Armed with that knowledge, this deck seeks to do one thing above all else: out-value your opponents. Card for card, you just get to be doing more. With so many cards pulling double-duty, able to fill multiple roles, the value generation they represent allows you to be consistently ahead on resources, or able to quickly replenish when you're down. By getting multiple uses of the ETB creatures through significant amounts of recursion, the toolbox nature of this sort of deck can really be allowed to shine.
The tools currently in this toolbox allow for a play style that heavily rewards greedily using up your own life total as a resource, through cards like Sylvan Library, Birthing Pod, and plenty of painful lands, only to easily reset yourself with a Resolute Archangel.
Welcome to Value Town.
Each previous version of the deck had something going for it, but I always gravitated back to a purer ETB Bant ( ) list. That just felt better. More focused, more effective, and even more fun. The existence of Golos, Tireless Pilgrim changed things. Suddenly we were given an easy to cast, versatile, 5-colour commander, with both a huge value-generating activated ability and a strong ETB ability. While I resisted the Gospel of Golos for some time, once I finally tried a Golos version of this deck it became clear it was the way to go. It just felt right.
And so, with all that in mind, it has come to this: a deck that is still primarily Bant-focused in colour, but takes advantage of the access to red and black to be able to play a small splash of strong, on-theme cards that serve only to enhance the deck's effectiveness, without detracting from its feelings of focus and fun.
Current shortlist of cards being considered includes:
- The World Tree
- Dire Fleet Daredevil
- Fiend Artisan
- Spellseeker
- Felidar Retreat
- Smothering Tithe
- Living Death
- Command the Dreadhorde
Some time later, after the original primer was retired, I created my own Jenara ETB primer that was maintained for some years. Over the years since then, the deck has gone through many iterations. It has changed commanders a few times, even gaining an extra colour for a little while there, but has been most consistently a Derevi deck for the last couple years. Or, more accurately, several different Derevi decks. It has gone from pure ETB, to having a tax/hate subtheme, to having a wizards subtheme, to combining those subthemes, and right back to being close to a pure ETB deck again. Bant has been my favourite colour combination in Magic for a long, long time, and I suspect I'll have some version of this deck sleeved up for about as long as I continue to play Commander.
There are some toys in the current iteration you wouldn't likely have found in the old Jenara versions, specifically things that play really nicely with Derevi's untap ability. The list also includes a couple different ways to combo out to close a game, because sometimes you gotta do what you gotta do.
- Reveillark + Karmic Guide + Mirror Entity + ETB creature with 0-2 power = infinite ETB effects
- Eternal Witness + Kogla, the Titan Ape/Eldrazi Displacer/Soulherder/Thassa, Deep-Dwelling/Venser, the Sojourner + Time Warp/Temporal Manipulation = infinite turns