Alesha (BUDGET Commander & Primer)

Commander / EDH Budget Midrange Multiplayer Primer RBW (Mardu) Reanimator

golgarigirl

Land (36)

• 1x Command Tower
• 1x Evolving Wilds
• 1x Exotic Orchard
• 1x Field of Ruin
• 1x Foreboding Ruins
• 7x Mountain
• 1x Nomad Outpost
• 8x Plains
• 1x Rogue's Passage
• 1x Scoured Barrens
• 1x Slayers' Stronghold
• 7x Swamp
• 1x Temple of Malice
• 1x Temple of Silence
• 1x Temple of Triumph
• 1x Terramorphic Expanse
• 1x Wind-Scarred Crag

Advantage (13)

• 1x Airlift Chaplain
• 1x Cathartic Reunion
• 1x Daretti, Scrap Savant
• 1x Faithless Salvaging
• 1x Key to the City
• 1x Mentor of the Meek
• 1x Militia Bugler
• 1x Subira, Tulzidi Caravanner
• 1x Thrill of Possibility
• 1x Thrilling Discovery
• 1x Tormenting Voice
• 1x Vile Entomber
• 1x Village Rites

Removal (17)

• 1x Bone Shards
• 1x Callous Bloodmage
• 1x Cathartic Pyre
• 1x Citywide Bust
• 1x Declaration in Stone
• 1x Despark
• 1x Duplicant
• 1x Dusk / Dawn
• 1x Fiend Hunter
• 1x Leonin Relic-Warder
• 1x Mythos of Snapdax
• 1x Ravenous Chupacabra
• 1x Reduce to Memory
• 1x Rip Apart
• 1x Rite of Oblivion
• 1x Slaughter the Strong
• 1x Stingscourger

Tokens (7)

• 1x Beetleback Chief
• 1x Chittering Witch
• 1x Judith, the Scourge Diva
• 1x Pentavus
• 1x Ponyback Brigade
• 1x Quintorius, Field Historian
• 1x Vindictive Vampire

Combat (6)

• 1x Breathless Knight
• 1x Gray Merchant of Asphodel
• 1x Nighthowler
• 1x Resolute Blademaster
• 1x Serra Redeemer
• 1x Shrieking Mogg

Commander (1)

Other (15)

• 1x Alesha, Who Smiles at Death
• 1x Ardent Elementalist
• 1x Barrage of Expendables
• 1x Carrion Feeder
• 1x Feldon of the Third Path
• 1x Fleshtaker
• 1x Karmic Guide
• 1x Lae'zel's Acrobatics
• 1x Nantuko Husk
• 1x Perpetual Timepiece
• 1x Pitiless Pontiff
• 1x Reveillark
• 1x Sun Titan
• 1x Vampire Aristocrat
• 1x Viscera Seer

Ramp (5)

• 1x Ambitious Farmhand  ^Flip
• 1x Boros Signet
• 1x Burnished Hart
• 1x Commander's Sphere
• 1x Orzhov Signet

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I do own a fully-powered, near-blinged-out Alesha deck with $60 cards and such (It is my favorite deck so far)...but I wanted to prove that Alesha is a fine lady even for a beginner on the cheap. This deck is easily obtainable for under $35, will out-play commander precons, and can hold it's own against decks a tier or two above. The deck is also meant to be easily customizable, and the Custom sort category highlights what I consider important parts of an Alesha build. If you hit the 'Custom' sort category in my full-power build below, you can see the categories we discuss here as they apply to a more powerful list.

The pet deck:

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Alesha's Recursive Beating Machine

Commander / EDH* golgarigirl

SCORE: 12 | 1416 VIEWS | IN 4 FOLDERS

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^^^ Please check out this deck list for more in-depth discussion of the commander herself, build notes, strategy, how the deck plays, and card choice!

Note I: I play a very toolbox/midrange-style of Alesha, that tends to tutor for pivot points based on opening hand outcomes and what opponents are playing. The most competitive variants one might see in cEDH are very different from my lists.

Note II: This budget list is based on cards I had spares of, and is sticking to a budget of around $1 or less per card. There are some excellent budget cards out there that I just don't have spares of at the moment!

Comments and questions are welcome :)

PS: I didn't know which category to put Gray Merchant of Asphodel in, so I just slapped him in wherever...

