Legends Legends - Xira Arien

Jeff Dunn • February 4, 2025

Deckbuilding
Xira Arien
 by Simon Dominic Brewer

A hearty hello and welcome to all you intrepid entomologists! This is Legends Legends, a weekly column where we dive into 1994's Legends expansion and its original 55 legendary creatures! Each week, we take one of those original legends and attempt to build a Commander deck around them... in spite of their overall low power level or confusing design.

This week we're putting the insect queen Xira Arien

under the microscope where we'll meticulously pick her apart before punching a needle through her chest and mounting her in a glass case on the wall. (Sorry, too dark?) 

General Thoughts

Xira Arien

is one of a handful of three-color rare legendary creatures from Legends. She's a three-mana Insect Wizard with flying, a 1/2 body, and an ability that lets you pay and tap her to force a target player to draw a card.

Last I checked, Jund wasn't the shard best known for card draw, so this presents an interesting opportunity for any burgeoning Xira Arien

player: just how do you build a deck themed around card draw in red, green, and black?

This Xira Arien

Commander deck lives halfway between a group hug deck and a group slug deck. We'll use symmetrical effects to keep the entire table happy while we ramp and draw our way into the slug portions of our library.

Then, we'll punish our foes for taking our advantage-bait with draw-punishers, like Orcish Bowmasters

and Razorkin Needlehead
. Before long, our opponents will either deck themselves or die to our tidal wave of damage triggers in their draw steps. 

Group Bug

The early game for our Xira Arien

deck relies heavily on your own political acumen. Knowing your opponents' decks, and therefore knowing who needs gas when and why, is paramount to playing out your first few turns.

Many of our traditional ramp spells have been replaced with symmetrical or nearly symmetrical effects. Spells like Collective Voyage

instead of Cultivate
, Veteran Explorer
 instead of Wood Elves
, and Tempt with Discovery
 instead of Kodama's Reach
 will ramp us as well as our opponents. Marching Duodrone
 has playtested well as a group hug card in my games, as well.

Our other early plays are focused on helping us and the rest of the table draw cards. Besides Xira Arien

herself, who we can always use to help someone dig through the top of their library in a flash, we've also got a handful of easy-to-cast artifacts with symmetrical draw abilities.

Howling Mine

is perhaps the most famous of this bunch, but Font of Mythos
 and Horn of Greed
 are also both essential to our gameplan. Temple Bell
 helps, too, with the added advantage that it can be activated on the end step before we start our turn to deny our opponents access to the new cards as they draw them.

Rites of Flourishing

and Ghirapur Orrery
 keep the game chuggin' along if anyone starts to run out of mana or spells.

Howling Golem

works like our Howling Mine
, and, despite its mediocre statline, it should stick around for a few turns as everyone enjoys the benefits of its triggered effect. The same goes for Heartwood Storyteller
. These two should cover all the bases of decks we could come up against, right? Decks are either creature- or noncreature-based, right?

If our opponents feel like these "symmetrical" cards are benefiting us more than them, we should take care to remind them that we're running Master of the Feast

as well, a card which only draws cards for our opponents, thank you very much. Pay no attention to his 5/5 flying body, it's meaningless, I swear. 

Finally, Seizan, Perverter of Truth

, Stormfist Crusader
, and Rankle, Master of Pranks
 will each trigger another draw each turn, albeit with a little pinch to the life total.

Even our removal in this deck is keyed to compensate our opponents for their losses. Druid of Purification

is about as "fair" of a noncreature removal spell we can manage, and our Assassin's Trophy
 and Baleful Mastery
 both compensate our opponents with a little something-something in exchange for their woes. At least Guff Rewrites History
 Chaos Warp
s in some new permanents for them, too!

Bugging Your Opponents

Aw, how nice of us to grant our opponents so many cards and lands for free! Surely, we had no ulterior motives behind that, right? Wrong! Now it's time to punish those sweet, summer children that we call our fellow Magic: The Gathering enthusiasts.

We'll start off with the easy ones: since Xira Arien

can tap to force a player to draw a card whenever, it follows that we should include as many draw-punishers as possible.

