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Modern-Legal Aurelia

As promised last week, Sheldon shares his Modern-legal Aurelia, the Warleader Commander deck and tells you about it in a primer-style format.

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A month ago or so, I wondered out loud if Standard- or Modern-legal Commander could be a thing. I think that it won’t (but it looks like Bennie Smith had some fun exploring the idea), but I’ve put together a Modern-legal Aurelia, the Warleader deck that might be worthwhile.

It started as I continued my quest to build a deck of each color combination. Aurelia seemed like a cool Boros commander, so I started building. I went with a Knights theme because individually the creatures are good for their mana costs and I wanted to keep the curve really tight—maybe even topping out with Aurelia. One Knight in particular, Crusading Knight, struck my fancy, especially in a world where Urborg, Tomb of Yawgmoth likes to run around.

After I had put the deck together—at least among the candidates for the 62 nonland cards—I realized that there weren’t that many older cards (Crusading Knight notwithstanding) in the deck. This was right on the heels of the aforementioned article, so Modern was certainly on my mind. I started playing around, and I ended up with a deck that doesn’t even have any of the Commander product in it. It’s completely legal in Modern. First, we’ll look at the list, and then we’ll take it on in a primer-style format.

Modern-Legal Aurelia, the Warleader
Sheldon Menery
0th Place at Test deck on 04-28-2013
Commander
Magic Arena

Creatures (38)

Planeswalkers (2)

Lands (35)

Spells (24)

Magic Card Back


Why Play It?

Play this deck if you want some fast, straightforward beats in a way that isn’t getting played at the moment. If the folks you play with give style points, the fact that this one is completely Modern-legal with get you some mad props—especially when it does relatively well. It will give you a bit of a break if most of what you play is ramp-into-epic-stuff style. It will certainly give you a break from thinking too hard. Sometimes there will be math, especially in the “can I get just enough through to kill that guy?” fashion, but I don’t think it’s a particularly brain-taxing deck.

You’ll Like This Deck If…

You like attacking.

You like attacking with lots of small guys who might be bigger because of all the attacking or other guys.

You like themes, especially the guild theme.

You like on-board tricks.

You relish the idea of being the immediate threat.

You Won’t Like This Deck If…

You prefer to be subtle.

Your favorite two things are ramping and drawing.

You like big, splashy individual cards.

Recursion is your thing.

You’re a control player.

Attacking frightens you.

You love blocking.

What Does It Do?

It attacks. It gets out low-cost creatures and gets into the red zone. It has a few reset buttons in the eventuality that their guys start being better than yours. By that time, you should have done quite some damage to your opponents, so when you restart you’ll be in a decent position. The deck sets the pace of the action early on and then relies on Aurelia’s haste should there be a late game.

It’s going to occasionally get a commander damage kill with Aurelia because of the multiple attacks, especially if she’s Sword-equipped or has double strike due to Silverblade Paladin. Occasionally Gisela will be able to help in that regard. She’s pretty much most of your defensive strategy as well.

It also has a few janky tricks, like Blasphemous Act and the sometimes-hilarious Chain Reaction plus Boros Reckoner. It has a few “you can’t block” tricks with Master Warcraft and Odric, which might just be the finishing touches you need. Otherwise, it’s quite straightforward: make guys and swing with them. The other major trick is to have lots of dudes and then make them all large with Mirror Entity. Finally, there’s the “swing twice with a bunch of guys including Hellrider” idea.

Remember that Aurelia untaps all your creatures, not just the ones that attacked. This means that you can use Intrepid Hero twice to kill big guys before they can block and get two uses out of Weathered Wayfarer.

What Doesn’t It Do?

It doesn’t get quickly to Aurelia. You’re spending your early turns dropping creatures and putting on pressure, so you’re not ramping. It’s unusual for the format in that there aren’t often any times that you have humungous guys. There are certainly no Craterhoof Behemoth or Overrun like things going on. Other than potentially sticking Boros Reckoner in front of a huge dude, it doesn’t block very much.

The deck doesn’t have much recursion. Some of your smaller guys are going to get killed, so Sun Titan can help a little, but for the most part dead is dead. They may come back via drawing them after cracking Elixir of Immortality.

It doesn’t draw a great number of cards, but hopefully Skullclamp and Mind’s Eye can help a bit.

Other than a few board resets, it doesn’t have much hate of any kind. A creature equipped with Sword of Fire and Ice might be able to kill a few small guys, but the primary thing to do with larger creatures is go around them. It doesn’t have any direct graveyard hate and has a limited amount of artifact and enchantment removal.

How Does It Lose?

The biggest problem is other peoples’ reset buttons. If you can’t protect yourself with Boros Charm or Knight Exemplar or bring back everything with Faith’s Reward, you could be in topdeck mode pretty quickly. Having a commander who has haste and attacks multiple times helps mitigate that, but there isn’t otherwise much comeback capability in the deck. It’s all-in all the time. If you’re not dropping guys early, you’re probably losing.

Even without resets, there are times when your guys are going to be outclassed by big (mostly green and black) monsters. With trample. You will get stomped.

Crawlspace and its cousins will make your life pretty miserable. Without some luck, you’ll also get wrecked pretty badly by dedicated control decks, especially those that create a great deal of hostility toward creatures.

Life gain is certainly going to be a bad thing since your swarms are going to have a limited lifespan. Again, the possibility for Aurelia kills exists, but having to attack huge life totals isn’t your idea of a good day.

Since there’s no real disruption, you also don’t have much defense against combo of any kind. Your only hope is to see them coming and focus fire.

