Table of Contents
Aggro decks are the fastest kind of deck you can play in Commander. The archetype is about winning the game as quickly as possible. Often, this is usually before your opponents even have a chance to set up. It is a rather “broad” archetype with no real defined way an Aggro deck plays. It might be Burn, could be Combo, or perhaps Token spam. Regardless of what kind of Aggro deck you’re building, there are a lot of cards you should be aware of. They won’t fit in every Aggro deck, but they fit in most of them. This article will go over various Aggro synergies so you can boost up your Aggro decks to make them faster.
Acting With Haste
If you’re playing with creatures, you want to make your creatures come down with haste. Luckily, there are a ton of great haste enablers in the game in many of the color options. You are fresh out of luck if you’re playing Blue or White with no other colors, as these are the two colors that pretty much never get haste. So, if you’re keen on playing those colors, make sure you bring along one of the other ones to enable haste.
One of the most common haste enablers is Rhythm of the Wild. It prevents your creatures from being countered, and if you can take the turn off, you can give your creature a +1/+1 counter instead of haste for extra utility. Temur Ascendancy provides a blanket haste effect to all your creatures, along with acting as draw power. It requires some setup, but Anger is an option too. Both Concordant Crossroads and Mass Hysteria both give all creatures haste. So if you want the game to go really fast, give everyone haste! Or, if you want all the haste for yourself, you have Fervor and Fires of Yavimaya.
With haste, your creatures can get active right away. In Aggro decks, you don’t want to sit around waiting to attack your opponents. You want them to attack right away. The quicker life totals come down, the easier it is for you to win the game. These kinds of decks falter when they have to play slow, so you always want to pack some haste.
Archetype-Specific Haste
Sometimes, there are great haste enablers, but they belong in specific archetypes so aren’t as generic as the ones discussed before. For example, Slivers are a big one. Blur Sliver, Cloudshredder Sliver, and Firewake Sliver are all ways to give specifically Slivers haste.
Some other more specific haste enables include Winged Hive Tyrant and Tesak, Judith's Hellhound, which give it to creatures with counters, Vihaan, Goldwaker for outlaws, and Maze Rusher for multicolored creatures. Tokens have a few haste enablers too, including Phabine, Boss's Confidant and Roar of Resistance. These are a bit more specific in use, but in decks that can run with them, they’re a fantastic add for any Aggro deck.
Burn Damage
Another key aspect of Aggro decks is being able to attack life totals without having to physically attack with your creatures. This is the main way they can close out games if your opponents manage to build up a battlefield of solid blockers. You can’t win the game if you can’t connect for damage, after all.
In many cases, a lot of burn damage comes from permanents that deal damage when creatures enter. Many Aggro decks are creature decks, so these go naturally together to help close out games fast. The most common is Impact Tremors. It’s cheap, effective, and gets the job done. With an extra color and an extra mana, you can upgrade it to Warleader's Call, which also provides a stat boost. It’s an effect found on creatures as well, including Agate Instigator, Witty Roastmaster, and Molten Gatekeeper. These are all fantastic includes for any deck that’s creating a ton of creature tokens every turn.
In addition to burn from creatures entering, you also have burn from spells being cast. There are a large suite of creatures that deal burn damage when you cast noncreature spells. These include Guttersnipe, Firebrand Archer, Coruscation Mage, Kessig Flamebreather, Black Waltz No. 3, and Electrostatic Field. These are all staples of Storm decks that win the game through burn damage by casting a ton of spells.
Passive Burn Damage
This section refers to cards that you don’t have to do anything to get burn damage. Before, it was getting creatures to enter the battlefield or casting noncreature spells. Instead, these just burn opponents with their triggered abilities instead of having to jump through a hoop to deal the burn damage.
One of the best cards for Aggro decks is Descent into Avernus. It does give everyone Treasure tokens (and a lot of them), but also burns everyone to quickly put a turn clock on everyone with how much damage it can do if it sticks around for long enough (especially when paired with proliferate effects). You can punish your opponents drawing cards with Sheoldred, the Apocalypse, Razorkin Needlehead, and Scrawling Crawler. It does require your opponents to draw a card, but in most cases, they can’t actually skip drawing the card. You can even just blanket burn opponents at upkeeps with enchantments like Roiling Vortex, Sulfuric Vortex, and Copper Tablet
You can also punish opponents who are lacking on basic land types (or have too many land types). Primal Order burns every player equal to the number of nonbasic lands they have. Even Mono-Colored decks play nonbasic lands, and are usually more common than basic lands in many cases (especially in multi-colored decks). Likewise, if an opponent is in multi-colored and has a ton of land types, Mask of Intolerance can deal some damage that stacks up quickly. Karma may seem weak at first. However, you can make all lands into Swamps with Urborg, Tomb of Yawgmoth to do a ton of damage to everyone on their upkeeps.
