Animar, Soul of Elements Big Mana Eldrazi

Commander Overview

Animar is one of the top 50 commanders for a reason. What an exceptionally powerful commander! They are extremely easy to get big and reduce our creatures’ cost, and in a deck packed to the brim with Eldrazi, having these cast cheaply or even for free can be absolutely game-changing and tip the game in our favor. Animar is the perfect commander for a creature type-focused deck like Eldrazi, almost all of them are fully colorless, and getting to ten or eleven counters and free casting our stuff is shockingly easy to do. Animar is a huge part of our deck and by far the most important card in our deck; it enables all of our shenanigans!

How to Play the Deck

This is a straightforward deck to play, their are minimal complex interactions present within this deck, our whole gameplan is very simple and consists of dropping Animar, buffing them up by continuing to cast creatures and most importantly use our creature discount to drop crazy Eldrazi like Kozilek, The Butcher of Truth and Ulamog, The Ceaseless Hunger, once we get one or many of our Eldrazi out we can be extremely hard to stop, one of the best parts about Animar is that we actually cast the creatures we play with our discount so we can get some devastating cast triggers like Ulamog, The Defiler. This deck is probably ok for a beginner, but would be better used in a more intermediate player’s hand. As long as the player has a good understanding of the rules, they should be fine.

Synergy’s in the deck

Our whole deck is one big synergy with Animar, but we have a lot of helpful Eldrazi that can change the game, especially in the early game, like Glaring Fleshraker, which can be a great way to get some extra scions so we can cast our big creatures! It That Heralds the End is a great creature as well, giving our biggest colorless creatures a discount, which can be strong, and they are extremely easy to free cast with Animar. Our whole deck is very synergistic and centered around our huge Eldrazi and colorless creatures.

Phases of the Game

Early-Game: We actually have a strong early-game; our commander greatly assists this, which only costs three mana. Still, we can be quite explosive in the early game. We have a lot of creatures in the one to three mana slot, so in the early game, we speed out our commander as quickly as we can and start slamming creatures to get the buff! We can cast huge colorless creatures surprisingly early in the game. Animar is likely going to be the target of early-game removal because, well, they are Animar! Just something to be mindful of.

Mid-Game: If we can keep Animar on the board, our mid-game is truly amazing! If not, it’s just the quest to get Animar back out. But in this case, we will assume they are out, and if they are, things can get very crazy quickly. Even if we’ve only cast four or five creatures with Animar out all of our big creatures have a discount plus the lands we already have, its not extremely uncommon for us to play a very early Eldrazi Titan, once we get one or many of them out we need to be aggressive and swing hard, once we start dropping big creatures all eyes will be on us.

Late-Game: If we have been going crazy with Animar and dropping huge creatures, the only goal in the late-game is swinging, but if we haven’t been able to resolve or stick Animar, then by this point, we can typically just hard cast our big creatures. No matter what path we are on, swinging with big creatures remains the ultimate goal.

Card Breakdowns

Ramp

We have a lot of non-traditional ramp in this deck and a few pieces of traditional ramps. We have a good amount of mana dorks like Birds of Paradise and Elvish Mystic, which help us with the ultimate early game goal of getting Animar out as soon as we can. Beyond that, we do have Cultivate and Kodama’s Reach, which not only ramp but also provide some mana fixing for the deck. Ramping into Animar is the only thing we really care about, but if we can’t stick them on the board, ramping into some of our bigger creatures is an option.

Card Draw/Card Advantage

Guardian Project is an excellent source of card draw for the deck, and with how many creatures we end up casting because of Animar, it can truly put in overtime for us and draw a ton of cards, this card can come down quite early and be a consistent source of card draw throughout a lot of the game. Garruk’s Uprising can be a strong source of card draw as well. Still, it is a “win-more” card, as if we are getting benefits off of it for dropping big creatures; we are typically already dropping our big Eldrazi/Colorless creatures, and the card draw doesn’t matter as much, especially if we are dropping something like Kozilek, Butcher of Truth who comes with some nice card draw too! However, it can still be a nice source of additional card draw, and the trample is pretty great too. Lastly, I want to highlight both Mulldrifter and Nulldrifter. Both are evokable and cheap sources of card draw. Evoke does count as casting, so if we Evoke these for the card draw, we also get a counter on Animar, truly the best of both worlds.

