Dealing Lethal Commander Damage With Commander Eesha

Commander Eesha | Art by Rebecca Guay

Welcome to Technically Playable, where our mission statement is "Every commander is Technically playable" (the best kind of playable). The way this works is every article will have a commander generated using EDHREC's random button, I'll talk through the card and then write about how we can build around it.

This week's random commander is Commander Eesha.

Eesha is one of those cards that feels like it was made for Technically Playable. An inefficient mana cost to effect ratio alongside a very niche ability that can be built around. Our absolute bread and butter.

Rebecca Guay is also one of my all-time favorite artists, so I'm always happy to turn any "bad" card she has done art for into a powerhouse.

Protecting the Bird

Protection from creatures is an amazing ability that allows us to not only avoid any creature-based targeted abilities and get through any blockers with no worries, but it also means Eesha ignores any damage that would be dealt to it from creatures.

Enter: Pariah. One of my favorite personal decks is my Wayta, Trainer Prodigy deck that plays around Brash Taunter and cards like Pariah. We can take a lot of inspiration from that deck here and build a deck that keeps us alive, pretty much forever.

With Eesha, this gets dialed up to 11 with every card that redirects creature damage to Commander Eesha being an effective Fog. The permanents that do this obviously give us the most value. I've already mentioned Pariah, but the downside with that is that if Eesha is removed, you lose the Aura forever.

Enter: Pariah's Shield. For a higher upfront cost, we instead get a repeatable Pariah that we can put onto any creature we play.

But we can't just rely on Pariah-style effects forever; Swords to Plowshares is legal in the format. We need to make sure that Eesha sticks around to take all of the damage.

Blasphemous Act is one of the most popular board wipes in the format (in fact, it's the 10th most played card, overall). The Wanderer does double duty in this deck by providing noncombat damage protection and also being able to remove any troublesome threats we might otherwise not be able to deal with.

Vexilus Praetor is another one that works really well to protect Eesha, acting as a great partner to Bastion Protector to ensure our commander lives.

Blocking the Boards

Redirecting damage isn't the only way we can protect ourselves, though; there's always good old-fashioned blocking. Well, kind of "good old-fashioned." Realistically, what we're going to do is abuse effects that let us block additional creatures to make the most of our protection from creatures.

Entangler and Brave the Sands are always my go-to cards for this. Entangler lets you block as many as you want, while Brave the Sands lets you play aggressively at the same time, allowing you to protect yourself while still being able to play with a defensive mindset.

We can also run some creatures that have similar effects. Hundred-Handed One (a little bit of bias from me since it was one of the first rares I ever opened) as well as Guardian of the Gateless and Wall of Glare are all great options of creatures that don't need Entangler to block an entire board.

The unfortunate thing is that neither of these has any kind of protection, so they will need something like Darksteel Plate or Avacyn, Angel of Hope to effectively block lots of creatures.

We can also use the en-Kor cards, like Nomads en-Kor, or my personal favorite Shaman en-Kor. All of these en-Kor creatures have the same zero mana ability that allows us to redirect damage from them to another creature. This means we can block any size of creature with our extremely cheap blockers and redirect all of that damage to Commander Eesha.

We can also run Cho-Manno, Revolutionary and Dawn Elemental as other backup Eeshas that we can also redirect damage from noncreature sources to.

I really like Shaman en-Kor because it allows you to not only redirect damage from itself to another creature, but from other creatures to it. This means we can save Eesha from noncreature damage like Blasphemous Act for the low, low cost of two mana.

Winning the Game With Commander Eesha

As always, I like to make sure that there is some way that these commanders can actually win games. I'm all for playing durdley decks that do nothing most of the time (I have an Angus Mackenzie deck...), but it's important that those decks aren't just slowing everyone else down, and are actually working towards some kind of goal.

As I mentioned above, this deck will rely a lot on Commander Eesha's inability to be blocked as our main pathway to victory. Cards like Inquisitor's Flail work particularly well with Eesha, allowing us to deal more damage while having a downside that we simply ignore since we cannot be blocked (and if Eesha blocks, we ignore the damage anyway). But Eesha is pretty small, only a 2/4, so we need some extra heft behind these attacks.

Blackblade Reforged is normally my go-to since you benefit from just playing the game. But since we are a single-colored deck, we can leverage Strata Scythe by exiling a Plains to make sure we get a huge amount of additional power and toughness as the game goes longer.

And of course, we can go with the simple beat sticks to buff Eesha. Ogre's Cleaver is a very simple but elegant way to get Eesha to that key power of seven that allows us to kill our opponents in three attacks while Colossus Hammer makes Eesha a two-shot kill and thanks to our protection from creatures losing flying is basically irrelevant.

We can play a couple of underutilized cards in this deck to really good effect. Sublime Archangel turns all of our little utility creatures like Nomads en-Kor or Guardian of the Gateless into buffs for Eesha and Rammas Echor, Ancient Shield, while not quite as powerful as Sublime Archangel, has the benefit of allowing us to create a board of Walls to help us survive if Eesha is removed. Rammas Echor also lets us run cards like Wall of Glare or even Wall of Omens without the downside of them not actually helping us to win the game.

The way I'd choose to win is an easy one, just like my Wayta, Trainer Prodigy deck: turn my opponents' power against them. While Eesha doesn't have access to Brash Taunter, and sadly also doesn't have access to hybrid mana cards like Boros Reckoner or Spitemare, Phyrexia: All Will be One has given us something almost as good in the form of Phyrexian Vindicator.

Using cards like Pariah's Shield or even Gideon's Sacrifice or General's Regalia we can easily turn our opponents' boards against them in a real Deflecting Palm vs Emrakul, the Aeons Torn style moment, allowing us to turn the tables on decks that have access to more powerful creatures than us.

Of course, you can also just run something like Approach of the Second Sun or The Millennium Calendar, but I'll save talking more about those until I get a real pillow fort commander.

As with all Technically Playable articles, this was a very quick look at Commander Eesha as a commander, and a few of the cards that can really make a deck with Eesha as the commander tick. Let me know in the comments below if you play Commander Eesha, if you want to build a Commander Eesha deck, or even if you just enjoyed this article!