Animar, Soul of Elements Commander Deck Guide

Last updated on March 11, 2025

Animar, Soul of Elements | Illustration by Peter Mohrbacher

Animar, Soul of Elements is a classic Temur commander () that’s been rumbling over tables like the Colossal Titan since it came out in Commander 2011. It offers an incredible mana advantage and demands to be surrounded by a horde of creatures, but it asks little else.

This low barrier to entry makes Animar a bit of a blank slate that you can build in any number of ways since any Magic deck loves a good cost reduction advantage. This decklist takes a pretty traditional route with a heavy +1/+1 counters theme—keeping it simple like this makes it a great deck for a new player to mess around with.

The Deck

Vorinclex, Monstrous Raider | Illustration by Daarken

This Temur counters deck leans hard into green cards for access to the best +1/+1 counter tech, with blue cards and red cards providing powerful support. This deck wants to beat your opponents down with a powerful midrange shell that draws a ton of cards and makes every creature into a threat with some counter distribution and counter doublers.

This deck is a solid 3 within the Commander bracket system. It lacks Game Changers, but the deep synergies and the ability to develop winning board states from nowhere thanks to the commander or counter doublers outstrips the power of the average EDH precon—or, if we’re being honest about how they play, any precon.

The Commander

Animar, Soul of Elements benefits from counter synergies to generate an even more significant mana advantage. It’s a fun cycle: Counter cards make Animar stronger, fueling more explosive turns. This deck is the epitome of a snowball deck that turns a 3-mana 1/1 into a wild board state.

While Animar’s a powerful tool for the deck, it’s far from critical; you can just play a regular game without it—a necessity for a commander that’s often killed on sight due to a proclivity for dropping Eldrazi titans into play.

Counter Distributors

You can’t have a functional +1/+1 counter deck without ways to get counters on your creatures. Most of these provide steady access to counters each turn, making each into a significant threat to overwhelm opposing removal. I’ve included counter doublers here as well.

This isn’t the best Bristly Bill, Spine Sower or Scythecat Cub deck since you’ll primarily use creature-based ramp. But you do have some fetch lands, and just getting a counter roughly every turn provides an excellent advantage.

Zameck Guildmage is rather dorky, but switching between a counter distributor and a draw engine provides reasonable value from a cheap body.

Arwen, Weaver of Hope serves as a counter distributor and a counter payoff since putting counters on Arwen gives extra counters to future creatures.

Fight Rigging promises you a steady source of counters with an additional spell sometime down the line. You get up to 7 power quite quickly, especially once a counter doubler hits the field.

Invigorating Hot Spring provides a few counters, though that’s arguably less important than giving your team the zoomies to pressure the opposition.

Halana and Alena, Partners is one of the pricier counter distributors, but like Arwen, it greatly benefits from the other counter cards. Also acting as a haste enabler makes it quite threatening with your larger creatures.

Inti, Seneschal of the Sun combines card advantage and counter distribution into a single, aggressive package. You can’t really flood with this in play, and the trample comes in clutch once your creatures have 8 or more power. This is the ideal 2-drop as it’s great on turn 2 and impactful later.

Forgotten Ancient appears in virtually every +1/+1 counter deck for good reason: It goes insanely hard with any counter doubler and produces a stream of counters for your other creatures. It’s especially powerful in EDH with multiple players casting multiple spells a turn.

Court of Garenbrig is almost the best counter distributor in the deck. You have plenty of tools to fight over the monarchy, and just one trigger of “double your +1/+1 counters” can be back-breaking for your opponents.

It’s hard to argue with Innkeeper's Talent being the best counter producer and doubler in the deck. It may be even the best counter card to come out in 2024, right up there with Bristly Bill.

Pir, Imaginative Rascal is a solid counter doubler for little mana, as it often comes down for thanks to Animar. The deck also runs Toothy, Imaginary Friend for sheer value; you either draw Toothy, which is essentially a second copy of one of your best cards, or you draw Pir, and it comes with a threat. Both options are excellent.

