Alela's Sky Swarm

Commander / EDH Enchant Flying Tokens WUB (Esper)

Artificer12

Land (35)

• 1x Ancient Den
• 1x Arcane Sanctum
• 1x Azorius Chancery
• 1x Command Tower
• 1x Dimir Aqueduct
• 1x Dismal Backwater
• 1x Evolving Wilds
• 6x Island
• 1x Mistvault Bridge
• 1x Orzhov Basilica
• 7x Plains
• 1x Razortide Bridge
• 1x Scoured Barrens
• 1x Seat of the Synod
• 1x Sejiri Refuge
• 3x Swamp
• 1x Temple of Deceit
• 1x Temple of Enlightenment
• 1x Temple of Silence
• 1x Terramorphic Expanse
• 1x Tranquil Cove
• 1x Vault of Whispers

Artifact (11)

• 1x Arcane Signet
• 1x Azorius Signet
• 1x Bident of Thassa
• 1x Dimir Signet
• 1x God-Pharaoh's Statue
• 1x Mana Geode
• 1x Orzhov Signet
• 1x Sol Ring
• 1x Spear of Heliod
• 1x Sword of the Animist
• 1x Whip of Erebos

Enchantment (21)

• 1x All That Glitters
• 1x Bitterblossom
• 1x Blind Obedience
• 1x Darksteel Mutation
• 1x Dramatic Finale
• 1x Estrid's Invocation
• 1x Etchings of the Chosen
• 1x Ever-Watching Threshold
• 1x Favorable Winds
• 1x Frogify
• 1x Ghostly Prison
• 1x Gravitational Shift
• 1x Intangible Virtue
• 1x Lawmage's Binding
• 1x Monologue Tax
• 1x Prison Realm
• 1x Propaganda
• 1x Sigil of the Empty Throne
• 1x Smothering Tithe
• 1x Thopter Spy Network
• 1x Unquestioned Authority

Instant (7)

• 1x Banish into Fable
• 1x Dovin's Veto
• 1x Esper Charm
• 1x Inkshield
• 1x Mortify
• 1x Return to Dust
• 1x Utter End

Sorcery (5)

• 1x Dance of the Manse
• 1x Kaya's Wrath
• 1x Ponder
• 1x Stolen by the Fae
• 1x Winged Words

Commander (1)

Creature (19)

• 1x Arcanist's Owl
• 1x Archetype of Imagination
• 1x Baleful Strix
• 1x Curiosity Crafter
• 1x Empyrean Eagle
• 1x Etherium Spinner
• 1x Ethersworn Adjudicator
• 1x Ethersworn Sphinx
• 1x Faerie Formation
• 1x Filigree Attendant
• 1x Hypnotic Siren
• 1x Jelenn Sphinx
• 1x Pilgrim's Eye
• 1x Sephara, Sky's Blade
• 1x Stormscape Familiar
• 1x Thalisse, Reverent Medium
• 1x Warden of Evos Isle
• 1x Watcher of the Spheres
• 1x Windreader Sphinx

Planeswalker (1)

• 1x Serra the Benevolent

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Alela's Sky Swarm

Flying creatures can be kind of a pain, literally. Flying is a very reliable way to get at player's faces and/or planewalkers. It's quite good. Let's make a whole mess of flying creatures, make em bigger and blot out the sky with their various kinds of wings. We've got faeries, angels and thopters, and they're all going to try to ruin someone's day.

This is a deck made to take advantage of Alela, Artful Provocateur's triggered ability and anthem. Playing enchantments and artifacts that buff creatures in general, or flying creatures specifically, which in turn gives us a flying creature. With this deck, even the humble Pilgrim's Eye can hopefully end up being a threat to our opponent's life total.

Ultimately, the game plan is simple. Play Alela, play some artifacts and enchantments, make some fliers, swing out. To make that happen, we have a few different tactics:

1) Blot out the sky

While Alela is pretty good at spitting out fairies, having more ways to generate flying creatures is useful, since redundancy adds reliability. So we have a few additional token generators in the list to provide more of that.

• Bitterblossom: Also makes faeries. Also is an enchantment. Double threat
• Faerie Formation: Already a flier, but comes with card draw and faeries
• Sigil of the Empty Throne: Another trigger for when we play our enchantments that gives us angels (the faeries larger, judgier cousin)

2) Big Wings

Little flying gnats are well and good, particularly if there are a lot of them, but we don't have to settle for good. We have a few ways of making our swarm of flyers more threatening

• Spear of Heliod: Little bit bigger now, also provides some target threat removal
• Intangible Virtue: Reading the card explains the card, and in this case, why it's in the deck
• Empyrean Eagle: An anthem on a stick. With wings

3) In swarm benefits

You know there's a surprising number of utilities that specifically call out the flying keyword? Well, there are, and they benefit us quite a bit

• Windreader Sphinx: This can net us a lot of cards, giving a decent sized swarm
• Sephara, Sky's Blade: Doesn't save us from bounce clears, but I've heard having an indestructible board is pretty good
• Winged Words: 2 mana draw 2 almost always good. Hard to say no

4) Clouds are kind of pillowy?

The joke got away from me a little bit, but enchantments are pretty good at building pillowforts, so there's some of those kinds of effects in here

• Ever-Watching Threshold: Opponents can still swing at us, but we'll get cards, so maybe they'll choose not to? Or we'll draw cards
• Gravitational Shift: Not only does this make us stronger, it makes just about everything else weaker (definitely everything when paired with Archetype of Imagination)
• God-Pharaoh's Statue: People will hate you, but they'll struggle to deal with you

Other things of note

• Estrid's Invocation gives us at least one trigger of Alela on our upkeep, because it blinks
• Inkshield can turn a game around on it's own when used at the right time. Fog a big attack and get revenge with a lot of tokens
• It can be sneakily easy to ult Serra the Benevolent, making us pretty hard to kill by virtue of consistent token generation

Date added	4 years
Last updated	2 years
Legality	This deck is Commander / EDH legal.
Rarity (main - side)	5 - 0 Mythic Rares 28 - 0 Rares 30 - 0 Uncommons 18 - 0 Commons
Cards	100
Avg. CMC	3.40
Tokens	Angel 4/4 W, Angel 4/4 W w/ Vigilance, Emblem Serra the Benevolent, Faerie 1/1 U, Faerie Rogue 1/1 B, Inkling 2/1 WB, Knight 2/2 W w/ Vigilance, Spirit 1/1 W, Thopter 1/1 C, Treasure