Teval, the Balanced Scale Commander Deck Guide

Last updated on September 22, 2025

Teval, the Balanced Scale | Illustration by Chris Rahn

Teval, the Balanced Scale topped my ranking of Tarkir: Dragonstorm’s commanders as a powerful, dynamic creature that supports a range of strategies, from casual decks that fiddle around with Insidious Roots to higher-powered decks fiddling around with Dark Depths and Glacial Chasm.

I love lands dearly, so I decided to dip into the stronger end of the spectrum. This deck goes deep into green’s land synergies to assemble powerful wincons that teach your opponents the value of interacting with a mana base via Demolition Field and Strip Mine.

The Deck

Greensleeves, Maro-Sorcerer | Illustration by Tuan Duong Chu

This deck closes the game with a powerful lands package. Your primary threats are Field of the Dead for an undead horde and Dark Depths to go as tall as tokens can go. You can also use Glacial Chasm to save yourself from combat damage.

As a backup win condition, all the lands coming and going from the battlefield summons a token army with two Titanias and Greensleeves, Maro-Sorcerer. This deck leans heavy into green, with blue and black cards enhancing the deck’s interactive package and dipping into deep graveyard synergies.

The Commander: Teval, the Balanced Scale

Teval, the Balanced Scale provides several angles of attack. Firstly, milling yourself and returning lands digs to and enables your combos, providing a crucial source of recursion to activate Dark Depths multiple times or keep Field of the Dead around.

It’s also just a one-dragon army. You have plenty of recursive cards to make Zombie Druid tokens, even without Teval’s attack trigger. Your opponents need removal very quickly or you get some value and gradually run away with games. Spot removal isn’t good enough because you have zombies, and board wipes don’t affect the lands you recur. Talk about a resilient commander!

The Lands Package

These cards might be lands, but they have little to do with the actual casting of spells; rather, these are value-oriented cards you want to tutor for because they’re your win conditions or value engines; the rest of the deck supports this core.

Dark Depths is one of your primary win conditions when paired with its old friend Thespian's Stage. I avoided cards like Vampire Hexmage since you can easily find and recur the Stage, and I didn’t want to dedicate too much space to this one combo.

The more I tinker around with Field of the Dead, the more I wonder if it should be a Game Changer. It’s incredibly hard to interact with it, and while fast combo decks might not care about it, it’s a beast in fair matchups and slips into 3-color mana bases with relatively little effort.

Thespian's Stage primarily appears to combo with Dark Depths, but don’t be afraid to make a second Field of the Dead, Urza's Cave, or Horizon of Progress; the deck has more than enough recursion to get it for round two. Vesuva has similar utility—though it doesn’t combo with Dark Depths.

Talon Gates of Madara provides a bit of sneaky interaction you can use at instant speed with the activated ability. It protects one of your cards, disrupts a combo, and occasionally brings a token or two—what’s not to love?

Horizon of Progress is a notable inclusion as a card advantage engine. You can recur it with Teval for an extra card each turn, but it gets really spicy with a Crucible of Worlds effect and extra land drops—in addition to drawing several cards, you get loads of landfall triggers.

Discovering New Lands

Having a land package is nice and all, but how do you find the cards? I’ve added a few general tutors to get the job done.

Nylea's Intervention is expensive, but X=3 lets you find Dark Depths, Thespian's Stage, and Field of the Dead in one go—that’s all your best win conditions available instantly thanks to this one card, which has even more utility thanks to Boseiju, Who Endures and Bojuka Bog interacting with your opponents.

Crop Rotation’s the best land tutor in this deck since the land goes directly to play. You get got by countermagic, but it’s too valuable to exclude. Entomb does a reasonable impression with Teval or another recursion piece.

Realms Uncharted synergizes beautifully with Teval. You don’t care much about lands going to hand or the graveyard. Don’t forget the fail-to-find trick that breaks Gifts Ungiven to send two important lands to the bin for recursion.

Titania's Command has a high mana cost, but it dumps two key lands into play (often Field of the Dead and something else) while interacting with the graveyard. The counter mode provides sudden damage to push for a win.

