Ashaya’s Enduring Bond Commander Deck Guide

Ashaya's Enduring Bond | Illustration by Anato Finnstark

The idea that rules are made to be broken is rarely applied to Magic. After all, breaking the rules is often paramount to cheating, assuming intent, and ignorant rulebreaking is soon corrected.

But Wizards makes the rules, and they get to change them from time to time. For Mystery Booster Commander Edition, they decided to jump rope with them. It isn't one of the actual rulebreaker cards, but Ashaya's Enduring Bond flaunts its uniqueness as a legendary sorcery that gets to sit in your command zone. Let’s see what we can do with it.

The Deck

Ashaya, the Awoken World | Illustration by Raymond Swanland

At its heart, this is a Bracket 3 stompy deck. There’s a heavy bias towards legendary creatures since you need to control them to cast your commander, but a theme hardly arises from that. Instead, the deck focuses on producing as much mana as it can as quickly as it can to cast the commander and other nasty threats like Ugin, Eye of the Storms and Ulamog, the Ceaseless Hunger.

The Commander: Ashaya’s Enduring Bond

Ashaya's Enduring Bond plays a supporting role. The deck certainly acknowledges it, with cast-from-exile payoffs and all those legends, but it’s not always the star.

It mostly serves as the perfect mana sink, which is vital for an archetype prone to flooding. As long as you can cast the Bond, you have something to spend your mana on, and that something gets better and better as the game goes on. I won’t call it impossible to flood with it in the command zone, but it adds a wondrous amount of consistency and card advantage.

A few notes on how the commander works: Since Ahaya's Enduring Bond is a legendary sorcery, you can only cast it when you control a legendary creature or planeswalker. If that permanent dies with Bond on the stack, nothing bad happens; it’s a condition for casting it, not resolving it. Also, the discover ability scales with the commander tax. Because it specifically references the amount of mana spent, not its mana cost, the value of X increases with the total cost you pay. The first time it resolves, you discover 3, the next discover 5, and so on. The discover value also goes up or down accordingly with cost increasers and reducers.

Cast From Exile Payoffs

The cast from exile payoffs squeeze just a little extra value from AEB but they’re far from dependent on it since red’s favorite way to draw cards these days is impulse draw.

Unstable Amulet, Nico Minoru, Runaway, and Flaming Tyrannosaurus all smack your opponents for extra damage while casting spells. Keeper of Secrets replaces archetype staple Passionate Archaeologist because you’ll never control a commander to gain the ability.

Faldorn, Dread Wolf Herald makes a board from nothing. The combination of card draw and board presence makes it a great solo threat.

Nalfeshnee isn’t at its best with so many legendary creatures, but there are enough eligible spells to run it. Spider-Verse is similarly useful and gets around the legend rule.

Legends-Matter

While legendary payoffs are far from central, they’re useful with the deckbuilding restriction Ashaya's Enduring Bond imposes.

Reki, the History of Kamigawa and Time of Need are the most significant. Reki generates incredible card advantage, and it’s important to note it only cares about legendary spells, not permanents, so it draws off the commander. Time of Need finds whichever of the deck’s many creatures you need at a given time. Many of them can be removal or card draw, so you often have an ideal target.

Hajar, Loyal Bodyguard protects your board with a fairly intimidating body.

The Peregrine Dynamo has no shortage of triggers to copy, though the best targets are likely the triggers off Etali, Primal Conqueror and Ulamog, the Ceaseless Hunger.

Legolas Greenleaf and Gimli of the Glittering Caves become quite formidable when most creatures in your deck add counters to them.

Removal

Where I could, I attached removal to large creatures to improve consistency. You’re unlikely to miss on a ramp target and removal when they’re the same cards!

To that end, Ugin, Eye of the Storms and Ulamog, the Ceaseless Hunger were among the first cards in the deck.

Roxanne, Starfall Savant snipes small creatures each turn while Kogla, the Titan Ape fights something beefy, then smashes artifacts as it rampages.

Terror of the Peaks and Halana, Kessig Ranger make other threats into removal spells. Minsc & Boo, Timeless Heroes fulfills a similar role.

Apex Altisaur often trades for multiple creatures, though it can be a one-sided board wipe with an indestructible trick.

Jaya's Immolating Inferno handles three threats at max, but those threats include your opponents.

Big cards are cool, but sometimes you just need to trade with a threat. Chaos Warp has been a Commander staple for good reason and Guff Rewrites History is a riff on the same idea.

Gruul () excels at sneaking removal into the mana base, with cards like Stump Stomp and Bridgeworks Battle doubling as removal spells and lands.

Finally, Chandra's Ignition turns your biggest threat into a Highlander-style sweeper. Since it hits your opponents, it even doubles as a win condition.

Card Draw

My card draw philosophy is similar to that of removal: In a ramp deck, the more of it attached to the ramp targets, the better, but that can’t replace a few cheap draw spells.

