Reya Reanimate (EDH / Commander)

Reya Dawnbringer is, unfortunately, a pretty terrible commander. She has quite a powerful ability but, at CMC 9 in monowhite, it's pretty hard to get her onto the battlefield, let alone to get back to your upkeep with her. Cards like Debtors' Knell kind of make us cry. This might be why, at time of writing, she's in a mere 19 decks on EDHRec (0.004%).

This deck is an attempt to make her at least playable, building around her renanimation theme. White actually has some pretty competitive "return to battlefield" spells, so pitching big creatures into the graveyard and then cheating them back out is viable. Reya herself is more expensive than most of the payoffs so she's not exactly cheating anything, but she does allow it to be done repeatably.

Unfortunately White does not have a lot of self-mill, so we rely mostly upon colourless artifacts for this. We can also make use of this with other recursion cards like Salvaging Station and Sun Titan, which give us a non-traditional but pretty potent form of card advantage. Note that Emeria Shepherd can return any permanent, and Codex Shredder, whilst a little expensive, can bring back any card at all (and itself be returned with the Station or the Shepherd) so we can potentially cast any given card in our deck over and over. Our "draw-and-discard" cards also help filter what we actually have in hand, offering some (small amount of) stealth card advantage.

White also struggles for ramp, so we have to use quite a lot of fast mana rocks. Fetchlands offer an interesting combo with Brought Back / Cosmic Intervention, give us extra triggers for the very powerful Emeria Shepherd and Seer's Sundial for some traditional card draw, as well as enabling Crucible of Worlds. Taken all together, it's very possible for this deck to ramp out surprisingly quickly with the right starting hand.

All in all, this is kind of like a Teshar deck, but you get to play big, impressive creatures rather than lots of tiny ones, which is arguably more fun. It's pretty dependent on early draws, is totally shut down by something like Rest in Peace (but then, to be fair, a lot of graveyard-based decks are), and just simply won't keep up with fast decks with decent removal. Nevertheless, if left unchecked it can get up to a surprising level of power and run away with a game - and it's fun if it ever does go off.

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Possible Modifications
I've included a few "early plays" here which probably don't fit - though Blade of Selves is a pretty neat combo with Serra Ascendant and also works well with big beaters later (and imagine putting it on Elesh Norn or Meteor Golem!).

There are only a couple of equipments and auras; if you took out Blade of Selves you'd want to lose Stoneforge Mystic too. Open the Armour is interesting in that it can grab you Skeleton Key for self-mill, or removal in the form of Darksteel Mutation/On Thin Ice.

You can pretty much swap out the big creatures for other big creatures. However you're aiming not to cast them most of the time, so a lot of the big eldrazi are not the best choices - you want ETB triggers instead. Sandstone Oracle is a strong possibility as it can refill your hand if things aren't going well, even if you just cast it. ~10 feels like a good number, because then you'd expect to see one of them within your first couple of turns or for each ten cards milled.

We're a little light on lands, but actually there are lots of ways to fix and ramp, and a little light on removal. We could possibly use some more protection for Reya, too; there's nothing worse than getting up to 9 mana to have her removed as soon as you cast her. There are also a couple more Resurrection type spells we could put in if we cut something.