General Tazri Commander Deck Guide

General Tazri | Illustration by Chris Rahn

I have fond memories of Zendikar, the wild plane of exploration, of mana so intense the world itself quakes and churns beneath the Roil, and container of the eldritch horrors that are the Eldrazi. I began playing Magic in this block and remember seeing the Eldrazi spoiled card by card.

As interesting as I found the cosmic monstrosities, I found the ally typal strategy more enthralling. The idea of building a board of creatures that fed each other was compelling; helped by the fact that in my early days of playing, I couldn’t conceive of a creature stronger than Turntimber Ranger. Today, we’re revisiting the allies in commander with General Tazri, the warrior who gave Zendikar unity when it needed it most, helming the deck.

The Deck

Drana, Liberator of Malakir | Illustration by Mike Bierek

This is a casual typal deck. In all honesty, ally synergies aren’t the greatest in the world. It’s feast-or-famine. Sometimes, you’ll develop an impossibly powerful board. Each creature you cast makes waves like the greatest of bombs as your unified forces prove greater than any coalition a measly Commander pod could form against you.

Sometimes your impactful allies die, or you get hit with a board wipe, and you’re not doing much. The same can be said for most typal strategies, but allies require such a critical mass that it can feel much more detrimental.

To help extend the value, you have a handful of changelings. These cards don’t have rally abilities, but they are allies. Upping the number of allies without relying on too much draft chaff helps keep the power level of the deck up.

On top of the typal synergies, you have an ETB subtheme. You want to trigger your allies as many times as possible for the greatest advantage. This deck focuses on the ally cards from the original Zendikar block and the rally allies from Battle for Zendikar, mostly ignoring the cohort mechanic from Oath of the Gatewatch. I’m ignoring it because the mechanic is bad. There’s more value in focusing hard on ETBs.

The Commander

General Tazri is the perfect leader for this deck. Having access to all five colors lets you make the most of your rally abilities since all five colors have at least a few allies worth running. The other ally legends are two to three colors, and some of them incidentally have the type.

Since you’re focused on getting extra ETB triggers, you can repeatedly tutor for your best allies. While most are generally powerful, you also have a few situational ones, like Tuktuk Scrapper, that are worth finding in some games.

The activated ability helps close the game out. The typal synergies and your creatures are primarily focused in green and white. You don’t always get +5/+5, but +3/+3 is plenty of damage to overwhelm your opponents.

Rally Allies

These are the allies with rally abilities – and the original allies, which have abilities templated the same way, even if they don’t have the keyword – that provide the bulk of your value. You want to trigger this as often as possible since they often scale with the number of allies you control.

Even after all these years, I have a soft spot for Turntimber Ranger, the first ally to make the list. It might not be as unbeatable as I once thought, but the board presence is still welcome with your pump effects.

Kalastria Healer represents damage and lifegain when it comes down on turn 2. Even later in the game, it can often turn the tide of a close game, much like Blood Artist in sacrifice decks. Hagra Diabolist fills a similar role but a little stronger since it scales with the number of allies.

Oran-Rief Survivalist becomes weaker later in the game, but when drawn early enough, it becomes a 2-mana 6/6. A massive vanilla beater goes pretty well with your allies that spread keywords.

Lifegain is typically weak, but Ondu Cleric gains enough incidental life to be worth the include. Gaining 4 or more life every time a creature comes into play buys a lot of time and turns races in your favor.

Firemantle Mage helps you get in with menace, an underrated keyword that makes blocking a pain, especially with your token producers.

Kabira Evangel also helps push damage. Getting protection from one color helps enable attacks, but two or three triggers often leave your opponents without any means of blocking.

Chasm Guide gives your allies haste, which is potent with some of your typal support cards. It’s also just a good keyword to give in an aggressive deck.

Talus Paladin is another card that wins the race. Giving your team lifelink works well with Tazri’s buff, and the Paladin grows, so it remains a relevant threat.

Tuktuk Scrapper devastates artifact decks. It’s useful in other matchups; most decks run some mana rocks, so accelerating this out can set your opponents behind while you develop your board.

Resolute Blademaster helps push a bunch of damage through with double strike. It’s especially potent with Seascape Aerialist to push damage and Firemantle Mage to force your opponents to make uncomfortable blocks.

Tajuru Warcaller is like a backup Tazri to pump your team. It’s pretty easy to get two or more triggers, forcing your opponents to make rough blocking choices.

Murasa Pyromancer decimates creature decks. It comes down late enough to destroy relevant creatures and makes it hard to keep up blockers as you blow through opposing armies.

Support Allies

These creatures are allies without rally abilities but have the creature type and provide valuable effects. I’ve included the changelings that reinforce your ranks among these cards.

