Pauper Commander - Aristocrat Action
Half of a Haymaking Deck
There's a lot of powerful cards I see in regular EDH games that I think would make a great pEDH commander. There's just a huge variety of cards that are legal pEDH commanders that show up in Commander just for being good. My friend runs a Livio, Oathsworn Sentinel and Nadier, Agent of the Duskenel deck that cares about blinking Nadier to make a ton of tokens. Like, a ton of tokens. Livio is unfortunately stuck as a rare, but Nadier is totally open for us to use as our commander. I could totally pair him with Prava of the Steel Legion to get access to white and blink him easily, but that's a bit too easy. I'm looking for a challenge, so I'll pair him with Miara, Thorn of the Glade and keep the deck mono-black. Now, the question is, how do we blink a creature in mono-black?
Not Quite Dead Yet
There's actually a very simple answer. You see, while white is very good at dealing with the exile zone, and therefore has the cards that briefly move creatures to exile, black is excellent when it comes to the graveyard, and has cards that let creatures visit the graveyard briefly. More importantly, these creatures will leave the battlefield briefly, then return, which is what Nadier wants.
The cards I'm talking about are Not Dead After All and friends, from Undying Evil to Feign Death. I think that ever since these cards starred in the oppressive Rakdos Scam deck, Wizards has been intent on putting at least one new copy of the card in every single set. We have nearly 15 copies of it, in every single form. Funnily enough, they all do something slightly different. Demonic Gifts gives a buff before the creature dies. Fake Your Own Death does that, too, but also makes a Treasure token. Shade's Form has the ability to steal a creature when it dies, if we don't need to use it on our own commander.
The benefit from running so many of these cards is huge. Firstly, our commander is extremely difficult to remove. Our opponents will either be forced to use an Imprisoned in the Moon-style card, or exile it. Should they attempt to use a Feed the Swarm, we will simply make more Elves. Our commander is not staying in the graveyard.
A Sacrifice I'm Willing to Make
The second benefit is of course that we can trigger our commander any time we want. Pair it with a sacrifice outlet, and we can simply press a button to have our commander make some Elves. Luckily, sacrifice outlets are abundant in pauper, and, we can match every single recursion effect with a way to send our commander to the graveyard. There's ones that will add mana, like Soldevi Adnate, ones that'll draw cards, like Village Rites, and ones that act as removal, like Bone Shards.
But what we really want are the ones that can sacrifice any number of creatures, including our little Elves. Why? Because if we sacrifice Nadier, bring him back, and sacrifice the three Elves we just made, he's gonna make six Elves next time. If we keep going, we get big fast. In addition to making a horde of Elves huge, we can also make our Phyrexian Ghoul, Bloodflow Connoisseur, or Carrion Feeder absolutely colossal. Heck, we can scry so many times with Viscera Seer that we'll practically be tutoring. We can make so much mana with Ashnod's Altar that we might as well be going infinite.
And of course we need to take advantage of every death. Falkenrath Noble loves this kind of deck. Warteye Witch will sculpt our deck to perfection. Voracious Vermin is another creature that can get huge. Sadistic Glee, a combo piece in a current pauper deck, can make any creature huge!
First Run
Alright, the deck does its thing very well, that's clear. Making a ton of tokens is trivial once you get to the six mana needed to cast Nadier, but the deck is clearly missing a wincon. One copy of Falkenrath Noble isn't quite going to do it. A ton of tokens is useful, that's for sure, but in Commander, where there's 120 life points to work through, or even in Pauper, where there's 90, you need more than just 1/1s Luckily, we actually have more than just 1/1s. We have a stupid amount of creatures that get a stupid amount of power when creatures get sacrificed to them so let's take advantage of them! The first thing to do is give them a bit of evasion. Trample from Vorrac Battlehorns or Haunted Cloak is a good start, but I'd like to lean more into flying. Trample is a bit more consistent at getting damage in, but unless your creature is bigger than the sum of every other creature on an opponent's board, it's not the safest means of getting through. Flying keeps your creature secure, and is complemented by the load of removal that a mono-black naturally runs. Add in Cobbled Wings, Cloak of the Bat, and Wings of Hubris, and our ramp package is complete!
But even better than evasion is not needing to attack at all. Two spells that I never would've expected to be common fit into this deck perfectly. Enter Essence Harvest and Rite of Consumption. They can dead power equal to the biggest creature we have, and let me tell you, that can be a lot of damage. Even better, our opponents will never see it coming. No matter how obvious it is that we would want these cards, most people don't realize they're available in black. We can't be running Fling, so our opponents think they're safe. Nope! And on top of being able to knock a player out of the game, these cards can also gain enough life to buy us some more turns. (We'll need that life when the remaining players realize the danger they're in.)
Now that deck has an obvious route to victory, it does just as well as I hoped. Our deck is almost oppressive, the way it's so difficult to deal with. Turns out running 15 ways of keeping our commander from leaving the battlefield makes life tough for our opponents. Tough enough that once they learn their lesson, they leave us alone, giving us the opportunity to take the game. I'm particularly happy with this deck because I could've just taken a white commander and run a ton of Ephemerate variations. I've got no doubt the deck would've been better, but at least this way, it's not generic. Do y'all have any decks that you're proud of for being hipster?
