Thank you everyone for your suggestions, they’ve been tremendous help so far. I was surprised at how many people were suggesting mono-white commanders, I may need to rethink about excluding them.
As for the Kaalia debate, as I mentioned before, rightly or wrongly her reputation makes any game with her an auto archenemy game, something I’m not interested in. The playgroup at my lgs absolutely hates commanders like Kaalia and Animar and will go after them without hesitation.
Decent example; just the other week we had a person from a few towns over come in with his new dinosaur tribal deck. Everyone was excited to play..... until he opened his deck box and showed that it was ANIMAR temur Dinos. The pod he was in (I was in another pod unfortunately) immediately became an archenemy game until he scooped around turn 5..... and this being a pod that had a Scarab God mill deck AND an infect deck in the mix. So yeah, Kaalia as awesome as she is is definitely out.
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As for the Kaalia debate, as I mentioned before, rightly or wrongly her reputation makes any game with her an auto archenemy game, something I’m not interested in. The playgroup at my lgs absolutely hates commanders like Kaalia and Animar and will go after them without hesitation.
Decent example; just the other week we had a person from a few towns over come in with his new dinosaur tribal deck. Everyone was excited to play..... until he opened his deck box and showed that it was ANIMAR temur Dinos. The pod he was in (I was in another pod unfortunately) immediately became an archenemy game until he scooped around turn 5..... and this being a pod that had a Scarab God mill deck AND an infect deck in the mix. So yeah, Kaalia as awesome as she is is definitely out.