Pauper Commander - Tatyova, Benthic Druid

Tatyova, Benthic Druid

by Mathias Kollros

Once again, I'm here to explore the top commanders in pEDH. Last week, we checked out Soulherder

She does one very basic, very power powerful thing: for every land you play, she grants you a life, and more importantly, a card in hand. That card in hand could potentially be another land, another chance to draw a card. If you can keep the cycle going, you've got very powerful engine.

That's what our deck is going to be built around: drawing out our turn as much as possible and playing land after land. The longer we go for, the more we can do the next turn, and there's even an exciting combo we can implement in the deck!

The lands theme is a well established archetype in EDH that's been receiving support since the beginning of the game. There are so many cards that fill it, enough that the theme has its own subtypes: graveyard land decks, toolbox land decks, Landfall decks, or just generic ramp decks are all easily built. And of course, this means that there are plenty of common cards for us to work with. Building a powerful deck with Tatyova, Benthic Druid

There's a few goals we need to evaluate and tackle properly. First, we know that Tatyova draws cards when we play lands, so how do we maximize the amount of them we can play? There's generic ramp, obviously, like Rampant Growth

We want a ton of this, because these cards are, simply put, very good. Cultivate

Of course, the thing you'll notice is that those all fetch lands from within our library, but Tatyova draws cards, and if we have too many lands in our hand, they're useless. So how can we play more than one land a turn? If we were playing EDH, we'd use a card like Explore

All these cards do a fantastic job of putting lands on the battlefield, and we've certainly got a card advantage engine going, but of course, we have to ask how we win the game. Simply having more cards and more mana is kind of a game-winning strategy on its own, but we eventually have to translate that to damage.

To achieve that goal, I've included a few cards that turn lands directly into power and toughness. Canopy Baloth

Territorial Scythecat

Finally, we have the combo that I mentioned earlier. It's a strange one that involves our commander and three other cards. The first of the three is a group I already mentioned, the creatures that tap to put a land from our hand onto the battlefield. Easy enough to find, we have a ton of them in the deck. Then, we have the land that they're putting onto the battlefield, Mystic Sanctuary

If we have three Island

At this point, the combo is fairly obvious, but I'll explain it to you anyways. We tap a Skyshroud Ranger

This combo achieves two things. First, we gain infinite life with Tatyova, and then, if we have a Landfall creature, like Sporemound

To find this combo, we have a couple of cards. First, we need to get Mystic Sanctuary

Or we can just use cards that get any land, like Expedition Map

Our odds aren't low, thanks to Tatyova's ridiculous ability, but it's impossible to guarantee anything. 

And that's what an average Tatyova deck should look like. If you're getting into the more competitive side of Pauper, there's another combo that involves Ghostly Flicker