Removal

We are much less interested in single-target removal compared to board wipes. If our commander gets consistently hated out of the game and the game starts getting out of hand, we do have some cards to reset, like Blasphemous Act and Chain Reaction, both great ways to reset the board and ensure we don’t die. All is Dust is another great option, while it will affect some of our stuff. If we have enough big colorless/eldrazi creatures on the field, it doesn’t matter at all to us, a great option if we fall behind. We do have some single-target removal like Beast Within and Null Elemental Blast which are great cheap options for the deck to have access too. Our removal package is good; not only are we decently strong on the spell side, but our huge creatures can help to remove our opponents’ creatures in combat as well.

Protection

Animar is a huge removal magnet and for good reason, lets be real if our opponents let us keep Animar on the field things will get out of hand extremely fast, since our opponents do not want our commander on the field we have to have ways to protect them, one of my favorites is Snakeskin Veil which not only gives Animar hexproof but the +1/+1 counter gives us an additional one discount on all of our creatures which can be quite relevant, the same is true for Slip out the Back. I also like Turn Aside, just a very cheap and easy way to protect Animar. We have quite a bit of protection in the deck; it can still sometimes not be enough if our opponents are removal-heavy, but our ramp and the ability to re-cast Animar can be helpful.

Utility / Support

Let’s go over some of the best cards in the deck! Ancestral Statue is a true Animar staple and is almost always free. Being able to bounce a big cast trigger Eldrazi like Kozilek, The Butcher of Truth or Ulamog, The Ceaseless Hunger can be amazing for us and devastating for our opponents. Forgotten Ancient is another card in this deck that stuck out to me, being able to move all of their counters over to Animar can allow us to be explosive after only one or two turn cycles of Forgotten Ancient being out. Echoes of Eternity is an absolutely busted card in this deck; all of the stuff we get off of Animar allows us to cast it. Hence, we are able to copy it, just an insane card for only six mana, while sadly it doesn’t get an Animar discount, six mana is nothing for all of the value we get out of this card.

Mana Base

Our mana base is all about efficiency; it’s the reason we are running all of the fetches, shocks, and bond lands. We also have a few wastes for some of our costs that require exactly colorless mana. I had no trouble with this mana base, and when combined with our ramp package, we can ensure we cast Animar on turn three and get the deck rolling.

Win Conditions

Combat is our only win condition in this deck. Combat is typically pretty short if we have a good game, since we hit like a truck, and combining that with the annihilator from our Eldrazi can be pretty crazy, but we only close out our games through combat.

Strengths of the Deck

We can free or cheaply cast huge creatures way earlier than they should be out!

Since we are in Temur, we have a good combination of protection as well as utility cards.

Weaknesses of the Deck

We are entirely reliant on Animar to be explosive; we can be quite slow without them.

Decks heavily focused on sacrifice effects can be very good against us since we don’t have a lot of ways to stop them, and it can be hard to keep our big indestructible creatures on the field.

Deck Testing/Matchups

I tested this deck against three different decks

Game 1: Vs Tergrid, God of Fright. Matchup Record: 1-4

This was a horrendous matchup for our deck, not that Tergrid isn’t a horrendous matchup for every deck they play against. We feel safe since a lot of our creatures, especially the big titans, are indestructible. Well, Tergrid certainly puts a stop to that! This is a terrible matchup for our deck; killing Tergrid is what I did during the only game I won, and it was still quite a struggle.

Cards that worked really well in this matchup:
Beast Within, All is Dust and Blasphemous Act.

Game 2: Vs Arcades, the Strategist. Matchup Record: 4-0

Arcades is pretty good at blocking a lot of our early-game stuff but once we start dropping huge Eldrazi or colorless creatures we can run away with the game pretty quickly, Arcades does not deal well with Annihilator!

Cards that worked really well in this matchup:
Up the Beanstalk, Calamity of the Titans and Null Elemental Blast.

Game 3: Vs Caesar, Legion’s Emperor. Matchup Record: 3-2

A tough but winnable matchup, we can get beat up a lot in the early game, but if we stick to our game plan, it is pretty easy for us to stabilize by the mid-late game. Just keep casting big stuff and keep swinging, our annihilator effects aren’t great in this matchup since they have so many tokens, but other than that, we are better than them in combat and can dish out a lot of damage.

Cards that worked really well in this matchup:
Garruk’s Uprising, Cyclonic Rift and Spellskite.

Conclusion

Thanks so much for reading to the end! Animar truly is a busted commander, and while I have always played them as a combo deck, they are an amazing deck for Eldrazi. Having access to Temur and all the support/utility it brings, on top of all the amazing Eldrazi, is great. This deck has been a blast to brew and play!