The Top Shelf

An Eggcelent Start (Commander)

Eric von Allmen

06 Jul 2020 - 15 min read

Hello and welcome to The Top Shelf. I’m Eric and I’ll be your guide for most of this series. I am being brought on to add a new voice and additional perspectives to Hexdrinkers. You can read more about me and find other articles by me on my author page here (https://hexdrinkers.com/authors/eric.html)! The Top Shelf is a new series, focusing on unique commanders that have exciting potential in both competitive and casual magic. There are a lot of commanders that fall into this category but we’ll start with one that I have been interested in for a long time: Atla Palani, Nest Tender .

Her ability initially makes you wonder what ‘Eggs ‘are there in Magic and how good are they? Don’t let the eggs fool you though, for the competitive build we’re looking at today the real eggs aren’t eggs at all. Instead they are Changelings! Creature’s with the Changeling ability count as eggs, which is just fine for our purpose.

Atla was originally a secondary commander in C19. The base deck was designed to continuously create and copy tokens. Jumping off from that point would typically make you think of creatures that make tokens or a large battlecruiser deck that cheats some mana through sacrificing eggs. We’ll even be going into one of those later in this article. But for now, we’re going to look at Atla as a combo focused commander.

I’m not Even Yolking, It Works

Atla has a bespoke combo that works with her triggered ability. It requires us to run the following cards: Mirror Entity , a card that does damage when it enters or leaves the battlefield, and a card which can shuffle our graveyard back in when it dies. Additionally, Atla needs to have either a temporary stat bonus for the turn or a +1/+1 counter. The good news is that we only need Atla, Mirror Entity , and the buff in play to actually start the combo. The rest can be in our deck, our graveyard, or even exiled from the game.

Let’s step through the combo now to just get a base example of how it works. With both Atla Palani, Nest Tender and Mirror Entity on the field, give Atla at least +1/+1 then activate Mirror Entity ’s ability for zero mana an arbitrarily large number of times. This will set the toughness of all your creatures to zero and makes them all eggs, but Atla will survive due to the buffs we just gave her. Mirror Entity will die and cause the next creature in your deck to flip onto the field. It too will be an egg with zero toughness, so it’ll die and rotate out as well. This repeats until we run out of creatures. We can loop this process by shuffling our graveyard back into the deck with a card like Kozilek, Butcher of Truth . Finally, Goblin Arsonist will eventually kill all our opponents by pinging them each time it leaves the battlefield.

Protecting Our Nest Eggs

Most competitive EDH metas are rife with stax and other defensive tools to prevent combo wins like ours. So, included in this deck are a variety of creatures who will help remove those obstructions as we cycle through with the Atla combo. Goblin Sharpshooter can kill any creature without Hexproof and Manglehorn can do the same for artifacts. We’re even running Caustic Caterpillar to get around things that shut off enter the battlefield effects. Riftsweeper can recover any of our helpful creatures that have been exiled, offering us some protection against even instant speed graveyard hate. So if you’re feeling bold you can try to combo off in the face of almost any defensive setup and just see if the heart of the cards is on your side.

These creatures will do a lot of work toward protecting us after we’ve entered the loop, but we’ll need some protection beforehand as well. Naya doesn’t have a very wide selection of cards that fall into that category. However, we can still find some powerful cards among them, see Pyroblast and Red Elemental Blast . Additionally, bask in the groans of the table every time you get to cast Veil of Summer and Autumn’s Veil .

Naya Can’t Combo… Unless?

Competitive decks can struggle if they only have one route to victory. So, in order to avoid those issues we’re going to run a suite of other typical combos that fall into our colors. The first ones that come to mind for most are the variations involving Kiki Jiki, Mirror Breaker . We’re going to be running multiple cards that allow for different infinites with Kiki as well as Splinter Twin to add consistency.

Offense isn’t going to be enough to get us across the line though. On the scale of cEDH decks, we don’t expect to keep up with Tier 0 decks, but we do need to be able to stop some decks faster than ours. In order to do this we’ll be running a light stax package to compete with those strategies. But not to worry, we won’t hurt our own game plan too much. Root Maze and Kataki, War’s Wage have always stood out to me as solid cards for the format given the omnipresence of artifacts. Both Thalia, Heretic Cathar and Thalia, Guardian of Thraben will also give us a chance to pump the brakes on other common strategies. A few of our other powerhouse defensive cards are shown below.

Easter Egg Hunt

Now, for the final question: How are we going to find and play all these cards we just talked about? To play our main combo in one turn is a minimum of eight mana, including four colored mana (WWRG). In order to find all our pieces and have the mana to play them, ramp and tutors are going to be key.

We run an interesting mix of ramp packages to make sure that our hate cards (and those of our opponents) don’t end up hitting us too hard. Mana dorks, such as Birds of Paradise , Bloom Tender , and Arbor Elf are always good to have around, so we’ll toss a few of those in. Artifact ramp is a staple in cEDH if only due to its raw power. So including cards like Mana Vault and Sol Ring can help us accelerate to key turns when it really matters. Finally, by rounding out with a few choice enchantments, shown below, we end up with a very strong looking ramp package.

