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

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

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

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

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

And of course we need to take advantage of every death. Falkenrath Noble

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

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

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