Damage Doublers/Triplers
What’s better than dealing damage fast? Dealing double the damage, of course. It’s primarily an effect exclusive to Red, but there are a lot of ways to make your permanents and spells deal a ton of damage. The permanents that do this can be costly in mana, but are usually worth it with how powerful the effects are at closing the game out.
Solphim, Mayhem Dominus turns all noncombat damage into double damage, and can easily make itself indestructible too. Angrath's Marauders, Twinflame Tyrant, and Fiendish Duo are all other creatures that give double damage. A bit more dangerous are Furnace of Rath and Dictate of the Twin Gods, which make it so all sources deal double damage, including to you. But hey, you know what they say: A quick game is a good game! Speaking of, you can make your sources deal triple damage with City on Fire and Fiery Emancipation to really deal some damage.
The best part about these damage doubles is that they stack. So, if you control City on Fire and Fiery Emancipation, the damage gets tripled, then tripled again. This turns what would normally just be one burn damage into nine, which, as you probably expect, gets very out of hand very quickly when you’re stacking various burn effects.
Ability Doubling
Many Aggro decks rely on powerful abilities. So, a good way to win the game faster is by making them trigger multiple times. This is a very common effect, and generally found on cards that care about triggered abilities. The best ones to copy are ones that trigger when attacking, since you’re getting value from life totals going down once damage gets through, along with the effect that triggered.
You can get this effect in the command zone if you use Isshin, Two Heavens as One as your commander. Another way to re-trigger attack triggers is with Windcrag Siege (or can be used to generate tokens if you really want). It requires a few counters first, but Firebender Ascension can do this as well. More generic ability copiers include Adric, Mathematical Genius, Kirol, Attentive First-Year, and Lithoform Engine. You can copy them multiple times with Gogo, Master of Mimicry and Mister Fantastic, assuming you have the mana to do so.
There are trigger doubles that only work for specific permanents. Tawnos, Urza's Apprentice and Scientist Supreme of A.I.M. require them to be from an artifact source. You can use The Peregrine Dynamo for legendary sources (excluding commanders) or Weaver of Harmony for enchantments. Even colorless has options with Abstruse Archaic and Echoes of Eternity.
These colorless cards are fantastic for Eldrazi decks. If you want to learn more about them, you can see our article about Eldrazi here.
Effects To Double
In Aggro decks, there are specific kinds of effects you want to copy. In most cases, this is for cards that either deal burn damage or create a ton of tokens, both very common in the archetype.
For the most part, these are all attack triggers. Arabella, Abandoned Doll can deal a ton of burn damage, Winota, Joiner of Forces can get a ton of creatures from your deck, Anim Pakal, Thousandth Moon generates so many tokens, and Voja, Jaws of the Conclave can spread a ton of counters and draw a bunch of cards.
It’s not only cards that trigger when attacking you’d want to double, but effects that trigger when things are entering as well. You can get more Dragons on the battlefield with The Ur-Dragon, or you can put extra poison counters on an opponent by utilizing Fynn, the Fangbearer‘s effect. You can utilize Alesha, Who Laughs at Fate‘s effect twice to reanimate two creatures for the price of one.
Token Spam
Perhaps the most common kind of Aggro deck is a Token deck. These decks are aggressive in that they spam the battlefield with token creatures quickly, and usually make an exponentially growing battlefield. Sometimes, this is the form of a commander, such as The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl, Krenko, Mob Boss, and Edgar Markov. These are also useful in the 99, so you have the choice to use them as your commander o just utilize their effect with another one.
To flood the battlefield with more tokens, you can use various permanents that double the number you’re making. Adrix and Nev, Twincasters, Doubling Season, Parallel Lives, and Anointed Procession are the main four. In addition to these, you have multiple cards that can create a ton of tokens. Scute Swarm creates a ton of tokens, especially once you have more than five lands. Second Harvest makes a token copy of every token you control, and Anim Pakal, Thousandth Moon can make a ton of tokens every attack.
If you enjoy token decks, you might be interested in Deekah, Fractal Theorist, who is a fantastic token deck available in Mono-Blue. You can view our deck guide and overview here.
In Conclusion
Aggro decks are ones that can speed through Commander games. They’re great if you only have a lunch break to get a game in; you might even be able to squeeze in two! Ultimately, these decks are ones that utilize the many aggressive cards released over the years to win games very quickly. The downside of Aggro decks is that they can struggle if you don’t close the game out early. Thankfully, there have been plenty of new toys, and plenty of toys that keep getting added with every set release.
The cards gone over here are ones that are much more generic and can be splashed into almost any Aggro deck. This allows you to play them in any of your Commander decks without needing to worry about whether they fit within an archetype or not. Aggro decks are very fun; after all, what’s more fun than slamming cards down and turning them sideways?
Unless you like Blue decks. Then maybe Aggro isn’t the right archetype for you. But if you do enjoy the slower side of Magic, you can view our overview on Control to see what life is like on the other side of Aggro.
