(Sylvan Awakening | Art by Adam Paquette)

Commander's Most Unexpected Theme Park

Land cards are really popular in Commander. People love to show off their fancy lands, play funky, deep-cut utility lands, or debate the number of lands a deck should have. People love putting tons of lands into play, and it’s a defining feature of a format where people want the mana to do big, splashy things.

Then, after you put all those lands into play, there’s just no cooler way to win than having all of them turn into giant Elemental creatures and reduce your opposition to mulch!

A combined 83 total Anthousa and Jolrael players out there agree with me. Good on you.

Here on The Suite-est Thing we look at distinct packages of cards that can slot into a wide variety of decks to give them a new dimension. There’s a lot to be said for these “lands become creatures” effects as the icing on your strategic cake! One of the biggest problems when trying to win with creature beats in a multiplayer format is getting your army destroyed by Wrath of God effects.

A land-army has no such issues; it lies in wait, safe from all but Armageddon, until the time to strike has come. When you do pull the trigger, the lands you have in play effectively have haste, so you know you’re getting at least one big swing in. Plus, when you consider the amount of land most green Commander decks end up controlling, you may not even need a second swing at all!

Lay of the Land

As usual, the EDHREC synergy ratings are a great place to start gathering our suite. Even when I have some obvious direction to take things, these ratings can catch subtle and unique connections between cards which might not otherwise come up. The key is to try and find a starting point, or “signpost card”, which is highly representative of your chosen theme.

Here are Anthousa, Setessan Hero’s High Synergy cards. There’s some decent stuff for our package already, but also some cards which are more relevant to the Heroic ability, or just generic green staples. But wait, what’s this?

Earth Surge’s effect is so specific to our theme that it can only synergize with other cards which care about lands being creatures in some way. The fact that it’s only in 36 total decks on EDHREC confirms this: you have to specifically be on this plan to play it. This is an ideal signpost card for our suite!

Let’s see what Earth Surge’s EDHREC page looks like:

Ah, perfect. Not only are we now thinking outside of just green cards, but we’ve got a really clear cross-section of how we can work land beatdown options into decks. Sylvan Advocate and Embodiment of Insight represent the straightforward green theme, emphasizing Landfall and ramp in general to build a large landbase/army. Sylvan Awakening is one of the best effects we can play, getting maximum payoff from our synergies for just three mana.

Building Suites vs Building Decks

Commitment level is something I’m always asking myself about when looking at these card suites. How can we include a useful theme at varying deckbuilding costs? It’s one thing to build a whole new deck around a theme, but not every theme is supported to that degree. Adding a new theme to an existing deck means every new card displaces an old one, so we need to make that replacement simple wherever we can.

Lands that can animate using their own ability can slot in easily over other dual lands we might play while also benefiting from the rest of our suite. Awaken spells are awesome because Planar Outburst can just slot in instead of Wrath of God. Same with Nissa, Who Shakes the World. This insanely powerful planeswalker is already a mana-doubler and creature-maker. Almost every green deck is playing those effects. It’s at worst a sidegrade to swap her in for something like Rampaging Baloths, and now we have more land-creatures to jam with!

A Luxury Suite at CreatureLand

What if we are looking to go deeper on this package? Enough to justify support cards like Terra Eternal and Earth Surge itself? We can look into the High Synergy sections of cards we’ve already identified for our suite for further inspiration.

Embodiment of Fury, another card that specifically buffs land-creatures, is a winner! One thing to notice is that every single card here has the word Elemental on it, and almost all of them also care about lands or land-creatures. In fact, many spells that make land-creatures also give them the Elemental typing. If we look at every Elemental tribal card as a support card for land-creatures, we find some fun inclusions.

Creeping Trailblazer is an effective lord for our land-creatures, and provides huge value if we can turn all the lands on at once with Sylvan Awakening. Zendikar’s Roil, Avenger of Zendikar, and Omnath, Locus of Rage help us build a more consistent army and get value from ramp spells. Between these and the Embodiments, Landfall is going to be a huge part of the strategy in this deck! Once we’re generating all these Elemental tokens, Risen Reef looks like pretty great value too!

Let’s change tack and check out the EDHREC Themes feature. It has a page for Elemental tribal, along with every other creature type.

Muldrotha, the Gravetide and Yarok, the Desecrated are on-type and let us replay key lands and enablers or double up Landfall triggers, respectively. Incandescent Soulstoke provides another stat buff to our lands, so we might end up playing it if we’re committing heavily to Elementals. Unfortunately, anything that refers to an “Elemental card” or “Elemental spell” is going to fall flat, since our land-creatures are neither.

Off the Beaten Path

While I value the inspiration I get from these High Synergy sections, there will always be high-value cards they miss. Readers of my first The Suite-est Thing pointed out that my Damage Redirection deck was missing the various en-Kor creatures, which have a powerful interaction with Boros Reckoner and friends. I take this as a reminder that there’s always another sweet card to find!

We can’t do this without good old Gumby.

In this case, we want to track down more ways to turn our lands into creatures efficiently, repeatedly, and en masse. Liege of the Tangle was somehow not in any of our High Synergy screengrabs despite being an Elemental and turning our lands into the biggest creatures ever. Titania, Protector of Argoth is another extremely pushed Elemental with highly synergistic text. Chandra, Novice Pyromancer gives a great buff to Elementals, and sometimes she ramps us. Cards like Roil Elemental and Omnath, Locus of the Roil don’t directly help our land-creatures but do benefit from our ramp and Elemental synergies.

