Shalai and Hallar Commander Deck Guide

Last updated on February 13, 2024

Shalai and Hallar | Illustration by Mila Pesic

March of the Machine brought us lots of exciting team-up cards to brew around in Commander. Uniting legendary creatures to create new multicolor legends and interesting takes on previously printed abilities was a brilliant idea, and many of them make for interesting build-around commanders.

Shalai and Hallar is one of the team-up cards I’ve seen the most excitement for. It’s a versatile commander that lends itself well to combo decks or fair counter strategies. Why not try a bit of both!

The Deck

Renata, Called to the Hunt | Illustration by Chris Rahn

+1/+1 counters are a well-supported archetype, especially in Selesnya (). This deck seeks to take advantage of that legacy support to unleash an aggressive front that asks your opponents if they’re fast or interactive enough to handle a massive board of creatures coming their way.

Aggro decks can struggle in Commander. Weenie decks just don’t hold up well in a multiplayer format where everybody starts at 40 life and the name of the game is tossing around massive spells. But this deck has some legs to combat this.

The counters really help. With some setup from some archetype support, mostly enchantments, you can make your little guys plenty large enough to tussle with the monsters Gruul () and Simic () players like to drop.

You’ve also got a combo or two to close the door, even if you’re not a proper combo deck. These combos help you take the last few steps to close out a game you’ve lost a little steam in. This is a similar purpose to what your commander serves.

The Commander

As noted there’s no shortage of +1/+1 counter support, including plenty of commanders for the archetype. How does Shalai and Hallar stand out? The combination of vigilance and flying is a great start that makes it offensive and defensive.

It also provides so much closing power. It’s a 2-card combo with The Red Terror or Heliod, Sun-Crowned that wins the game outright. It’s central to the combos I’ve mentioned.

The damaging ability also closes out games. It gives you direct damage to throw at your opponents who have stabilized behind large creatures. It also helps you circumvent defensive decks protecting themselves with cards like Ghostly Prison and Ensnaring Bridge, among other options that make it hard to attack.

This commander is a primary win condition with your main gameplan to spread counters and beat down, a secondary win condition with your combo finishers, and even gives you a third potential win via commander damage, even though this isn’t a dedicated Voltron list.

It’s a pretty cheap commander to top it all off. I can’t ask for much more from this card.

Counter Doubling

Let’s look at the cards that increase your counters. You’ve probably accumulated many of these effects over the years. They’re vital to make your board scale with the game and outclass your opponents.

Kami of Whispered Hopes is one of several new additions to the deck from MOM. It’s a fantastic counter payoff since it increases all the counters your creatures get while producing a bunch of mana later in the game. It enables some explosive turns once you get a few counters on it.

Pir, Imaginative Rascal gives you an effect like the Kami's, though it doesn’t come with a burst of mana. This one attracts lots of removal because of the planeswalker synergies, but that’s okay since this deck doesn’t run planeswalkers. It gives your other threats some breathing room.

Conclave Mentor is one of your best counter buffers due to its efficiency. You don’t want to stack too many counters on this because it’ll already be a high-priority target for your opponents. But if you have nothing else, it holds them well, and you get a small benefit from it dying.

The Mentor is efficient, but you can’t get more efficient than Hardened Scales. It’s one of the best at what it does simply for costing a single mana. This is your best turn-one play that sets you up for turns to come. It also gets a boon for being an enchantment, one of the harder card types to effectively remove.

Ozolith, the Shattered Spire is another new addition from MOM; it’s wild that two of these effects were printed in the same set. The Ozolith has a benefit over the other versions of this effect we’ve looked at, primarily because it adds counters itself without needing another piece to get the ball rolling.

Evolution Sage gets a shout-out as an honorary counter doubler with its proliferate ability. It’s a lovely 3-mana investment that pays dividends over the course of a game.

Branching Evolution is the only true “doubler.” The other cards only add an additional +1/+1 counter, which basically doubles since the deck distributes counters one at a time. This card stacks the best with the other effects and is incredibly strong.

Counter Distribution

Biophagus is one of the best counter enablers. It ramps you, fixes your mana, and makes your creatures larger. Unlike many of these effects, the mana doesn’t have to get spent on a creature spell; you just get extra benefits if it is.

Anafenza, Kin-Tree Spirit helps keep your counters evenly dispersed since it always gives them to your smaller creatures. It maintains a robust board state without putting too many counters on one creature.

