Rukarumel, Ally Biologist

Archidekt Link

Welcome to another deck from the Sunday Stream! This week, we're building around Rukarumel, Biologist, our first five-color commander, and a face commander of the Silvers precon deck from Commander Masters. However, if you're familiar with this series, you probably already know that this is not a Slivers deck.

However, do you know what creature type behaves a bit like slivers and is friendly to kindred-typal decks? Allies. Allies typically have an ability that reads as something to the effect "when (creature) or another Ally enters the battlefield, do (effect) X number of times where X is equal to the number of Allies you control." While not a static effect like we see with Slivers, Allies typically having ETB effects can be very powerful, especially if we're able to trigger them multiple times.

Core Allies

The first items on the menu are the core Ally creatures that we want to center our deck around. Typically, we like to build our decks around the fun stuff first and take care of the "veggies" later, but given that we're specifically building around an Ally core, it makes sense to solidify those first.

Drana, Liberator of Malakir is one of the few creatures in the deck that focus on combat damage-related buffs, but this one has the potential to turn a heavy swing into a full-on lethal strike, adding a +1/+1 counter to all of your attacking creatures after the first strike phase, meaning most of your creatures will get the buff before damage.

Hagra Diabolist has an ETB that drains an opponent for life equal to the number of Allies you control. It's simple and straightforward, but it is powerful enough to remove a player in one fell swoop.

Harabaz Druid is an any-color mana dork that scales to produce more and more mana as you accumulate a board state.

Kalastria Healer is similar to Zulaport Cutthroat (which is also in the deck), but generates that ability on ETB and when any other Ally enters, making it far more powerful than Zulaport in our Ally-focused deck.

Kazuul Warlord essentially acts as a Cathar's Crusade for Ally creatures. Some people don't like the bookkeeping that can come with effects like this, but they're inarguably powerful.

Ondu Cleric is simple, straightforward life gain in potentially significant quantities.

Sea Gate Loremaster is a nice, repeatable draw engine that scales to draw more cards as the game goes on. We can basically recreate the best part of The One Ring without the downside of the damage or the massive price tag.

Turntimber Ranger is half of a few infinite combo pieces that are built into this deck which eventually produces infinite 2/2 Wolf creature tokens.

Slivers

I know, I know. I said this wasn't a Sliver deck, AND IT STILL ISN'T, but given that our commander has some nice built-in Sliver synergy, it makes sense to at least include a few good utility Slivers that can help us at any point in the game.

Manaweft Sliver and Gemhide Sliver both act as scaleable, any-color mana dorks that can pay off big-time later in the game if we have Sliver declared as a creature type on the commander or any of the kindred synergy pieces that I will talk about below.

Hatchery Sliver Hatchery Slivers gives all of our Sliver spells (which would be everything if we have Slivers declared as the creature type for our commander), replicate, which essentially is an early version of the newer offspring mechanic from Bloomburrow, giving us copies of our creature spells by paying extra mana.

Kindred Synergy (and Turntimber Ranger Combo Pieces)

In this deck, all four of these do roughly the same thing, which is to allow us to synergize our Ally and non-Ally creatures when Rukarumel is not on the board, or if she is and we need a different creature type declared. As long as we have any of these effects on the board with Ally declared as the creature type in the case of Reflections of Littjara, Conspiracy, and Xenograft, Turntimber Ranger will create an infinite number of tokens since each new one results in an Ally entering the battlefield. Maskwood Nexus is obviously a one-stop-shop for any creature type we'll need.

Fun Toys

As mentioned before, replicate and offspring both give us the ability to create token copies of any Ally we cast by just adding a little extra mana, so Zinnia, Valley's Voice is a natural fit in here for us.

Omo, Queen of Vesuva is a great fit for this deck, because her everything counters can simultaneously color-fix our mana base and give our creatures all creature types.

Intruder Alarm is a classic combo piece, and will potentially give us the ability for huge, explosive turns by untapping mana dorks and draw engines whenever a creature enters the battlefield.

Realmbreaker, the Invasion Tree is a very underrated artifact that acts as repeatable ramp by stealing lands from our opponents. If we're able to build up enough of a mana base and have Maskwood Nexus or another way to make all of our creatures Praetors, then we could use the big ten-mana ability from Realmbreaker and dump every creature in our deck directly onto the battlefield, which is essentially an auto-win.

Closing Summary

This deck is a really neat foray into five colors and a kindred strategy, both of which are very atypical to the decks we build. The Ally strategy should give us consistent value throughout the game while we accumulate value via all of our different ETB effects. This deck is a higher budget than we typically build, but we prioritized putting together a fun and creative deck over meticulously abiding by our $50 budget. If it's any indicator as to how fun this deck should be, Jason actually bought the deck from himself while we were streaming.

Levi Stevenson

Since first dipping his toes into Commander a a few years ago, Levi has consistently made a point to avoid making a whole bunch of the same kind of deck by brewing lots of different color combinations, only to discover that he just has token decks in almost every color combination. When not playing or talking about Magic, you can find him playing drums in a cover band, writing and talking about Iowa State athletics, or embarrassing his wife in public with outrageously dumb jokes.