Elvish Reclaimer finds key lands while enabling Titania, Protector of Argoth and giving Teval something to recur.

Tolaria West finds whatever land you like. Transmute costs more than other tutors, but it dodges most countermagic since you put an ability on the stack, not a spell.

Land Recursion

This deck plays heavily from the graveyard, counting on its commander to recur vital lands to use them again or as a response to interaction. But Teval’s not the only way to do that.

Crucible of Worlds is the classic example of this, and it’s joined by Ramunap Excavator and Conduit of Worlds, with the latter recurring other cards if needed. Let me know in the comments if you’d play Walk-In Closet//Forgotten Cellar instead of the Conduit; 5 mana for a single good turn seems like a lot, but I could be underrating it.

Standard aficionados likely recognize Aftermath Analyst from the Temur lands deck before New Capenna rotated, and it gets up to similar stuff here. This card’s great as it mills and recurs, and getting multiple lands at once buys back the entire Depths combo instead of doing it one piece at a time. Lumra, Bellow of the Woods and Splendid Reclamation provide similar value.

Hedge Shredder goes the opposite direction by putting lands into play as you mill. It’s a bit narrower since it doesn’t help get lands back after you use them, but it sets you up so well with Mesmeric Orb or Hedron Crab that I can’t bring myself to cut it.

Self-Mill

Recurring lands is nice, but you need to get them in the graveyard since your opponents probably won’t be kind enough to fire off an Armageddon to fuel your strategy.

Hedron Crab turns the lands you play from the graveyard into more lands in the graveyard to replay.

Getting six cards in the graveyard for is a stellar rate, so I’m happy to play Stitcher's Supplier. I don’t have any sacrifice outlets in this deck, but you can chump with it, or it gets hit by a board wipe.

Ripples of Undeath might be my favorite card from 2024. Self-mill and card advantage wrapped into one package makes this an excellent variant on Phyrexian Arena.

Life from the Loam strikes the perfect balance between self-mill and recursion, and it even got a reprint in the Sultai Arisen precon with thematic art for Teval.

Witherbloom Command and Awaken the Honored Dead staple removal and other effects to their mill. Don’t turn your nose up at Witherbloom Command destroying tiny permanents; cards like Rest in Peace and Relic of Progenitus demand immediate answers.

Mesmeric Orb and Court of Cunning are two of the best self-mill enablers in the format. You can’t beat the efficiency of the Orb, and the card draw from the monarchy’s invaluable. You have plenty of chump blockers to protect it and a flying dragon to reclaim it.

Lands Support

These are the most expensive cards, and the most impactful outside of the proper land package.

With so many lands flying around, The Gitrog Monster promises to be one of the best card advantage engines you could hope for, especially once you combine it with a recursion piece to play fetch lands from the graveyard.

Titania, Nature's Force, Titania, Protector of Argoth, and Greensleeves, Maro-Sorcerer each represent an army in a can. These were chosen to overwhelm your opponents with a fleet of tokens independent of Teval or the core lands. You hit enough land drops with this deck that any one makes a board state your opponents are forced to answer while simply playing your game plan. If one dies, another takes its place. They add lots of redundancy and resilience to the deck.

Aesi, Tyrant of Gyre Strait also dominates games, but it does so via card advantage rather than board presence. This pairs nicely with other land support to attack your opponents on multiple fronts.

Nuts and Bolts

Let’s glance over the interaction and card advantage to give you a picture of everything else the deck does.

Ledger Shredder and Zimone and Dina might be too cute since they both interact heavily with Teval. The former relies on Teval to negate the downside of the loot while the latter feeds off the Zombie Druid tokens.

Black Market Connections is the best Phyrexian Arena variant available since it combines ramp and mana production into one admittedly painful package.

Kishla Skimmer works with Teval and all the other recursive elements. It’s basically Aesi, Tyrant of Gyre Strait when you have Ramunap Excavator.

The deck has ample countermagic to protect its important pieces or disrupt the opponents’. An Offer You Can't Refuse, Swan Song, and Counterspell are just some of the best.