Good-Fortune Unicorn, Renata, Called to the Hunt, and Master Chef are among the best counter distributors because they do the thing for free. Once you drop this in play, everything’s bigger, better, and more threatening to your opponents.

Rhythm of the Wild gives your creatures riot, letting them come into play hasty or with counters. It also gives you invaluable counter protection, forcing blue players to turn their interaction elsewhere.

Tribute to the World Tree usually dispenses counters since most of your creatures are smaller. When paired with one of the other counter enablers and a counter doubler, this becomes a powerful card draw engine. The flexibility is worth the intense mana cost.

Guardian Scalelord distributes counters and saves some permanents from an untimely demise. You have lots of cheap cards, so this gets most things from your graveyard without extra counters.

Rishkar, Peema Renegade gets you a few counters and some mana early. It enables surprisingly powerful turns later in the game; it often nets mana when cast by turning all your creatures into Llanowar Elves.

Shalai, Voice of Plenty doesn’t give you free counters, but it gives you a great mana sink for turns you’ve run out of gas and protection for your board state that forces your opponents to have a wrath or waste a removal spell on Shalai.

Forgotten Ancient is a beast in this deck. With Shalai and Hallar  out, every spell your opponents cast pings them for damage. If you get a counter doubler out, this damage increases, and you get tons of counters since you can move one counter from the Ancient to get two on whatever creature you’re targeting.

Invigorating Hot Spring is like Rhythm of the Wild; the two work well together since you don’t need to pick between haste and counters. It’s great with your creatures that tap for mana based on their power, like Kami of Whispered Hopes since it gives them extra power and haste.

Together Forever gives you two counters pretty cheaply and protects your board. Aggro decks are susceptible to removal and board wipes. A little extra mana lets you recoup some of your losses, so it’s not a complete blowout, even if it sets you back.

Cathars' Crusade is one of your best non-combo finishers. This generates tons of counters, translating to tons of damage with your commander out. It’s not impossible to take out one player with the damage from a few triggers before attacking another player to take out two at once.

Uncivil Unrest is an amazing addition from the MOM Commander decks. Doubling the damage your creatures do is insane. It’s also not limited to combat damage, so Shalai and Hallar deals twice as much direct damage with this in play. It puts unbelievable pressure on your opponents, especially if they don’t have a good answer.

Counter Payoffs

Massive creatures are a great boon of this strategy, but you have payoffs beyond letting your creatures punch well above their mana cost.

Champion of Lambholt gets counters all on its own while spreading evasion across your team. Champion is one of your best ways to push damage. It can come as a surprise later in the game, with a couple of ways to get counters on it as soon as it comes into play.

Kodama of the West Tree is far stronger than it looks. Giving your team trample makes chumping impossible, and this generates a massive mana advantage. It's great at preventing the tension that comes from choosing to spend your mana ramping or advancing your board state.

Gyre Sage and Incubation Druid are more mana dorks that produce tons of mana once you get some counters on them. The Sage scales better in the late game, while the Druid fixes your mana better, but both put you ahead of your opponents.

Dusk Legion Duelist loves it when you distribute +1/+1 counters around. The vigilant body helps keep you offensive and defensive, and the card draw keeps you playing an extended game. It’s an all-around great card for this deck.

Armorcraft Judge and Inspiring Call are two more cards that turn your counters into card draw, but they do so in a large burst rather than a steady stream of card advantage. Call also provides vital protection from board wipes.

Interaction

This deck has a couple of kinds of interaction. You’ve got a typical assortment of white spot removal, including Swords to Plowshares and Path to Exile, but I want to look specifically at the stax pieces and reactive pieces to protect your board.

Drannith Magistrate is a much-maligned card that’s much easier to deal with than its haters would have you believe. This is a great roadblock against decks dependent on curving out their commander before doing anything else, and it shuts off some sources of card advantage.

Esper Sentinel is a fantastic piece in this deck. It’s either card advantage or a taxation effect on your opponents. Nobody pays for this once you have a few counters and the tax is three or four mana, so you get a lot of value.

Thalia, Guardian of Thraben imposes a harsh tax that your mostly creature deck doesn’t care about. This is one of the best early plays that really hits players reliant on cheap ramp spells and expensive creatures.

