Commander Ideas For Gift Exchange (EDH / Commander)

List of Deck Ideas

Normal Commanders

Agatha of the Vile Cauldron

Just seems cool in general, there are ton of green creatures with activated abilities that cost a bit too much but would be great to try out. Probably wins via combat, or maybe Shaman of the Forgotten Ways

Balmor, Battlemage Captain

Very straight forward idea. Do all the "when cast" "make token" effects and slay bitches. Great for gift exchange because you could easily make it pretty strong on a very tight budget.

Killian, Ink Duelist

Prison warden deck, uses stuff like Oblivion Ring and a bit of reanimation to control the board. The discount here is very strong, and can run a bunch of the super budget removal options with upside like Vona's Hunger. This would be a very budget friendly control deck despite its power.

Pia Nalaar, Consul of Revival

Madness/Adventures deck with ability to thopter spam to heck'n'back. Relatively budget friendly, but can get spendy if not careful. Hard to pilot though.

Stenn, Paranoid Partisan

Can be blinked each turn to choose a new type if you wanted. Not sure what I'd have as the primary focus, would depend on the cost of planeswalkers. Could be fun to do a saga/enchantment thing. Really have to dig into budget to decide here. Interesting note though, one of the absolute lowest total decks on EdhRec

Errant and Giada

Flash tribal for sure. Not even sure what within that very large theme I'd do, but flash tribal could be pretty fun.

Jasmine Boreal of the Seven

Two things going on here, the first is that this deck should be able to play out efficient threats pretty quickly. Secondly if you remove a creature's ability, her second ability should apply. This means you can have creatures with ETBs if you have enough ways to remove the abilities. The deck would be budget friendly but also decently strong because you spend all of your $$ on the enchantments, equipment, lands, etc of the deck for high power there, and Jasmine is super low mana which makes her easy to recast and hard to remove.

Katilda and Lier

This would be a pretty interesting Humans list, playing humans mostly for their immediate benefit and getting to cast spells from the yard a second time. Due to needing to do both in the same turn, a lot of the humans would be 1-2 drops, and the spells could be literally anything. Strange tool-box deck.

Queen Kayla bin-Kroog

Lots of artifacts, some madness, lots of graveyard spells. The list could easily devolve into a stax list if I'm not careful but the value out of that ability is insane. I could see this being very strong for the budget because the mana efficiency is just so high.

Tameshi, Reality Architect

This is a bounce control deck. The reanimation targets are probably things with their costs split, or that occupy a strange zone of play like Seal of Removal, Mystic Remora, and Aether Spellbomb. Probably wins with something like Approach of the Second Sun.

Syrix, Carrier of the Flame

Most Phoenixes manage to have a way to reanimate themselves so a huge part of the deck would be taking advantage of that by having triggers like Syr Konrad, the Grim .

Oskar, Rubbish Reclaimer

Self Discard the deck. No madness cause Oskar does that, but plenty of stuff that requires you to discard. And you do it for benefit like Skirge Familiar, and Alexi, Zephyr Mage

Tawnos, the Toymaker

Probably Bird Tribal or library manipulation using stuff like Spire Owl. Digging hard through the deck with cards like Commune with the Gods, and other tools trying to find combo pieces or the tools you need to deal with your opponents.

Partners

Reyhan, Last of the Abzan & Akiri, Line Slinger

This is a pairing for playing with artifact death and the Modular mechanic. Cards like Arcbound Ravager are going to be a bit of a stretch budget-wise, but despite 4 color the land base shouldn't be too bad because a lot of the deck would be colorless. The colors sit in a strange spot. I really like Reyhan for the reanimation colors and her effect with modular guys, but a ton of good artifact cards as well as modular creatures exist in boros. In a way Akiri is mostly here for the colors.

Tana, the Bloodsower & Prava of the Steel Legion, ALT Nadier, Agent of the Duskenel OR ALT Sidar Kondo of Jamuraa

I've technically built the Tana and Prava version of this deck before, but with so many new cards in the last two years it could be fun to see what new can be done with it. Its a tokens with high-toughness deck. You use cards like Assault Formation to really bring out Prava's value. The deck is very straight-forward, and powerful for how cheap it is to build.

Swapping one of the commanders for Nadier not only changes up the colors but also spins things in a new direction. It might be hard to swap Tana here because green is such a strong tokens color, and red isn't bad either, but Nadier does allow us to not care if the tokens die. Swapping out Prava for Nadier removes the toughness angle and pushes things a little different, but it could still be a lot of fun.

Another option would be to use Sidar Kondo with the toughness boosting angle because he cares about power, so if you're mostly boosting toughness then he gets all that damage in pretty easy. There are actually several deck concepts here that sit in such a similar zone that they're grouped together, but I don't know what angle I would actually want to take because of it.

Sidar Kondo of Jamuraa & Tormod, the Desecrator

Zombies unblockable lol. Strong reanimator deck with lots of benefits for doing so. Despite its strength this is one of the lowest played combonations with either of these two in it, and only has like 126 decks on EDH Rec

Backgrounds

Gale, Waterdeep Prodigy & Scion of Halaster

Definitely a spell slinger deck, but in the strange color combo of black & blue. The ability to choose what goes to hand and hwat goes to yard at the start of each turn lets us effectively draw two cards. Sure one of them will go right to yard and only be able to be used once, but it still pretty strong.

Lae'zel, Vlaakith's Champion & Clan Crafter

I feel like there is a strange amount of potential here. The biggest problem is that the counters only go on Lae'zel herself, but the fact you get to draw cards and put counters on a thing in exchange for a little mana and an artifact seems pretty good. Throw in something like Cathodion as the sacrifice option and you're strarting to cook with gas.You fill the deck with artifacts that like to be sacrificed, and creatures that like counters. Blue/White +1/+1 counters also cant be particularly common.

Lae'zel, Vlaakith's Champion & Master Chef

This is definitely the more common Lae'zel pairing, and imo its kinda boring because of that, but it would be strong, and easy for people to understand at the very least. I'd want to find a strange way to take the choices for what goes in the deck if I did this.

Abdel Adrian, Gorion's Ward & Clan Crafter

Abdel is an interesting commander. His biggest draw back is his mana cost, but man the benefits of doing funky stuff with him are insane. Getting to effectively blink your whole board as well as producing a ton of tokens if you blink him yourself is pretty nuts. Clan Crafter grants access to blue which is the 2nd best blink color (white being first), and in particular clan crafter also lets you have a little card draw engine beside it. The downside is that you now have to commit to artifacts to sac, and +1/+1 counters don't actually do a lot in a deck that constantly blinks its stuff.

Alt: Street Urchin

Abdel and street urchin could be interesting because Abdel himself generates plenty of tokens to sacrifice. The problem here is that it costs 1 mana to do this. This card would mostly be a color adder because while the 1 damage to any target is nice, the mana cost of this ability makes it significantly worse than even Barrage of Expendables. the best options for the effect would be Goblin Bombardment. You'd more likely be making sacrifices through things like Thermopod. Or taking advantage of the fact you're in token colors to boost tokens. Or using the red to create a strange etb/blink deck in boros.

Alt: Criminal Past

Criminal past giving menace makes it a really powerful option, and the boost of the graveyard does put some ideas into my head about where to take the deck. It might be challenging but I could see how the white ETB boosting of reanimaton effects, the token production, and criminal past could actually be pretty nuts.