Images courtesy of Wizards of the Coast
Hello and welcome back, everyone. I’m Command Zoe, and today I have a super fun deck to show off featuring one of the strongest commanders from Tarkir: Dragonstorm, Elspeth, Storm Slayer.
Slay, queen.
Elspeth is a token-doubler that also generates tokens, has some removal, and can finish a game with a huge alpha strike. This card has everything, and truly seems like the perfect white commander. So let’s dive in to the cards and the game plan.
Elspeth, Storm Slayer Brawl Deck List
The Strategy
The game plan is midrange; but what does that mean? Midrange is a strategy that likes to win in the middle turns of the game. It’s a plan that seeks to play like a control deck against aggressive, or “aggro,” decks, and beat them by pushing the game later than they are able to win. But it also wants to go faster than true control decks. Put simply, against control it looks like an aggro deck, but against aggro it looks a control deck.
There are many, many different ways of playing midrange. Some will ramp ahead of their opponents in mana, and use that mana difference to play threats that are too big to answer at that stage of the game. Some midrange decks will attempt to cheat out big threats before its opponents expect to see them, like with Indomitable Creativity. Then there are decks like this one, which will try to get control of the board state early, then generate resources like cards and game objects in abundance to overwhelm our opponents with value.
Our main goal is to generate more total resources than our opponents are able to keep up with. As alluded to above, how we go about that will depend on what type of deck we’re facing.
How to Play Against Aggro
Aggro decks, like burn, white weenie, and green stompy, are gonna try to kill us quick. Our best way of dealing with them might seem a little counterintuitive; we let them push ahead of us, and we focus on finding hands with board wipes in the mulligan phase.
We want them to over-extend on resources and then deny all of those resources with as few cards as possible — ideally just one. Have you ever played out your whole hand of creatures and then had an opponent cast Wrath of God? Or worse still, played your entire hand with affinity into a Meltdown? In a perfect situation, that’s what we want to do.
I will never financially recover from this.
Letting them get ahead of you on board can feel precarious, but it’s essential to creating a resource gap. When you use one card to remove 4-5 of your opponent’s cards, you create that gap. So try to save that spot removal for bigger threats after you board wipe, rather than trading lots of 1-for-1s. If you play all of your spot removal early, you might not have it when you really need it.
How to Play Against Control
Oh great, this guy again…
Against control we care less about resources, and more about tempo. That’s not to say we don’t care about resources, but generating lots of cards and pushing the game late isn’t worth much if our opponent’s endgame strategy is more powerful than ours.
So we need to apply pressure early. Don’t play into the trap of over-extending your resources. You don’t want to end up walking into exactly what I explained above. Instead, play your threats one at a time. Apply pressure with those threats, and force your opponent to handle them one by one or else lose. Use the rest of your cards and mana to try to generate card advantage while your threat does its job; that way, if they remove your threat, you already have the next one ready to go.
Elspeth will always be a threat, so you need to make sure she generates enough advantage that by the time she’s destroyed, you already have the mana to recast her. It’s a tightrope walk, but since she can double our tokens or act as spot removal you shouldn’t struggle to find a way to do that.
Specific Card Shout Outs and Interactions
Dedicated Dollmaker and Three Blind Mice: The Dollmaker can make non-legendary copies of Elspeth, Storm Slayer, or, if she’s already out, can target Three Blind Mice, which will be doubled by our commander. Then when you start making copies with the Saga, you can choose itself since it’s a token now. This is infinite value, and nearly impossible to overcome if left unchecked.
Dollmaker’s Shop // Porcelain Gallery: Both halves of this card give us everything we want to close a game out. The tokens that the Shop creates get doubled by our commander, and the Gallery makes our whole board huge so that Elspeth’s 0 ability can alpha strike to win!
Anointed Procession, Mondrak, Glory Dominus, and Ojer Taq, Deepest Foundation: Look, is this win-more? Yes. Is it also both very fun and very funny? Why don’t you try it out and see?
Warren Warleader: The offspring ability makes tokens, so with our commander out this turns into a truly terrifying powerhouse that can pump out so many tokens! Note that the Warleader itself need not attack to get the effect.
Phelia, Exuberant Shepherd: There are so many great ways to use this doggo that I won’t be able to list them all, but one of my favorites is to use Elspeth’s -3 ability to remove something and then flicker her so that she goes back up to five loyalty. It’s also a great way to change what’s under a Sheltered by Ghosts or Ossification, or to alien-abduct an opponent’s threat with an Unidentified Hovership.
I will never forgive WotC for making Solitude this good doggie’s best friend.
Until Next Time
I truly hope you enjoy playing this list because I foresee it getting placed into the dreaded “Hell Queue” some time in the near future. She’s just too strong of a card to remain at a middling power level.
In case you missed it, go check out my last article where I ranked my top five most exciting Brawl commanders from Tarkir: Dragonstorm, and see how well I did. Remember to check out all my socials so you can catch all of the content I’m working on as soon as it releases, and get previews of things coming up as well!
Next time we’ll be talking about the new cards coming in Tarkir: Dragonstorm‘s Alchemy set, theorizing what decks they go in, and figuring out which will be the strongest for Brawl. See you then!