I’ve been coming around to Stubborn Denial when my commander has 4 or more power. It’s not a cEDH strategy, but it feels great when it works and resolving an effective Force Spike is always funny.

Three Steps Ahead and Decisive Denial sacrifice efficiency and promised results respectively for modality; having a little flexibility in the deck makes you even more resilient.

Soul Shatter and Windgrace's Judgment are incredible in a multiplayer format, handling multiple threats with a single card.

Crux of Fate provides a very thematic board wipe. There are only 20 creatures in this deck and it can rebuild quite quickly, especially since this wrath often destroys everything but Teval, the Balanced Scale.

The Mana Base

I’ve gone over the lands that win the game, but what about cards that accelerate you into these win conditions?

Let’s start with the mana dorks, of which there are plenty. Notable inclusions are Exploration, one of the best 1-mana ramp options in the game, and Azusa, Lost but Seeking, which makes all your cards that care about sacrificing lands incredibly powerful with Ramunap Excavator.

Insidious Roots and Squandered Resources are ramp spells with very high ceilings. Roots doubles down on the tokens you get from Teval while making them into mana dorks, and Squandered Resources enables explosive turns with a recursion piece and some extra land drops.

Bloom Tender shines as ever in 3-color decks, and I especially like it with a 4-mana commander.

Outside the value lands, you have a bundle of shocks and fetches and stuff for excellent mana fixing. Boseiju, Who Endures and Otawara, Soaring City sneak additional interaction into the deck while Takenuma, Abandoned Mire offers more mill and recursion.

Shifting Woodland often comes online passively; though you aren’t dedicated to delirium, you mill plenty of cards. It becomes a copy of the most important permanent in your graveyard—not bad for a Forest.

The Strategy

You really need ramp in that opening hand, and I wouldn’t hate some self-mill or interaction either. You really want to land Teval early to start hitting with it and build up your resources to prepare for the inevitably grindy game you’ll have on your hands.

This deck is quite resilient, which comes from the combination of its lands package and the land support cards working in tandem. If your opponents want to stop Field of the Dead or Dark Depths, they need to interact with your lands; but that alone isn’t good enough because of Teval and your other recursion pieces, so they need to mess with your graveyard. While you play the core game plan, The Gitrog Monster or Aesi, Tyrant of Gyre Strait sit around passively drawing cards, so your opponents need removal for them. But that spot removal isn’t enough for either of the Titanias or Greensleeves, Maro-Sorcerer, which require board wipes to handle. Don’t forget that Marit Lage requires exile-, bounce-, or shuffle-based interaction. And while all this happens, your self-mill cards, ramp spells, and draw spells accrue tons of value.

When somebody tells me they have a resilient deck, this is what I expect: a deck that pressures its opponents on multiple fronts. Your opponents need many removal spells of multiple varieties to handle your threats, and that’s before you factor in all the countermagic you have to fight back, plus removal to prevent them from becoming the threat.

Making use of these resilient threats and gaining an advantage on the field, in the hand, and on the stack is the core of the deck’s strategy. It’s hyper-grindy midrange dialed up to a power level that competes with Commander.

Combos and Interactions

I want to go over some of the combos real quick, mostly the ones centered around lands since they do the winning.

Dark Depths+ Thespian’s Stage

This combo requires both pieces in play. Activate the Stage to copy Dark Depths. The copy triggers the legend rule; keep the copy and sacrifice the original.

Because Thespian's Stage didn’t enter as a copy of Dark Depths, it has no ice counters, so you can sacrifice it and make Marit Lage immediately.

I’ve seen lots of players think this works with Vesuva, but Vesuva doesn’t work because it enters the battlefield as a copy of Dark Depths; the timing works out such that the Vesuva copy does have ice counters, so this just wastes a land drop.

Glacial Chasm

Glacial Chasm is a strange card. It’s a powerful protection piece if you can offset the loss of a land and paying life into the cumulative upkeep cost—and circumvent not being able to attack.

The simplest way to break this card is to pay the cumulative upkeep cost as little as possible. Teval enables this quite simply; sacrifice the Chasm in your upkeep, then attack with Teval to get it back. Since Teval and any other creatures we attack with were declared as attackers before the Chasm returned to play, you still get your full combat step while protecting yourself.

