Commander on a Budget with Ashling the Pilgrim

Between Vintage cards that cost hundreds of dollars a piece and some of the strangest deck building rules in Magic: the Gathering, Commander can be a tough format to break into. It’s also some of the most fun you can have with the game. Here’s a way to get started for under $75.

I think Magic players who are interested in Commander get hung up on a couple issues. First, some new players approach the format with the idea that a “casual” format is the same as a “budget” format, and get discouraged when they see established players running decks worth a couple thousand dollars. The biggest advantage money buys in Commander is the mana base, and the easiest work-around is to just play a single color, especially if it’s red. Red tend to be extra-cheap, because it gets a bad rap from some established players who consider it a newbie’s color. This works to your advantage though, since it means those players tend to undervalue red cards. Mono-red also just happens to have a perfect general for getting started in Commander.

Second, some new players get hung up on finding the “best” card for a deck, instead of just playing a card that’s good enough (and already on hand). So instead of giving you a list up front, I’m going to walk you through the card options first and show you how they fit together. That way, if you don’t have a particular card, you still have some suggestions for what to replace it with.

General: Ashling the Pilgrim

Besides being in the best budget color, Ashling gives the deck a solid 3-step plan to victory. First, she controls the board by burning creatures. Second, she advances towards a winning game state by burning players. Third, she easily becomes gigantic, which makes it easy for her to knock out other players when they get low on life. If you’re new to Commander, putting together a functional deck can be a real challenge, so having a general that with solid game plan makes it much easier to choose cards.

And as a bonus, she’s 75 cents.

Basic Mountains (35)

The "worst" card in Magic, but the best card in this deck. Ashling is going to soak up as many mountains as we can put in play, and since they're cheap, playing a lot of them saves money on the deck.

Other Lands (5-7): Buried Ruin, Ghost Quarter, Haunted Fengraf, Kher Keep, Mystifying Maze, Springjack Pasture, Terrain Generator, Tectonic Edge, Temple of the False God, Valakut, the Molten Pinnacle.

Most of these should be self-explanatory; they’re all value-producing, and they’re all for $1 or less. Ghost Quarter and Tectonic Edge are the highest priority to include. We don’t want to devote actual spell slots to land destruction (cards like Stone Rain are terrible in EDH), but something like Glacial Chasm could shut Ashling down, so it’s important to have answers. Since Valakut was just unbanned in Modern in may jump in price by $1-2, but any effect that counts the number of mountains you control is worth having in this deck.

Other Mana Sources (4-7): Armillary Sphere, Darksteel Ingot, Everflowing Chalice, Expedition Map, Foriysian Totem, Pristine Talisman, Traveler's Amulet, Wanderer's Twig, Wayfarer's Bauble

The best here are Armillary Sphere, Wayfarer’s Bauble, and Expedition Map, which are all excellent in EDH. Traveler’s Amulet and Wanderer’s Twig may look underwhelming, but they’re useful cantrips and they combo with Salvaging Station (more on that in a minute). Everflowing Chalice is sort of a delayed burn spell; if we have a lot of mana available and nothing to do with it, we can pump it all into a gigantic chalice and save it until we find an X-burn spell.

Boring Staples (6): Insurrection, Lightning Greaves, Loxodon Warhammer, Oblivion Stone, Sol Ring, Solemn Simulacrum

It seems like there are two extremes when it comes to EDH staples. In one group, you have players who want every deck to be totally unique, and have 17 different decks (none of which play the same two cards), including their super cool Brushwagg tribal deck. In the other group, you have players who surf up lists of “X Best EDH Staples,” take the top cards off the list, build a deck with the 89 “best” cards, add the 10 cards they need to flavor out the deck, and end up with 17 different decks that are all the same.