Of course, draw engines such as Sylvan Library will always have their place, but we want to go even faster. So instead we’re looking for direct tutors such as Altar of Bone and Sylvan Tutor . Some of our alternate win conditions require us to find enchantments so we’ll be running Enlightened Tutor and Academy Rector as well. Most of our wins require specific creatures though, which green does a fantastic job of tutoring for with cards like Chord of Calling and Finale of Devastation . We run a lot of tutors so I won’t go into all of them, but a few more of our choice selection are shown below:

Well, that is all on our competitive deck. With this guide on the build you can feel free to make your own meta dependent switches. In the sideboard of the deck I call out a few helpful cards that can be subbed in depending on budget and meta. Even if your first few matches end up being a bit scrambled or hard boiled, I’m sure you’ll be winning matches over easy in no time! (I’m not even close to sorry about the egg puns).

Full Decklist

All Our Eggs In One Basket

Let’s take a step back now that we’ve finished one of our decks. We originally said this commander would be great for a less competitive build focused on eggs, tokens, and the sweet sweet taste of battlecruiser magic. Well, I’m excited to let you know that’s exactly what we’re talking about next. This build is going to run you under $200 and should fit in a more casual and/or combat focused meta. Atla Palani, Nest Tender will still be front and center, but we still have one lurking question about this deck… How many eggs are we allowed to run? Dragon Egg was printed not too long ago, so surely there should be plenty in magic’s long history, right?

And that’s it! All the Naya eggs. Wait, that’s it? Frantically checking notes. That can’t be it, right? How are we going to make this deck work with four eggs? Well, we’re going to have to rely on Atla’s slightly underwhelming activated ability for the most part. But, we still have some good news coming! Nesting Dragon is able to crank out at least an egg a turn while we’re hitting our land drops. Additionally, there are a few changelings that we can run to fill in our empty nest.

(PSA, do not try to activate Mirror Entity’s ability for 0 in this deck. You will not enjoy the results.)
What if we clone our eggs?. Atla and Nesting Dragon both make egg tokens, so populating and doubling tokens can be very powerful for us… Of course a lot of token doublers would bust our budget pretty hard, but Second Harvest is a great fit and Growing Ranks is a good example of a repeated populate effect. We’re also going to be on the lookout for cards that give us other benefits in addition to copying our eggs, such as the following cards:

Loot Boxes, In My Card Game?

Well, now it’s time to hatch those eggs and find out just what is inside! In order to cycle through these eggs fast enough to see our powerful cards, we’re going to need some sacrifice outlets or ways to crack these eggs. In Naya we don’t have a ton of options, but they definitely exist. For example, Greater Gargadon and Dragon Broodmother allow us to add more top end to our deck and start off our sacrifice package right. Martyr’s Cause offers us a good defensive option and can set up a strong counter punch. Switching out one of our eggs for a beefy blocker can seriously disrupt our opponent’s plans. I also want to offer a specific call out for Slaughter the Strong which allows us to sacrifice all our eggs, keep Atla on the field, and clear the way for all the creatures about to hatch. Artifacts are going to let us fill out the rest of this package.

We’re going to be running a pretty tight selection of creatures so that every time we crack an egg we either get another egg or a powerful creature. Enter the battlefield triggers will really help exaggerate the effects we get from cheating mana. Combustible Gearhulk and Ravager Wurm are both cards that immediately present a strong board presence and give us an upside when they come into play. Angel of Serenity and Terastodon also fall into this category as well. They help us keep the board clear as we’re hatching these massive creatures. Naya is also a home to creatures that are incredibly powerful when they get to sit on the field. Vigor is a pet card of mine that I think will do great work for us. It manages to simultaneously discourage people from attacking us or blocking our creatures. Aurelia, the Warleader is arguably one of the most powerful cards we get to include. Multiple combat steps can allow for massive and unexpected swing turns.

Green Eggs and Ramp

I think there’s some bad news coming though… We may not always get to turn a bunch of eggs into massive creatures at little to no cost. We may at some point need to start paying for these monsters, so mana ramp is going to be a prominent feature of our deck. Unfortunately we don’t get to use mana dorks because seeing one come out of an egg may actually break my heart.

Let’s start with the land ramp. Explosive Vegetation and Rampant Growth are obvious classics for a ramp package. But, I’m here to offer the deep cuts, the B sides, of ramp. So let’s talk about Spoils of Victory and Collective Voyage . These cards are going to help us fetch stronger lands and more lands respectively. On the topic of getting more than one land, Khalni Heart Expedition and Tempt with Discovery can be very powerful as well (Never get tempted by someone else by the way).

Lands aren’t the only way to ramp though, artifact ramp is in some ways even more powerful, but with its own weaknesses. The signets are a great way to start off at this power level, so let’s toss in the full set. Sol Ring is one of the best cards in this category and should be pretty easy to get your hands on. Commander’s Sphere and Fellwar Stone are also going to do great things for us in terms of mana fixing.

Well, that concludes my analysis on this version of the deck. I tried to keep this to a budget that made sense to me, but I remember hating spending money on lands when I could get some game winning eight-drops for the same price. I’ve offered some higher end suggestions in the maybe board of the deck list. Feel free to make any substitutions you’d like though! This is a deck that can be driven in pretty much any direction. Tribal and Token themes could be more pronounced if that appealed to you. If you have any commanders you’d like to see me do an analysis of like this or any thoughts on the series feel free to let us know on Twitter or in the comments below! Thanks so much for the read and see you next time on The Top Shelf!

Full Decklist

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