What crazy things can we do with Atla?
I haven’t messed around with Commander at all. Atla seemed straightforward while still interesting commander to go with. Makes Eggs, crack them, discover what surprise you get.
I’ll take the approach of going through each card to explain their inclusion.
• Angel of Serenity is a removal beater. No real synergy. Just generic removal on a juicy crack of the egg.
• Anointed Procession is for Egg multiplication. A game of four players makes one Egg on each of your turns very slow. Just one of these can begin to spiral out of control but stacked together and you could overwhelm the board.
• Armada Wurm is a good example of the base level of what we want. While we have Strionic Resonator to copy Atla’s egg death trigger, the primary means of replicating our top deck surprises is by multiplying the tokens that hatch into those monsters. To streamline this synergy, we try to use big bodies that deal in tokens to some degree. We’re not trying to swarm the board. Using token generating creatures is just a solid way of capitalizing on our Egg multiplication engines. Armada Wurm doesn’t have any particular synergy with Atla herself. Wurm just happens to use a lot of the same token support that Atla wants.
Ashnod's Altar and Phyrexian Altar are a bridge of synergy between wanting to sacrifice your Eggs with having a top heavy curve. I will echo throughout this description that while Atla is about cheating monsters out of your deck, some monsters will inevitably find their way into your hand. You do not want to be constructing Atla in a way where you ignore what’s in your hand. These sacrifice based mana rocks are a great way of saccing your eggs for Atla monstrosities while giving you mana to get the ones in your hand out.
Barrage of Expendables and Goblin Bombardment are cheap (Egg) sac outlets. The damage for a game of Commander is pretty negligible but it’s something tied to a sacrifice outlet.
• Battle Mammoth is as preventative maintenance. A deck full big monsters is sure to attract some removals. Get a little something for your effort with Battle Mammoth!
• Beast Within and Generous Gift are thematic removal that can diminish a big attacker or get rid of a problem permanent like a Sphere of Safety. The obvious idea behind including them is their utility on our own Eggs. You don’t want to go firing off useful removal if you don’t have to but that niche utility of getting a token on top of our Egg surprise is nice to have access to.
• Blasphemous Act, Hour of Reckoning, Hour of Revelation, Phyrexian Rebirth, and Vanquish the Hoard are our choices of sweeper. All play straightforward but Phyrexian Rebirth is notable for generating a token.
• Deathrender is another way of getting big monsters from our hand on the battlefield repeatedly. The stat bonus is there if you want to stick it on a big beater and send it at something with deathtouch but really it’s all about the Eggs.
• Doubling Season is mostly here for the token doubling. There is a small presence of counters but as such, is probably the least desirable of our token doubling enchantments.
• Dragon Broodmother is a bridge between counters and tokens. The brood grows quick as the text means you get a token on everybody’s turn. But to top it off, it’s also a sac outlet producer.
• Dragonlord Dramoka is a big body that isn’t for the synergy but to say you have to pay attention to the rest of the board.
• Eldrazi Monument gives us a sacrifice on every one of your turns and protects the rest of the board while doing so.
• Emrakul's Evangel is effectively a smaller version of Dragon Broodmother.
• Evolutionary Leap is a sac outlet that feeds our hand. While you generally want your creatures in your deck, you don’t want to be caught empty-handed.
• Giant Adephage is a giant, self-replicating machine. A true nightmare with token multiplication.
• Godsire gets a buff in stats for being a knockoff Giant Adephage. The bug is far superior as the tokens get the same replication ability but Godsire is still serviceable and excels at defense over Adephage thanks to vigilance. You can get in a free big swing, sit back on defense, and pop out a token as the turn comes back to you.
• Growing Ranks is mild token duplication. A bit slow as it’s only once per your turn cycle and needs a token but you take what you can get. All the token multiplication (or addition).
• Guardian Project is great for any green deck looking to get a lot of its creature cards out.
• Heroic Intervention is a protective piece. A standard for most green decks. It’s blowout reversal.
• Hornet Queen is an instant swarm. Between flying and deathtouch, they are great on both offense and defense.
