Hello and welcome to Commander Bites!

Today we are going to be taking a look at Atla Palani, Nest Tender!

Atla Palani is a four mana 2/3 that for two mana and tap you create a 0/1 green Egg creature token with defender and whenever an Egg you control dies, reveal cards from the top of your library until you reveal a creature card and you put that card onto the battlefield and the rest on the bottom of your library in a random order.

Game Plan

Cheating big creatures out is always a solid strategy in Commander, and there is always some amount of fun in spinning the wheel to see what sort of creatures we get does also make the deck more exciting to play.

The idea is to have a deck that is filled with ways to get more Eggs onto the battlefield as well as pack the deck with big creatures or some utility creatures that allow us to generate some amount of advantage when they hit the board.

Support

While Atla Palani can make Eggs on their own, we should have other ways we can get Eggs onto the battlefield.

Palani’s Hatcher is perfect for the deck because when it enters we create two 0/1 Dinosaur Egg creature tokens, gives Dinosaurs we control haste, and at the beginning of combat on our turns if we control one or more Eggs, we sacrifice an Egg to make a 3/3 Dinosaur creature token.

Nesting Dragon is a great way for us to get even more Eggs into play through its Landfall ability of making a 0/2 Dragon Egg creature token with defender that makes a 2/2 Dragon creature token with flying and firebreathing when it dies.

Continuing the theme of Eggs dying to get a creature out of it is Dinosaur Egg, which has evolve to get a +1/+1 counter whenever a creature with greater power or toughness than it enters and when it dies we may discover X where X is the Eggs toughness.

We can also use cards that make extra tokens to make extra Eggs, and while the usual token doublers do exist, I think Determined Iteration would be better for us because it lets us populate at the beginning of combat on our turn and gives the token made this way haste and we sacrifice it at the beginning of the next end step.

There is even ways we can use sacrifice outlets like Goblin Bombardment to deal 1 damage to any target in order to get our Eggs to die in order to spin into a creature or even a Phyrexian Altar or Ashnod’s Altar to get some mana from the Eggs to also spin into a creature.

As far as what creatures we want to cheat out, well we have a wide swath of creatures we can make excellent use of in our particular color combination.

If you want to stick to theme and be all in on Dinosaurs, the Gishath, Sun’s Avatar is great because when it deals combat damage to a player then we reveal that many cards from the top of our library and put any number of Dinosaurs from among them onto the battlefield and the rest on the bottom in a random order.

Should you want to play more into the big creature aspect then there is Worldspine Wurm which is a 15/15 that when it dies you make three 5/5 Wurm tokens with trample and if it were to go to the graveyard from anywhere it is shuffled back into the deck so you could roll into it again.

You can make use of cards like Terror of the Peaks, which makes it so that whenever another creature we control enters under our control then it deals damage equal to that creature’s power to any target or Warstorm Surge to get a second version of that effect into play.

There is also the ever popular tokens strategy to make a ton of tokens in one way or another and use something like Jetmir, Nexus of Revels as a payoff because it gives your creature +1/+0 and vigilance if you control three or more creatures, +1/+0 and trample if you control six or more creatures, and +1/+0 and double strike if you control nine or more creatures, all of those stacking up to get a potential aggro win from all of the tokens you make.

Setbacks

Interestingly this deck does pretty well against destroy or damage based board wipes if we have Eggs and Atla Palani in play because those would still trigger and we can refill our board pretty well.

However, since Atla Palani is the crux of the deck, targeted removal is where we are going to have a lot of problems. Since Atla Palani has a low toughness, something like a Lightning Bolt or a Last Gasp can take her out.

And while we can deal with destroy and damage based removal, exile based removal also does not happen to work well with our Eggs since they need to die in order for us to cheat a creature into play and cards like Farewell really don’t help us do that.

What will also be difficult for us to manage is when we draw a creature that we want to cheat out, and since we drew it we can’t cheat it out unless we have an alternate way to cheat those creatures out like with say a Kona, Rescue Beastie or a Sneak Attack.

We also have the issue of making sure that we have Eggs in play in order to have something to let us cheat a creature out. While Atla Palani can make an Egg, it is pretty slow and we have to wait a turn in order to do so if we don’t have a haste enabler, and while there are other ways to get Eggs into play, other than the Eggs we can cast, they are pretty mana intensive to cast.

Bracket Rating: 3

I think that Atla Palani is a solid Commander, as evident by her popularity as a Commander.

Her strength lie in the fact that for a relatively low cost we can cheat out large creatures with the downside that we need to keep her and our Eggs in play in order to “do the thing.”

The struggle of balancing those two can be annoying, but manageable. I don’t think she is strong enough to be in higher brackets because of how linear and predictable the strategy is, but in bracket 3 I think that Atla Palani can manage well enough, even making use of Natural Order very well to cheat two big creatures into play.

Thank you for reading, see you all tomorrow!

Peace,

From, J.M. Casual