Pauper Commander - Dina, Soul Steeper

These past two months we've been exploring the best decks of the Pauper format, from the Snakes of a Fynn, the Fangbearer deck to the Landfall shenanigans of Tatyova, Benthic Druid. This week, we're going to tackle a deck that I've struggled to comprehend every time I've seen a decklist.

Dina, Soul Steeper seems like a fairly underpowered commander, essentially acting as a Marauding Blight-Priest in the command zone. If Marauding Blight-Priest was legendary, would I run it as a commander? Probably not, so why does every Dina, Soul Steeper deck seem to take over a game like it's nothing? I guess we'll find out today. 

Let's start by dissecting Dina's text box, because she does actually do a bit more than the Blight-Priest. Her first ability is exactly the same of course, draining our opponents for one life every single time we gain any amount of health.

Then, we have an activated ability, asking us to pay one mana and sacrifice a creature to give Dina +1/+0 until end of turn. Huh. That ability seems... mediocre? We're sacrificing a creature's power, that would otherwise stick around on the board, in order to give Dina a temporary boost. That seems difficult to take advantage of, but a deck is forming in my head that uses both abilities. 

Dina's basic list looks simple enough, but I think it has a few flaws. It's saturated with every possible way to gain small amounts of life, from Deathgreeter, to Jaddi Offshoot, to Ill-Gotten Inheritance. These are all effective cards, there's no doubt about that, but they don't synergize with each other in any way.

Kazandu Nectarpot wants us to play a ton of lands, and focus on Landfall, but that's an entirely different gameplan from what Falkenrath Noble wants. By supporting either gameplan, we're making the other more useless, so I think it's necessary to narrow our vision and maximize the output of one strategy, so I'm going to take a hint from Dina's sacrifice ability and do away with everything else.

Would Witherbloom Pledgemage, Grazing Gladehart, and Dogged Pursuit all do solid work, even on their own? Yes, but they're taking away a slot that could supercharge Essence Warden

What's a creature-focused gameplan that can gain a ton of life? Let's start with the creatures that actually gain the life. Obviously, you have Essence Warden and Social Climber, which incentivize us to play as many creatures as possible. But then you have Deathgreeter and Falkenrath Noble, who want creatures to die.

Okay, so we want creatures to enter the battlefield and die. Let's play a bunch of creatures that sacrifice other creatures, and gain life while they're at it. Vermin Gorger was the first creature like this that I found, followed by Bushmeat Poacher, Gibbering Barricade, Acolyte of Aclazotz, and Dreg Recycler.

Now we've got a whole cycle of life on our battlefield.

There are a few more miscellaneous creatures that fit in here. Night Market Lookout, Agate-Blade Assassin, Ragged Recluse, and Sanguine Syphoner were taken straight from Belbe, Corrupted Observer's EDHREC page, as cheap, easy ways to immediately gain life. Creeping Bloodsucker and Garrulous Sycophant do essentially the same thing, without needing to attack.

Then, Vampire Neonate acts as something to do when we have a bit of extra mana. Yes, all these creatures seem just as random as a Trespasser's Curse, but the important thing is that they are creatures themselves, meaning they can be sacrificed, they can be recurred, and most importantly, they trigger Essence Warden

Then, we have some creatures that take advantage of all this lifegain. Of course, we have our commander and some extra copies, Marauding Blight-Priest and Epicure of Blood. There's stuff like Courier Bat, which cares about if we gained life this turn. And then there's Blood Researcher, a creature that's pretty much everything we want in this deck. It grows at rapid pace, and when it's colossal, we can sacrifice it to Dina. Unfortunately, it's one of kind in Pauper.

But we need more than one creature that gets really big, so let's figure out another way to do that. Luckily there's a set of creatures that can get to mammoth sizes really quick. Carrion Feeder, Nantuko Husk, and Bloodthrone Vampire fit perfectly into the theme of this deck, and are perfect for when we want to set up an alpha strike with Dina. 

A sudden alpha strike? Oh yeah, I guess I forgot to mention that. This is where Dina's second ability comes into play. Like I mentioned before, Dina's sacrifice ability doesn't really do anything helpful normally, so we need to create some special reasons to use it. The first thing I thought of was lifelink. There are plenty of enchantments that can grant Dina the ability to steal life when dealing damage, like Eternal Thirst, Vampiric Link, and Cartouche of Ambition.

By enchanting her with these Auras, we can use her own damage boost to gain a ton of life. We can also equip her with things like Whispersilk Cloak to sneak a bunch of damage through. But my favorite thing to do with her is use Essence Harvest and Rite of Consumption to smack someone for a colossal sum out of nowhere.

I've won so many games with those cards, and it's so satisfying every time. 

I think Dina's ability is mostly going to be used at the very end of the game, to convert a board full of creatures into one powerful menace. Before that, it's all just a grind game, where we slowly erode our opponents life with all the drain that the deck is packed with.

It ends up being overwhelming for our opponents as every game action we takes involves an "Everyone take one." Then, when everyone's at ten life or so, we start sacrificing things to Dina and knocking people out. 

And there's the full deck! To be honest, I'm not sure if I should've thought about Dina's second ability at all. Like I said in the beginning, it's just not that powerful, and we don't have a whole lot of tools to take advantage of it in Pauper. However, I stand by my decision to get rid of all the random life gain/drain effects. Ill-Gotten Inheritance does work, but not as much as an Essence Warden when it's well looked after. When your deck makes engines with itself, that's how you know it's got potential, and this deck is packed full of synergy. I'd still call this one a success. Which Pauper commander should I check out next?



Alejandro Fuentes's a nerd from Austin Texas who likes building the most unreasonable decks possible, then optimizing them till they're actually good. In his free time, he's either trying to fit complex time signatures into death metal epics, or writing fantasy novels.