Primer is WIP
Here for a good time, not a long time
Welcome to my Alesha Commander deck! Alesha is a general that I've been playing with since I started into EDH. While building a deck around her can be a headache, for reasons I'll go through in a moment, it can also be a fulfilling, synergistic, and just plain fun experience to play with and against.
You've probably sat across from an Alesha player before: she's a very popular choice to head the 99, and there are very good reasons why she appears as one of the top commanders on EDHrec.
- She's cheap to cast . A three-mana commander means you'll be casting her early and often.
- She's powerful . For her low CMC, you get a reasonable body with first strike. That means she survives combat in the early game, and the later game with a few enhancements. (Conditional) Reanimation on a stick is (conditionally) bonkers.
- She scales to all budgets . Whether at 20$, 200$, or 2000$, you can build a deck that will bring game to your table.
- She's synergistic as hell and enables different playstyles . Mardu colours offer a deep card pool that plays well together, especially for low-power creatures that jive with her reanimation ability. WBR is chock-full of tribal, sacrifice, ETB/LTB/aristocrat, and GY/reanimation themes. There are dozens of different ways to build Alesha: from tokens, to combo, to allies to all-in reanimation, to vampires - Spikes, Johnnies, Timmies, Vorthoses, and Mels will find plenty to love.
- She's a compelling character . Do yourself a favour and go read 'The Truth of Names' .
With so many paths to take with Alesha, no wonder the deck can have a hard time settling - not unlike the Mardu themselves.
History, influence, and structure
"We live, we die, we live again!"
When I first built the deck, flavour was a big consideration for me besides just power and synergy. Tarkir brought us one of the richest worlds in Magic, and the clan factions that lived there were remarkable for the way they combined real-world cultural influences with the philosophies of each wedge. Fate Reforged dropped in January 2015, when I opened Alesha in a pack and started drafting a deck; Mad Max: Fury Road came out not long after, and the parallels between the Mardu and the War Boys were uncanny (does anyone else ever try to apply the colour identities of Magic to other properties/stories?). Many of the quotes from the film's culture could have been taken right from Tarkir block's flavour text, and vice-versa. Originally I tried to build using the hierarchies and culture of the War Boys; and while the structure of the deck may not reflect that as such anymore, the philosophical ties remain.
Since then, Alesha has always had a deck in my Commander roster. 'Solving' her has been elusive: even with a focused theme, you can easily find yourself with a 'shortlist' of hundreds of cards while drafting the deck. I've struggled with finding the right proportions for themes and effects in the deck; tools and templates like the 8x8 are great, but their usefulness falls off once a deck reaches a certain level of synergy - which Alesha can have in bounds. The card pool can be intimidating too: more 0-, 1-, or 2-power creatures are printed every set, along with solid ETB/LTB/sacrifice effects, and there's just no way to fit them all into the 99 without removing other solid players or pet cards. With so many moving pieces, building Alesha can be both challenging and satisfying, which is part of the appeal of Commander to me. I'm writing this primer in part for this reason: not only to help players who are looking for inspiration in their own Alesha decks, but also to help myself sort out my thoughts as I head into another iteration of the deck and better understand how this well-oiled war machine works.
That said, the deck has always been fun to play, and has certainly become stronger/more finely tuned over time. Not wanting to be holed into one particular niche of Alesha's potential, I decided to include elements of many different themes in my build. While conventional Commander wisdom might say that taking this approach would make the deck unfocused and unreliable, the amount of synergy that can exist between the cards of the 99, as well as the many individual cards that can play multiple roles, glues the deck together into a cohesive whole that's more than the sum of its parts - which again, tickles my Mardu.
This is a 75% deck, and relatively budget. I do not play this deck to assemble the same combos as quickly as possible each game, play solitaire, or end the game on turn 4. Some sub-optimal choices exist in the deck for fun, flavour, or style.
Strategy
Coming soon!
Individual Cards - WIP
I've divvied this section into the various themes and subthemes that exist in the deck, in alphabetical order. Cards are cross-listed in multiple sections as they may wear many hats in the course of the deck's operation.
