Hello and welcome to Daily Commander!

Today we are going to be talking about Asmira, Holy Avenger!

Asmira is a four mana 2/3 with flying and at each end step you put a +1/+1 counter on Asmira for each creature put in your graveyard that turn.

Asmira reads very much like a Voltron Commander, but what interested me when looking at this Commander is that there are ways that we can take some aristocrat aspects to make Asmira into the effective Voltron Commander.

While both white and green can be used for aristocrats, you don’t tend to see them without black in the mix somehow, so an aristocrats style deck without black is definitely a challenge, especially without the traditional aristocrat payoffs like Blood Artist.

First we need to find ways to sacrifice our creatures.

When looking for ways to sacrifice creatures for cheap and to get the ideal payoffs, we already have plenty of ways for creatures to sacrifice themselves for a cheap cost.

You have creatures like Sakura-Tribe Elder that can sacrifice itself to ramp you, or a Selfless Spirit that can sacrifice itself to give all of your creatures indestructible, or the number of creatures that can sacrifice themselves to destroy an artifact or enchantment.

The concern comes with other benefits to sacrificing creatures. Altar of Bone is a creature tutor that allows us to sacrifice a creature to add one to our hand, which is useful when we need to deal with a problematic threat.

There’s Greater Good which allows us to sacrifice creatures to draw cards, Bound by Moonsilver which we can sacrifice a creature to move it to something else, and of course Phyrexian Altar for mana and if you can fit it in your budget.

As Asmira starts getting bigger and bigger, we need to make sure that they are protected, and there are plenty of ways to get that working.

Royal Treatment gives them hexproof for a turn and a Royal Role token which gives a +1/+1 and ward 1 and Snakeskin Veil gives a +1/+1 counter and hexproof until end of turn, which helps facilitate the Voltron strategy we’re aiming for while providing protection.

Even better, there are creatures that can give protection to other creatures by sacrificing themselves, Alseid of Life’s Bounty and Dauntless Bodyguard being some of the cheapest.

What makes this deck interesting is that we want to find ways to make only one creature survive and the rest can go, meaning that if an opponent goes for a destruction based board wipe, then we benefit from it, especially if we have a bunch of creatures on board.

Even and incidental token maker in Skrelv’s Hive can benefit because it makes a creature token at the beginning of your turn, we can use that token for sacrifice fodder, or even hit in for the occasional toxic damage.

The way we win is through board wipes, and making sure we can clear a way for Asmira to start beating people down through Commander damage.

Final Showdown is probably the most ideal board wipe because it’s instant speed and its modal. If we have an on board way to protect Asmira then we just need to spend 6 mana for an instant board wipe, but we can spend 7 if we don’t have a way to give Asmira indestructible on the field already.

If we need another body to swing in, then Phyrexian Rebirth is a way to destroy everything and make a huge body in the wake of that destruction, but that is a sorcery.

One of the more effective sorcery speed board wipes is Sunscour because we can exile to white cards from our hand to cast it instead of paying its mana cost, which is helpful because we can give Asmira indestructible in response.

Asmira has a straightforward game plan, but unlike some other Commanders where I have an issue with a straightforward plan is that there are more ways to guarantee that your game plan goes through.

Asmira is a resilient deck, and if the deck is tuned to focus on getting Asmira out on the battlefield with huge number of ways to protect them, then we have a chance to win a decent number of games.

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

Peace,

From, J.M. Casual