Hello. Welcome to Alesha's value train of murder.

This is a mini-primer on my pet deck, the one that started me on my path to spending way too much money on little bits of cardboard. Originally, this was a Kaalia deck, and there are still a few remnants of deckbuilding ideas from then. That deck went through a few renditions before becoming an all-in aggro deck, and I started to get a bit bored of the coin-flippy nature of it. Alesha had been released by then and I toyed around with the idea of making a Mardu combo-control deck that could switch between using both Kaalia and Alesha as commanders. This was inconsistent, and I eventually made it into a full Alesha deck.

I have a few restrictions in this deck to make it more interesting from a deckbuilding perspective, but these are, of course, my own and not recommended if you want to make a fully optimized version of this deck. I've made some notes near the end of this primer on how to optimize the deck more. They are as follows:

No unconditional tutoring. This means no Demonic, Vampiric, Diabolic etc tutors. If a card in this deck tutors, it tutors with restrictions on what it can find. This also means that I've tried to include a fair bit more card draw than a typically optimized black deck would run.

All instants must be Sunforger targets. Sunforger is love. Sunforger is life. As of the 17/08 update, Sunforger has been removed, but it's spirit remains in case I ever feel like putting it back in the deck.

No mana rocks. I got a little sick of having ~36-37 lands plus at least 6-7 mana rocks per deck, so this is made to run low to the ground on lands only. I also hate drawing them later in the game. This restriction has also meant a bit more focus on card draw, and finding land via Knight of the White Orchid and Weathered Wayfarer.

Onto the deck!

Deck Styles

Alesha lends herself to a variety of styles that can be tailored depending on your playgroup meta. This is tuned to an... odd mix of decks. Most of them aren't Tier 1 competitive, probably closer to around 75%. There are some pretty normal things in there, like Oloro Esper Control, Karador Midrange Reanimator, Meren doing Meren things, but also some more casual things such as Scion Dragon Tribal, Karametra Tokens, and also the beautiful oddball that is Derevi Superfriends.

Alesha as a commander means you'll be building a deck around bears that provide some form of value, whether that be killing things, drawing cards, creating tokens, or just messing with the board to slow down your opponents. You'll need some top end for the lategame if not aiming to win via combo, and top end that provide value for your bears like Sun Titan and Elesh Norn, Grand Cenobiteare brilliant. My Alesha deck is tuned to be a hatecats control-combo deck, removing threats while always having the threat of going off and winning via a number of combos that can (sometimes) be assembled accidentally. The deck focuses on using attrition and politics to stay alive until it is ready to combo off. Hatebears (or hatecats, if preferred) slow the opponents down so you can find your combo pieces. Occasionally you might get lucky and win via combat damage with Alesha strapped up with equipment, but I've yet to pull this off. This has become even less likely lately as I've slowly been stripping the equipment out of the deck. Only Skullclamp remains because it's the clamp.

Mardu as a wedge has some well defined weaknesses. Notably, the wedge suffers from having limited ramp, so you have to find ways to keep up with the green players. Usually this comes in the form of mana rocks. Card draw is available, but it usually costs life payments, being primarily from black. As with all non-blue wedges, you have little ability to interact with the stack, outside of oddities like Mana Tithe, Dash Hopes, and Lapse of Certainty . To make up for this, you can remove practically anything that hits the battlefield, as well as having easily accessible and recurrable grave hate. You also get Sunforger, along with access to the best tutors, and powerful taxing effects. Mass removal is also very easy to come by, as is lifegain to offset the life lost from black card draw.