Because we're in Mardu, we want to be able to have reliable access to our colours. Since mana-fixing is light in WBR, lands that tap for colourless only need to be kept at a minimum. These ones merit the inclusion.
Geier Reach Sanitarium
-
also in draw, also in GY dump
Hanweir Battlements
- also in army
Vault of the Archangel
- also in army
Agent of Erebos
Meta-dependent, but having some standing GY hate in the deck (that is tutorable and reusable) is not a bad idea.
Apprentice Necromancer
Some brief reanimation gets us an ETB/LTB effect in short order. This can also grab our bigger dudes, and can itself be recurred by Alesha (though it has to survive combat to use the effect the next turn).
Ashnod's Altar
A sac engine piece and a great source of ramp. I'm hesitant to include this because I want to lean away from combos for this deck, and I'm not sure that double colourless would be so helpful when the rest of the deck is coloured-mana-hungry. The ability to sacrifice at instant-speed, for no cost, is great though.
Azra Oddsmaker
This provides card selection and advantage, a way to get cards from the hand to the graveyard, and starts a fun mini-game on the table. It's not recurrable, but it hits a lot of the right buttons for me. I'd love to find a place for this.
Behind the Scenes
A relatively cheap source of pseudo-evasion for a small team. This is great, especially when trying to keep whatever you've recurred with Alesha on the table for another turn.
Burn at the Stake
With the number of creatures that can end up on the board, this can easily one-shot a player in the mid-late game. CMC is high.
Dowsing Dagger
Plants introduce some politics, and potentially turns into some solid ramp. I haven't played this in any decks yet - how do other people find it?
Entomb
I already have a few GY tutors:
Buried Alive
and
Final Parting
. One mana for one target is a great deal tbh, and sometimes you need a cheap silver bullet that leaves up mana to reanimate the new target in combat.
Five-Alarm Fire
I've never tested this out, but I feel like this would be bonkers?? This deck has a lot of critters being thrown into the red zone, and blaze counters should get stacked high, quickly. This can close the gap for an alpha strike or take out larger creatures when other removal isn't available.
Flameshadow Conjuring
Goblin Bombardment
Grenzo, Dungeon Warden
Grenzo, Havoc Raider
Hanweir Garrison
Judith, the Scourge Diva
Khorvath's Fury
Mardu Ascendancy
Moonlight Bargain
Murderous Redcap
Ogre Slumlord
Phyrexian Tower
Protector of the Crown
Sudden Spoiling
Sword of the Animist
Teshar, Ancestor's Apostle
Teysa Karlov
Tree of Perdition
Wake the Dead
Recent changes
OUT:
Ponyback Brigade
,
Evolving Wilds
IN:
Fellwar Stone
,
Prismatic Vista
After a few games where I was out of the game before I could even start playing it, I needed to do something, even small, about the mana. 35 lands I don't think is too few for a low-CMC deck, but I'm not sure when I went down to only 7 pieces of ramp.
Ponyback Brigade
is an alright effect for reanimation - one body that brings three friends when it arrives - but I'd always rather have
Siege-Gang Commander
, and I'd never want to cast PBB for its actual cost. That's a lot of backflipping just for a few tokens, with no gravy on top (except for Mardu flavour gravy, but there's still plenty enough of that to go around).
Fellwar Stone
comes down early, and should be able to tap for at least one of our colours, if not more. Meanwhile,
Prismatic Vista
is going in nearly all of my decks. I picked up a bunch of copies of the horizontal art cards that show up in the Modern Horizons packs, and they're much cheaper than a copy of the real thing! Since I'd be using proxies anyway for an expensive staple like this, the art cards look great and are easy on the wallet with minimal inconvenience. Strict upgrade for
Evolving Wilds
.
Advice and constructive criticism
Are the proportions of my deck all wrong? Am I missing out on an obvious inclusion? Have I given a pet card too much leeway? See an easy swap from my maybeboard?
Remember, I'm not trying to build a cEDH, blinged-out commander deck; 75% and fun is the name of the game here. I want to know if I have too much focus on any one section, or not enough on another. If you've tried any of the cards from the maybeboard in your own decks, Alesha or otherwise, I'd love to know whether they worked out and why. Thanks for your input, and thanks for reading!