Collector Ouphe is another card that strikes at an opponent’s mana, but only if they’re all in on artifact ramp – which many non-green decks are. You have all of two artifacts in Sol Ring and Ozolith, the Shattered Spire, and this doesn’t even shut off the Ozolith’s counter doubling, so this has a minimal impact on your board. It’s also great at shutting down players trying to combo with Treasure production.

Tamiyo's Safekeeping and Loran's Escape give you some spot protection to counteract your opponents’ spot removal. These are especially useful when you’re trying to combo off and can save a key creature from a board wipe.

There’s the previously mentioned Inspiring Call for board wipe protection, as well as Clever Concealment. Concealment is powerful because you don’t need to hold up the four mana, making it a lovely surprise for the opponent who thought a Wrath of God would solve their problems. Phasing is also becoming premium protection as more and more wraths that exile like Farewell and Sunfall are printed.

Silkguard gives you some team-wide hexproof for as little as one mana depending on what you’re trying to protect. It’s also an excellent finisher that spreads damage across the board with Shalai and Hallar and/or a counter doubler in play.

The Mana Base

We’ve looked at some of the counter-specific ramp pieces already. There are some traditional mana dorks here; Birds of Paradise and Avacyn's Pilgrim do a lot of early acceleration and mana fixing, as does a Nature's Lore to snag Jetmir's Garden. There are also some good value lands.

There are several modal double-faced cards that bolster your land and spell count. Valakut Awakening gets you a fresh hand if you start drawing dead later in the game. Bala Ged Recovery finds your best card in the graveyard, while Shatterskull Smashing sends their best creatures to the bin. Emeria's Call wraps this up with a potential finisher that gives you some tokens. These cards are super powerful and increase your range of keepable hands.

Gavony Township and Oran-Rief, the Vastwood are lands that distribute counters to the team. Oran-Rief is a little narrower but costs significantly less mana, and you’ve got a decent number of green creatures.

Strip Mine and Demolition Field are powerful tools that are primarily here to deal with problematic lands like Gaea's Cradle and Cabal Coffers. Demolition Field also provides fixing in a pinch.

Beyond these value pieces, there’s just some solid fixing to comfortably cast your spells on curve with as few tapped lands and mana issues as possible.

The Strategy

One big thing about this deck is that it’s not just battlecruiser ramp. You’ve got some mana acceleration, but you’re looking to curve out smoothly and set up some sort of value engine, which is the biggest thing this deck needs.

These value engines often include a counter distributor and doubler. Once you get down a Hardened Scales and Good-Fortune Unicorn (hopefully with a stax piece between), you’re off to the races. Opponents have a lot of things they need to answer and you have both protection and redundancy to make that hard for them.

You want opening hands that have a bit of assertiveness and are at least part of the value engine. You also have some powerful combo hands. A little ramp and The Red Terror or Heliod, Sun-Crowned can lead it a win as soon as turn four, though it tends to be a little bit of a glass cannon.

Once you have some value, you need to be aggressive and get in there. You can finish your opponents with Shalai and Hallar  or your combos, but you’re not combo-centric enough to bide your time while you wait to draw into pieces. You need to deal damage early and often to get your opponents low enough that your commander can burn them out.

Try to avoid piling all your counters on one creature. You have plenty of effects that spread them across the whole team, so it’s pretty easy to keep them evenly dispersed. The risk of piling everything on one creature is getting blown out by a single removal spell, so diversifying your threats is important. The only exception is if you want to go all-in on commander damage and can protect Shalai and Hallar with something like Tamiyo's Safekeeping.

Combos and Interactions

Let’s look at the interaction of replacement effects. In the case of this deck, that’s all the counter doublers that say “instead.” The owner of the affected card decides the order in which replacement effects are applied. In many cases, that doesn’t matter for this deck.

If you’re putting a single counter on Kami of Whispered Hopes and control it and Pir, Imaginative Rascal, then it doesn’t matter which order you apply their replacement effects. Either way, the Kami gets three counters.

This changes with Branching Evolution since it doubles the number of counters. You’ll want to apply all your “add an additional counter” effects before doubling all the counters to maximize your output. To continue to the above example with Branching Evolution, if you were to double and then add the additional two counters, you’d get four counters. But applying the additional replacement effects before the double replacement effect nets you six counters. Always be clear about how you’re ordering replacement effects to avoid any confusion and miscommunication about the board state.

