Thalia and The Gitrog Monster | art by Howard Lyon

Da Bears

Hello again! Welcome back to Archetypes of Imagination, a series where I build decks based on popular Commander archetypes. I'll be using Scryfall's tagging system and EDHREC's Tag pages to build around a new theme each week. Scryfall has a really cool way of categorizing cards, where each card has specific labels attached to it for later reference.

For example, Spellstutter Sprite has the counterspell tag and Talisman of Dominance has the ramp tag. EDHREC's tag system is really cool too, letting users see popular cards associated with a given strategy.

For example, Xorn is great in Treasure decks and Infectious Inquiry is great in infect decks. These tagging systems are great ways to get inspiration for certain deck archetypes, and I often start there when it's time for me to build a new deck!

This week, we'll be building a deck focused on hatebears: creatures that slow down the game and limit the number or kind of actions that players at the table can take. Most hatebears are small, lower cost creatures. A perfect example is Thalia, Heretic Cathar.

She slows down our opponents' board development while also being a nice attacker or blocker. But, today's deck won't just be White and it won't just be led by Thalia. We'll be building an Abzan () hatebear deck with Thalia and The Gitrog Monster as the commander!

Thalia and The Gitrog Monster is a super powerful commander. This card lets us play an extra land each turn, sacrifice a disposable permanent for card advantage, and acts as a positively lethal attacker/blocker.

Plus, on top of all of that, this commander is a hatebear: they make sure that our opponents creatures and (at least some of their) lands come into play tapped. Thalia and The Gitrog Monster will give us ample access to card advantage and ramp, it's now up to us what we'd like to do with the resource advantage provided by our commander.

I think, given that our commander lets us play an additional land each turn, we'll make our win condition based on those lands. We've got a pretty simple two part plan: slow down the game with a large collection of hatebears, then cruise to victory with any number of Landfall payoffs. Let's get going!

There's a fine line between love and hate

So, even though Thalia and The Gitrog Monster is already a pretty cool hatebear, we're filling the deck with a ton of others. One of my personal favorites is Archon of Emeria, which provides a slightly-worse backup version of our commander and limits each player to just one spell per turn.

Although we don't have many creatures that can be flashed in on our opponents' turns, thus breaking parity on this restriction, we're totally fine with a slower overall pace of play here. To that end, Kambal, Consul of Allocation will slowly but surely drain our opponents' life totals.

He should keep our life total high, something that's important given that our opponents will surely want us out of the game with all of the stax pieces we'll be playing. I also really like Mirri, Weatherlight Duelist. She can either make most of our team completely unblockable, and then act as a neat defensive tool afterwards. That's a lot of value for just three mana.

There's a lot more creatures here, so I'll just talk about a few more big hits. Hushbringer prevents all creature ETB abilities, which we truly don't mind. We've only got four creatures in the whole deck with relevant ETB triggers. Plus, should we draw one of those creatures and want to make use of their text, we can just sacrifice the Hushbringer to Thalia and The Gitrog Monster.

There's also Archon of Valor's Reach, which may seem a bit ambitious at six mana. But, because our commander lets us play additional lands, we'll usually be getting this big, stax-y creature on the board on turn five or earlier. Having the ability to completely shut off a card type is extremely powerful, and we can make sure to choose a type that'll have little to no effect on our game plan.

There's also a few one-sided effects in here, like Aven Mindcensor. I feel a little bit mean for playing this card, but it fits so well with the gameplan. It slows our opponents down, can be flashed in on one of their turns to get around our Rule of Law effects, and it's an evasive attacker. So, to make a long story short, the card is good.

Land, ho!

And, once the game is moving at a more comfortable speed, and we've got access to our commander's extra-land-each-turn ability, it's Landfall time. Avenger of Zendikar is an obvious choice here. It can provide us with a large army of ever-growing creature tokens that our opponents just won't be able to keep up with.

The same can be said about Felidar Retreat. It'll either pump up our whole team multiple times per turn, or provide some extra bodies should we need them. The brand-new Mossborn Hydra works so well in this deck, especially if it hits the battlefield early. With the extra land drop Thalia and The Gitrog Monster provides, this creature can get troublingly large.

And, because we're running a full 40 lands (not counting MDFCs), Six is going to be an absolute star in this deck. We've got a few ways to play lands from the graveyard, so using Six's retrace ability isn't much of a problem at all, and this creature can help us pull other creatures that we sacrificed to our commander back to life.

This is one of my favorite cards from last year, and I think it should find a slot in just about every green-inclusive Commander deck. There's also a potent combination of cards that each work super well in the 99 of this deck: Titania, Voice of Gaea and Argoth, Sanctum of Nature. Both of these cards are great on their own, either providing some disposable tokens + self mill or some incidental lifegain, but are obviously even better when combined.

I don't normally like putting meld cards in my decks, but I'll make an exception here because both halves of the eventual Titania, Gaea Incarnate are great standalone cards.

This week's decklist is a bit pricier than previous ones in this series because of the mana base. It's full of fetch lands and shock lands, largely because of how well fetch lands synergize with Landfall abilities and how great they are when played from the graveyard.

If you're interested in buying this deck, I encourage you to try out a cheaper mana base first and see if you like the general flow of the deck. Anyways, financial rant over. Here's the full decklist:

The machine marches on…

That's it for this week, folks! Before you go, though, I wanted to chat about a few pieces of recursion that make the deck more resilient. One of my personal favorites is Conduit of Worlds. This is a Crucible of Worlds effect with upside, and I think this card will work fantastically with all the lands we'll be sacrificing to our commander. Notably, this is the only artifact that I included in this deck.

That just makes cards like Heartwood Storyteller and Collector Ouphe even better. I also really like Agadeem's Awakening. If you've read any of my writing before, you'll know I love MDFCs (maybe even a little bit too much). But this card can either be an extremely powerful reanimation spell OR an untapped -generating land. What more can you ask for?
Lastly, I wanted to show off Serra Paragon. This is another card that I think should see more play. This card is already a relatively efficient attacker/blocker, but then we also get to recur a land or a small permanent on EACH turn AND gain life when that permanent dies later. This card does a little bit of everything, and fits so well in the 99 of our deck.

Thanks for reading! I'll see you all next week for a deck based around unblockable creatures.