Hello and welcome to Commander Bites!

Today we are going to be talking about Anim Pakal, Thousandth Moon!

Anim Pakal is a three mana 1/2 who has whenever you attack with one or more non-Gnome creatures, put a +1/+1 counter in Anim Pakal and then you create X 1/1 colorless Gnome artifact creature tokens that are tapped and attacking, where X is the number of +1/+1 counters on Anim Pakal.

Game Plan

I am going to be completely honest, I had thought that I had already done Anim Pakal before until I checked and saw that I had mentioned them a couple of times in previous articles, but I had not done one specifically for Anim Pakal.

Which is a shame because I play Anim Pakal a lot on Brawl because the strategy is straightforward and simple, but there is some amount of interesting ways to go about it. The idea is to pack Anim Pakal with counters so you can make a wide swath of Gnomes to attack your opponents, and in our colors we actually have quite a few cards that let us do so.

The way I personally play the deck is to always have ways to have a creature on board in order to trigger Anim Pakal along with ways to gain additional benefits from the Gnomes coming into play.

Support

A card that I have found to be really useful to have to make sure that we always have some sort of creature in play to trigger Anim Pakal is Urabrask’s Forge. At the beginning of combat on your turn you put an oil counter on the Forge and create an X/1 Phyrexian Horror creature token with trample and haste, where X is the number of oil counters on the Forge and the token is sacrificed at the beginning of the next end step.

You will always have a creature to attack in, even if it doesn’t start off as a threat in the early game, it gains more and more value as time gets on to the point where it needs to be answered.

Even cheap haste creatures like Monastery Swiftspear work really well with Anim Pakal, especially since the Swiftspear also has prowess, which can work well with any of the noncreature spells you cast that give Anim Pakal a +1/+1 counter.

I am also a fan of Devilish Valet, which has trample and haste along with an Alliance ability of whenever another creature we control enters, we double the Valet’s power until the end of turn. This works especially well the more tokens we put on Anim Pakal to make a massive threatening creature that could potentially take a player out of the game.

We also have plenty of cheap source to give Anim Pakal a +1/+1 counter like Honor which puts a +1/+1 counter on target creature and we get to draw a card, Feat of Resistance to put a +1/+1 counter on target creature we control and to give it protection from a color of our choice for a turn, and Requisition Raid which can be used to destroy an artifact, an enchantment, and/or put a +1/+1 counter on each creature target player controls.

What’s really great for us are additional ways we can make use of having a bunch of token creatures coming in and attacking. Impact Tremors and Warleader’s Call deal 1 damage to each opponent whenever a creature we control enters, with Warleader’s Call also giving creatures we control +1/+1.

Arabella, Abandoned Doll is another solid pick for use because whenever it attacks it deals X damage to each opponent and we gain X life, where X is the number of creatures we control with power 2 or less, which can be a huge swing of damage when we swing out.

By far my favorite way to win however would be using something like Great Train Heist, which can give our creatures first strike and a +1/+0 boost or potentially make a bunch of Treasure tokens, but the real winning part of it is that we can untap all creatures we control and if we cast it during our combat phase, we get an additional combat phase after this phase.

More +1/+1 counters, more Gnomes, and a lot more damage coming in.

Setbacks

As with all go wide decks, the major concern with this deck is dealing with board wipes.

Now this deck can actually manage well against damage based board wipes and destruction based board wipes fairly well, since we have access to cards like Boros Charm and Unbreakable Formation, but it is the board wipes like Toxic Deluge and Aetherize being not ideal for us.

We also have the concern that a lot of aggressive decks have which is that we need to make sure we can reliably deal, at minimum, 120 damage because we are dealing with three players. Aggro decks generally have a hard time because a lot of cards can manage a 1 on 1, but a 1 on 3 is much more challenging.

Being able to deal with three players is also a concern because, unless you have something like Teferi’s Protection, the One Ring, or a way to stop you opponents from casting spells with the few counter spells you have access to in white, you are going to struggle interacting with your opponents.

You can always keep some creatures back in order to have some number of blockers, but that doesn’t do too much against creatures with trample when your creature suite consists of small tokens. Anthems can help manage this a bit, but ideally its much better to have use a proactive anthem like Warleader’s Call because not only does it give you a buff, but it has another effect.

There’s also the problem of running out of gas, which is a major danger for aggro decks because if Anim Pakal gets removed too many times or your out of ways to get creatures on the board, then you’re easy pickings.

Bracket Rating: High 3

I do think that Anim Pakal can be built as a solid aggro Commander that uses a go wide strategy to your advantage to get a lot of attacking bodies in play to run over your opponents.

If you manage to have some token doublers in play then you can get an army of Gnomes attacking for you, but even if you don’t have access to them, you should still be able to manage yourself well enough to win a good number of games, even against some more well tuned decks.

It will struggle in the higher brackets purely based on the speed of those decks and them erring more on the combo side of things, but I do think that Anim Pakal is a solid deck that can hang with some of the stronger Commanders out there.

Thank you for reading, see you all tomorrow!

Peace,

From, J.M. Casual