Harabaz Druid gets to tap for a ton of mana at most points in the game. It’s perfectly playable as a 2-mana dork that taps for 1, and it only gets better.

You have a lot of valuable allies that you want to double the triggers of, and Jwari Shapeshifter helps scale. Your best targets are Hagra Diabolist, Turntimber Ranger, and Kalastria Healer.

I love stealing my opponent’s creatures, so Agadeem Occultist was a no-brainer. Reanimating multiple creatures without paying mana does a lot to develop your board, especially once you get to the late game and your opponents feel compelled to chump your large creatures.

Drana, Liberator of Malakir offers another way to buff your team, this time with counters, and an evasive threat that benefits from the various keywords and power your creatures grant.

Sea Gate Loremaster is just silly. Tapping a creature to draw four or five cards for no mana is great. That said, it’s very emblematic of the weakness of allies: a relatively frail, overcosted creature that’s only good with a wide board.

Unsettled Mariner essentially gives your team ward 1. It’s not the strongest protection in the world, but it’s often annoying enough to keep a creature around for an extra turn.

Masked Vandal is just a good card. Taking out an artifact or enchantment permanently is worth exiling a creature from your graveyard, which is barely a cost since you don’t have much recursion.

Mirror Entity is strong in most decks that want to go wide for its activated ability alone. Getting typal synergies is a fantastic bonus. This is a lovely creature; it provides cheap rally triggers and a late-game mana sink.

Irregular Cohort might be your best changeling. This deck wants nothing more than to make allies enter the battlefield, and the Cohort gets two triggers.

Typal Support

These cards support your typal strategy but aren’t allies themselves, just generally good support pieces. As a 5-color deck, you get your choice of available typal support. Your creatures provide plenty of board presence themselves, so these cards primarily focus on generating card advantage. Since ETBs matter so much to allies, I’m including the ETB synergy pieces in this section.

Realmwalker counts as an ally, and it’s one of your most potent sources of card advantage. Getting to cast extra spells is always nice, but just seeing the top card of your library makes lines much clearer.

Titan of Littjara similarly draws tons of cards. It’s nice that this synergy piece wants a wide board of allies as much as the creatures themselves.

Reflections of Littjara and Molten Echoes are incredible for this deck. They provide card advantage in the form of board presence, which is especially potent mixed with the allies’ desire to have a bunch of ETB triggers. Making token copies of your creatures also plays well with Kindred Discovery.

Raise the Palisade and Kindred Dominance provide asymmetrical board wipes that leave you heavily favored, especially since nobody else plays allies. Some of your support creatures can get caught up, but you’ll still be far enough ahead that it won’t matter.

Soulherder and Thassa, Deep-Dwelling both provide end-of-turn flickers for extra ETB triggers, and both become powerful threats in their own right with a few turns of development.

Elesh Norn, Mother of Machines hasn’t broken EDH as some players predicted but it’s amazing for this deck. Doubling your triggers while shutting down your opponent’s ETBs is amazing, especially as ETBs grow stronger with creatures like Etali, Primal Conqueror and Ghalta, Stampede Tyrant.

March from the Tomb does good work. It can get some great allies back after they die and helps you to rebuild after a board wipe, which can wreck this deck. Eerie Interlude and Semester's End also help evade wraths while depositing endless triggers.

Golden Argosy provides another mass ETB effect. A vehicle can get crewed with more power than its crew cost requires, so you can tap your entire board.

Interaction

Your deck is pretty proactive, so you don’t have a ton of removal. You have excellent spot removal in Swords to Plowshares and Path to Exile, among others. Cyclonic Rift gives you a convincing finisher.

Since board wipes impact your deck so much, you have plenty of ways to stop them. Depending on your playgroup, you might not need this many, but between the mass exile effects above, Clever Concealment, Boros Charm, and And They Shall Know No Fear, you have plenty of ways to evade the board wipes. Countermagic also helps in this regard.

The Mana Base

There’s plenty of acceleration since you want to drop big creatures quickly. You have a suite of mana dorks, like Birds of Paradise, Beastcaller Savant, and Noble Hierarch get your pricy allies out quickly, alongside some land ramp in Cultivate and Three Visits. All this ramp doubles as invaluable mana fixing for your 5-color deck.

Since your color requirements are so strict, there’s no room for value lands. Ally Encampment is the only exception, and even that’s a typal 5-color land. Your mana base is primarily fetch lands, shock lands, and Triomes to get you all your colors, plus some untapped lands.

The Strategy

Allies, and many typal decks, lend themselves to a simple strategy: build out your board to overwhelm your opponents. That’s especially true of the allies as they scale so well with each other.

This deck performs best against other creature decks. Partly because you get the most value in those situations and partly because creature-heavy decks tend to run fewer board wipes. You want that advantage.