All-star famous cards, like Orcish Bowmasters

and Sheoldred, the Apocalypse
, top the list for best value draw-punishers, obviously, but there's absolutely no reason we should stop there. We're slamming Underworld Dreams
 in alongside Fate Unraveler
, Gixian Puppeteer
, Kederekt Parasite
, Razorkin Needlehead
, and Scrawling Crawler
. Spiteful Visions
 and Curse of Fool's Wisdom
 round out this section, giving the deck enough consistency to reliably put down a Lightning Bolt
's worth of damage for each card drawn by an opponent.

Once our opponents' hands are full of spells and their battlefield full of lands, there's nothing sweeter than denying them the chance to play with them. We'll use Reforge the Soul

, Dark Deal
, and Winds of Change
 to dump a huge amount of damage onto the board as our opponents wheel their hands away, along with whatever plan they were formulating.

Often, we won't even have to force our opponents to discard those cards for an effective turn. Our Peer into the Abyss

will deal a massive amount of damage when combined with just one Underworld Dreams
 effect, as will Price of Knowledge
. I've included Storm Seeker
 here as well. It's not the best hand size hate spell, but its original Legends printing means it's earned a space here alongside Xira Arien
.

We aren't necessarily counting on our opponents discarding cards - running Price of Knowledge

makes that a little counterproductive - but we'd be remiss not to include at least Megrim
 and Geth's Grimoire
, especially since we're running Winter, Misanthropic Guide
. 

Mana Base

We've already briefly touched on how many of our ramp effects are symmetrical in keeping with this deck's "Group Bug" archetype, so I won't belabor the point. I do want to call out two important tech lands for this deck, though: Mikokoro, Center of the Sea

and Geier Reach Sanitarium
 have seen many, many reprints in Commander products over the years since they're excellent interaction for multiplayer games.

In this deck, they become offensive attackers, though, triggering our Underworld Dreams

effects for cheaper than Xira Arien
 can while still being a nearly un-interactable permanent (seriously, when is someone going to Ghost Quarter
 your Mikokoro? Never, that's when).

On top of that, we've got 34 other lands, plus six spells that fetch lands from our library, and six mana rocks of various sizes. 

Budget

The cheapest price we're looking at for all the singles in this deck is around $300. That's due in no small part to Sheoldred, the Apocalypse

at nearly $70 and Orcish Bowmasters
 at $38. Cutting these two cards slashes the deck price by a third, and they can easily be replaced with other draw-punisher effects.

I recommend Zurzoth, Chaos Rider

and Leela, Sevateem Warrior
 for some permanent threats; while they won't deal the damage directly to your opponents, they'll still generate quite a bit of value on their own.

Xira Arien Decklist

Xira Arien

View on Archidekt

Commander (1)

Planeswalkers (1)

Buy this decklist from Card KingdomBuy this decklist on TCGplayer

Wrap Up

Where do we draw the line between group hug and group slug? Does a group hug deck stop being group hug when it drops a win condition? Shouldn't my group slug deck prioritize helping the enemies of my enemies? These are the questions that philosophers such as myself get paid the big bucks to sit around and think about instead of writing up Legends-themed Magic: The Gathering content for websites. 

This Xira Arien

deck is sort of the inverse of the Sour Patch kids: first it's sweet, drawing a ton of cards and ramping the entire table simultaneously, but then, it very quickly goes sour, draining the life from our opponents as they are paralyzed by choice from the 10+ cards we've forced them to draw.

Are we possibly shooting ourselves in the foot by giving them access to so much of their library? Maybe! Let's just hope they remember all those cards you drew for them once they've removed our Underworld Dreams

effects!

Let me know what you think of this Xira Arien

deck in the comments, and tell me how you'd build around this insect queen!

Thanks for reading! Until next time!

Jeff Dunn

Jeff Dunn

Jeff's almost as old as Magic itself, and can't remember a time when he didn't own any trading cards. His favorite formats are Pauper and Emperor, and his favorite defunct products are the Duel Decks. Follow him on Twitter for tweets about Mono Black Ponza in Pauper, and read about his Kitchen Table League and more at dorkmountain.net