I fall somewhere in the middle. I agree it’s a little boring cramming the same few cards into every single deck, and that if you play the same twenty or thirty cards in every deck you build, then the format starts to get stale really fast. And I disagree with the “good stuff” argument that anyone needs to put cards in a deck, since really no one needs Magic cards. On the other hand, the best cards are the best cards. Many staples do something unique, and if you have them, your deck will run better. The goal is finding a balance between having a unique deck that will be new and fun for other players at your table, but will also play smoothly enough to be fun for you. The way to do that is to find just a few staples that spruce up your deck a without making it exactly the same as every other deck. I think these six cards fit that role.

The other thing about these is that they’re cheap. Insurrection is the single best finisher in red, and it’s only a dollar. Solemn Simulacrum is still going for $3-4, but since it's been through several reprints in the last year, there are plenty in circulation. On top of that, the sad robot is rotating out of standard, which will cut its price further and make it easier to trade for. Sol Ring is the trickiest card here. The new rings from the Commander pre-constructed decks are going for about $6-8 online. Your best bet may be to find a crusty old 3rd edition one, which occasionally go for as little as $3.50. (I love damaged or worn cards, since they can be less than half the price of a mint card. As long as they won't show through their sleeves, they're good to play, and that's the most important part.) Your Sol Ring and other staples are likely to use a lot of your budget, but since they fit in any EDH deck, they’ll transfer seamlessly to another deck even after you get tired of playing Ashling.

Money Cards (0-5): Basilisk Collar, Gauntlet of Power, Repercussion, Sculpting Steel, Thawing Glaciers

If you already own some or all of these cards, you should absolutely include them, but you probably need to consider carefully before you buy. Again, money is relative, these will eat into a budget quickly, since they all sell in the $4-$8 range. The other problem is that these cards don’t have a place in every metagame, and unlike your staple cards, they won’t necessarily translate well into other decks. For example, Gauntlet of Power and Thawing Glaciers are really powerful for Ashling, but they’re only good in mono-colored decks with a lot of basic lands. Since most EDH decks tend to be 2-3 colors, you might not get much use out of them when you’re ready to build a new deck. Repercussion is amazing if you’re playing Ashling against swarms of creatures, but if most of your friends play spell-heavy decks or rely on single, large creatures, you won’t get as much mileage out of it. Out of the five cards, Basilisk Collar and Sculpting Steel are the weakest in abstract, but they’re the most likely to be useful in other decks. If you plan on buying any of them, I would start with those two.

Mass Burn (4-9): Comet Storm, Earthquake, Fault Line, Jaws of Stone, Jiwari, the Earth Aflame, Lavaball Trap, Magmaquake, Molten Disaster, Starstorm

These are pretty self-explanatory; they all supplement the burn-and-control plan. Each has it’s own advantages, but they’re more or less interchangeable, and none of them cost much money. They also combo spectacularly with Repercussion against creature decks, so if you have a Repercussion, you want to be on the high end of this range.

Other Equipment (2-4): Blade of the Bloodchief, Darksteel Plate, Diviner's Wand, Explorer's Scope, Magebane Armor, Nim Deathmantle, Ring of Valkas, Scythe of the Wretched, Strata Scythe, Swiftfoot Boots, Whispersilk Cloak.

Don’t go crazy here. This deck is already very dependent on Ashling and has a low overall creature count, so there’s a risk that your equipment will be dead if you. This deck (and mono-red decks in general) are heavily dependent on artifacts, and overloading on artifacts increases the chance of getting shut down by an opponent playing a lot of artifact hate.

Steal and Copy Effects (5-10): Act of Aggression, Avarice Totem, Blind with Anger, Grab the Reins, Mass Mutiny, Mimic Vat, Reiterate, Reverberate, Wild Ricochet, Word of Seizing.

Steal and copy effects are the best reason to play Red in Commander. They are really powerful, and make the game a lot of fun. There are more good creature-stealing cards (like Unwilling Recruit); I’ve just listed out a few top options. And I try to pack in as many spell copying effects in my red decks as I can (except for Radiate; at 5 mana, it usually gets stuck in my hand).

