Welcome back to 1994's favorite Magic: The Gathering weekly blog post, Legends Legends! Are you burnt out on new-school Magic's novel-length rules texts and overly complex combos? Tired taking a huge deep breath and running through all 500,000 triggers of your Panharmonicon decks? Come with me back to the simple days of Magic's origins, where decks were all stompy and combat damage was the only victory condition we could hope for.
This weeks Legends Legend is the simple, straightforward Palladia-Mors.
General Thoughts
Palladia-Mors is the Timmy-est of the Elder Dragons. She's a flying 7/7 for eight mana, similar to her siblings, and also comes with trample. Just like her siblings, she costs an addition three mana every upkeep, or else she's sacrificed. This steep mana investment makes Palladia-Mors hard to cast and moderately difficult to keep around, for a comparatively poor payoff. I mean, just compare her to any other eight-mana beater; nowadays, we get cards like Griselbrand for eight mana. A measly 7/7 flying trampler with a downside isn't a great look!
Thankfully, we don't care that Palladia-Mors has a nearly french-vanilla rules text. She's a big, scary, Elder Dragon. We're going to send her careening into our foes as fast as possible, and as many times as possible, in hopes that they'll be crushed beneath our dragonfire-y commander damage. This means we'll be ramping hard to get our eight-drop out, then using haste-enablers, extra combats, and power buffs to make her into a one-turn kill for the board.
Birth of the Elder Dragons
We'll cover how to ramp up to Palladia-Mors down in the Mana Base section, but there's another important step to take before we dive into casting our commander. Palladia-Mors is an Elder Dragon, a veritable Dragon deity in the lore, and we need her to be appropriately powerful before/during her first combat to properly evoke the terror she deserves.
Rhythm of the Wild is one of the best enchantments this deck, or really any creature-heavy deck, can run. For three mana, we're shutting down the bane of aggro decks, the infamous Counterspell. This enchantment also gives each of our creature spells riot, letting us choose between a haste or a +1/+1 counter when they enter the battlefield. Rhythm of the Wild is great because, on the off chance we've already drawn and played our Fervor, we'll still see some benefit from its +1/+1 counters and counterspell-negation.
Rith, Liberated Primeval saves our commander (and a handful of our other creatures) from any untaxed targeted removal, usually enough to sway our opponents into Murdering something else instead.
Kediss, Emberclaw Familiar is the glue that holds many aggro Commander decks together. Suddenly, Palladia-Mors is a threat to the entire table when she arrives, and not just the single player without any flying blockers.
Two Auras in this deck are meant for Palladia-Mors specifically: Dragon Breath and Idolized. Dragon Breath is great because it can re-enter and attach itself to Palladia from the graveyard, making it the perfect choice to pitch to our pillage effects, like Big Score and Pirate's Pillage. The other, Idolized, gives our commander a huge buff; by the turn she arrives, we should have a huge selection of nonland mana dorks, mana rocks, enchantments and other various creatures to buff her.
Two Dragon creatures act as heralds of Palladia-Mors's arrival: Atarka, World Render grants our commander double strike when she attacks, cutting the number of extra combats we need for a commander damage victory down to two, and Thrakkus the Butcher can bring that down to a single attack for 28+ damage.
Finally, of course, we've got the free-to-equip Lightning Greaves, much better than Swiftfoot Boots in a deck with an eight-mana commander.
The Dragon War Unending
Although the Dragon Wars have long since ended, Palladia-Mors's rage is eternal. She forges a path of destruction wherever she goes, only stopping when she's enchanted by the Tickery Man (aka Chromium in human form). To represent this, our gameplan is to cast Palladia-Mors and use every extra combat effect that we can to obliterate our foes in one fell swoop of Dragon fire.
Setting up for Palladia-Mors's arrival is paramount to securing a victory the turn she arrives. We need to get at least two extra combats to hit someone for 21 commander damage in her first attack, so we've doubled, tripled, and quadrupled down on sources for this effect.
