MTG: Top Five EDH – Selesnya (GW) Commanders
Just because a creature is small doesn’t mean it’s weak. And it probably has a lot of friends. Let’s talk Selesnya (Green/White) Commanders.
Welcome Planeswalkers and Praetors to our ongoing series about the best casual experience in Magic: Commander. For the uninitiated, Commander is a semi-casual format for Magic: the Gathering, where you use a deck of 100 cards led by a legendary creature, your Commander.
Aside from basic lands, you are only allowed one copy of each card in the deck. Moreover, you can only include cards in your Commander’s “color identity” or artifacts. Each color and color combo has a unique playstyle and a wealth of mighty generals to lead your deck to victory. EDHRec.com is a great source for Commander info and can give you ideas to build your next Commander deck or tune an existing one.
Creature tokens are a common theme in Commander, and there are few combos that do it better than Selesnya. The combination of creature generation from White with buff magic from Green means you can generate a lot of little guys and turn them into big guys in no time. Of course, token spam is far from the only thing Selesnya is good at. Enchantress, lifegain, and counters are big as well, but they don’t hold a candle to the Token Tribal punch of this color match. If you want to play a bit more of the long game and unleash an army of cute fuzzy monsters, this is the clan for you.
Sythis, Harvest’s Hand
The queen of the Enchantress archetype, Sythis is gaining increased popularity thanks to the reintroduction of Enchantment Creatures in Commander Masters. It’s a lot easier to get the benefits of Sythis’s abilities when even your creatures are triggering it. Plus, with just a few Constellation adds to the deck, you can get triggers on top of triggers whenever one of your enchantments hits the field. If you can double those ETBs, then you’ll overpower your opponent in no time.
Kyler, Sigardian Emissary
Humans are becoming extremely popular thanks to all the buffs from the Lord of the Rings set, and Kyler is seeing a huge uptick. He self-buffs, buffs all your Humans, and has a ton of synergy with both Backup and Proliferate strategies. Of course, the best way to play Kyler is typal, allowing you to make all your tiny creatures enormous to overwhelm your opponents in a human tidal wave. It’s almost like playing Slivers, except you won’t immediately get hated off the table.
Arahbo, Roar of the World
Not the strongest of typal Commanders, Arahbo still has a high position thanks to Eminence. With that, he doesn’t even need to be on the battlefield for his primary ability, turning one of your Cats into a full-on Sabretooth Tiger. Of course, if he IS on the battlefield, he can make that Cat even deadlier, doubling its power and giving it trample. Most Cats are 2/2, so with Arahbo’s two abilities, you’ll be swinging in with a 10/10 trample Cat. If you have ANY buffs at all (and in these colors, you will), you can unleash a feline cruise missile that would make the UN take notice.
Trostani, Selesnya’s Voice
If there are two things Selesnya loves, it’s gaining life and making creatures. Trostani does both, giving you life based on the toughness of your creatures as they enter the battlefield and giving you new copies of tokens. Combined with generators like Helm of the Host or Myriad, you can pump out a ton of critters and gain more life off their backs. Put some Walls in the deck for cheap, high toughness creatures and you’ll have an unreachable level of life in no time.
Karametra, God of Harvests
Ah ramp; the thing Green is famous for. While Karametra isn’t amazing on her own, she dodges board wipes and boosts Landfall. Should your devotion get high enough, a 6/7 beater certainly isn’t nothing, but that’s not why you have her in the Command Zone. You can beat out your opponent on lands in no time, allowing you to drop your bigger beaters, trigger landfall effects, and potentially dig for important lands. After all, it never specified BASIC Forest or Plains…