• Ilharg, the Raze-Boar is another sweet way of getting stuff out of our hand. It doesn’t do it permanently but that can be great with any ETB effects.
• Kodama of the East Tree is super awesome cheat support that is similar to Ilharg in getting stuff out of our hand.
• Lightning Greaves are standard commander protection. Same goes for Swiftfoot Boots.
•Lithoform Engine is primarily a token replicator. The spell copying and permanent copying aren’t super relevant. We mainly want to copy Egg production activation and Egg death triggers. So it’s a clunky double doubler.
• Lorehold Command has a lot of utility but finds its wayinto this list by having a sacrifice effect. Board protection is also really nice.
• Luminate Primordial is another removal body very similar to Angel of Serenity.
• Lurking Predators is great at disincentivizing opponents from playing spells for fear of the monsters.
• Martyr's Cause is a utility sac outlet. Eat an egg to protect us from a hit.
• Nesting Dragon is great as it is a separate Egg generator. Note that the ability it goes it’s eggs is not shared with Atla’s but Atla’s death trigger will work for Nesting Dragon Eggs.
• Nyxbloom Ancient can make it ridiculously easy to cast our heavily-costed creatures.
• Old Gnawbone is somewhat similar to Nyxbloom Ancient in that it can help us to get stuff out of our hand. Getting that mana as tokens works great with our token synergies.
• Parallel Lives is literally a white Anointed Procession.
• Pattern of Rebirth is a one shot Atla death trigger that you can attach to an Egg for double the surprise or to another creature that might get killed in combat (like an egg on defense).
• Penumbra Wurm is very similar to Armada Wurm except you get the token on death. Worldspine Wurm is really just a suped-up version of this. However, getting WW back into our deck makes it a juicy offering to our sacrifice outlets.
• Primal Vigor is effectively the same as Doubling Season for our purposes. The only difference is the only counters Vigor can double are +1/+1 counters.
• Relic Vial is one of my favorite sac outlets in the deck as a generic colorless card draw engine. Some of our sac outlets can be a bit situational in utility but cars draw is always valuable.
• Selvala's Stampede can potentially drop a ton of big monsters from your hand or your deck.
• Shard Convergence is a decent land grab. The more colors your run, the better it is.
• Skullclamp is notorious for using a deck’s x/1s for card draw. Eat an egg, get a big monster, and draw two cards.
• Skyline Despot is a big payoff Dragon that is essentially doing a Dragon Broodmother but it gives you a big token up front rather than the sac outlet potential on a smaller token.
• Smothering Tithe is probably genetically good enough for most white decks and we are pleased to pair it with our token subtheme.
• Song of the Worldsoul isn’t going to be swarming the board off of a long spell chain. Song is just another way of passively building tokens.
• Soul of the Harvest is effectively Guardian Project on a big body.
• Strionic Resonator is primarily here for the Atla egg death trigger. However we have lots of triggers to use with this from Soul of the Harvest and Angel of Serenity to Armada Wurm, Penumbra Wurm, and Worldspine Wurm.
• Symbiotic Beast and Symbiotic Wurm are very similar to Penumbra Wurm but the token is split into a bunch of 1/1s.
• Trostani Summoner is a crew in a card and works spectacularly well with our token multiplication.
• Trostani, Selesnya's Voice is a good life extension card that can populate for more tokens.
• Utvara Hellkite is solid enough on its own to produce tokens but we actually have a moderate amount of dragons with Old Gnawbone, Nesting Dragon, Skyline Despot, Dragon Broodmother. I’ve also considered Moonveil Hellkite, Hellkite Tyrant, and Rith, the Awakener so there’s definitely potential for a more Dragon heavy build. Utvara Hellkite is similar to Giant Adephage in that it’s a self-replicating army. The only real difference besides the body is that Utvara Hellkite itself needs to stick on the battlefield for our dragons to reproduce where Adephage clones (as clones) retain their reproductive capabilities even if the card itself is removed.
• Zacama, Primal Calamity isn’t here for any synergy so much as the utility. Zacama can help get rid of problems on the board. Zacama is a prime example of how we aren’t looking for maximum synergy but big bodies
