Have you ever gotten obsessed with a card and just wanted to brew around it over and over? No? Just me? Well, then let me share my current obsession with you and provide possible inspiration for your next Commander Deck!
We recently did an episode on our podcast that was all about spamming out as many permanents as possible using token generators to cast a massive Great Aurora just for kicks. For those curious, here's the link to it! Ever since then, and it's been about five months, I can't stop thinking about it and the things we can do with it!
I'm going to go over some cards that go well with The Great Aurora without a deck skeleton to put them in. I feel like each of these options would be fun to use, so I'll leave it to you if you want to put them all in one crazy deck, or pick a couple of favourites to put into a solid base. Me? I'll probably be going ham, as they say.
The main core of the deck should be lots of cards that put multiple permanents into play, since The Great Aurora counts them for its resolution. The more permanents we have out there, the bigger the Aurora!
Next, we'll need to make sure we can generate lots of mana. We need this mana not only to cast our Auroa in the first place, but we'll also want to float some extra to make our shenanigans happen! We're definitely running Green, so that shouldn't be a problem. However, we should make sure to get our extra mana in the form of permanents rather than sorceries.
Sorry Cultivate, but we want to be able to ramp while making our eventual Great Aurora stronger. That's why cards like Farhaven Elf and Solemn Simulacrum will be good here. I also like Prosperous Pirates, since we can use their treasures to help us ramp if needed, or they can sit there and add to our permanent count.
Borborygmos Enraged, believe it or not, didn't make it into the first brew of my deck for the podcast, but it's too good to pass up once you realize how it works. The Great Aurora lets us put all of our lands into play, but we don't have to. Yes, it's a lot of mana to float, but if we can cast our Aurora and then have enough mana leftover to put Borborygmos Enraged in play, we can fire off lands as Lightning Bolts at our opponents.
If we're in the midstages of a game, it seems reasonable to finish off our opponents with about fifteen lands. Very reasonable, if all goes according to plan!
I've never played with Uyo before, but this seems like a decent brew for her.
We're going to prioritize lands that come into play untapped. That way, after we Aurora, we can put tons of lands into play and use them right away. We will be running a few sorceries, so triggering Uyo to copy them could come in really handy. And because of how The Great Aurora works, as long as the cards are in our hand, they'll still contribute to our count. Uyo becomes "free" copies before a Great Aurora, since having no lands doesn't matter if we're resetting our battlefield.
Since we're brewing our deck to maximize a Great Aurora, we'll have tons of cards in hand afterwards. However, it's certainly possible that an opponent won't. This is where these cards come into play. We'll all discard our cards and draw up to the maximum in any player's hand, which is probably ours. We have to watch out that we don't deck ourselves though.
Ninety-nine cards may seem like a lot at first, but once you draw thirty or so, then do that again, a large chunk of our deck has just passed through our hands. Draw much more and we'll be out of cards. Without a way to reshuffle our graveyard into our library, this'll finish us off before it finishes off our opponents.
As I've said a bunch already, we'll end up with a lot of cards in our hands after The Great Aurora goes off. If we've managed to float a bunch of mana beforehand, we might want to leave most of our lands in our hand to cast a Fateful Showdown and eliminate an opponent. Plus, since it lets us draw a bunch more cards, we might find a Master the Way. Perhaps this will be enough to eliminate another one of our opponents. If not, let's just pray that we can drop enough artifacts after Aurora-ing to get metalcraft on a Molten Psyche. The Great Aurora does make all of our opponents draw, after all.
So, after going through all this, it would seem like Temur is the shard to go with for our deck. With that in mind, Riku of Two Reflections just seems like the obvious pick for Commander. Copying creatures into more permanents and doubling up any spell we want to cast will both help us on our combo.
Well, this hasn't satiated my obsession for The Great Aurora. If anything, it's made me want to brew up this deck too. Will I be the first person to have two different Great Aurora decks? Maybe! And you know what? I'm okay with that.