Against more controlling decks, you need to be aggressive and try to take them out faster than they can wipe the board. You have ample ways to stop most board wipes that don’t exile or give -X/-X (looking at you, Farewell and Toxic Deluge), but avoiding them is still best.

If you get wiped, you have some recursive elements, but your best bet is to avoid the situation entirely. Mulliganing to protection becomes more important against anything playing UBx or UWx, as those tend to be the more controlling colors in the format.

You want to pressure your opponents early, but cards like Hagra Diabolist and Sea Gate Loremaster give you plenty of late-game staying power. Most of your creatures are pretty impactful the turn they come into play. You get plenty of power even in stalled board states where you can’t attack.

Knowing what to tutor up with General Tazri is important. You have three good options for stalled board states: Hagra Diabolist, Murasa Pyromancer, and Seascape Aerialist. Diabolist gives you inevitability. It must get removed, or a player must start attacking; otherwise, you win. Pyromancer chews through the opposing creatures while Aerialist lets you ignore the stalled board altogether. Mirror Entity and Tajuru Warcaller can help break through boards with brute force.

Tuktuk Scrapper is another great tutor target. I’m especially fond of finding this if you get an explosive start with a lot of mana, as blowing up your opponent’s artifacts can extend your mana advantage further. You can find Masked Vandal for troublesome enchantments.

Sea Gate Loremaster and Ondu Cleric are two of the stronger tutor targets when preparing for a grindy game, giving you a massive lead in cards and life, respectively. Turntimber Ranger provides board presence to tussle with your opponents.

Combos and Interactions

This deck is straightforward. You’re more interested in supporting your allies and attacking than comboing off, and enters-the-battlefield strategies are pretty simple. There are a few small interactions to keep your eye out for.

When you get Thassa, Deep-Dwelling and Soulherder into play, they can’t have the same target. If you put both triggers on, say, Irregular Cohort, one trigger would resolve first, flickering the Cohort. This would then count as a new instance of the permanent, and the second trigger won’t resolve as its original target has been removed.

Eerie Interlude and Semester's End have lots of uses, but one of the more subtle is as a combat trick. If you have Soulherder in play, you can use them to exile the rest of your board, potentially adding five or more counters on top of the ETB value you’re getting. It’s a great way to generate a surprise blocker, especially if you’re tapped out.

The allies from the original Zendikar block, the ones without rally, have optional abilities with “may” clauses. This is especially important for Ondu Cleric, as there are plenty of ways to punish lifegain and Seascape Aerialist in case your opponents have flying defenses like Sandwurm Convergence.

Rule 0 Violations Check

This deck lacks combos or fast mana, so it clears most rule 0 conversations. Some players may quibble about the inclusion of Cyclonic Rift, but my philosophy on casual decks focuses more on concepts than individual cards. I also have the oddly controversial opinion that it’s good for Commander games to end.

Budget Options

The biggest place to save money is the mana base. Fetches, shocks, and Triomes are expensive. If you don’t mind playing a little slower with tap lands, you'll find plenty of budget options. Pain lands are especially useful, as they come into play untapped at the cost of some life.

Bloom Tender and Noble Hierarch are pricy mana dorks, but some simple ramp like Rampant Growth or Farseek can work in their place.

Elesh Norn, Mother of Machines is one of the best Panharmonicon variants on the market, but any similar effect, including the original, works fine.

And They Shall Know No Fear seems to be charging by the word. Indomitable Formation or Make A Stand provide the same effect for a little more mana. These could also be budget replacements for Clever Concealment.

Cyclonic Rift has been ending games of EDH forever and a day, but Winds of Abandon does a similar job of removing our opponent’s boards and leaving yours untouched.

Other Builds

General Tazri is a very, very specific commander; it’s hard to play without allies. One alternate path you could take is adding some combo spice. It’s easy to create infinite flicker loops with cards like Preston, the Vanisher and Displacer Kitten; once established, you can add allies like Hagra Diabolist and Kalastria Healer to burn the table and get infinite triggers of other relevant allies. That build would take Tazri from a value engine to a combo enabler while still having the alternate attack everybody to death mode this deck prioritizes.

Commanding Conclusion

Agadeem Occultist | Illustration by Vance Kovacs

I might be a little (very!) biased, but the allies are a pretty cool creature type. They’re similar to the party mechanic, except with more support and a lower bar to entry since you don’t need four creatures of specific types.

The archetype has its weaknesses, but it’s also a lot of fun to play at casual tables if you don’t mind keeping track of a billion or so ETB triggers. What’s your favorite typal archetype? Have you enjoyed our many forays to Zendikar? Let me know in the comments below or on the Draftsim Discord!

Thanks for reading and stay safe!