So far it's gone well. Won a 4-person game and some 1v1s at the weekly commander group. The Voltron part mostly feels like a way to stay in the game and keep the cards flowing, but hoo boy if I manage to stick one of my premium bear-machines the game can get out of control in a hurry.
In the 4-player, after a long grindy match, I landed a bearscape with ~15 mana, tons of cards in the grave, doubling season, and a fresh helm of the host. Go to combat, helm triggers, I now have 3 ayulas. Hold priority, start making bears. Each activation makes 2 bears which give a total of 8 counters (or 2 fights). Turn ayula into a lethal threat, kill every enemy creature on board, dish out ~80 damage for a double kill to finish off the game.
Interestingly I can't help but feel the deck wouldn't mind some of the crappy vanilla bears. It would help justify some of the cards like hardened scales and metallic mimic. But idk that I want to actually acquire them just for this one deck, my collection is getting pretty bloated as-is. Maybe if I stop fully sleeving everything, idk.
I'm not much for tribal decks, but I do like the flexibility, power, and low cost Ayula provides.
There's just one problem. Bears are, uh...garbage.
I've played against a couple Ayula decks and it basically always plays out in the exact same way. First, Ayula hits the board early and starts dropping pretty big power pretty quickly. Maybe kills some stuff. Looks big and threatening, everyone is freaking out. Then a board wipe or something happens that disrupts her. And then Ayula...exists. Charitably speaking.
On EDHrec, grizzly bears holds an incredible 96% inclusion rate for Ayula. Cards with a higher inclusion rate for any commander are few and far between.
I suspect that might be root of the problem. Even as a functional 4/4 for 2, we're not really "doing EDH" with a 4/4 for 2. And most Ayula decks aren't just packing grizzly bears - they're packing all the craptastic functional reprints, along with other mediocre bears, all of which are terrible topdecks at most points in the game.
There are 21 non-changeling bears in commander, and they're nearly all mediocre piles of stats with, if they're lucky, some mediocre keywords stacked on top. There's really only 3 that merit any interest at all: Goreclaw, Terror of Qal Sisma (not so synergistic with other bears), Mother Bear (otherwise mediocre but good with Ayula) and werebear. Ashcoat bear gets a minor mention as a fight spell with flash could be ok disruption tech, though other cards do this much better.
Ok, so forget all the normal bears - what are we supposed to do now?
The problem with bears is that they don't really provide any sustainability. A 4/4 for 2 is a fine rate, but it runs you out of gas in a hurry. We want something with a bit more reach. So the two biggest, most obvious synergy cards for Ayula are bearscape and Ayula's influence - and to a lesser extent, words of wilding. Any of these not only give us a nearly unlimited number of bears, but they also provide them at instant speed (well, -ish for words). Unfortunately, there aren't many enchantment tutors to be found in mono-green. So we'll need to draw for them. Luckily, draw works perfectly with all three as it provides fodder once we draw them.
Ok, so a bunch of draw, and these enchantments. What else?
We'll want a decent amount of recursion, I think, in case our enchantments end up in the grave. Along with that, I think we may as well run some dredge tech, which can fuel bearscape, and loam in particular can fuel influence. We could also run Genesis to recur our few actual bears in case we want to recast them.
Finally, since Ayula is a perfectly fine 2/2 for 2, which fits nicely into a lot of equipment curves, I think she'd do well to wield some weaponry...maybe a sword or two, jitte, etc, while she waits for the bear-pocalypse to come online. Plus then, once we hit one of them, we could potentially crap out a half-dozen bears in one turn and start one-shotting people.
Ok, that might be too many ideas. Anyway, I'm going to start throwing something together, any thoughts?