Legends Legends - Jasmine Boreal
Welcome back to the latest installment of Legends Legends. We've undeniably entered the slog through the vanilla legendary creatures of 1994's seminal-and-ciritically-acclaimed Magic: The Gathering expansion set Legends, and boy, is it starting to look rough out there.
This week's underwhelming and nearly useless commander is Jasmine Boreal. Jasmine is a vanilla 4/5 with barely any relevant oracle text. She is a Human, and she's in the best colors for humans, so this week we're rolling out another kindred deck with a Jasmine Boreal Humans deck! Humans have tons of support across multiple sets and planes, so this shouldn't be too hard, right? Right?
General Thoughts
Jasmine Boreal has less than 50 decks logged on EDHrec; so few that she doesn't even have any themes associated with her page. Luckily, we're top-tier deckbuilders here at Commander's Herald and are chock full of generative material.
One way to make Jasmine relevant, besides just strapping 100 weapons to her and making another Voltron deck, is to place her at the head of a Humans kindred deck. Inside this shell, Jasmine can benefit from the generic buffs our Human creatures will get, making this 4/5 with no abilities almost worth her five-mana casting cost.
Humans are one of the easiest creature types to build around. They've received generous mechanical support in expansions across multiple planes, including Innistrad, Ixalan, and even Ikoria. Hopefully, we should have a lean, mean, Selesnya fighting machine already laid out for us that we can just staple Jasmine onto. Let's dive in!
Of Men and Monsters
So, which Humans should actually make the cut into our Human kindred deck? We want each and every Human to synergize with the rest, either buffing our board or creating more Humans to be buffed elsewhere.
Let's start with the basics: Humans that make more Humans. Adeline, Resplendent Cathar is a powerhouse of a three-drop that survives Lightning Bolts and nets us three Human tokens per attack. We can't get much more value out of a Human creature than this, but that doesn't stop Maja, Bretagard Protector from trying. Thraben Doomsayer can also create one Human token each turn, with a very conditional anthem we can use in the late game if we can manage. Torens, Fist of the Angels also gets us another 1/1 for each creature we cast, ensuring we always have a target for his training ability.
Champion of the Parish and Thalia's Lieutenant are both excellent early game plays that'll swell into powerful threats if they go unanswered.
Kyler, Sigardian Emissary and Mikaeus, the Lunarch are two halves of the same anthem. Each will gradually grow the power and toughness of our Human army one point at a time.
LTR's Lossarnach Captain is a sleeper threat for shutting down your opponents powerful blockers to allow our Human soldiers to slip by uninhibited.
Katilda, Dawnhart Prime and Heronblade Elite act as ramp, color fixing, and an additional way to buff our creatures with +1/+1 counters.
Veteran Cathar, Odric, Lunarch Marshal, and Greymond, Avacyn's Stalwart help us actually win combat with our army of buffed-but-still-relatively-small Human tokens.
Finally, Visions of Glory and Increasing Devotion are two big spells that should at least double the number of Humans we have on the board. Just add mana and we've got an instant army!
For The Alliance!
The Humans of Magic's planes are always forging friendships and alliances with the other creatures of their homeworlds, so it follows that a few of them would bring their friends along.
Innistrad's Angels love their little Human friends, so much so they have an entire subtheme of synergizing with them. Angel of Glory's Rise is one of the more exciting Human-Angel support cards, and even more so if you frequently find yourself staring down the loaded end of a Grimgrin, Corpse-Born deck.
Two of our three Sigardas fit into this category: Sigarda, Font of Blessings for clearing away the top of our library, and Sigarda, Champion of Light for refilling our hand once we've dropped every cheap Human we can.
Angelic Overseer is a bad rate for a 5/3 until you control a Human and land an indestructible and hexproof 5/3 instead.