With that out of the way, let’s look at some combos! You have two two-card combos that involve your commander for an instant win that kills your opponents at any life total, giving you an answer to those Oloro players who gain scores of life in a game.

The first combo uses Shalai and Hallar and The Red Terror. You need both in play for this combo.

It’s pretty simple. You need any red source to deal damage. An attack with Shalai and Hallar  is the easiest way to do this. The damage triggers The Red Terror, which gets a counter. This triggers Shalai and Hallar.

Use that trigger to deal damage to any opponent. This triggers the Terror again, and this loop continues until your opponents are dead!

You can also add an additional piece to this with any of your cards that give your creatures counters when they come into play. It doesn’t change the combo too much; it just bypasses the attacking step since The Red Terror comes into play with a counter, which starts the chain reaction.

The second combo uses Shalai and Hallar and Heliod, Sun-Crowned. Again, both cards need to be in play.

Use Heliod’s activated ability to give your commander lifelink and attack with it. You’ll gain life, which triggers Heliod, putting a counter on Shalai and Hallar  or any creature you control. The counter triggers Shalai, which deals a damage, gains a life, and triggers Heliod all over again.

Like with the The Red Terror combo, you can also do this without attacking by getting a counter on any of your creatures after you’ve given Shalai and Hallar lifelink. The counter doesn’t need to go on them.

You also have the Walking Ballista and Heliod, Sun-Crowned combo. This combo requires both cards in play and the Ballista to have at least two counters. Give it lifelink and perform the same loop with Shalai and Hallar, removing counters from the Ballista to deal damage and replace them.

Rule 0 Violations Check

This deck has a lot going on that some tables might not enjoy. There’s a stax package, scant as it is. Drannith Magistrate in particular gets a lot of hate. That said, it’s far from a prison deck. None of these stax pieces should win the game when played; they’re just here to slow things down.

You’ve also got some infinite combos that are really consistent since your commander is one of the combo pieces. The Red Terror and Heliod, Sun-Crowned don’t do much in the deck but combo off. If your playgroup is staunchly anti-combo, I’d recommend replacing them with All Will Be One and Lae'zel, Vlaakith's Champion, respectively. Walking Ballista is a combo piece, but also a strong enough card alone to stay in.

Budget Options

Let’s look at a few ways to bring the price down.

 Branching Evolution costs a pretty penny, but you can replace it with Lae'zel, Vlaakith's Champion to keep getting extra counters, even though you lose your true doubling effect.

Emeria's Call and Shatterskull Smashing can be replaced with the appropriate basic land counterparts to make the mana base a little cheaper; while you’re looking to bring down the price of the mana base, temples and pathways can replace fetches and shocks, though that weakens the mana base considerably.

Esper Sentinel is a valuable piece of card draw and cardboard. Welcoming Vampire can be awkward with some of your counter synergies but is a fine replacement.

Biophagus gives you lots of counter value, but any cheaper dork like Paradise Druid can slot in for it.

Eladamri's Call is a great tutor to set up your combos, but you could go for something like Time of Need or Shared Summons to bring the price down.

Strip Mine is easily replaced with Ghost Quarter to keep pressuring value lands without pressuring your wallet.

Other Builds

You can take Shalai and Hallar down a few other build paths. One route you can take is the Naya tried and true Voltron! They’re an evasive commander that wants you to use counter synergies, so why not put all your eggs into one angelic basket? That deck would focus less on even counter distribution and more on cards like Hydra's Growth and Storm the Seedcore to build up one massive commander.

You can also lean far harder into combos. Naya is host to a number of powerful creature combos with cards like Devoted Druid and Kitchen Finks that work with a plethora of other effects to make infinite mana, gain infinite life, generate infinite ETB triggers… just generally going infinite! If you can find a payoff that includes infinite +1/+1 counters, Shalai and Hallar becomes a machine gun taking your opponents out without any combat.

Commanding Conclusion

Managorger Hydra | Illustration by Lucas Graciano

The team-up cards from March of the Machine brought us a slew of fan-favorite legendary creatures brought together on one card. Shalai and Hallar unite two legends of Dominaria to create a powerful engine and combo enabler.

With this Angel Elf at the helm of your deck, you can take to the skies with a massive flier, rain destruction from above with counter damage, and even combo your opponents to secure an early win.

How would you build Shalai and Hallar? What’s your favorite team-up legend from MOM? Let me know in the comments and on the official Draftsim Discord.

Stay safe, and win with value!