starting point here for building the deck outright, but there are easy upgrade paths if you want to kick it up a notch to a higher budget/bracket level if you please. Who’s the culprit for this experiment, you may ask?
Felothar, Dawn of the Abzan is going to lead the helm today. I chose this commander because it had occured to me that this was really the first true Abzan commander we had gotten to stick to the themes presented by Abzan in the Tarkir sets. The themes of sacrificing + counters had been done before by things like Ghave, Guru of Spores, but Ghave had cemented his role well as a combo piece rather than facilitating a value engine. Felothar is unique in these colors because she not just promotes an aggressive, combat focused go wide strategy for creatures, but she also pushes you to building around her sacrifice engine to make sure you keep the wheels turning. She lets you sacrifice any nonland permanent when she enters or attacks, which isn’t quite enough to build heavily into aristocrats but just enough that we will plan to have some synergy around those triggers.
There are a few different directions you can push this commander to, but I’m opting for a hybrid token/counter strategy, heavily focused on going wide and always having ways to juice up your board as well as virtually always having fodder to sacrifice to her attack triggers. She provides a really good shell for some other effects, such as Persist and, shockingly I know, Endure, which really help you play the game at high tempo and aggression while always making high value plays. Our game plan is pretty simple, we want to build out a board state pretty early before getting Felothar out – she’s cheap, but we want to take advantage of her as much as we can right off the rip with her. After that, we want to maintain our token generators/persist creatures while supplementing our counter generation with cards that provide extra counters as well as well as giving other bonuses to creatures with counters on them. Our win condition is simple – beat them down with our board state. While you definitely can slot in some persist combos or aristocrats synergies to help win over the top, this deck can get scary fast and can rebuild pretty well from board wipes, so I opted to go all in on as much synergy for the main strategy as I could.
Here is a link to the decklist on Moxfield!
We’ll break down the deck and discuss some key cards as well as some potential replacements and upgrades you could make.
Ramp
This is a concept I’ve talked about in previous articles but I want to reiterate a bit here – my philosophy on ramp is that it’s grouped into a set of cards I call “setup cards” in the context of commander. The idea is that in casual commander, the early turns are most often spent bulking out your resources and/or board state to have a more explosive and powerful mid game. While ramp is the most common way to do this as mana is arguably the most valuable resource in the game outside of cards in hand, for a lot of decks (such as ours here), we really want to have as many creatures/counter support cards on board before we let Felothar out to play. Due to this, we don’t run a crazy robust ramp package, but we try to keep it synergistic and easy to fit into our curve.
- We only have one artifact for ramp – Sol Ring, it’s a hard classic to beat.
- We have three creatures – Sakura-Tribe Elder, Incubation Druid, and Gyre Sage. While they aren’t as mana efficient as things like Llanowar Elves, they have much better scalability and ramp really heavily with how easily we can give them counters. Steve is mostly for flexibility – while it doesn’t explicitly have a ton of synergy, acting as an extra body when you need it over a land can be nice to have, and land ramp is always going to be a priority. Speaking of which…
- We have five land ramp cards, with a pretty classic green ramp package. Notably, we use Farseek + some dual lands with land typings to help color fixing as well as Into the North and the Snow Duals, a really nice budget way to ramp out dual lands. Search for Tomorrow has always been a budget ramp option I’m a big fan of as well.
Nine ramp cards isn’t anything crazy, but it should be enough to get us where we need to be and reliably get a ramp spell off at least our free mulligan.
Draw
- Spot card draw is very important to me for smoothing out rough hands and making sure your deck flows a bit smoother without being totally out of resources when you have tough draws, so I always try to include a few things like Harmonize and Night’s Whisper here.
- Phyrexian Arena and Hollowmurk Siege are great enchantments for incremental card draw – we aren’t a particularly explosive deck so these will often get a lot of value for us over time.
- Yathan Tombguard is a great way to capitalize off going wide with how many creatures we have with counters on them.
- Armorcraft Judge is a great budget shout here as it can often net us 5+ cards reliably for 4 mana and leave an extra body behind to boot.
- Ichor Wellspring is a great early play since it gives you some efficient draw while having something you aren’t worried about shipping off to get sacrificed when Felothar enters for the first time.
We have 6 other synergistic cards that can help us draw, as well as Evolution Witness for some extra graveyard recursion. Overall, this means we will not be short of options to keep our hand full of gas.
Removal
We’re a very creature based deck, with almost 1/3 of our total cards being creatures. We always want to pack some sweepers to make sure we don’t get blown out, but really spot removal for key threats will be the name of the game here.
- Damn and Austere Command will be our sweepers, providing flexible options that can often be very useful even when we already have a board state or want to maintain an existing one.
- We definitely stick with flexible removal being the main goal with our spot removal, packing a whole boatload of ways to deal with nonland permanents from Stroke of Midnight, Mythos of Nethroi, Generous Gift, and Beast Within. We don’t really care as much about handing out the chump blockers for other people anyway.