Category Breakdowns:

Combat Enablers

Alesha's reanimation ability triggers on attack, but she is a relatively small creature in the world of commander. Her 3/2 first-striking body gets her in early, but it's not long before someone plays something with 4 toughness to make your life awkward. Further more, attacking is an excellent way to progress the game, so we want to make that happen. Deathtouch is a nice trick, given our commander has First Strike, and will kill any other creature before it can hit her back (unless it also has First Strike, or is Indestructible). Giving our creatures Indestructible or evasion (Unblockable, flying, etc), or sometimes even just plain making them bigger also works. Resolute Blademaster is one of my favorite cards you very rarely see suggested for an Alesha deck, and it behaves as an Overrun effect in green...if your opponent doesn't have enough defense, you will run them over with it, and thus acts as a solid finisher if our board state is decent.

Upgrades Swords of X and Y like Sword of Fire and Ice etc, Reconnaissance, Mirror Entity, Break Through the Line.

Zone Mobility

Alesha works by reanimating creatures from our graveyard, so we want to get cards from other places into our 'yard. This means from our library, from our hand (no one wants to hard-cast a 7-mana Pentavus!), and play itself (especially if people get wise to our strategy and stop trading with our creatures in combat). The less mana these cost, and the fewer cards these cost, the better. Other cards reanimate creatures from our graveyard like Alesha does, because redundancy is always good in Commander. Perpetual Timepiece is one of my picks for overlooked cards for this slot because of it's second mode...since Alesha is a graveyard deck, having your 'yard exiled is one of the worst things that can happen to you in a game. Not only can it rebuild your graveyard after it's exiled, but if it's out before, it can save the good bits (and -just- the good bits).

Combo Station!

Since all the pieces are >$1 now, I can include an infinite, game-winning, competitive combo in this deck!

Karmic Guide + Reveillark + win con Gray Merchant of Asphodel/Vindictive Vampire etc. + free sac outlet such as Viscera Seer or Nantuko Husk

Guide, Lark and your free sac outlet are your core pieces. Sacrifice Lark to your outlet or Evoke it. In response, sacrifice your Guide (or bonus points if you'd previously discarded it/milled it/tutored it to your graveyard). Guide hits the graveyard, then Lark hits, triggering its ability. Lark reanimates Guide (and a buddy! More on this later). Then Guide's enter trigger happens and reanimates Lark. Now you have all your parts back in play. Those three themselves do not win a game, but they provide infinite enters and leaves the battlefield triggers for themselves and up to one other 2-power or less creature. We can win on enters with something like Impact Tremors, leaves the battlefield with Vindictive Vampire or Zulaport Cutthroat and their aristocrat-y friends, or just straight drain or damage everyone out with Gray Merchant of Asphodel or Murderous Redcap.

This combo is so hard to disrupt because once all moving parts are in play, the creature components can just be sacrificed in response to removal and brought back. More tutors make it easier to find, and none of the pieces are high mana (especially if we start with any of them in the graveyard). Furthermore, aside from Guide and Lark, so many different cards can fit the bill for the combo.

Upgrades Altars like Altar of Dementia, Doom Whisperer, Entomb, Geier Reach Sanitarium, Yahenni, Undying Partisan

Card Advantage

A load of our card advantage doubles as zone mobility, because it is red's version of card draw...looting effects (effects that require you to discard a card to draw a card)...which are perfect for our commander. A few others are attached to recur-able bodies for Alesha to go grab. I also consider tutors a part of this idea, as you're burning a card to find the exact right thing you need to do what you need to do at the moment. Daretti, Scrap Savant is one of my favorite planeswalkers in commander period, and I am thrilled he's cheap enough for this budget list. Not only does he offer us looting every turn if we so desire (his + says 'up to', so even if we like our hand as-is and do not want to draw-discard, he still ticks up), but he can get one of our valuable artifacts back in a pinch (which only get more valuable as combat enablers as the deck climbs out of budget territory). People seldom see him as much of a threat, especially in a deck without many artifacts, so he often just sits there and does his thing.