The pinnacle of ramping into card advantage has to be Etali, Primal Conqueror. Even though this deck doesn’t retrigger it particularly well, casting a few free spells is great when ahead or behind. Also, the deck ramps plenty hard to transform it.

Laelia, the Blade Reforged, Inti, Seneschal of the Sun, and Toski, Bearer of Secrets, and Dragonhawk, Fate's Tempest reward your aggression with cards drawn.

Garruk's Uprising, Selvala, Heart of the Wilds, and Muerra, Trash Tactician generate passive card advantage as you cast spells.

Ashaya's Enduring Bond might be the best commander to utilize Myth Unbound. The cost reduction is a little awkward since AEB scales more slowly, but it always goes back to the command zone, so you draw enough cards to overlook it.

Chandra, Torch of Defiance could go into any number of categories, but I’m mostly running it as yet another card draw engine.

Reckless Impulse and Wrenn's Resolve tie this section together with quick, on-demand card draw.

The Mana Base

The mana base is considerably deep in this deck, with an abundance of ramp and lands to ensure you have the mana to cast your spells reliably and ahead of schedule.

The most significant element of this mana base are all the legendary mana dorks. Cards like Black Tom Cassidy and Ruby, Daring Tracker rarely see play but are entirely necessary to reach a good legend count for Ashaya's Enduring Bond. These are supported by more common ramp spells, like Farseek and Delighted Halfling.

There are also a few utility cards. I noted some MDFCs as removal, but there’s also Turntimber Symbiosis to cheat something into play. Boseiju, Who Endures sees abundant Commander play as artifact/enchantment hate. Its predecessor, Boseiju, Who Shelters All, makes a less common appearance so you can always resolve AEB.

Mosswort Bridge is card draw while Talon Gates of Madara can be ramp and interaction. Plaza of Heroes keeps your threats safe and Shifting Woodland can rebuy some of their value if you didn’t protect them.

The Strategy

Stompy decks are often simple and straightforward; it’s a great archetype for new players. In this case, you just want to ramp and cast spells. The few interactions in the deck are as simple as cards that want you to cast spells and spells to cast.

The big thing to look out for is ramp. Thanks to Ashaya's Enduring Bond sitting in the command zone, you don’t need to worry about threats to ramp into because you can always cast it, then cast it again.

A good opening hand contains several lands and at least two ramp spells. Don’t be afraid to mulligan aggressively to ramp, and try to avoid keeping a hand with too few lands or ramp spells. You’re more likely to lose with a bunch of 5-drops rotting in your hand than you are for having too many ways to cast them.

Combos and Interactions

The only interaction you need to keep an eye on involves Laelia, the Blade Reforged and your commander. Thanks to a rules quirk, when you exile cards until you find something, each card exiled counts as a unique instance of exiling a card. That means Laelia gets a +1/+1 counter for every card exiled by the discover ability until and including the moment when you find a legal spell.

Rule 0 Violations Check

This deck falls comfortably in the Bracket 3 category. The removal and speed isn’t up to snuff in Bracket 4, but the ramp package is too consistent and the threats too powerful to really hang in Bracket 2.

Budget Options

Though the deck has many pricey cards, few of them are so unique that you can’t find budget substitutions. Because the deck doesn’t rely on key card combos or deep synergies, just good cards, it reworks into a budget one surprisingly easily.

Budget cuts should always start in the mana base. You can do away with utility lands and expensive duals like fetch lands for budget duals or even basics. If you make these swaps, I encourage you to replace MDFCs with lands of the corresponding colors; I added them to this deck as lands first.

You can replace many of the big, beefy spells with other big, beefy spells that are just less impressive. Ugin, Eye of the Storms is good, but Cityscape Leveler or even Kogla and Yidaro are big threats with removal that hit hard. Terror of the Peaks can be Warstorm Surge, Etali, Primal Conqueror can be downgraded to Etali, Primal Storm, Three Visits becomes Rampant Growth, etc.

Other Builds

You could build Ashaya's Enduring Bond with much more focus on spellslinging. Get in some cost reducers like Goblin Anarchomancer and The Scarlet Witch, payoffs like Storm-Kiln Artist, and a bundle of copy effects that can copy Ashaya's Enduring Bond or other big spells.

You could also lean harder into the cast-from-exile synergies. Add additional cast from exile payoffs like Iraxxa, Empress of Mars and Memory Worm plus a helping of cascade/discover cards like Apex Devastator and Chimil, the Inner Sun to support them and you have a different flavor of good-stuff value pile.

Commanding Conclusion

Ashaya, Soul of the Wild | Illustration by Chase Stone

Ashaya's Enduring Bond has a pretty wild textbox but is a tame commander, all things considered. Scaling discover is quite strong but not nearly broken enough to cause an issue, and the synergies are more cute than harmful. I look forward to seeing more commanders with niche abilities like this!

What do you think of this commander? Is it cool, or is this one stretch of the rules too far? Let me know in the comments below or in the Draftsim Discord! If you want more Draftsim coverage, check out our YouTube channel, The Daily Upkeep!

Stay safe, and thanks for reading!