Lathril, Blade of the Elves is an awesome new Legendary creature to build around from the Kaldheim Commander decks.
One thing we like to look for when building Commander decks is additional Legendary creatures we can run in our deck that fit our themes well, so that we can switch them out for the odd game here and there. There are plenty of Legendary Elves in Golgari for us to choose from:
We can even have a couple options with some Partner creatures:
Lathril seems like the most powerful of the bunch, but they all can perform well depending on how heavily we decide to support certain themes in our deck. Lathril wants us to focus on token/Elf swarm themes, but also benefits from pump effects and focusing on combat.
Let’s start by taking a look at some of the good ways to increase Lathril’s power. Equipment seems like an obvious place to start, with priority being placed on those that give vigilance so that we can generate tokens and immediately activate Lathril’s tap ability.
That’s a pretty solid list of equipment, but there are plenty of more ways to buff Lathril that we can consider. The tribal focused ones are especially awesome.
While the ability to generate additional combat steps seems to lie outside of the color identity of Lathril, we can definitely find some untap effects that will let us use Lathril’s activated ability multiple times in a turn. These have the added bonus of acting like ritual effects if we have some of our more powerful mana creatures in play.
So we have an abundance of ways to make Lathril churn out a ton of tokens for us. She already has a mild form of evasion, so we probably only need to supplement that a little. Next let’s take a look at some of the good cards that we can play to focus on the Elf token theme. Shoutout to Hunting Triad for being pretty cool on both sides of this equation.
Since we’re going hard on the Elf creatures, we have access to a ton of good tribal cards.
Now that we’ve covered the support packages, let’s list off all of the good elf creatures we might want to play. There are plenty of options, so you can tune the deck to your style and to your own metagame. For example, if your play group likes to run with lots of Wrath of God effects, you’ll want to skew more towards the card advantage/resiliency cards, but for some groups you will just want to focus on being a streamlined aggressive deck. We’ll start with our biggest grouping, the utility/generally good elves.
Our next Elf package includes those with a more aggressive slant, which may pair well with the ability of Lathril to drain your opponent’s life total.
Of course, no tribe listing would be complete without its Lords:
And lastly, we’ll list off the mana dorks. Some of these are auto-includes on power level, such as Heritage Druid as it works so well with the fresh tokens. However, the total quantity of these ramp creatures that you’ll want to include depends on how your play group builds their decks.
Finally, we’ll just toss in a list of generic Green/Black stuff that seems like it would fit well in most version of this strategy. It does seem like we have a lot of options though, so you probably won’t be able to fit too many of these!
Lastly, we’re not going to tell you how to build a Golgari manabase again, but we have put together a list of the notable lands that work well with Lathril’s strategy.
If you’re interested in trying out Lathril in Commander but don’t want to break the bank, we’ve put together a complete 100 card custom deck that you can purchase at our storefront. Check out our budget Lathril EDH deck if you want to get an easy starter pack for building Elf tribal:
Thanks for reading! We hope that you have fun figuring out how to tune and optimize this list, since fans of Green/Black Elves have so many tools to choose from!
