MTG Commander of the Week: Elenda, the Dusk Rose
Check out a new featured Commander to add to your build list! This week features Elenda, the Dusk Rose, a vampire from Ixalan who grants power from death, even her own.
Welcome Planeswalkers and Praetors to our new series about the best casual experience in Magic: Commander. For the uninitiated, Commander is a semi-casual format for Magic: the Gathering. You use a deck of 100 cards led by a legendary creature, aka, 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 an excellent source for Commander info and can give you ideas to build your next Commander deck or tune an existing one.
The Commander
A vampiric conquistador from Ixalan, Elenda is one of the most popular Vampire typal Commanders on the market. While she’s a bit pricey for a 1/1, you shouldn’t be thinking of her exclusively as a combat powerhouse. She can certainly GET there, but she doesn’t start that way. A 1/1 with lifelink isn’t much to go on, but watch what happens when creatures start dying.
Whenever a creature dies, on either side of the game board, Elenda gets a little bit bigger. In an aristocrat deck, that 1/1 can become a 5/5 in no time, but that isn’t where Elenda’s nastiness ends. When SHE dies, you get 1/1 lifelink Vampires equal to her power. If a bunch of other creatures have died before that, you’ll get an army of bloodsuckers to buffer your board. After that, you can just cast her again and start feeding her those tokens you made.
Featured Cards
A similar piece to Elenda, Elenda’s Hierophant trades out lifelink for flying and drops the extra color. Her ability is based on life gain rather than creature death, so she’ll get bigger any time you get more life. This makes her the perfect companion to Elenda since she gives you life whenever she hits something. Like her namesake, once she dies, you get a boatload of Vampire tokens. If you have something that can bring her back (it’s Orzhov, you do), you can cycle her and make a nasty army of powerful critters.
Elenda is making a lot of tokens, so you want something that will make those tokens bigger. Cathar’s Crusade buffs all your creatures any time another creature hits the field. If you still have Elenda out, that means more creatures when she dies, but even if you don’t, that means the tokens she makes will get stronger and stronger. Watch your one woman army turn into an unstoppable force in no time.
MTG is ever-changing, with new busted and broken cards rising to the top. Check back in next week for another featured Commander.
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