Intro
Soul of Elements is a creature-heavy Commander deck that focuses largely on generating +1/+1 counters and utilizing them in conjunction with large creatures in order to overwhelm your opponents. The decklist features many means of generating counters to place on various creatures, along with large creatures to summon on the cheap with Animar, Soul of Elements and evasion abilities to allow these monstrosities to function as finishers to the game.
Structure
The Commander
The key component to this deck is Animar, Soul of Elements itself, the commander. Its innate ability to generate counters whenever you cast a creature spell allows you to get value even when your creatures are countered, and any counters on Animar function as a generic mana discount for your creature spells, furthering the cycle. To take advantage of this, the majority of the deck is creature-based.
Defending the Commander
However, at only 1/1, freshly-summoned Animar is squishy. Its innate protection from white and black can only go so far, and a meat-shield made of counters is useless against destruction and exile. To this end, the deck includes varying forms of protection for Animar (though they can be applied to other creatures as needed):
- Bear Umbra grants totem armor, protecting one time against destruction due to targeted spells or damage.
- Elgaud Shieldmate can pair with Animar via Soulbond, granting both creatures hexproof, allowing you to still target Animar with your own beneficial effects.
- Once Animar is large enough, Not of This World becomes a free Counterspell/Stifle combo.
Creating +1/+1 Counters
In addition to Animar's ability to generate counters, the deck includes a plethora of other cards, mostly creatures, that can also produce counters in some fashion:
- Primal Vigor stands in as the "fixed" Doubling Season (which was too expensive for me to pick up). This is only a drawback if other players are running large numbers of counter-placing effects (or a Thief of Blood).
- Creatures with evolve (Experiment One, Cloudfin Raptor) provide lower-cost creatures that can swell in size as bigger creatures join the fray.
- Some creatures (Scute Mob, Hamletback Goliath) generate counters when certain conditions are met, while one of these (Forgotten Ancient) can also move those counters to other creatures during your upkeep, allowing you to pump up creatures that have been missing out.
- Utility creatures like Zameck Guildmage and Master Biomancer cause creatures to enter with additional counters.
- When you need a creature without a built-in ability to gain a counter, you can use Ring of Kalonia, Ring of Valkas, and Forced Adaptation to start the ball rolling. As an added bonus, the two Rings can be moved around as needed, and only your blue creatures will be left out of their support.
- Some creatures (Renegade Krasis, Ridgescale Tusker) drop counters on several creatures at once.
- Proliferate (Evolution Sage, Inexorable Tide, Merfolk Skydiver) allows you to increase the number of counters of any kind on chosen permanents and players, and Vorel of the Hull Clade and Gilder Bairn can use mana to double counters further.
Evasion and Similar Abilities
Of course, it does no good to make your creatures larger if they can't get through a defensive wall of 1/1 tokens. To this end, there are multiple ways to give your creatures extra abilities that function as evasion or otherwise support an attack strategy:
- Some cards, like Archetype of Aggression and Cyclops of Eternal Fury, simply give all of your creatures an ability that makes them more useful.
- Others, like Herald of Secret Streams, Skatewing Spy, and Tuskguard Captain, only give these abilities to creatures with a +1/+1 counter on them, but that's not difficult to do with this deck.
- On the defensive front, in addition to Skatewing Spy granting flying, Longshot Squad grants reach, allowing your bolstered creatures to take out even dragons.
Mana Ramp
In order to build up to everything, the decklist includes a suite of mana ramp to cast everything you want to drop:
- Karametra's Acolyte, Somberwald Sage, and Sylvan Caryatid are some of the mana creatures that simply have an ability that taps for mana. With haste-enablers on the board, they can even tap the turn they enter the battlefield.
- Jiang Yanggu, Wildcrafter grants a mana ability to any creature with a +1/+1 counter, with the added bonus of being able to put counters on creatures via his loyalty ability.
- One with Nature tutors for basic lands when combined with evasion or used early enough to avoid blockers, Fertilid spends counters to fetch basic lands, and Bear Umbra untaps all your lands.
- Just for fun, Unexpected Results has the chance to drop a land for free (and recycle the spell), or possibly cast one of your other spells for free.
Card Advantage
On the card draw front, the deck features a handful of ways to turn your big creatures into added card advantage, since the name of the game is constantly being able to replace creatures as they're removed.
Finishing Moves
So how does this deck win? Largely by making creatures large, giving them evasion, and then swinging for great damage. To facilitate this, the deck includes a selection of large creatures (or creatures that are very easy to make large) for the final swing:
- Mowu, Loyal Companion and Galloping Lizrog have relatively small stats, but both can be made much larger very easily with the right application of counters.