Kami of Whispered Hopes provides an incredible mana advantage by amplifying Animar’s cost reduction and tapping for ridiculous amounts of mana itself.

Vorinclex, Monstrous Raider is one of the most threatening cards in the list. The combination of raw stats and an overwhelmingly powerful ability makes it a potent threat at 6 mana—a cost this deck almost never pays in full.

Benevolent Hydra works amazingly with Animar since the discount counts towards X-spell creatures. Beyond that, a counter doubler that distributes counters across the team is just a filthy card.

Counter Payoff Cards

Once your creatures have enough counters that you can’t see the cardboard beneath the mound of dice, you need a card or two to reward you for patiently making a 20/20.

Walking Ballista is just a crazy powerful card in a deck that dumps multiple counters on creatures, but Animar’s cost reduction pushes it over the top. It’s absolutely possible to pay 0 mana for a 16/16 Ballista in this deck. Even at tamer numbers, the combination of board control and reach makes this construct one of your best cards.

Basking Broodscale provides a rather innocent boon with some Eldrazi Spawn whenever it gains counters. It’s mostly a ramp spell, but you can stack counters on the Spawn quickly if need be. Evolution Witness gives you a similar ability but rewards you with card advantage rather than tokens.

Kodama of the West Tree is a counter staple for good reason; trample’s a critical keyword ability to punch through tokens, and the ramp ability turns a good start into a fantastic one.

River Song is an experimental choice. You don’t care about the first ability in the slightest in this deck, but heaping counters on a creature that uses its power to punish your opponents for casting Rampant Growth or cracking a fetch sounds interesting at the very least and must-answer at best.

Giggling Skitterspike provides a much more reliable way to turn counters into direct damage. Some decks also struggle against a giant indestructible creature, and Animar works very well with colorless cards; this one’s often free.

Spike Weaver messes up combat for your opponents. Transferring counters around becomes pretty beneficial once you have a counter doubler in play; removing one counter from this creature to put two on a Walking Ballista goes pretty far.

Danny Pink consistently overperforms. At worst, this makes the first creature spell you cast cantrip with Animar in play. At best… let’s just say this is the only card in the deck that might justify adding Reliquary Tower.

Kami of Celebration provides excellent card advantage once you have a few modified creatures. It even distributes some counters, though less consistently than your main counter distributors since you need creatures with counters to start.

Minsc & Boo, Timeless Heroes also has limited counter distribution abilities, though cards like Kodama of the West Tree and Invigorating Hot Spring broaden the target selection. Boo benefits from the counter doublers, but I’m primarily interested in this planeswalker as the game’s best Fling. It obliterates people in the late game. I’ve included Kazuul's Fury for a similar reason.

Uncivil Unrest might be the deck’s best counter card, both for adding counter distribution (lots of redundancy there!) and being a potent finisher. This ends games the turn you play it and demands an immediate answer. Herald of Secret Streams has a similar lethality.

The Good Stuff

Outside of the counter package, this deck includes a variety of solid Magic cards that made the cut on the back of their generic goodness. Okay, it’s mostly card draw and interaction, but those are necessary to make any deck tick!

Emberheart Challenger doesn’t care about counters specifically, but it loves that most of your counter distributors target creatures.

The deck rarely uses Ravenous Tyrannosaurus’s devour ability; you’re more interested in using the attack trigger to chew through the opposition.

Apex Altisaur and Cityscape Leveler are massive removal spells that Animar makes eminently more castable.

The removal suite goes deep on creatures for Animar synergies, so Kogla, the Titan Ape also shows up. Steelbane Hydra provides a little more artifact hate and enchantment destruction that works beautifully with Animar thanks to its X-cost. There’s even a creature-based counterspell in Mausoleum Wanderer!