This is a pretty proactive deck, so really a lot of the removal and interaction are just to deal with key stopping points efficiently.
Evasion and Protection
One key thing in this deck is that we lean hard into Felothar being our primary source of counter generation, which means keeping her alive is pretty essential for us.
- Prowler’s Helm, Trailblazer’s Boots, and Whispersilk Cloak will help make sure Felothar can stay attacking safely even when her Trample and growing stats aren’t enough to cut it.
- Alpha Authority just makes her plain obnoxious to deal with.
- Our instant protection package is handy because we can use them pretty flexibly for whatever we need – Inspiring Call (we often use this just for card draw too!), Loran’s Escape, Revitalizing Repast, and Tyvar’s Stand all can stuff a lot of removal spell from connecting with any key pieces of your board.
It might seem like overkill, but removal and board wipes are the main counter to our strategy. Keeping creatures alive to maintain all of their precious counters is a really important part of this deck when you don’t want to invest into cards like The Ozolith that can circumvent this.
Creatures
The meat and potatoes of our strategy. It’s a lot to go through in one sitting, so I’ll highlight some key features. The rough idea is that you want things that generate tokens, increase the amount of counters we generate, or hold counters really well. Persist also is welcome here, as it basically gives us a reliable way to get a lot of value off a single creature sacrificing each turn without burning through tokens.
- Abzan Falconer and Envoy of the Ancestors give great bonuses to everything with counters, which will quickly be everything we have.
- For token generation, we have Adeline, Resplendent Cathar, Basking Broodscale, Felisa, Fang of Silverquill, Ophiomancer, Scurry Oak, and Sinkhole Surveyer.
- We also have a bunch of creatures that hold counters really well but make a ton of tokens when they die, such as Hangarback Walker and Nested Shambler.
- Avenger of Zendikar also makes tokens and is a great late game two card value engine with Felothar as long as you can keep dropping lands.
- Host of the Hereafter is a great way to make sure you’re getting the most value off killing your creatures that already have counters on them and to punish players removing your stuff without wiping everything.
- Marketback Walker is absolutely disgusting for how many cards it can draw when it dies, but keep your eye out for exile based removal. Having a reliable way to kill it makes it handy to sac in a pinch for card draw exactly when you want it.
- Puppeteer Clique and Kitchen Finks are our persist cards. You could also slot in Putrid Goblin if you want another, but these gain additional value when we loop them. The idea is that we can sacrifice them, then next time they gain a counter it will cancel out the -1/-1, making it super easy to keep recycling them without burning through tokens.
- Scavenging Ooze is a tech card for graveyard hate that can be either sacrifice fodder when you need it, or just sit there and be a mana sink for extra power on board.
The rest of our creature package is designed to help support our counter generating power while also providing more bodies to actually put counters on themselves, making a really symbiotic playstyle where our support creatures also become our beatsticks.
Others
- We have a bunch of enchantments to stack counter generation, such as Hardened Scales, Branching Evolution, and Loading Zone.
- Skrelv’s Hive makes tokens and can be really annoying if left unchecked as a way to at least threaten poison kills, even if it’s not a main goal of this deck and likely won’t happen in most scenarios.
- Overwhelming Encounter is a sweet overrun effect that can generate a ton of value if we land on one of the counter generating versions, but also can just be handy to push your damage over the top to finish a player while not leaving you too exposed on the crack back.
Lands
We run 36 regular lands and a single MDFC, bringing us to the clean standard of 37 lands. It’s a good mix of mana generation backed up with 7 Forests, 2 Swamps, and 2 Plains. We also have a Scavenger Grounds and Tectonic Edge for utility. Manabases are flexible, so if you want to swap around these dual lands to ones that better suit your needs, feel free as long as you make sure you’re generating primarily green mana across the board to enable your ramp.
Upgrade Options
There are almost too many to list here. The first thing is Warden of the Grove, which was a pretty close cut but I think could easily find a slot here. Carmen, Cruel Skymarcher, Elenda, the Dusk Rose, Reyhan, Last of the Abzan, and Jacked Rabbit are all great options for the creature package, with The Ozolith being a staple support piece. Doubling Season gets crazy value here as well if you’re looking for big splashy upgrades. Heroic Intervention would be fantastic here in place of one of the other protection instants. Bitterblossom is always great for more tokens, and Cathars’ Crusade is great if you don’t get a headache tracking it. The manabase can always use upgrades for faster lands, so feel free to do that to taste.
Lastly, if you want to, you can include some infinite combos with the persist creatures via things like Ashnod’s Altar to enable loops with other counter generators. I didn’t find one I specifically wanted to include here, but you can definitely do this as an alternate win condition and still make good use of the pieces if you don’t want to dig for the combo.
That’s a wrap, I hope you enjoyed the deck! Make sure to pack some dice with you though, you’ll have a whole lot of counting ahead of you with this one.
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