Najeela, the Blade-Blossom is, in plain terms, a scary commander. Running her allows you access to the WUBRG good stuff, but on her own she only costs one red mana to get in play and has a mana cost of a mere three. Once she hits the board as a 3/2, she’s not particularly scary alone, but she’s essentially never alone because of her triggered ability to create a 1/1 Warrior tapped and attacking whenever a Warrior attacks. This leads to a fairly scary curve, where Najeela attacks, generates one Warrior, the next attack Najeela and that Warrior each create an additional Warrior, and so on. 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128. That’s it, eight attacks and you’ve done plenty of damage to kill everyone else in the pod. In fact you’ll generally get there in seven attacks or even fewer, assuming you haven’t lost any Warriors along the way.
This situation is inherently threatening. Najeela can easily roll out turn 2, and start hitting turn 3. And the game is now on a clock. There’s a downside here, which is of course many people will react by killing Najeela, and on her own she isn’t particularly big. 3/2 with no evasion, no first strike or death touch. Her active ability can give out trample, lifelink, and haste, to all attacking creatures. Lean into this. Throw Najeela out there and protect her. Pressure any opponents who use life as a resource to run their decks.
Of course, that geometric progression on it’s own would be scary, but Najeela allows you to pay WUBRG and untap all attacking creatures, give them haste, trample, and lifelink, and there is an additional combat phase after this one. Which means if you can generate 5 mana (one of each color) by attacking, you can just keep attacking. Rather shockingly Najeela herself doesn’t have to attack to allow you to use this effect. Sure, she won’t be generating Warriors, but that means your opponents can’t like, throw their commander in her way and kill both of them.
Naturally, getting to a state where you can do that is a good target for Najeela decks, and it’s not really all that hard. There are several cards that in conjunction with permanents to pay the costs will get you there.
- Derevi, Empyrial Tactician is probably the easiest, especially since he untaps permanents, and so if you get permanents tapping for additional mana you can leverage that with him. Additionally, Derevi’s ability works by generating a bunch of single triggers, so you can untap the same permanent repeatedly due to his ability triggering off five Warriors hitting at once.
- Druids’ Repository generates a charge whenever a creature you control attacks. Now this means you can use the counters thus generated to give your attacking creatures haste, lifelink, and trample long before they hit, or even play games with untapping them if you have a good reason for that.
- Nature’s Will untaps all your lands whenever one or more creatures you control deal combat damage to a player, which means potentially up to three untaps in a single combat phase (okay six if you somehow end up with all kinds of double strike).
- Bear Umbra is okay, but has real blowout potential. You’re basically forced to throw it on Najeela, further incentivizing just killing Najeela. It also forces you to have enough lands in play to pay WUBRG, which isn’t always guaranteed.
- Sword of Feast and Famine similarly allows for a blowout, and also requires lands generating five mana.
- Grim Hireling gets a bit more tricky, you’ll need your creatures to be hitting three people to get enough Treasures to pay for WUBRG, and also requires you to not kill anyone off prematurely since you’ll drop from getting six Treasures per combat phase to four, once someone dies. Though by then you should have… a lot of Warriors.
- Professional Face-Breaker can generate up to 8 Treasures per combat, but you’d need double strike (four instances). Generally you won’t have that, but it can still generate enough tokens with something else you can get there.
- Warren Soultrader. Once you have five Warriors in play, you’ll generate five Warriors every combat which means you can sac five of them for Treasure, and in turn sac those five for mana. You’ll burn life, but Najeela’s ability gives lifelink, so you should be fine here.
- Baylen, the Haymaker is a complete stretch. You’d require 10 Warrior tokens (that don’t need to hit), but you can end there, and this Rabbit Warrior will let you use your tokens for card draw if you seem to be stalling out.
- Neyali, Suns’ Vanguard will give your tokens double strike, making it easier to win with Grim Hireling or Professional Facebreaker. It will also generate double triggers for some of your other untap effects, and you can pump these through Najeela if you want.
A lot of the deck is about bootstrapping into a place where you can generate infinite combat steps. Thus, all the land tutors. While these land tutors are a bit slow and cumbersome, so many of these infinite combos rely on having enough land out to generate WUBRG every time you attack and generate a trigger, so getting to five lands out ASAP is pretty critical. You could build a weird Land Tax, land matters version of this deck running the lands that tap for multiple mana, essentially the Ravnica block cycle. And I do love Land Tax, but there’s neither here nor there.
The other components of the deck are basically just ways to protect Najeela, protect your combo, or draw cards. Since you’ll be generating Warriors, you can feed them into your sacrifice / draw spells. If you can’t protect Najeela, turn targeted removal into a feels-bad moment by sacrificing Najeela in response, so people will be less likely to want to blow her up. Be careful though, once she hits seven or so mana to recast it starts to be really difficult to pop off.
For starting hands, you really want a forest. Forest, forest, forest. If your starting hand has no way to generate green mana you should seriously consider a mulligan, unless it has some way to fetch a green mana source. Secondly you’ll want a way to cast Najeela, so some red mana. Your tertiary need is some kind of card draw to keep from stalling out.
Other than it’s a fairly simple game plan. Ramp, Najeela, attack, draw into combo piece, protect Najeela and go infinite, GG.
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