Interaction can only do so much while stapled to creatures. Rapid Hybridization and Chaos Warp add a little extra spot removal. This deck plays a bunch of 1-mana counters; Stubborn Denial is basically always on in this deck, and it joins forces with Swan Song and An Offer You Can't Refuse to reject board wipes.

Board wipes are actually quite threatening to this deck given its high creature count and dependency on keeping them in play. In addition to the counterspells, I’ve included Heroic Intervention, Ripples of Potential, and Mutational Advantage for additional protection.

This list has a solitary wrath in Wave Goodbye that ignores your permanents and destroys your opponents’.

The Mana Base

This deck has a host of utility lands, starting with the sorcery section, funnily enough. I play Bushwhack as a tapped land that occasionally works as a fight spell. Analyze the Pollen similarly switches between being a land and a creature tutor.

Talon Gates of Madara does lots of little things. Playing it on your turn frees up a good attack while activating the ability to put it into play on somebody else’s turn ramps you, provides protection for Animar or another important creature, and potentially disrupts a combo or lethal attack.

Horizon of Progress is basically a second Waterlogged Grove that occasionally ramps an extra card, which is pretty good for a land I’m running for flood insurance.

Llanowar Reborn provides a simple source of counters with a minimal deckbuilding cost.

Boseiju, Who Endures and Otawara, Soaring City round out this mana base with a few lands that juice up the interaction suite, and they’re notably powerful because it’s very hard to interact with a channel ability on the stack.

This deck’s mana acceleration focuses on mana dorks to get you ahead while triggering Animar, with Gyre Sage and Incubation Druid standing out as particularly powerful cards with your counter synergies.

Beyond the dorks and utility lands, you have an idealized mana base with fetch lands, shock lands, dual lands and such; this deck has very few mana problems.

Strategy

This deck has lots of snowball potential. Once you get Animar, Soul of Elements in play with a few counters, you really get going. But you need to get there first.

The most important cards to look for in an opening hand are card advantage and counter distribution. This deck turns the corner abruptly, but it doesn’t blitz out a win the way a combo deck could. You turn a board of creatures into a sudden win with something like Uncivil Unrest; you need the card draw to accumulate the resources to make that winning board state and to find a proper finisher. Counter distribution gets you to a point where you can leverage that card advantage; cards like Bristly Bill, Spine Sower and Innkeeper's Talent help grow Animar even faster.

The midgame cares about assembling a counter doubler and spreading the doubled counters across the board until unearthing a finisher. Keep an eye out for countermagic and protection spells to handle EDH’s endless wraths.

A crucial decision point involves when you want to go off. This deck doesn’t have any infinite combos (though, knowing +1/+1 counter decks, I may have missed one), but it can turn a board with a dork and Animar into a massive mess of creatures. You can become a threat very quickly and need to consider if you can back it up, preferably with countermagic and other interactive spells; if you become The Problem too early and get slapped into place, you might not bounce back. Thankfully, the high levels of card draw help rebuild.

Combos and Interactions

The deck has no infinite loops, but it has some notable interactions and combos worth pointing out, including one that discusses replacement effects so you get the most from your counter doublers, a way to go well over the top of your opponents, and tutor lines with Conduit of Ruin.

First off, let’s square away the replacement effects on the counter doublers. Though I’ve referred to them all under the same umbrella, this deck actually has two varieties: Cards that truly double your counters (Vorinclex, Monstrous Raider) and cards that add an additional counter (Kami of Whispered Hopes).

These are both replacement effects that modify the number of counters you put on a creature. Alone, they often amount to the same thing—whether you control Vorinclex or the Kami, Scythecat Cub puts two counters on a creature instead of one. But what happens when you control both?

The player who owns the game piece being modified—in this case, you—decides the order replacement effects are applied. The best way to do this for your deck is to apply the Kami’s additional counter before Vorinclex’s doubling; you’ll place four +1/+1 counters on the creature, but if you double the counters before adding additional counters, you only get three.

