Hello and welcome to Commander Bites!

Today we are going to be taking a look at Elsha of the Infinite!

Elsha is a five mana 3/3 with prowess, allows you to look at the top card of your library any time, and you may cast noncreature spells from the top of your library and if you cast a spell this way, you may cast it as though it had flash.

Game Plan

Spell slinging decks are a deck archetype that I personally want to play more of because I love the idea of them. Being able to cast spells as often as I would like is excellent, but the limitations of them relying primarily on instants and sorceries does make them a bit more challenging to sequence properly.

However with Elsha in play we not only eschew us being limited to casting sorcery spells on our turn, but any noncreature spell we have access to means that there we have basically every other card type that is available that isn’t a creature, meaning there are plenty of avenues to explore.

Support

Ideally we need cards that we can cast cheap initially while also having ways to gain advantage from casting them so cheaply.

Blind Obedience can be very good for us because it is a cheap card we can get out for out opponents creatures and artifacts to enter tapped, meaning we can blank out aggressive decks for a turn and since many decks play some form of artifact ramp, we again slow them down for a turn.

Ancestral Knowledge is a fascinating card because when it comes into play we can look at the top ten cards of our library and exile any number of them from the game an put the rest back on top of our library in any order, and if we don’t like those top ten cards we can refuse to pay the cumulative upkeep cost to reshuffle our deck.

While it was a menace in Standard and Pioneer, Cori-Steel Cutter in Commander actually works really well with our deck because, provided we have the mana, we can cast two spells each turn to accumulate a bunch of 1/1 Monk tokens with prowess, ideally on each of our opponents turns as well.

Speaking of artifacts, while I don’t often talk too much on staples, you could actually have Elsha as a Voltron styled deck and using a combination of Sigarda’s Aid and Lightning Greaves, you can protect Elsha from being targeted since Sigarda’s Aid can auto attach Equipment when they come into play.

Ideally, however, we want a lot of sorceries to cast because they are often the cards that provide a lot of advantage, clear the board, or more importantly make us a lot of mana. For example, Mana Geyser adds red mana for each tapped land our opponents control which we can combine with Mana Short to tap all lands a player controls and empty their mana pool against the player that has the most lands.

Windfall can refresh our hand or prevent our opponents from drawing if we have a Narset, Parter of Veils to go along with it, Sevinne’s Reclamation to return a cheap permanent from our graveyard to the battlefield, or even Gamble to have an unconditional tutor with the downside of discarding a random card from our hand.

Planeswalkers work exceptionally well in the deck like Teferi, Time Raveler, which makes it so that we force our opponents to cast spells at sorcery speed, let’s us cast sorcery spells as though they had flash, and can bounce a problematic artifact, creature, or enchantment to its owner’s hand and the draw a card.

Ral, Crackling Wit is also an excellent Planeswalker for us because whenever we cast a noncreature spell we put a loyalty counter on it, we make a 1/1 Otter creature token with prowess, draw three then discard two, and the ultimate which we should be able to hit and that is we draw three cards and we gain an emblem that gives our instants and sorcery spells storm.

Setbacks

To get the obvious problem out of the way, Elsha is five mana to cast and while there is a lot of value from them being in play, we need to have enough mana to not only cast Elsha, but also keep them in play so we can cast more spells later.

What’s more is that since we are focusing on primarily noncreature spells, any creature spells that we do play have to be utility creatures that we don’t want to die.

It also becomes difficult when we are limited to what spells we can cast or are taxed because it lowers the number of spells we cast each turn. Even something like a Damping Sphere or Thorn of Amethyst can be backbreaking for us in the long run.

Oftentimes they are reducing the cost of our spells so we can cast more of them and if they get removed from the board or are forced to become a blocker, then that is less than ideal. Leyline of Anticipation does help us in this regard since it lets us cast spells as though they had flash, but we still can’t cast any creatures from the top of our library.

Which brings me to another point and that is at least a third of the time, we are going to have a land on the top of our library and we aren’t in colors that let us play multiple lands per turn. We have a bevy of ways to draw cards, but if we stalled out then we are stuck with a land in play.

As with many spell slinger decks, sequencing can be tricky for newer players, especially since we aren’t limited to instants and sorceries and that can put a lot of pressure on which order to play your spells. While it isn’t a major issue, it is still something that does need to be addressed.

Bracket Rating: 3

I think that Elsha has the decent potential of being a strong bracket 3 Commander with their ability to cast a wider variety of noncreature spells other than instants and sorceries.

Even at base line, you could make a solid Elsha deck that is primarily Equipment based and win via a Voltron strategy, a Planeswalker deck, or even a niche enchantress build to some extent.

What holds Elsha back is that they are a higher mana value than is ideal, and while we do have access to more spells that we can cast from the top of the library, we will occasionally whiff and not have the ideal spell to cast or hit a land and have no draw spells or way to shuffle our library.

Thank you for reading, see you all tomorrow!

Peace,

From, J.M. Casual