Hello and welcome to Daily Commander!

Today we are going to be talking about Nath of the Gilt-Leaf!

Nath is a 5 mana 4/4 that at the beginning of your upkeep allows you to force one of your opponents to discard a card at random and whenever an opponent discards a card you may create a 1/1 Elf Warrior creature token.

Talk about pulling Commanders from out of nowhere. For reference I have looked at several Elfball Commanders on my own time for a bit, and I have no recollection of seeing Nath.

I don’t know why, because this is neat Commander that has two ways to dominate a game: resource denial and going wide with Elves and that sounds like fun.

Discard outlets are not hard to come by, so we should have a bit of a focus on how to take advantage of those discard outlets.

Waste Not is probably one of the better ways to take advantage of the discards because of the wide swath of effects you can get from whenever an opponent discards a card.

There is also Vulturous Zombie which gets a +1/+1 counter whenever a card is put into an opponent’s graveyard from anywhere and has flying so it can be a threat as the game goes along.

In Foundations there is also Tinybones, Bauble Burglar that takes an opponent’s discarded card with a stash counter and allows you to play those cards on your turn, able to use mana of any color to pay for those costs.

Now we need to talk about the Elves that we are planning to play. While there are a total of four Elves (not including our Commander) that has our opponents discard a card, they aren’t the primary source of Elves in the deck.

Abomination of Llanowar cares about Elves on the field and graveyard, if Dwynen’s Elite enters when you control an Elf you make an Elf Warrior token, Elven Ambush and Elvish Promenade creates an Elf Warrior token for each Elf you control, and much much more.

Elves, much like Goblins, are really good at getting Elves onto the battlefield and benefit from getting Elves onto the battlefield.

They also have Elves that make mana based on how many Elves you control, make your Elves bigger based on the number of Elves, gain life, make your opponents lose life and much more.

Now if we are able to maintain a maximum capacity number of Elves then we should win with Overrun type effects, though I do like Full Steam Ahead to further make blocking against you difficult.

With the variety of discarding that our opponents should be doing, whether by our own actions or their own effects, we should be able to deprive our opponents of necessary answers to make a full swing lethal to more than one opponent if we can pull it off.

Elves are really good at generating mana so if our Commander dies, which is more likely than not with this sort of deck, then we should be able to recover Nath fairly consitently.

I am surprised that I never paid Nath any mind, because this is a fun Commander to take a look at with a plan and several ways to execute that plan effectively.

Elves are a popular typal Commander and while it would be easy to go the standard go wide Elf deck, having Nath as an option provides an alternative while staying with the go wide plan.

Thank you for reading, see you tomorrow for the next Daily Commander!

Peace,

From, J.M. Casual