- Other creatures like Hamletback Goliath and a pair of Hydras start large enough and can get larger, while Thorn Elemental can deal its full combat damage even when blocked by an equally large creature.
- Kiora, the Crashing Wave's third ability creates an emblem that makes 9/9 kraken tokens during your end step.
- Bearer of the Heavens acts as an additional boardwipe threat if it should die.
- Finally, the deck features three Eldrazi, including Emrakul, the Promised End), all three of which can be cast completely free if Animar has enough counters on it. Add to that Emrakul's ability to "borrow" an opponent's turn, with which you can wreak further havoc on the battlefield, and you've got a devastating blow.
Extras
Additional utility includes, in small amounts:
Strategy
The general strategy to this deck is to lay out a combination of creatures and the rare additional permanent that creates a +1/+1 counter factory, building up your army swiftly to large enough sizes, with evasion abilities tacked on, that they can swing in aggressively for lethal damage. The idea is to hit fast and hit hard.
Weaknesses
This deck can run out of steam in the long game if your opponents keep removing your best pieces, as there is very little, if any, recursion. The removal suite is small to make room for the counter production aspect of the deck, and thus it lacks sweeping effects to remove large quantities of threats from the table. The only means of dealing with enemy planeswalkers is to attack them. Animar is also frequently a target, as it is a key element to casting the deck's largest creatures, especially if you find yourself stalling out. Focus on protecting it.
Strengths
This deck can get out of hand in a hurry if you get the ideal combination of cards on the table and your opponents can't remove them quickly. Many creatures are capable of swelling to large size based on what you or your opponents do, and with the right application of evasion effects, can easily swing in for a sudden finishing blow. Not of This World is always a fun surprise when someone thinks they've finally found their targeted removal for your biggest threat and you're tapped out.
Fun Interactions
The following are some of the more interesting interactions or situations I've been able to get into when running this deck. This section is subject to update as I find new combinations.
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Ridgescale Tusker + Renegade Krasis: Normally the Krasis will only put a counter on creatures that already have counters, which might not help if only a few of your creatures have them. However, as long as the Tusker is still capable of evolving the Krasis after its own ETB resolves, you can game the system a little. Both creatures' abilities trigger off of the Tusker entering the battlefield (assuming you meet the evolve condition with the Krasis). If you stack the triggers so that the Tusker's resolves first, it will place a counter on every creature you control that isn't the Tusker (make sure this doesn't push the Krasis too large to evolve anymore). Then, when the Krasis evolves, its other ability will trigger, putting a counter on each creature except the Tusker. If you combine this with something like Zameck Guildmage's first ability, even the Tusker can be granted extra counters.
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Forgotten Ancient + Animar, Soul of Elements: This combination helped me ride out an early game mana stall. I had just enough mana to cast Animar, and equip him with one of the Rings. That first counter enabled me to then cast Forgotten Ancient, which gained a fair number of counters before my next turn came around due to the other players casting spells. On my upkeep, I was able to move those counters to Animar and start dropping larger creatures until my lands finally showed up.
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Hamletback Goliath + any evasion ability: The Goliath ended up being a star in this deck, thanks to its ability to generate counters whenever creatures enter the battlefield, regardless of who controls them. When combined with Skatewing Spy or Tuskguard Captain for flying/trample, this card quickly became a heavy-hitter.
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Savage Knuckleblade + Animar, Soul of Elements: The Knuckleblade doesn't have any innate counter generation abilities, and its first ability can only be activated once (though it passes the "vanilla test"), but its second ability to bounce to its owner's hand allows for some shenanigans with Animar's triggered ability. For 6 mana on a single turn, or 3 each on two turns, the Knuckleblade can be bounced and then recast for another counter on animar, in addition to possible other combos such as increasing the counters on Hamletback Goliath or creatures with evolve, which can have their own benefits (like card draw from Fathom Mage).
This deck started life as a response to my husband removing Animar from his
Riku of Two Reflections deck in favor of more things Riku could double. I decided to take Animar's +1/+1 counter ability as a theme and run with it, which thankfully hasn't been too difficult thanks to the sheer number of cards that synergize with such a theme. Even after realizing that Animar could also be a beast with the morph strategy (due to being able to cast any morph for free with only three counters on Animar), I wanted to keep to this tactic. It would be fun to take it toe-to-toe with an Animar morph deck one day, just to see which strategy prevails.
