Esper Auras Never Looked So Good! | $50 Arna Auras
Hey friends, I'm back with another Budget Commander, and this time I'm returning to an old favorite archetype of mine with Arna Kennerud, Skycaptain
Auras: Best Budget Archetype?
I've been in love with the Aura archetype for a long, long time. It started a decade(!) ago with my Pinball Karona deck over on a now dead site called PureMTGO and I've come back to it again many times with Siona Combo, Sram Mono White, Stangg Aura Voltron, and even a Modular Auras package that lets you swap between every single White-based guild pairing! So yeah, I've covered Auras a ton.
In my opinion, Auras has been and continues to be one of the most powerful archetypes on a budget, if not the single most powerful one. There's a ton of powerhouse Aura commanders you can build around, with the absolute top being probably Light-Paws, Emperor's Voice. So with Modern Horizons 3 releasing I decided it's a great time to talk about a brand new Aura powerhouse commander that you can build cheap: Arna Kennerud, Skycaptain.
Arna is a very flexible commander, providing an incredible payoff to any type of "modified" strategy -- +1/+1 counter, auras, and equipment. And while Equipment is more popular with her as is always the case with commanders that benefit both with Auras and Equipment (people simply love Equipments), I believe Arna is simply much stronger focusing on Auras for two main reasons:
- The best Aura cards are far less expensive $$$ than the best Equipment cards which is important for this series
- Even ignoring $$$, Auras are simply a stronger archetype than Equipment because they are way faster at doing their thing not needing to pay for equip costs AND the cards themselves are stronger, with Aura-specific powerhouse cards like Retether and Winds of Rath having no Equipment-specific equivalents at all (Mantle of the Ancients is shared by both archetypes and is better in Auras!)
So to give you the most powerful budget brew I'll be sticking to Auras. Now that we've settled on an archetype, let's brew!
Our deck's win con is combat damage: we're looking to vomit out a whole bunch of auras on the battlefield, slap one of our game-ending aura buff spells like Auramancer's Guise, Ethereal Armor, All That Glitters, or even the equipment Helm of the Gods, and swing out for massive damage. Arna doubles all auras when our enchanted creatures attack so all of these deal more than double damage, making swings for 30+ damage incredibly easy. Our commander is also a flying lifelink so if Arna is the one swinging for that damage not only do we have evasion but we gain enough life that any opponent left alive will have a tough time killing us before our next turn!
For ramp we've got a diverse variety of options: I'm running a lot of generic early game ramp like Arcane Signet and all the Signets / Talismans both to mana-fix but also because we want to ramp out our commander asap. There's also White catch-up ramp with Claim Jumper and friends. But the most unique options are Aura-specific: we've got a bunch of creatures that give our auras a mana discount like Hero of Iroas, Killian, Ink Duelist, but my favorite is Pearl-Ear, Imperial Advisor which also doubles as draw.
Speaking of draw, we have TONS of it: we have the usual suspects like Kor Spiritdancer and Sram, Senior Edificer to draw whenever we cast an aura, but also a ton of different auras that draw as well, from combat damage draw like Curiosity to cantrip draw like Cartouche of Knowledge to broken draw like Sage's Reverie. Remember that Arna Kennerud, Skycaptain makes a copy of these auras each time the enchanted creature attacks so we double the value out of all of these each combat, so we snowball super quickly.
Our removal package is scary good as well. We have two very strong one-sided wipes, Winds of Rath and Doomwake Giant, along with a ton of diverse spot removal, my favorite being Chains of Custody which acts an Oblivion Ring + ward and Arna can double it each combat to keep exiling more and more things. I'm also quite fond of Amphibian Downpour which can turn multiple creatures into useless 1/1's at instant speed.
For protection we've got a ton of ways to protect our creatures from dying with umbras like Hyena Umbra, indestructible with Timely Ward, hexproof with Swiftfoot Boots. And if things do get destroyed we've got Mantle of the Ancients and Retether to get back all auras or Unfinished Business to get back a creature.
$50 List
The $50 list already has basically everything you want: all the best auras, pretty much all the best interaction and ramp, and a decent land package. It's going to get the job done and be a terror at most casual playgroups.
$100 List
The $100 list has very few nonland improvements, basically just Codsworth, Handy Helper which is a great Aura ramp card that adds a bit more protection for our commander. Our land package is what gets a massive boost though with far more untapped mana-fixers like Sea of Clouds and a bunch of MDFCs like Sink into Stupor.
Further Upgrades
Honestly there's not much Aura-specific stuff left to add. Serra's Sanctum is the only other major thematic upgrade I'd make.
In terms of generic stuff there's definitely plenty you can do to up the power level: Vampiric Tutor, Demonic Tutor, and to a lesser extent Enlightened Tutor are super flexible mana efficient tutors that allow you to cut down on some of the deck's redundancy, so for example you can cut down on the weakest Curiosity cards (e.g. Sleeper's Robe) and other "similar but slightly worse" type of cards in the deck and that will give you room to add a few more powerful generic spells like Fierce Guardianship, Mana Drain, Swan Song, Rhystic Study, and Cyclonic Rift.
The lands can be better too: I'd run all the available fetchlands, shocklands, surveil lands, and battlebond lands in Esper colors. Keep in mind that the deck skews heavily White so you need your lands to reflect this, make sure that White sources are the primary color generation!
Thanks For Reading!
I actually brewed these decks on a bus ride from Paris to Bruges on my phone -- not ideal but got the job done. I love Auras and am super familiar with the card pool, so Arna was very easy to make a strong list for. I hope this makes some fellow Aura lovers happy!