Answers (10-20): Arena, Ashnod's Altar, Aura Barbs, Brittle Effigy, Burst Lightning, Char, Claws of Gix, Dead // Gone, Fling, Goblin Bombardment, Hammer of Bogardan, Into the Core, Junktroller, Lightning Bolt, Mogg Cannon, Mogg Salvage, Phyrexian Furnace, Pyroblast, Red Elemental Blast, Relic of Progenitus, Scrabbling Claws, Seismic Strike, Shattering Pulse, Shatterstorm, Shivan Harvest, Smash, Sudden Shock, Tormod's Crypt, Vandalblast, Voyager Staff.

There’s a lot of variety here, so I’m going to break it into smaller groups. For these, you need to tailor the answers you play to the group you play with, so consider this a general overview.

1. Sacrifice effects: These answer a few different problems. First, we want to kill the creatures we steal with. Second, we want to kill our own creatures in case anyone else tries to steal or copy them. And third, we want to have a way to sacrifice Ashling in response to an effect like Terminus that could put her on the bottom of our library (remember, if she dies, she goes to the Command zone where she’s easy to recast, but there’s no good way to get her out of the library). While Ashling can destroy herself with her own activated ability, it takes a lot of mana, so we need some cheaper ways to kill her. Ashnod's Altar, Claws of Gix, Fling, Goblin Bombardment, and Shivan Harvest are all good options for this job.

1. Graveyard control: This is a tough area for red decks, and our artifacts have to carry the entire load for us. Relic of Progenitus is the most powerful in abstract, but each card here has a few assets. Junktroller’s high toughness make it a handy wall in addition being a good answer. Phyrexian Furnace, Scrabbling Claws, and Tormod’s Crypt all partner with Salvaging Station, and the furnace and claws station generate valuable card advantage with the station.

1. Spot removal: Even though Ashling and the mass burn spells will be pretty good at controlling the board, it’s still important to have a few emergency outs. There are more direct burn options than I can list here, but a few good ones are Arena, Brittle Effigy, Burst Lightning, Char, Dead // Gone, Hammer of Bogardan, Lightning Bolt, Seismic Strike,Sudden Shock.

1. Artifact hate: As above, red has more ways to kill artifacts than I can list here, but Into the Core, Shattering Pulse, and Smash are a few of my favorites. The exile effect on the first is pretty hand, and the other two are great at maintaining card parity. Vandalblast, the new overload spell from Return to Ravnica looks great. Don’t be afraid of Shatterstormeither. There will be games where the other players have more or higher quality artifacts than you will, and Shatterstorm is an easy out.

1. Other answers: A few of these don't fit neatly in any category. I play Red Elemental Blast and Pyroblast in all of my red EDH decks (in other words, all of my EDH decks). I realize they seem like narrow cards, but it's rare that I sit down to play a game with three other people and have none of them play blue. If you put them in your deck, you will find a use for them. Aura Barbs is reasonably self-explanatory; in general, the color red is bad at dealing with enchantments, so sometimes the easiest solution is to just get rid of the guy playing all the enchantments. Voyager Staff combos with Ashling; in response to activating her ability for the third time, you can exile her with the staff so that she dodges the damage. You can also use it to blink creatures with enters-the-battlefield abilities, or blink enemy creatures to prevent them from attacking (or to strip them of equipment or auras).

Other Creatures (10-15): Akroma, Angel of Fury, Anarchist, Artisan of Kozilek, Charmbreaker Devils, Conquering Manticore, Crater Hellion, Hoard-Smelter Dragon, Inferno Titan, Kumano, Master Yamabushi, Jaya Ballard, Task Mage, Magma Phoenix, Magus of the Arena, Malignus, Ryusei, the Falling Star, Shivan Hellkite, Steel Hellkite, Vulshok Battlemaster.

