Legends Legends - Ayesha Tanaka
Ayesha Tanaka by Bryon Wackwitz
Is it time? Are we really doing this? Okay, you asked for it, here's the banding Commander deck you knew was coming.
This week on Legends Legends, our regular dive into 1994's Legends set has unearthed one of the highest-scoring Storm scale mechanics in the game: the dreaded banding keyword. Banding is a mouthful of text, but basically, it lets you choose how your opponents' creatures assign damage when they choose to block your banded creatures. The creatures in the band are blocked as a single entity, which can sometimes result in your opponents misplaying and blocking unfavorably. Here, we'll use Ayesha Tanaka as the basis for our banding deck, banking on using her to disrupt our opponents' utility artifacts while we build a board of anthems and weenie soldiers before swinging in with a mess of bands. With less than 100 decks on EDHrec, Ayesha Tanaka's got a lot of space for us to fill with banding synergies from across Magic's history.
General Thoughts
Born with the ability to destroy artifacts and enchantments naturally (I love when the in-universe lore uses the game mechanics' vocabulary), Ayesha was Tetsuo Umezawa's armorer and the teacher to Kei Takahashi.
What's funny is Ayesha's ability doesn't actually destroy artifacts, it only counters their activated effects. This effect might seem like it has very few uses, but there are quite a few activated artifact effects in Commander that you'll actually want her around for.
In addition, Ayesha has banding, allowing her to team up with any of our banding creatures and at most one other creature to attack in a band, letting us decide how combat damage is dealt when it's blocked. Attacking with bands flips the blocking math on its head, and I'm willing to bet more often than not that your opponents will just treat your bands like they're unblockable rather than waste time weighing the options of whether or not to block.
Ultimately, this deck is a true test of skill for the table. Through attack declarations, bluffing, and a few combat tricks, we'll run the board with our banding creatures.
Bands On The Run
Creatures with banding aren't known for their combat effectiveness, typically. We never want to attack if we can't use our bands to control the damage, so cheap access to a banding creature is paramount to our game.
This means running some white weenie creatures, like Benalish Hero and Kjeldoran Warrior, both simple little 1/1s with banding.
As the banding creatures increase in mana value, they get a little more utility and survivability. Kjeldoran Knight has a worse Firebreathing built in, useful for getting that extra point of damage in or buffing its toughness to tank incoming combat damage.
While Icatian Skirmishers's low power makes it very weak for a four-mana spell, the first strike anthem it grants to its band can drastically change the outcome of your combat.
Knights of Thorn makes for a fun utility bander: against mono-red decks, you can assign all of those blocking Goblins damage to the Knights. As a side note, as long as at least one creature in a band is a legal target for the blockers, the entire band can be blocked, so Knights of Thorn's protection from red won't make its entire band unblockable, just really hard to remove.
War Elephant and Noble Elephant are notable for being the only banding creatures with trample built in. These measly 2/2s might not seem like much, but they'll swell in power as we play anthems and other buffs. Trampling damage through our opponents' blockers is one of our best ways to use our bands to win, so sticking one of these Elephants is often one of our most important plays.
Speaking of, Urza's Engine is an absolute must-have for this deck. Granting the entire band trample makes it difficult for your opponent to weigh the cost-benefit of blocking it. Your choice to assign damage in a nonlethal manner and still trample extra damage through is a guaranteed way to turn our bands into actual threats.
Bands That Make Her Dance (sorry)
I apologize for my dated reference in the heading for this section
Anthem effects are a hallmark of go-wide white decks and are the best option available to us for buffing up our relatively weak banding creatures. These are the songs of your warbands, and they'll make Ayesha Tanaka sing and dance across the battlefield at the head of her warhost.
Our anthem effects are split up into two main groups: the creatures and the noncreatures. A number of classic white Commander cards are here, including Odric, Lunarch Marshal and Elesh Norn, Grand Cenobite.
Other creature-based anthems include Benalish Marshal's Glorious Anthem-on-a-body, Heliod, God of the Sun's vigilance anthem, and Avenging Huntbonder's slow but steady double-strike enablement.
Our noncreature anthems include both Spear of Heliod, great for threatening to remove a creature on the punch-back, and Bident of Thassa, a great way to keep pace with the table while also squeezing in damage here and there. The Bident does double duty of goading our opponents' creatures into attacking, should we so choose, letting us block with our band and assign the combat damage from those creatures unfavorably.
Some anthems we'll use as combat tricks, including Dictate of Heliod and Celestial Crusader, tricking our opponents into thinking they're safe to block our band before the whole crew grows in size.
In the Trenches's activated ability might seem expensive for a one-time use effect, but the consistency of having so many Glorious Anthems in the deck can't be overstated.
Band From My LGS
This final section represents the actual good stuff in our deck: the creatures we want to put in bands with our weaker guys. This includes a handful of creatures with enrage and other effects that trigger when they're dealt damage, or creatures that are perfect for tanking all of the damage blocking our band, or weak creatures with effects that trigger when they die.
