4 Commander Decks For Less Than $100 Total! | 4-in-1 Modular Auras
Modular Is Back!
A while back I explored the concept of modular decks with my 2-for-1 Modular Kicker article: essentially we built two distinct Kicker decks -- a Simic Value deck led by Verazol, the Split Current and a Gruul Burn deck led Hallar, the Firefletcher -- with both decks sharing an overlapping core section of Green cards. This allowed us to build two powerful decks that play totally differently while saving a ton of money in the process. The response was so great I decided to go even bigger this time around with my all-time favorite archetype: Auras! Here is my 4-in-1 Modular Aura Deck, whose total price is under $100!
How Does It Work?
My Modular Aura decks are comprised five sections:
- A White Core section composed of only White and Colorless cards.
- A Boros section composed of only Red and Boros cards, including a Boros commander.
- A Selesnya section composed of only Green and Selensya cards, including a Selesnya commander.
- An Azorius section composed of only Blue and Azorius cards, including an Azorius commander.
- An Orzhov section composed of only Black and Orzhov cards, including an Orzhov commander.
So to play any of the decks, simply take the White Core section and any other section, shuffle them up, and you're good to go! And since each section is divided by color identity it's easy to divide them back into sections after you're done playing with one version.
For example, if you want to play the Boros Auras deck, simply mix together the White Core section and the Boros section for a full 100-card deck led by Wyleth, Soul of Steel. Then when you want to play a different deck, simply take out every card that has a Red or Boros border to divide the sections once more. It's that simple!
White Core
The White section is the core of all four of these modular decks. White is the primary color of Auras and contains all the best support cards for the archetype. In fact, White having overpowered Aura cards is something that is shockingly often left out of the conversation in terms of White's power level in the archetype, despite me praising it all the time. Seriously, check out how many amazing things White does with Auras that it traditionally struggles to do:
- Ramp? Hero of Iroas, Starfield Mystic, and Transcendent Envoy are aggressively costed mana discounts.
- Tutors? Heliod's Pilgrim, Open the Armory, and Three Dreams are insanely efficient tutors.
- Card Draw? Kor Spiritdancer, Sram, Senior Edificer, and my all-time favorite, Sage's Reverie, keep your hand nice and full at all times, all Mono White cards btw!
- Recursion? Mantle of the Ancients, Retether, and Open the Vaults are busted ways of dumping your graveyard directly on to the battlefield.
- Finishers? Archon of Sun's Grace and Sigil of the Empty Throne can give you a huge token army or just turn a creature into a 1-shot beast with Eidolon of Countless Battles
White's Aura support is insanely good and it's crazy to me that it's not talked about more. That's fortunate for us though, because that means this archetype is super affordable!
This White core covers, well, the core of our deck: we've got all of our essentials like ramp, card draw, tutors, interaction, recursion, and generic finishers. It is the biggest of the five sections sitting at 66 cards. It provides a strong basis for our four decks to build off of. Now that we've got our core, let's look at our modular decks.
Boros Section (Wyleth Voltron)
Our Boros section is Voltron Aggro led by Wyleth, Soul of Steel. The goal of this deck is to kill people with commander damage, something Wyleth is amazing at doing thanks to its utterly busted card draw potential: our goal is to beef up Wyleth with all of our cheapo auras and start swinging for lethal damage, all while drawing a zillion cards off Wyleth's attack trigger. Boros helps this strategy by providing haste with cards like Escape Velocity, double strike with Reyav, Master Smith, and most importantly extra combat steps like Breath of Fury, which can allow us to take out multiple opponents in a single turn.
While the primary goal of the deck is to win with commander damage, we can still easily close out games with backup win conditions like reloading on all of our auras with a hastey Storm Herald or burying our opponents with an army of Elementals summoned by Valduk, Keeper of the Flame, plus all of the generic finishers in our White core.
Selesnya Section (Siona Combo)
Our next most aggressive strategy is our Selesnya section, a Combo deck led by Siona, Captain of the Pyleas. Siona is an incredibly powerful and consistent Combo commander since she's part of an easy 2-card combo made even easier since one half is sitting in our command zone: simply pair Siona, Captain of the Pyleas with Shielded by Faith in our White core to make infinite 1/1 Human Soldier tokens, then swing with your army and win. All we have to do is cast Siona, find and cast Shielded by Faith, and we've basically won.
But this deck is far from just a 1-trick pony: Selesnya is the primary color pair for Enchantress and access to Green gives us tons of archetype staples like Sanctum Weaver for insane ramp, Sythis, Harvest's Hand for insane card draw, and Dreampod Druid for insane token production. Of all the Aura decks, Selesnya predictably has the most powerful ramp options, which combined with our amazing card draw means we can zoom towards any of our finishers with incredible consistency.
Azorius Section (Bruna Midrange)
Our Azorius section is a Midrange deck led by Bruna, Light of Alabaster. Bruna has an incredible combat trigger that lets you put all the auras in your graveyard back into play enchanting it, which in the mid or lategame makes Bruna basically a 1-shot threat that your opponents must answer repeatedly. Bruna can also steal your opponents' auras which is neat too! We've added additional ways to strengthen our Voltron plan, quickly filling our graveyard up with auras using Traumatize and Sage of Mysteries and boosting Bruna into 1-shot territory with Auramancer's Guise and Righteous Authority.
But this deck isn't focused on Voltron like the Boros version: we can also win by stealing our opponents' best permanents with Confiscate or Corrupted Conscience, and we can repeatedly tutor into play our best auras with Sovereigns of Lost Alara! So we can kill with our commander or even our opponents' commanders if we need to, plus all of our other finishers.
Orzhov Section (Daxos Control)
Our Orzhov section is a Control deck led by Daxos the Returned, aka Cold Daxos. Of all the decks in this article, this is by far the grindiest: the goal here is to control the board while accumulating experience counters on Daxos, pumping out ever-larger spirits that eventually take over the game. Since experience counters never go away this makes Daxos a stupidly resilient commander as you can just recast him over and over and keep pumping out those beefy spirits. Plus the spirits he makes are enchantments too so they trigger constellation like Doomwake Giant and Archon of Sun's Grace. The longer the game, the better it gets for Daxos.
We've got more removal to help control the board, like loading up Agent of the Fates to repeatedly kill off opposing creatures, Agent of Erebos to keep opposing graveyard clear, and The Eldest Reborn to make people throw stuff away and then steal them.
Also, we've got lots of downright fun cards like Hateful Eidolon to draw more cards, Killian, Ink Duelist to ramp out the auras, and Evershrike as a repeatable self-recursive threat.
The Full Deck Lists
Here's how each Modular Auras deck looks like when you combine a section with the White Core:
And That's Modular Auras!
And there you have it: four Aura decks with distinct playstyles, using the same core White cards. The price to buy all five sections at Card Kingdom according to MTGGoldfish is $98 at the time of writing this, which is an average of $24.5 per deck. Not bad! I hope this modular approach to deckbuilding can serve as a good launching pad for your own brews while saving you money. Let me know what you think about modular decks and if you'd like to see more of these in the future. Thanks for reading!