This is a low creature count for most decks, but this build doesn’t need too many creatures. Their main role will be supporting what the deck already does well: burning the board, killing creatures, smashing artifacts, and occasionally punching for damage. Basically, the plan is to play out fatties one at at a time, let them wreck as much as possible, and then play another when the first gets blown up. There are also a couple utility creatures here like Anarchist and Charmbreaker Devils that I like a lot, since red doesn’t have too many ways to reuse cards from its graveyard. If you end up with a large number of “damage each creature without flying” X-burn spells, you may want to use as many flyers as possible

Other Good Stuff (5-8): Caged Sun, Downhill Charge, Dreamstone Hedron, Farsight Mask,Fatal Frenzy, Gilded Lotus, Gratuitous Violence, Journeyer's Kite, Reforge the Soul, Recoup, Salvaging Station, Savage Beating, Spire Barrage, Staff of Nin.

The top cards here are Caged Sun (amazing in any mono-colored deck), Gratuitous Violence (amazing with Ashling and your other creatures), and Salvaging Station. The station isn’t obviously powerful in the same way the sun is, but with a dozen artifacts to pair with it, it gives you a tool for grinding out card and mana advantage in long games, which is something red decks are usually bad at. If the idea doesn’t appeal to you, you can leave off the station and some of the other 1-mana artifacts (like Wanderer’s Twig or Scrabbling Claws), and run different cards from this group with a similar function like Journeyer’s Kite or Staff of Nin.

If I were putting it all together, it would look like this:

Lands:

35 Basic Mountain

1 Buried Ruin

1 Ghost Quarter

1 Haunted Fengraf

1 Mystifying Maze

1 Terrain Generator

1 Temple of the False God

1 Valakut, the Molten Pinnacle

Creatures:

1 Akroma, Angel of Fury

1 Artisan of Kozilek

1 Conquering Manticore

1 Crater Hellion

1 Hoard-Smelter Dragon

1 Jiwari, the Earth Aflame

1 Magma Phoenix

1 Malignus

1 Ryusei, the Falling Star

1 Solemn Simulacrum

1 Steel Hellkite

Other Spells:

1 Armillary Sphere

1 Caged Sun

1 Claws of Gix

1 Darksteel Ingot

1 Earthquake

1 Everflowing Chalice

1 Expedition Map

1 Fault Line

1 Fling

1 Gauntlet of Power

1 Goblin Bombardment

1 Grab the Reins

1 Gratuitous Violence

1 Insurrection

1 Jaws of Stone

1 Lightning Greaves

1 Loxodon Warhammer

1 Magebane Armor

1 Molten Disaster

1 Oblivion Stone

1 Phyrexian Furnace

1 Reforge the Soul

1 Reiterate

1 Relic of Progenitus

1 Repercussion

1 Reverberate

1 Salvaging Station

1 Scrabbling Claws

1 Seismic Strike

1 Shattering Pulse

1 Smash

1 Sol Ring

1 Spire Barrage

1 Strata Scythe

1 Swiftfoot Boots

1 Tormod's Crypt

1 Traveler's Amulet

1 Vandalblast

1 Voyager Staff

1 Wanderer's Twig

1 Wayfarer's Bauble

1 Wild Ricochet

1 Word of Seizing

There’s a neat pricing tool over at Magic Game Plan (http://magicgameplan.com/mtg-deck-pricing-tool/) that pulls the average price of cards listed on eBay and gives you a total for it; his list comes up to $62 as of 9/26/2012. If you bought the entire list from mainstream website would put you a little higher (I got totals between $65 and $70 before shipping and handling.) If you bought the deck in store, the upfront total would be a little higher still, but you wouldn’t have to sweat the S&H. And with the Dragon’s Den player’s reward program ($10 in credit for every $100 you spend), you’ll end up ahead if you hang out at the store for a while. So if you’re looking for an easy way to get into Commander, give this a try.

Daniel Stockton lives, works, and goofs off in the Hudson Valley. He once won a game day without playing any Jaces in his deck