The land count is a little greedy. At 35, we’ll need a little luck to hit land drops number five and six. That number of lands was the base when we had Land Tax and Tithe in the deck and might need some revisiting down the road if it shows inconsistency in getting to the critical point.

Cards That Aren’t There

More Swords: I gave some further outside the box thought to perhaps making Aurelia into a Voltron Commander, but I liked the idea of attacking with bunches of guys better. Knights like to carry Swords, but we need more Knights on the ground than blades in hands.

Akki Lavarunner: Could it be worth battling, having it flip into Tok-Tok, Volcano Born, and giving my red guys +1 damage? Maybe, but not at the initial cost of 3R for a 1/1.

Aurelia’s Fury: For one, I didn’t have an extra lying around. For two, it’s a little mana hungry. I’m going to keep an eye out when I play the deck to see how often a three-to-five X value might be worthwhile for the deck because it certainly might be another arrow in the Master Warcraft quiver.

Avacyn, Angel of Hope: Really expensive and really hate drawing. People are justifiably afraid of her, and the deck doesn’t have too many ways to answer the hate.

Bonfire of the Damned: Suffering from the same mana problem as Aurelia’s Fury (even when cast for its miracle cost), I struggle to see Bonfire’s usefulness here. Just like with Aurelia’s Fury, I’ll keep an eye out for and make note of situations where it might have been useful.

Darien, King of Kjeldor: Cut for space. I wouldn’t mind being able to work him back in as a little bit of defense. No one’s going to attack me if they’re worried about the crack back of dudes that are probably going to be bigger than 1/1s when they swing.

Decree of Justice: Cycling DoJ at EOT for a swarm of Soldiers is a neat idea, but since the deck doesn’t ramp that well, I figured that we’d rarely see value out of it.

Elesh Norn, Grand Cenobite: The card I most regret not finding room for. It’s another that I’m going to put into the “keep an eye out if it would have been good in this spot” bucket.

Hateflayer: Seems like it would be neat with the extra attack steps, but I think it’s way too pricey.

Hokori, Dust Drinker: Not a style I like, although if there were ever a deck that would tempt me to use it, it’s this one.

Jaya Ballard, Task Mage: I didn’t think I’d have enough cards to use the abilities.

Luminate Primordial: Giving life to other players seemed suboptimal. The margins are thin enough already.

Rule of Law: Early on, I’d considered some kind of slowdown strategies. That’s where Thalia originally came from, and Rule of Law was an early add. It was a late cut because of not committing to the strategy.

Rune-Tail, Kitsune Ascendant: Might be reasonable protection, but I thought it would slow things down more than speed them up.

Signal Pest: Everything needs to do something if there aren’t a bunch of guys attacking. This does nothing. I think Marshall Sutcliffe would be happy that I passed on this one.

Skullcrack and Unstable Footing: I’d really love to be able to work in the complete pants dropping this would give someone. It’s a completely unexpected blowout for the “I’ll just Fog” answer. I wonder if I can find room for Skullcrack in my Ruhan deck…

Stigma Lasher: This was a favorite of mine when it was Standard-legal, and I’m still searching for a home for it in Commander.

Stoneforge Mystic: The Swords are nice but not critical, so it didn’t seem worth focusing on searching them up. This might be worth a revisit due to the fact that the Mystic is another low-cost creature. Godo is still in the deck because he both searches for an Equipment and gives Aurelia an extra attack step.

Stonehewer Giant: See Stoneforge Mystic except for the low cost part.

Urabrask the Hidden: Why am I not playing the fairest of all the Praetors here? Didn’t have one. I’ll probably grab one and replace the not-particularly-abusable-in-this-deck Reveillark.

This Deck and the Future

I’m going to see how the deck plays over a few weeks. If it’s viable, I’ll keep it as Modern-legal and keep expanding it as Modern expands. If it just can’t get there, I’ll tinker with it some before completely giving up on it. If I just can’t make it work, then we’ll go with the fully caffeinated version. I suspect that while it won’t be the most bombtastic deck in my arsenal, it’ll get there enough to be worth keeping.

Summary

Modern-legal Commander as an entire format might not have the legs, but there seems to be plenty of room for individual Modern-legal decks to make a go of it. I’ve only played the deck twice so far, and it was fun to play.

It sputtered out in the first game after dealing a fair amount of damage but was mostly a non-factor. In the second, it did extremely well, killing all three of my opponents in different ways. I can’t claim to have done all the damage, but I got the finisher on one with a swarm of guys, one with some direct damage off of casting spells with Balefire Liege in play, and the last with Aurelia damage after a series of board wipes. Those two games seem to be an indication of how the deck is going to do over its lifespan: sometimes good, sometimes meh.

Bonus Tracks

The cards which were originally in and didn’t fit into Modern legality were Academy Rector, Northern Paladin, Southern Paladin, Marton Stromgald, Goblin Bombardment, Lashknife Barrier, Land Tax, War Cadence, Order/Chaos, Tithe, Order of the Sacred Torch, Viashino Heretic, Crusading Knight, Goblin Welder (although that was in just to mess with other peoples’ artifacts), Martyr’s Bond, Ruination, and Akroma’s Vengeance. I might build a second version just to keep the Modern-legal one around. Here’s the complete list:

Aurelia, the Warleader
Sheldon Menery
0th Place at Test deck on 04-28-2013
Commander
Magic Arena

Creatures (39)

Planeswalkers (1)

Lands (35)

Spells (24)

Magic Card Back