Herald of War might seem like it starts up rather slow for a card that's built to reduce the mana cost of our future spells, but you'll see its value when we have to recast Jasmine Boreal once or twice and have to justify paying seven mana or more for our basic 4/5.
Since many of our Humans won't deal damage until after they've been buffed in some way, Kutzil, Malamet Exemplar makes sense for refilling our hand and keeping our creatures safe from counterspells during our turn.
Finally, I keep waffling on whether or not I want Dearly Departed in this deck. I love the flavor of the deceased ancestors of our Humans granting them additional strength, but managing to get a six-mana 5/5 into the graveyard without a specific sacrificial outlet seems like it may be a pain.
Determined and Adaptable
Humans in fantasy media are often described as the determined and adaptable race, as opposed to Dwarves with their dour stubbornness or elves and their ethereal enigmatic-ism (I know that isn't a word). The Humans in our deck are built to last, ready to hurdle whatever challenges our opponents throw at them, assuredly contrasting themselves against the horrors/wonder of whatever fantasy trope they're used as a scale against.
All that to say we're running some key cards to keep our Humans alive. We all know Heroic Intervention by now, but I don't want you kids to forget about Wrap in Vigor, either. Back in my day, the best way to respond to a board wipe was casting the Wrap, but you kids are spoiled today with your Teferi's Protections and whatnot. For some extra safe insurance, we're also running And They Shall Know No Fear. If you absolutely need this effect on a Human creature, we're also running Paladin Danse, Steel Maverick for your indestructible pleasure.
That's not all, though. Innistrad's very own Sigarda, Heron's Grace creates a hexproof shield around us and our Human creatures. She's also a fun comparison for what you can get for on a 4/5 body these days.
Man-Made Weaponry
Some key magical artifacts and enchantments are what make our Humans an actual force to be reckoned with. Cards like Beastmaster Ascension and Cathars' Crusade are go-tos in any creature deck. We're also using Aura Shards in place of more traditional removal since we plan on having a creature enter the battlefield at least once per turn.
Cathar's Call and Laid to Rest are our two Human-centric enchantments, and both synergize with the number of tokens we plan to push out and the +1/+1 counters we plan to use to make those tokens into actual threats.
In addition to the standard suite of kindred support cards, like Vanquisher's Banner and Obelisk of Urd, we're also running Horn of Gondor, probably the best way to double the number of Humans we control on the cheap.
Mana Base
With an average mana value of 2.1, we don't need to run so much ramp to keep on curve. With our 36 lands, the only other ramp we're running is the traditional Arcane Signet, Selesnya Signet, Commander's Sphere, and Talisman of Unity (no Sol Ring? Oops!). This is in addition to our four ramp sorceries: Kodama's Reach, Cultivate, Three Visits, and good ol' Rampant Growth.
Jasmine Boreal Decklist
Budget
This deck's budget totals out to about $280. That's surprisingly steep for such a simple deck build. Let's dig into why:
The most expensive card in this deck is Greymond, Avacyn's Stalwart, partly because he only has two printings, and one of them is the Universes Beyond Rick, Steadfast Leader. We can swap out Rick for another Odric Baird, Steward of Argive if we want to go on defense.
Much of the rest of our budget is wrapped up in essential staples, but we can always downgrade our Adeline, Resplendent Cathar into a Commander's Authority or swap our Heroic Intervention out for a Fog effect.
Wrap Up
While this Jasmine Boreal deck may not explicitly need to cast our commander to play well, it never hurts to have a moderately sized Human creature in your command zone to activate your triggered effects. Sometimes we really will want to pay five whole mana just to trigger Beast Whisperer or Thalia's Lieutenant, and with Herald of War around, we might not even have to pay that much!
This is probably one of the more basic decks you can staple a vanilla creature like Jasmine onto and still call it thematic. I'm interested to hear from you about how you'd build a Jasmine Boreal EDH deck! Let me know in the comments, or feel free to come harass me on Twitter.
Once again, thanks for reading!