That puts you down a land each time, but you have plenty of recursion plus a land drop left. As long as you can make a land drop and put Chasm into play, it leaves you mana-neutral. Of course, one of the recursion pieces replays the Chasm and puts you down a land permanently, but that’s better than dying.

Pairing a Ramunap Excavator or similar card with an extra land gives you the same value as though you had Teval, but things get really spicy with Ramunap and Azusa, Lost but Seeking; that combination lets you play Magic as usual even as the Chasm protects you.

While the protection is nice, all that sacrificing and replaying makes the other land synergies work; having a land that sacrifices itself and others on demand is exactly what The Gitrog Monster and Titania, Protector of Argoth need to go off. You can even recycle the enters abilities on Talon Gates of Madara and Bojuka Bog by sacrificing and replaying them… this deck has lots of little interactions like those.

My last note on Glacial Chasm refers to its protection. It saves you from all damage, not just combat damage; it’s a subtle but important distinction as this saves you from Crackle with Power as reliably as Craterhoof Behemoth.

Rule 0 Violations Check

This deck toes the line between Brackets 3 and 4. You could make a reasonable argument for this being the peak of Bracket 3 or the floor of Bracket 4. Being up front about that should be enough; some players might find the lands package frustrating since casual players rarely interact with lands, but a lack of free spells, infinite combos, and ultimately telegraphed wins keeps this deck from being too obscene.

Budget Options

I always recommend trimming the mana base for budget options; playing temples, gates, and gain lands over fetches, shock, and duals is a great start, but what about all the fancy lands?

Neither Field of the Dead nor Glacial Chasm are budget-friendly. Chasm has no real replacement, but you could run Scute Swarm or another landfall-fueled token generator instead of the field.

Dark Depths + Thespian's Stage is actually quite budget friendly, thanks in large part to the combo being reprinted in a Duskmourn precon, so you’re good there.

Greensleeves, Maro-Sorcerer is another expensive token producer; Zendikar's Roil does the trick.

Modern players love pretending mill is viable, so Mesmeric Orb costs a pretty penny. Try Cemetery Tampering instead.

While I’m uncertain about Walk-In Closet//Forgotten Cellar being best in slot for the deck, it’s an amazing budget alternative for Crucible of Worlds at a fraction of the price.

Realms Uncharted has had all of one printing, so it’s a little pricey; Entomb is also up there. Both can be replaced with Vile Entomber or Unmarked Grave, which notably comes at the price of missing Dark Depths.

Squandered Resources also has a single printing that’s *checks date* almost 30 years old! It doesn’t really have a replacement. If you want to fiddle around with sacrificing lands, you can run Zuran Orb or Sylvan Safekeeper, but you should be safe to just add Three Visits or something. Which is my advice for other super-expensive mana accelerants like Bloom Tender or Delighted Halfling. There’s plenty of budget ramp to find.

Other Builds

So, what else can you do with Teval, the Balanced Scale? If you want a more casual brew, you could focus on the second line of text. “Leaves the graveyard” has lots of payoffs. You already have Insidious Roots, but you could add Chalk Outline, Amzu, Swarm's Hunger, and Syr Konrad, the Grim, to name a few. Add a Tortured Existence and you have a real brew going!

Another build looks at Teval less as an enabler and more of a support piece. My build and a casual graveyard deck try to maximize some of Teval’s text, but it’s a generically powerful card. I can see a midrange build that just plays all the Rampant Growth variants so it always has Teval on turn 3 to ramp into battlecruisers and provide blockers as you develop your board.

Commanding Conclusion

Ramunap Excavator | Illustration by Mark Behm

Despite being called “the Balanced Scale,” Teval seems anything but. It takes next to nothing to make it a broken value engine and a 4-mana 4/4 flier that ramps and mills is busted in its own right. This deck tries to do the most with it, but it could go in any number of directions.

Do you enjoy grindy decks like this? How would you build Teval? Let me know in the comments below or on the Draftsim Discord!

Stay safe, and thanks for reading!