I'll start with our utility creatures. Abu Ja'far is a 0/1 from Arabian Nights that destroys all creatures blocking or blocked by it in combat when it dies. Abu is a great blocker for when we goad our opponents into our blocking band, letting us assign all combat damage to him and wipe their board of attackers in one fell swoop.
Besides Abu, a few other utility creatures make great compliments to your attacking bands. Frontline Medic and Makeshift Battalion will both trigger when you attack in a large enough group. In a similar vein to Abu, with Cho-Manno, Revolutionary, we can assign all incoming damage to it and save the entirety of our band from any danger.
Now, for our big creatures. Forcing our opponents to deal damage to Trapjaw Tyrant and Body of Knowledge can generate advantage like no other, and Bellowing Aegisaur's five toughness means it'll tank some damage for our band while buffing the whole board.
Phyrexian Vindicator is another one of our best creatures to add to a band. We can assign as much damage as we want to it, then redirect it all back at our opponent's face (or use it to destroy their own creatures).
Finally, Cityscape Leveler and Darksteel Colossus are two huge trampling threats you can slap into a band to make sure all of their damage breaks through.
Mana Base
Not known for its amazing ability to ramp, our Azorius-aligned banding deck needs mana rocks if we're planning to keep pace with those green decks at the table. The typical suite of rocks is here, plus Burnished Hart and Solemn Simulacrum, who can join a band and attack for an easy death trigger. Besides that, we're running 36 lands (37 counting Sejiri Shelter) because we cannot afford to miss a land drop with so many of our game-enders costing five or more mana.
Strategy
Overall, this Ayesha Tanaka Commander deck is looking to use bands of attacking creatures to control combat and remove all of our opponents' essential blockers. Since we can ignore the damage assignment order when assigning damage to our bands, we can safely swing in with an army of small-to-mid-sized creatures and spread the damage out to keep them mostly safe from harm. This works when we're on the defense, too, so we'll also be goading our opponents' creatures just a bit.
I shouldn't have to reiterate this, but you definitely only want to keep an opening hand with some low-cost creatures and the mana to cast them. Mulliganable hands tend to have Akroma, Angel of Wrath, Ascend from Avernus, and Dictate of Heliod. The hands you'll want to keep will have lots of one-to-three-mana banders we can use to start setting up our attack party.
Turns four through seven for this deck should see you building up anthems as well as continuing to play utility cards for your bands. Courtly Provocateur, Bullwhip, and Bident of Thassa can help send your opponents' creatures charging headlong into your blocking band. Continue to surprise your opponents by dropping anthem after anthem; even if we only have three or four creatures on the field, multiple instances of +1/+1 can really turn up the clock on your foes.
We'll try to end the game by dropping a big creature and either attacking with it separate of our huge band, or slapping it in there to protect our creatures. Akroma, Angel of Wrath, for example, can be used to mitigate all of the damage that would go into a band from black and red sources, or attack by itself alongside the band to force an opponent to choose between which threat to block. Trapjaw Tyrant, Bellowing Aegisaur, and Elesh Norn, Grand Cenobite can all flip the game on its head and turn your weenie band into a force to be reckoned with.
Sadly, try as I might, there isn't much reason to cast Ayesha Tanaka from our command zone unless we see an opponent trying to set up their Lithoform Engine, or you want to use her to keep Swiftfoot Boots off of your opponents' commanders. In a pinch, she can get you a banding creature on the field to start grouping up, but otherwise she's just a four-mana 2/2 without much relevance. She can become a little more threatening if we give her Shadowspear or Kaldra Compleat, but this should be a last-ditch effort.
Budget Options
This Ayesha Tanaka deck rounds out to about $250. That's not too bad overall for a complete Commander deck, but there are definitely some cards we can cut to bring it down to a more manageable price point.
Our two most expensive cards are Shadowspear and Teferi's Protection. Both of these are Commander staples, with Shadowspear being one of the best trample-enablers in our deck and Teferi's Protection as our go-to to save use from board wipes. We can, however, replace them with some cheaper options, like Sword of Vengeance and Negate, respectively. This drops the price of the deck down at least $50, and we can save even more by trading in Elesh Norn, Grand Cenobite for any other anthem effect.
Ayesha Tanaka Decklist
Wrap Up
Ayesha Tanaka is definitely not the strongest possible Commander in Legends, but she may not be the weakest. While building around and exploiting her activated effect is difficult, to say the least, a deck built around the complexities of banding and weighing the outcomes of different blocks in combat can be very rewarding. Use this banding deck to test your opponents' tactical acumen: will they consider what the correct block is when you have five mana up and seven cards in hand? Or will they just default to "no blocks" to save time whenever you swing in? Only time will tell!
What are some of your ideas for an Ayesha Tanaka deck? Is there a way to abuse her activated effect, or is it just too wonky to survive in modern day Magic: The Gathering? Let me know in the comments!
Thanks for reading!
