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Felothar the Steadfast acts as the face commander toMagic: The Gathering’sAbzan Armor preconstructed Commander deck. While the precon is a rather strong one out of the box, shifting cards around for a dedicated Felothar the Steadfast deck is much better.
The deck heavily focuses on creatures with defender and high toughness stats. These creatures make for powerful walls to make it hard for your opponents to attack you while not costing much mana. If you enjoy building up a large battlefield of creatures capable of fending off most threats, or the gimmick of attacking with defender, a Felothar the Steadfast Commander deck is perfect for you.
Reunion of the House
x5 Forest
x4 Plains
x3 Swamp
Vault of the Archangel
Woodland Cemetery
The decklistcontains one planeswalker, 38 creatures, 11 sorceries, four instants, six artifacts, five enchantments, and34 lands. The creature lineup primarily consists of creatures with defenders, or ones that enable creatures to deal damage with their toughness instead of power.
Key Cards
Felothar The Steadfast
Felothar the Steadfast is what makes the deck properly function. Itenables creatures with defender to attack, something the deck desperately needs sinceso many creatures in it have defender. Felothar also essentiallymakes your creatures' power the same as their toughness.
A creature with defender means they can only block (and often have no power). All Wall creatures are defenders by default. There are cards such as Felothar that allow you to attack with them, however.
Felothar the Steadfast alsoacts as the deck’s main draw engine. You can opt tosacrifice a creature to draw cards. You do have to discard cards equal to its power, but since most of your creatures have little to no power, this cost won’t come up often.
Betor, Kin To All
In a way,Betor, Kin to All acts as a secondary commander. Betorwants you to have as high a combined toughness as possible, with 40 being the threshold you want to hit. There’s an effect forten, 20, and 40, and all of them will trigger one after the other to draw cards, gain life, or deal a ton of burn damage.
Betor, Kin to All has a solid statline to make it a massive threat in combat.You do not need to do anything for Betor’s effect to trigger, so if attacking would put it in harm’s way, you canopt to hold it back to ensure its utility effects can trigger.
Assault Formation
One of the best enchantments in the deck, youwant Assault Formation on the battlefield as soon as possible. While your defenders can act as walls, they’re not really a threat. With Assault Formation, you can start actually dealing damage to the creatures they’re blocking.
In the late game, if your commander is nowhere to be found,Assault Formation can be used as a mana sink to let your defenders attack. Alternatively, if you don’t have another use for mana, you can boost up your creatures' toughness stat to make sure they survive combat, or deal more damage.
Tree Of Perdition
Tree of Perdition is the strongest defender available for a Felothar deck. It has a massive 13 toughness,which turns into a 13/13 with the right permanents on the battlefield. So long as anything that lets creatures deal damage with their toughness is around, Tree of Perdition is the most threatening creature you can play.
Not only does Tree of Perdition have fantastic stats, but a great activated ability as well. By tapping it,you can make any opponent’s life total just 13. This makes it much easier to close out games quickly by lowering the amount of damage needed to be dealt significantly.
The exchange of toughness and life is permanent. So if your opponent is at 40 life and you use Tree of Perdition, your opponent’s life will shift to 13 while Tree of Perdition’s toughness willpermanentlybe 40.
How To Play The Deck
A Felothar the Steadfast Commander deckwants to load the battlefield up with defendersto be defensive until Felothar hits the battlefield, then you can turn around and go full offense.Cards that let creatures deal damage equal to their toughness are also vital to the strategy. Often, cards that let creatures with defenders attack have this effect attached to them too.
There are multiple board wipes that will be one-sided. Cards like Dusk, Slaughter the Strong, and The Battle of Bywater all destroy creatures with higher power stats, something your cards won’t have since many of them have zero power.
The deckplays very passively, building up a board state that discourages your opponents from attacking you since most won’t be able to get in for any damage. Itturnsthe tide late in the game to make big plays, especially with cards like MacCready, Lamplight Mayor and Sidar Kondo of Jamuraa that make your creatures significantly harder for your opponents to block.
Something important to remember is thatyou need to be patient. Felothar the Steadfast is not an explosive Commander deck, so you’ll have to be prepared to go into a grind game. There are no flashy game-ending combos, just a slow build to an explosive end with unblockable creatures.
Theprimary win condition of the deck is winning through combat. Once either Felothar the Steadfast or Assault Formation are out, you’re able to start swinging with your defenders for massive damage. The attackers are very evasive with the right permanents. Youcan also win through burn damage.
Both Betor, Kin to All and Jaws of Defeat can deal a ton of damage directly, making the path to combat victory even easier (or can just do enough burn damage to take someone out of the game on its own).
Thebiggest weakness of the deck is the reliance on permanents staying on the battlefield. Without ways for your defenders to attack or even deal damage, the deck does nothing but act as a wall. Once those permanents hit the battlefield, you’ll be snowballing, but it does require some moving parts to stick around in order for your deck to fully function.
