Calling all creatures! Are you of the White, Blue, Green, or colorless variety? Do you have phenomenal abilities or fantastic stats? Have you been featured in making a Commander deck run over opponents like a speeding locomotive?

Then you’re in luck. Step right up and see the amazing, astounding, stupendously splendid . . . JENARA, ASURA OF WAR!

Or, well . . . something like that.

The mass of casualties (that is, we casual players) have spoken: Jenara will be a Lady of the Town and pal around with many, many friends of all persuasions (creatures won out as the focus of the deck). And she’s not a cheap date, either; you voted for costs to be ignored. Whether you chose that just for kicks or decided that you wanted to drop the change no matter the cost, I applaud your brazen attitude. It’s just the way I like to run my decks—in your face (and eating your life points).

So where do we start?

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Since we want to focus on creatures, let’s break down some of the best options available. This won’t be a comprehensive list of every awesome creature available for a Jenara deck (as that would be ridiculously boring), but instead a list of suggested, powerful options by color—all of them creatures that serve a purpose.

Blue Creatures

Blue provides some amazing creatures, most of which are geared to punish opponents. Consecrated Sphinx is an insane card in multiplayer (it’s still insane everywhere else), and it happens to be a body. Being a body is an important feature I’ll get to a little later.

Every other creature is standard utility: counter some spells to steal/copy the best on the table. Clone and friends also come with a benefit of Legend-rule removal against most Legendary creatures. Handy stuff.

And Thada Adel is still underrated. If you get lucky and slip her into play very early, stealing Sol Rings and Solemn Simulacrums is just as good as equipment, and perhaps far better.

White Creatures

White provides access to powerful equipment tutors, removal-on-a-stick, and some additional force to dominate a board with. Rune-Tail is perhaps one of the most underrated creatures; dropping it early and getting to attack and block with relative impunity can really tilt life totals in your favor. While Mirror Entity is often a cohort of token strategies, having a creature advantage and using it as a repeatable Overrun effect is a fine idea.

Green Creatures

Green brings many of the most valuable enters-the-battlefield creatures to the deck. I lump mana acceleration under “Mana-Fixing,” which means putting Oracle of Mul Daya front and center to getting ahead. Most of these options are the standard fare, but Loaming Shaman serves double duty to recirculating things in unruly opponents’ graveyards, or getting your own tutor target available again. And it comes down early if needed.

Colorless and Multicolored Creatures

The options here are, naturally, some of the most interesting. Fellow tricolored Bant Legend Rafiq of the Many is a solid option to drop before Jenara attacks. Simic Sky Swallower and Wurmcoil Engine just do dumb things as well, being unusually difficult for opponents to immediately answer.

Knight of the Reliquary is possible the most valuable creature here, allowing us to use a package of refined, silver-bullet lands (again, more a little later).

So what does this all mean? Let’s do a quick count of our classes:

This means with our first pass, counting cards with dual effects as one for each, we are short on Card Draw and Counterspells, and could use some more Mana-Fixing and Tutors. Let’s patch these holes with some more cards, some creatures, and some noncreatures:

Here we fill out a bunch of great options we want to be flush in our deck. The variety of tutors, grabbing creatures, lands, artifacts, and more can help up ensure we hit our silver-bullet cards as we need them. Desertion is a rare card that serves double duty: stops a creature and steals it for ourselves, a potent weapon for being aggressive.

Plowshares and Path are two of the iconic—and powerful—removal spells at our disposal. But most surprising is likely the addition of the trio of on-color signets. These little buggers can help accelerate us early and help us cast awkward spells later in the game. It’s mana-fixing that is often overlooked.

And where do we sit, all-inclusive?

While sixty-four cards leaves ample room for lands, it doesn’t give us room for one thing that was overlooked: a nice equipment package.

Finding John

That’s the trickiest part of tricolor (and five-color) Commander decks: You just don’t have room for everything. How do we trim back from the good stuff? Well, let’s look at our core concepts: playing an aggressive creature deck.

The first way to trim out some fat is to cut some of the more expensive spells. While Commander games do go longer, the longer the games go, the poorer our chances will be. As opponents fight back against our attacks, they’ll gain access to more tools and answers. Being mana-efficient is one way to ensure we continue to apply pressure where needed, and Simic Sky Swallower is the face of expensive fatties for us. Unfortunately for us, there was already a minimum of expensive creatures—some but certainly not too many.

The second way to cut back is more subjective, but is certainly a skill that comes with many, many rounds of Commander game-play: removing the least synergistic spells. The following all have some issues:

• Mistmeadow Witch – Recycling ETB abilities is great, but this deck is focused on attacking, not defending and gaining incremental value.
• Mirror Entity – Powerful and game-ending, but often just cute or innocuous without the tokens to back it up.
• Rune-Tail, Kitsune Ascendant – Something I want to try, but I feel that this deck isn’t the place to maximize it.

All three of those cards are still good and still valuable in the deck. However, these are also the most marginal or potentially useless at specific moments.

The third option, and final path I’ll share today, is to cut back in a section that’s overrepresented. That is, do we have too many of a specific card class? Two come to mind:

Tutor: Chord of Calling – Again, a powerful card, but perhaps not the best way to use it.

Removal: Steel Hellkite – Having an Engineered Explosives effect that can repeat every turn is brutal, but removal that doesn’t hit immediately is probably wasted fairly often as opponents avoid getting hit.

With these cuts, we gain six slots for equipment:

While the “Sword of” swords are self-explanatory, and Umezawa's Jitte and Loxodon Warhammer are fairly easy to grok as well, Darksteel Plate may be throwing you for a loop.

Trust me: It’s insane.