As for going over the top of your opponents, this interaction involves Bristly Bill, Spine Sower and either Kami of Whispered Hopes or Gyre Sage.

Once these dorks tap for 5 mana, you can activate Bill’s ability, and next turn they’ll tap for 10, so you double your counters three times over the course of two turns. You can’t expect this to be sustainable because your opponents will interact, but it can create a huge burst of counters to make a lethal board state from nothing, especially if you sink mana from lands into Bill first.

Lastly, let’s go over the tutor lines with Conduit of Ruin. It only finds four cards:

• Nulldrifter
• Benthic Anomaly
• Hideous Taskmaster
• Cityscape Leveler

But when do you get these?

Cityscape Leveler is pretty obvious: Grab it when you need to answer a threat. If you need to grind your way through a clogged board state but don’t feel you need removal, or if you just want to play the Conduit and build a board state, Nulldrifter is a safe bet.

Benthic Anomaly works well if something’s going wrong—maybe an opponent wiped your board, or maybe they’ve all had a more explosive start. Either way, this creates enough bodies to pull you ahead at once.

Hideous Taskmaster is an excellent finisher; not only can it remove problematic blockers, but it also adds a lot of hasty power to the board very quickly. This card provides another “we win from nowhere” button.

Conduit of Ruin doesn’t have a super deep pool of cards to draw from, but there’s enough versatility here that it should always grab something worthwhile, and four’s enough that you should rarely draw the Conduit after drawing all its targets.

Rule 0 Violations

So long as you’re upfront about the power level of the deck, I can’t see it breaking any Rule 0s. There’s no fast mana, no free interaction, and no combos. While the deck runs a couple of Eldrazi, these aren’t nearly on the scale of cards like Ulamog, the Infinite Gyre and Kozilek, Butcher of Truth, so they should pass the bar.

Budget Options

Most of this deck’s budget rests within the mana base, and you can quickly remedy that by slapping in gates over duals, gain lands over shocks, Evolving Wilds instead of true fetches, and so on. You can also cut the utility lands for a couple of extra basic lands of the appropriate colors, and maybe get in a few MDFCs like Stump Stomp. The deck becomes slower, and therefore weaker, but it’ll do.

You can easily swap Vorinclex, Monstrous Raider for other variants of this effect like Hardened Scales or Branching Evolution.

Bristly Bill, Spine Sower and Scythecat Cub have incredibly high price tags because they’re relatively hard to replace, but other cards that put counters on your creatures like Hadana's Climb and Nissa, Voice of Zendikar can work. The same can be said for Innkeeper's Talent and Court of Garenbrig.

Tyrant's Familiar does a very cheap impression of Ravenous Tyrannosaurus, plus it’s not a Universes Beyond card, if that matters to you.

Legolas's Quick Reflexes is a spectacular protection spell that sometimes kills a creature, but Tyvar's Stand fills in the most important part.

You can swap Heroic Intervention for Inspiring Call, which is technically more thematic but also harder to cast.

You can replace Swan Song with Arcane Denial for a relatively small disadvantage.

Other Builds

Animar, Soul of Elements is a pretty generic value engine, so you can build it in a variety of ways. One path is to exploit its cost reduction to power out crazy strong Eldrazi or generate infinite loops with cards like Cloudstone Curio and Ancestral Statue.

Animar can also be built around morph cards, which become free to play face-down once Animar has three or more counters. Or you could take a typal route since all the good elementals are Temur anyway (except, of course, for Solitude). You can really take this any number of directions so long as you retain the creature focus.

Commanding Conclusion

Halana and Alena, Partners | Illustration by Jason Rainville

There are so many different ways you could build Animar, Soul of Elements that picking any one seems tricky, so I went with a straightforward midrange build that focuses on +1/+1 counter synergies to maximize Animar’s cost reduction and build imposing board states with scrappy creatures.

How would you build Animar? Did I miss any cool counters tech? Let me know in the comments below or on the Draftsim Discord!

Stay safe, and thanks for reading!