Host of Paupers (PDH) (EDH / Commander)

Pauper EDH is an alternative format that uses any uncommon creature as the commander, the 99 are commons.

This mono-white deck is built around Herald of the Host, (HotH) an angel with the sweet ability Myriad. It's one of my favourite keywords and was followed up with the equally sweet keyword Encore.

HotH is part of a Myriad cycle along with; Broodbirth Viper, Banshee of the Dread Choir, Warchief Giant and Caller of the Pack. They're all decent choices for a commander if you ask me.

With the Myriad ability there's a few restrictions put on the deckbuilding; our commander is only copied at the base, so any buffs, equipments, auras etc. are not copied. The token copies are also made on attack, which means sorcery-speed buffs aren't available. Furthermore the tokens enter the game attacking, they do not attack. In PDH this is less relevant but does cut off a few options.

I wasn't quite sure where to go with the deck. You could build a flying subtheme (however white flying creatures are quite subpar). You could still do voltron and just appreciate the "splash" damage from the token copies. You could go very wide with other tokens and run instant-speed buffs like Guardians' Pledge. You could even build some sort of Soul Sisters deck, benefitting from putting two tokens into play each turn, however there just aren't enough common rarity lifegain payoffs.

In the end I decided on a slower, grindier deck because the game plan of hitting several opponents at once means HotH is viable to be removed, requiring a fair amount of protection.

The protection I've gone for are mostly cards that can be played before HotH hits the board; Benevolent Bodyguard, Angelic Renewal, Standard Bearer, Fanatical Devotion, Floating Shield, Coalition Honor Guard.

Additionally there's Ephemeral Shields that likely can be cast for "free", Ephemerate, Gods Willing, Apostle's Blessing are all cheap. Shelter, Acrobatic Maneuver and Pentarch Ward replace themselves. Lastly Rootborn Defenses protects the entire board and can be used to make a "permanent" copy of HotH if cast while attacking.

Since the deck runs so much protection and is likely to make enemies it also has the odd combo of Wall of Glare / Palace Guard + Inviolability / Ghostly Possession / Sandskin. The auras can be tutored by Heliod's Pilgrim / Totem-Guide Hartebeest and are actually pretty okay to cast on the commander. (You attack to choose who not to deal damage to, and she's protected from damage.)

The rest of the deck is pretty generic, mostly removal, a few bits of card draw, a lot of ramp since the commander costs 5 (and likely commander tax on top of that).

Weaknesses of the deck are above all the fairly slow clock, while HotH is technically a 12/12, opponents are also technically at 120 life, it's difficult to scale that (Warded Battlements / Tah-Crop Elite, Mightstone if you're brave) so it's a slow clock. Mono-white PDH suffers from lack of card advantage and to some extent lack of card quality, it's easy to run out of steam if the commander tax grows too large.

Thanks so much for reading. If you have any questions or suggestions, let me know!