Most “removal” effect for artifacts are simple “destroy target” effects. Even things like Shatterstorm and Creeping Corrosion simply say “destroy.” Darksteel Plate rarely leaves play once it’s there, and once equipped to something annoying (like, say, Jenara), it can do some real damage.

I believe there’s a very real use for Darksteel Plate, and that is annoying the crap out of your opponents. Seriously.

Her Territory

So, what does the mana base look like? Well, here it is in two parts:

These are the core staples of the colors we’re dealing with. On-color fetch lands with the full complement of duals to grab, filter lands, and a few more common inclusions. It’s the second part that I’m more interested in: the tutor package.

These guys are the key to victory: an aggressive creature, ways to maximize having many creatures, and additional removal and recursion, with a few good tricks and tutors too. This is the kind of package Knight of the Reliquary (and Expedition Map/Sylvan Scrying, too, if you like—which I do) allows. Even without the namesake Knight, these are fantastic lands to support sending clowns into the red zone.

Payout

Here’s where Jenara finally came to rest:

[cardlist]

[Creatures]

1 Acidic Slime

1 Archon of Justice

1 Body Double

1 Clone

1 Consecrated Sphinx

1 Deadwood Treefolk

1 Draining Whelk

1 Eternal Dragon

1 Eternal Witness

1 Fierce Empath

1 Genesis

1 Gilded Drake

1 Glen Elendra Archmage

1 Indrik Stomphowler

1 Karmic Guide

1 Knight of the Reliquary

1 Krosan Tusker

1 Loaming Shaman

1 Mulldrifter

1 Mystic Snake

1 Oracle of Mul Daya

1 Primeval Titan

1 Qasali Pridemage

1 Stoneforge Mystic

1 Stonehewer Giant

1 Sun Titan

1 Thornling

1 Trygon Predator

1 Vesuvan Shapeshifter

1 World Queller

1 Yavimaya Elder

1 Solemn Simulacrum

1 Wurmcoil Engine

1 Keiga, the Tide Star

1 Linvala, Keeper of Silence

1 Rafiq of the Many

1 Saffi Eriksdotter

1 Sakashima the Impostor

1 Teferi, Mage of Zhalfir

1 Thada Adel, Acquisitor

[/Creatures]

[Spells]

1 Blue Sun's Zenith

1 Cryptic Command

1 Desertion

1 Enlightened Tutor

1 Hinder

1 Path to Exile

1 Swords to Plowshares

1 Worldly Tutor

1 Green Sun's Zenith

1 Wargate

1 Future Sight

1 Oblivion Ring

1 Rhystic Study

1 Sunblast Angel

1 Azorius Signet

1 Darksteel Plate

1 Loxodon Warhammer

1 Selesnya Signet

1 Simic Signet

1 Sol Ring

1 Sword of Feast and Famine

1 Sword of Fire and Ice

1 Sword of Light and Shadow

1 Umezawa's Jitte

[/Spells]

[Lands]

2 Forest

2 Island

2 Plains

1 Breeding Pool

1 Celestial Colonnade

1 Emeria, the Sky Ruin

1 Flooded Grove

1 Flooded Strand

1 Hallowed Fountain

1 Krosan Verge

1 Maze of Ith

1 Misty Rainforest

1 Mystic Gate

1 Nantuko Monastery

1 Reflecting Pool

1 Savannah

1 Strip Mine

1 Temple Garden

1 Temple of the False God

1 Tolaria West

1 Tropical Island

1 Tundra

1 Vesuva

1 Wasteland

1 Winding Canyons

1 Windswept Heath

1 Wooded Bastion

1 Academy Ruins

1 Gaea's Cradle

1 Hall of the Bandit Lord

1 Minamo, School at Water's Edge

1 Yavimaya Hollow

[/Lands]

[/cardlist]

Or, stated a little differently:

You wanted to bring the heat? I hope you stand clear of the fire here. A hefty ticket cost with a veritable bonanza of aggressive bodies. If this deck were any more awesome, Chuck Norris would be kicking your screen out right now.

Overused, old Internet memes aside, this is the type of Commander decks I often put together: liberal doses of “good stuff” with a smattering of more interesting things. Of course, I’m just one eye over the whole deck; I’d be very interested in hearing what you would do differently, what you think was missed, what you would have cut, and anything else tangentially related to a Jenara, Asura of War Commander deck!

It’s time for a quick poll:

[poll id="20"]

Join us next week, when Trick and I unload a secret project (yes, really!).

Bonus

New Phyrexia Goodies

This weekend is the New Phyrexia prerelease on MTGO. Since we’re soon to have a fresh, new set of great Commander cards I wanted to include but they aren’t yet available, here’s a rundown of options that I would definitely shoehorn in there somewhere:

Phyrexian Metamorph – A cheaper Clone that can also hit artifacts? This is probably the most aggressive blue card I’ve seen in a while. The depth of what this thing can do it insane, and from my paper experiences it’s always at least solid. Yes, the “worst case scenario” is still pretty favorable. Not many cards can stack up to that.

Sword of War and Peace – The sword that shuts off White spot removal and punishes decks that draw big? Sign me up.

Elesh Norn, Grand Cenobite – She will help you win creature wars while simultaneously punishing token strategies. Do not underestimate her raw power.

Birthing Pod – Transmuting a creature about to die (Mulldrifter) into a slightly more expensive creature can be just as absurd as you think. Imagine this sequence: Yavimaya Elder into Solemn Simulacrum into Mulldrifter into Primeval Titan. How many lands and cards are we up at this point? And this doesn’t even consider creatures as combat tricks (Elesh Norn), counterspells, or as just a Natural Order for a slightly different target range!

What would you be adding from New Phyrexia? If you’re not heading into desolate wilderness this weekend, check out the events and join in the fun!