(Alesha, Who Laughs at Fate | Art by Dmitry Burmak)

Laughing at Everything

Alesha, Who Smiles at Death, is back in Foundations as Alesha, Who Laughs at Fate. While they might have lost the color white, they gained an ability they had not seen in a while: Raid. The old version of Alesha, and by old, I mean the card printed in the past, was a reanimation machine thanks to their activated ability. While the newer version can still bring creatures back from the grave, there are more hoops to jump through.

But a new card brings a new challenge, so join me, Nick, as we look at what Foundations offers with a deck tech that will leave you in stitches!

Fate is a Cruel Mistress

Raid is not a mechanic I'm very fond of. It has its advantages, like usually not having a restriction on the creature with Raid attacking to get the trigger. But the major downside is that it triggers at the end of your turn. When it comes to Alesha, Who Laughs at Fate, a single attack will allow you to bring back any creature with a mana value of three or less. While that might not look like much, there are some solid creatures to get back at the end of a turn.

Accursed Marauder messing up the opponents' boards with an end-of-turn sacrifice or Imperial Recruiter getting you many of the creatures in your deck at the end of turn. Voldaren Thrillseeker can add a few counters to something already on the board, but with extra mana lying around, you can throw a creature for damage and set yourself up for reanimation on a later turn.

The sweet spot of this deck for free reanimation outside of some combos, which we will get to late, is at four CMC.

Pitiless Plunderer is a mainstay card in any black deck adopting an aristocratic strategy. Turning every creature that dies on your side of the field into treasures lets any turn that looks mild go wild. Canoptek Tomb Sentinel becomes a fabulous removal spell in this deck. Bring it back to exile, the biggest problem on the board, then attack it, hoping your opponent will send it back to the graveyard so you can do it all again.

Murderous Redcap often looks like a waste of a card slot to those who have never been combo-killed by this card in a 60-card format. In our deck, this card can be as few as two damage a turn to as high as 10+, depending on what other cards we have. It is also a card on which I have always enjoyed the art. Finally, Garna, Bloodfist of Keld, acts as another Judith, the Scourge Diva, and can sometimes draw an extra card or two.

By a Thousand Cuts

Speaking of Judith, the Scourge Diva, the primary win condition of this deck is using creatures to poke away at the life total of the table. Rakdos has access to all of the major players in the aristocratic strategies in the commander format. While self-expression is part of the game, there are some must-play cards.

Blood Artist and Zulaport Cutthroat are the most classic cards in our primary strategy. Both creatures not only deal damage but gain life, with Zulaport being a small margin better by hitting all opponents simultaneously. Marionette Apprentice is new on the scene but has the added benefit of creating a creature that can immediately trigger their effect, thanks to Fabricate. It can also work with Pitiless Plunderer or Professional Face-Breaker by dealing damage whenever we sacrifice a treasure.

What Makes Us Different?

Our additional two combos make this deck different from your average Rakdos Aristrocrats commander deck. The first combo is an old-fashioned one from commander long past, known as the Worldgorger Combo. As the name implies, it uses the card Worldgorger Dragon and how it interacts with cards like Animate Dead. The short version of this combo results in infinite enter and leaves the battlefield triggers and infinite mana. Still, I'll turn to our friends at Commanderspellbook for a more detailed interaction.

Most decks would take sole advantage of the mana generation to cast something like Fireball and win the game. We do not have any cards like that in the deck. Instead, we want to focus on another part of the combo.

Infinite Enters

Worldgorger Dragon allows us to use some newer cards and one of the best red cards in the format to get a win.

These cards will trigger when creatures enter during the loop, pinging our opponent for one damage at a time. We can see how the math gets fun if we have Murderous Redcap out during this time. General Kreat, the Boltbringer, is the newest addition to these types of cards and does an exciting interpretation of Purphoros, God of the Forge.

If we can sneak in some of our other under-the-radar cards like Genesis Chamber, Warstorm Surge, or Uncivil Unrest, not only will we be able to shorten the number of iterations of the combo, but we can get ourselves on the fast track to another game.

Fool Me Twice Shame on Me

The second combo in this deck is vastly more involved than the first. We have more than one way to combine cards to use our "second" combo. The key part to the combo(s) is Dualcaster Mage. This creature allows us to not only catch an opponent off guard by flashing it in to copy something like a Counterspell, a piece of removal like Swords to Plowshares, or even a card like Demonic Tutor allowing us to grab the last piece we need for a win.

There are 34 combos within the Rakdos color combination using the card Dualcaster Mage, and we don't have all of them, but what we do have is a creature that can immediately come back thanks to our commander and multiple cards that allow us to win the game.

My favorite part of these combos is making an impossibly large number of copies of Dualcaster Mage and then passing the turn. The tokens will all sacrifice themselves and allow us to trigger cards like Mayhem Devil, Bastion of Remembrance, Agent of the Iron Throne and Funeral Room // Awakening Hall.

Wrap Up

Alesha, Who Laughs at Fate, might not be the easiest creature to lead a Rakdos Aristocrats strategy, but it's one of the newest. Foundations is one of the year's best sets and one of my favorites in recent memory. I expect to see a lot of Alesha as they are a fan favorite character, and I hope to see many of the cards from this set both in decks and leading them. We even have Evereth, Viceroy of Plunder, as part of our 99, and it could very easily be used as the commander for this same deck style, if not our exact build.

If you need more content about Foundations, check out the other articles I and many others have written on EDHREC and Commander's Herald.

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Nicholas Lucchesi

Player and lover of all Magic the Gathering formats. Forged in the fires of Oath of the Gatewatch expeditions. Always down to jam games with anyone and everyone. When not playing Magic I am doing something else equally, if not more nerdy.