Hellkite Charger is one of my favorite sources for this effect. For a measly seven mana, we can untap everything and attack again as much as possible. We won't typically have another seven mana available after we've just cast Palladia, but this extra combat Dragon can easily go infinite alongside Grand Warlord Radha or Savage Ventmaw.
Scourge of the Throne and Bloodthirster are two more excellent creature-based sources for extra combat, albeit with a few stipulations. Bloodthirster is almost enough to get all three extra combats by itself, and if we time Scourge of the Throne correctly (after we've exhausted our Bloodthirster's extra combats) we can squeeze at least one more combat phase into our turn.
Aurelia, the Warleader and Karlach, Fury of Avernus each give us one extra combat each turn, with Karlach granting first strike to our creatures, helping them trade up into our opponents' efficient blockers.
Moraug, Fury of Akoum can get out of control very easily, and gives those extra ramp spells we draw in the late game some usefulness.
As for our noncreature sources of combat, we're running the classics Aggravated Assault and Relentless Assault, both of which will require a moderate mana investment if we want to cast them the same turn Palladia hits the field. We'll need 12-13 mana available if we're hoping to activate those all at once.
Seize the Day and World at War are two extra combat sorceries with a little built-in recursion: use World at War's rebound cast as a free extra combat the following turn when we cast Palladia-Mors, and Seize the Day's cheaper flashback cost to squeeze one more attack out of our commander.
Fury of the Horde is another "free" extra combat if we can exile the red cards from our hand; 49% of all mana symbols in this deck are red, so that shouldn't be too difficult so long as we've kept our hand full with Garruk's Uprising and Elemental Bond, or Return of the Wildspeaker.
There are two relatively new Universes Beyond cards we're running for extra combats, as well. Overpowering Attack can be cast for just three mana if Palladia-Mors has already connected with a player this turn, making it as effective as Seize the Day in most cases. Last Night Together takes Palladia-Mors to 9/9 for her second swing and lets us get another trigger off of Hellkite Charger.
Mana Base
Now, on to the fun stuff. We need a ton of mana available before we cast Palladia-Mors, enough for her to hit the field, get haste, swing in, and then cast some extra combat spells to lather, rinse, and repeat those draconic fireballs.
We're never going to miss a land drop with our hefty 38 lands. Don't worry, late game land top-decks will still provide value for Moraug, Fury of Akoum.
We have five spells to fetch lands from our library, plus seven mana dorks and six mana rocks to really hit the ground running with our mana base.
One of our mana dorks, Faeburrow Elder, is used for an infinite mana combo with Kiki-Jiki, Mirror Breaker. This is the easiest way to ensure we have enough mana to cast Palladia and overwhelm our foes with infinite combats:
We'll most often use our Shared Summons and Worldly Tutor to set up this combo, unless we've already found it. In that case, we'll dig for our Hellkite Charger combo, instead.
Budget
This Legends Legends deck ends up relatively cheap, with only a few standout cards over $10.
Bloodthirster is our most expensive card, clocking in at around $15. While this is undeniably one of the best extra combat cards in our deck, we can, in fact, live without it. If we remove it, I'd recommend replacing it with something to get us more consistent access to our other extra combat cards: advantage-generators, like Up the Beanstalk, or more ramp, like Wild Growth, is always a fair choice.
Palladia-Mors Decklist
Wrap Up
Elder Dragon Highlander gets its name from the cycle of Legends Elder Dragons. The whole reason commander damage is set to 21 is because that's three swings from an unmodified Elder Dragon. This Palladia-Mors Commander deck is built as a tribute to that mechanic: it hearkens back to a simpler time when EDH/Commander was all about combat with big haymakers and slow, battlecruisery deck lists. While it's not the most aggressive possible deck you can build for the format, it should still hold its own and surprise a pod or two with a massive attack out of nowhere.
How would you build around this classic Naya Elder Dragon? Let me know in the comments!
Thanks for reading!