Upgrades Boreas Charger, Imperial Recruiter, Land Tax, Smothering Tithe, Faithless Looting

Removal

Most of our recur-able bodies fit here. They eliminate opposing creatures or other troublesome permanents, and eat away at players' hands. These creatures tend to be small, so winning with them relies on eroding your opponent's forces by recurring them over and over. If each Ravenous Chupacabra eats 3 creatures, it's going to be hard for an enemy deck to overcome, and eventually you can beat them down with an army of 2/2s. If you run a non-creature removal spell, it should be able to do something the creatures have trouble doing, like exiling a creature or destroying any permanent. I include mass removal in here, and Alesha can make use of mass removal that can spare her (such as a Retribution of the Meek -style effect), which allows her to recover easily, turning a corner immediately from a weak to strong board state very quickly.

A note on Taxes builds: In a way, Taxes (or Death and Taxes) builds of Alesha are proactive, removal-focused lists. They play cards like Thalia, Guardian of Thraben and Magus of the Moon that make it more difficult for opponents to play threats until later, and then answer them if needed. This is one of the more competitive builds of Alesha, and is part of the Stax strategy, which focuses on resource denial to prevent an opponent from setting up a board state or enacting a game plan.

Upgrades Necrotic Sliver, Elspeth, Sun's Champion, Austere Command

Tokens

Tokens are an easy subtheme for Alesha, as all 3 of her colors lend themselves to token production on creature cards. Many cards that make tokens have low power to spread the power across many bodies instead of having one giant creature as Ponyback Brigade does. This allows us to 'go wide' with a large army of creatures, build them up with effects such as Ogre Battledriver, and take advantage of their death (which is easy to trigger with some of our Zone Mobility cards) with cards such as Judith, the Scourge Diva. Unfortunately, I don't have many of the key cards for this strategy in the deck anymore, as most have hit the $1-$3 range due to the popularity of aristocrats strategies. Still, if it's your cup of tea, it is an easy subtheme to focus into a main theme in the deck, and just build a pure Alesha Aristocrats list.

Upgrades Blood Artist, Angel of Invention, Teysa Karlov, Dictate of Erebos, Impact Tremors, Corpse Knight, Cathars' Crusade, Ethereal Absolution

For a more tuned Aristocrats Alesha build, check out sevocean 's build here!

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Smizing at Death

Commander / EDH sevocean

SCORE: 15 | 3 COMMENTS | 1924 VIEWS | IN 3 FOLDERS

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Ramp

Alesha is a pretty quick and aggressive commander, so getting all our mana early is very important. Since our colors are not good at traditional color fixing and ramping, the best way to do this is with mana rocks. The lower CMC these have the better, because hopefully we want these out before turn 3 when Alesha comes out to play. I prefer rocks that turn into cards late in the game, as flooding is pretty easy to do in such a low-curve deck. I am personally not a fan of mana rocks, but they are extremely helpful in a deck such as this, Daretti in our Card Advantage section, we can even turn a lowly mana rock into a pair of boots or a sword that someone blew up (for good reason!) later. Burnished Hart is one of my favorite cards for the deck. It's a little mana-intensive to get going, but if I have an opponent to attack into with Alesha, it's not difficult to out-accelerate even some green decks.

Upgrades Talismans such as Talisman of Hierarchy, Arcane Signet, Sol Ring, Solemn Simulacrum

Land

Because Alesha is such a low-cost and quick commander to get out in a game, I find that color fixing in the early game (I want {R}, {WB}, {WB} by turn 3) very important, and even better if it comes into play untapped. A budget manabase will do to get started, but finding upgrades is very easy. Just swap out lands that always come in tapped for ones that might not as you can trade for them or buy them. Some land upgrades can serve double duty, such as Phyrexian Tower and Geier Reach Sanitarium as Zone Mobility cards, and Slayers' Stronghold and Rogue's Passage as Combat Enablers. Other utility lands are up to personal preference and playstyle.

Upgrades Shocklands such as Sacred Foundry, Mistveil Plains, Path of Ancestry, Hanweir Battlements  

Date added	6 years
Last updated	1 year
Legality	This deck is Commander / EDH legal.
Rarity (main - side)	3 - 0 Mythic Rares 28 - 0 Rares 28 - 0 Uncommons 18 - 0 Commons
Cards	100
Avg. CMC	3.16
Tokens	Clue, Copy Clone, Emblem Daretti, Scrap Savant, Goblin 1/1 R, Morph 2/2 C, Pentavite 1/1 C, Pest 1/1 BG, Rat 1/1 B, Spirit 3/2 RW
Folders	cheap funny decks, Commander Decks, Wish list, EDH, Commander, Possible Ideas