Rude Awakening and Life//Death are the effects we most crave redundancy for: mass land animation. Natural Emergence is the best of the lot, since it’s a constant static ability, which then makes cards like Soul of the Harvest strong. Natural Affinity, Living Plane, and Nature’s Revolt are symmetrical land animators that we'll be better able to take advantage of than our opposition. None of these make our land-creatures Elementals, but there are ways to fix that.

Quirion Druid, Balduvian Frostwaker, Verdant Touch, Waker of the Wilds, Wakeroot Elemental, and Woodwraith Corrupter all allow for repeated, permanent transfiguring of lands into creatures. Siege of Towers isn’t repeatable, but it is efficient. All of these permanent versions of land animation carry the same pros and cons: we save mana and cards we would spend animating them again in future, but lose our advantage against sweepers. On the temporary animation side, Kamahl, Fist of Krosa is worth singling out for efficiency and utility, and Nissa, Worldwaker is a viable win condition.

Renovate or Build?

Having more extensively explored the possible support for a land-creature theme, let’s see how easy it is to create in practice. First, I wanted to demonstrate how a lighter package can be added into an existing Commander deck to give it a new dimension. I used EDHREC's Average Deck function to grab a quick sample of a Multani, Yavimaya’s Avatar deck from EDHREC to use as a starting point.

As an Elemental who cares about having many lands in play, I figured an average Multani deck would dovetail nicely with our land-creature suite. Sure enough, this sample deck already plays a few cards we want: Nissa, Who Shakes the World, Zendikar’s Roil, The Mending of Dominaria, and even Sylvan Awakening itself! That’s a great start, but let’s look at some easy changes where we can bring in cards from our suite as sidegrades.

There’s a surprising lack of Nissas in this deck! Nissa, Vital Force is a cheap and proactive draw engine for Landfall strategies. Nissa, Worldwaker seems like at least a sidegrade to a creature like Kalonian Twingrove. Apart from an insane ceiling for Greater Good sacrifices, I’d rather have a cheaper permanent that pumps out 4/4s and gives me mana. Similarly, Embodiment of Insight gels well with the Landfall cards in the deck and can replace Crash of Rhino Beetles, another more generic land payoff. Hunting Wilds is literally a strictly better Ranger’s Path! Titania, Protector of Argoth has a similar cost and ramping effect to Ulvenwald Hydra, and combines nicely with all the Harrow effects present.

In the manabase, we can swap in some of the self-animating lands available to mono-green over the current nonbasics. Treetop Village is a green mana producer, and Mutavault and Mobilized District are highly efficient. Hostile Desert is unfortunately a nonbo with Multani trying to stock the yard, so we’ll leave it at home.

After that, we have to make some more difficult decisions and look at cards that might be less harmonious with the new theme and replace them with essential suite cards. Jolrael, Empress of Beasts is a powerhouse finisher and Multani’s ability ensures you can always feed her fuel. Kamahl, Fist of Krosa is welcome in any green deck that attacks. Sylvan Advocate and Earth Surge ensure that our animation spells will be game-ending. Nature’s Revolt, Living Plane, and Rude Awakening give us further ways to animate our team. Splendid Reclamation and World Shaper, while not strictly part of our suite, provide insurance against our lands getting Wrathed, and they squeeze more value out of any land-self-sacrificing we may utilize.

So that’s what it looks like when we spruce up an existing deck with only a few changes! We managed to get most of the exciting green cards from our suite in there.

But what if we took things all the way? What if we didn't want to update an existing deck, but build from scratch? Can we build an entire 99-card deck of land-creature and Elemental synergies?

Yes, yes we can. This is far from an optimal list, although I have tried to balance it a bit (feel free to suggest better options in the comments).

I do want to point out a couple of my favorite cute interactions, though. First, using Awaken to put +1/+1 counters on a land that we then animate with other abilities can make the creature quite mighty, especially if it is also unblockable, or if it has double strike or Infect. If you enjoy this, I recommend adding in Noyan Dar, Roil Shaper.

Second, while Natural Affinity, Living Plane, and most of our similar mass-animation effects are symmetrical, Massacre Wurm and Elesh Norn, Grand Cenobite are not. These already-infamous permanents are especially tough to handle when nobody else has lands in play!

Anyhow, that’s our suite for the day. While there are few cards which refer directly to land-creatures, there turns out to be a large pool of cards which subtly support this theme. There’s even room for a variety of playstyles and decks to utilize them in different ways. Consider a Noyan Dar Spellslinger deck that Awakens a huge Inkmoth Nexus or Celestial Colonnade, or perhaps consider a Bant Enchantress deck that powers out lands with Burgeoning and Exploration, then assembles some combination of Terra Eternal, Nature’s Revolt, and tons of anthems!

If by some chance your deck doesn’t have any angle to include a land creature package, no matter. Chances are you’ll be able to find some suite new tech in next month’s The Suite-est Thing!

Tom Anderson

Tom Anderson has been brewing and battling since 2004, when his school friend showed up to lunch with a pile of strange playing cards. A lifetime white mage, he has a strong affinity for the Orzhov and Boros colour combinations, as well as hatebear and midrange decks more generally. His favourite Commanders are ones which unlock unique card options and playstyles, including Jaya Ballard, Task Mage and Karona, False God.