Hey folks, and welcome to Commander On A Budget! This month I’m talking about an exciting new commander that I believe is strong enough to dethrone Lathril, Blade of the Elves as the new best Elf commander: check out Dionus, Elvish Archdruid!

Dionus provides a huge boon to any Elf deck: since the main draw of Elfball is that Elves are amazing mana dorks (e.g. Llanowar Elves and friends), Dionus essentially doubles the value of all your mana dorks by letting you tap them twice per turn. And for most Elf players that’s enough to give Dionus a slot in the 99 of their Elf deck. However, Dionus’s ability is even more powerful, especially when built around!

There’s two reasons for this. First is that some very good Elves have tap abilities outside of mana: Fauna Shaman taps to tutor up creatures, Eladamri, Korvecdal taps to cheat creatures into play, Nullmage Shepherd disenchants pesky permanents, Timberwatch Elf can grow Elves twice per turn and so on.

Second, some very good Elves take advantage of the +1/+1 Counters Dionus is handing out: Gyre Sage and Incubation Druid tap for extra mana, Evolution Witness regrowths every time it gets a counter, and Joraga Warcaller grows the team.

In fact, with Dionus in the command zone you can actually include a +1/+1 Counter sub-theme, which is incredibly useful to Elfball in particular as it helps shore up traditional weaknesses to the archetype: Elves a vulnerable to board wipes, so adding extra draw and protection like Inspiring Call and Armorcraft Judge make it far easier to avoid getting shut down by wipes. There’s also plenty of +1/+1 counter synergy cards to make Dionus’s ability even sweeter like adding Hardened Scales for more counters or Rishkar, Peema Renegade to turn even non-mana dork elves into dorks.

Of course, Dionus passively adding +1/+1 counters to all your elves is a benefit outside of direct synergies: there’s also indirect synergies like making them bigger so bite spells like Windswift Slice and Bridgeworks Battle or draw spells like Season of Gathering and Return of the Wildspeaker get more potent. And obviously bigger creatures means combat is all the more lethal for us too!

And this is why I like Dionus, Elvish Archdruid in the command zone over Lathril, Blade of the Elves: yes, you lose access to Black, but you get access to a deep +1/+1 Counter subtheme to make up for it, and Dionus herself I think is even stronger than Lathril.

I’ve got a list for you too: it’s currently $100 on TCGplayer and Cardmarket, but obviously shipping and stuff will raise the price significantly, so as usual I would take the base price and double it for a more accurate total:

Elfball is such an old and popular archetype that there’s no end of sweet upgrades for it: Finale of Devastation, Green Sun's Zenith, Survival of the Fittest and Chord of Calling are incredible tutors, The Great Henge / Guardian Project are yet more draw options, Allosaurus Shepherd and Cavern of Souls protect against countermagic, Eladamri, Lord of Leaves protects against targeted removal, and Craterhoof Behemoth is the classic Elfball finisher. For +1/+1 Counter synergies I’m a huge fan of Innkeeper's Talent and Kodama of the West Tree. Oh, and Concordant Crossroads is a great haste-enabler, drop it down when you’re ready to pop off!

And that’s the list. As all Elfball decks, it tries to go fast and snowball out of control, meaning it pubstomps tables with low interaction but will struggle more against tables with high interaction. The deck is glorious when it’s popping off and I think Dionus is going to make things even more ridiculous. Let me know what you think and thanks for reading!