This article concludes our series on playing Eldrazi in Commander alongside the recent release of a bunch of new ones in Modern Horizons 3. If you haven’t read our previous article on Morophon, the Boundless, you can find it here.
Azlask, the Swelling Scourge is a new commander printed in Modern Horizons 3, helpfully built to support an Eldrazi Spawn/Scion deck. Or an artifact creature deck. There’s actually nothing in him that requires you to use Eldrazi, you could use him to support Mir or any generic artifact creatures or thopters, really anything colorless. Staying on theme is fun though, and Aslask is an Eldrazi, so Eldrazi it is.
There are 8 other experience counter generators, based on, respectively: enchantments, small creatures entering, casting large creatures, killing creatures, creatures dying, permanents leaving the field, casting instants or sorceries, and uh, attacking and making Rebels (which are colored creatures). Experience counters don’t care about who is “using” them, so they stack on top of each other pretty successfully, and at this point I’m guessing WotC is pretty wary of printing too many more experience cards because they have the danger of getting out of control. On the other hand, none of them do anything all that powerful, or if they do so they have large casting costs to slow them down, so they aren’t game-wrecking creatures.
The power of Azlask is also the weakness in that he’s a 5-color commander, though with a colorless casting cost and only a WUBRG activated ability his 5-color identity is easy to get onto the field and start amassing experience counters. Thankfully the experience counters go on you, and not Azlask, so removing him is only medium threatening to your plans and will actually get you a counter. On the other hand, if he’s not on the field you can’t get more experience counters from him nor activate his ability.
Azlask games are almost inevitably going to follow a formula of getting him out, casting a couple of land searches and getting a couple of enablers, and then getting some creature deaths either through sacrificing your own Spawns and Scions for mana or feeding them as blocking chumps or throwing them at your opponents in the hope they will get killed. There are a few sources of sacrifice in the deck, so you generally want to search for one of your creatures that generates 3 Scions or Spawns on entrance, then sacrifice that again and reanimate.
Your search targets are generally
- Spawn-Gang Commander – probably the best choice
- Brood Monitor
- Emrakul’s Hatcher
Once you have one, you can use it again as a sacrifice so it’ll be in your graveyard for later reanimation. You’ll generally want to grab your Smothering Abomination, though may also find yourself wanting to tutor up Fiend Artisan as it is itself a sacrifice and search source.
Your creature tutors are:
There are some other sources of sacrifice, in
- Flare of Cultivation – land tutor
- Smothering Abomination – card draw
- Eldrazi Monument
Once you’ve gotten a couple of creatures going, you need to ramp up enough to be able activate Azlask’s activated ability which costs WUBRG, so you’ll need one of every color mana. The deck features all the 3-cost sorcery land tutors (okay, all the good ones):
- Kodama’s Reach
- Cultivate
- Flare of Cultivation – allows you to sacrifice a creature
- Primal Growth – allows you to sacrifice a creature
Playing this deck you’ll need to manage your Scions and Spawns as a resource. They are your source of combat damage, but also potentially sources of tutors and draws and experience counters. To win the game you’ll need to deal something like 120 combat damage, which takes a fair number of buffed creatures. Ten 10/10s is around enough, but technically you need eleven 11/11’s to kill everyone in one combat, though this would also require you to not be blocked and have no-one gain any life.
In any case, this deck will probably have to grind out some victories over successive combats. There are effects like Door of Destinies, Titans’ Vanguard, Mondrak, Glory Dominus, and Panharmonicon all of which serve as multipliers, and one or more such multipliers will probably be necessary.
A good starting hand will include a Forest and at least one other land, and hopefully a land tutor. Other than that you don’t care too much, you’ll draw into useful cards and things to cast. The deck is fairly consistent with quite a few low cost enablers or buffers, generating some triggers, damage, or ramp, and then around 5 cost creatures that generate multiple tokens or multiple effects.
Once your board state is developed you’ll want to hold up mana to protect your creatures from a board wipe. The deck has quite a few sources of indestructible for all your creatures and these generally cost 2, which means trying to husband a bit of mana or else risk losing everything you’ve got. However, even if this happens you should generate a huge amount of experience counters, which means once Azlask comes back out and you get a few tokens they should be pretty dangerous.
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