EDH Decks: Animar (Patreon)

Here's the next post in my series highlighting my EDH decks. My previous posts were on my Hazezon and The Locust God decks.

Before I get started, a few people have been DM-ing me about the little dog that sometimes appears in my comics. He's actually based on my own dog, Charlie, which you can see here:

Charlie is roughly 20 pounds, and I'm not exactly sure what breed he is because he was a rescue. Looking at pictures online, my guess would be a bichon/poodle mix. He has a really mellow personality and likes to sleep a lot. So he's perfect for laying in my lap while I'm playing a game of Magic!

Back to the deck, this time we'll discuss the second Commander deck I ever made, which is Animar.

Here's a look at the entire deck:

When you're just starting in Commander, Animar has a lot of attractive qualities. Its protection makes it hard to kill. Only costing three mana means it can be played early and doesn't cost too much when you have to replay it. And it provides a pretty powerful engine. In addition, the RUG color combination has always been one of my favorites (I've been a big RUG Delver fan in the past), so that was another big plus for me. Although over time the deck has honestly gotten more and more focused on green, with blue and red being more of a splash.

Another thing you might notice is that contrary to the previous two decks I shared, in this one all of the artifacts use the newer silver color. This was a case of me just figuring, if I already have a bunch of silver-colored artifacts, might as well make them all match. Similarly, instead of the alpha/beta basic lands like the other two decks, I opted for something more modern here. In particular, this John Avon forest is one of my all-time favorites, and the Zendikar lands just feel right to me in a deck headlined by a few eldrazi creatures.

Here are some close ups of the cards if you want to check them out a little better:

Concerning the strategy of this deck, it's honestly pretty straight forward. Play lots of creatures to get counters on Animar, play even more creatures, and eventually beat everyone with either Craterhoof, Purphoros+Ancestral Statue, Walking Ballista+Ancestral Statue, playing a bunch of Eldrazi, or some other similar types of plays.

Because it's pretty simple to pilot, it can get a little boring and it's probably one of the decks I play the least. For this reason, I haven't updated the deck much over the last few years. Probably the newest additions are the Dominaria Remastered Birds of Paradise I randomly picked up and the Innistrad slow lands. The mana base in particular could probably be improved a lot, but I don't feel a lot of incentive to update the deck.

On the other hand, it's perfect for my son who likes Commander, but doesn't get a chance to play much. He uses this deck pretty regularly when we go to the LGS together.

I've also thought about totally rebuilding the deck. For example, some of the morph-focused Animar decks look pretty fun to me. Maybe some day!

That's all I got. Thanks for reading. Let me know if you have any questions, thoughts, comments, or whatever!