The Commander
: Draw a card, then exile a card from your hand and put a number of time counters on it equal to its mana value. It gains "When the last time counter is removed from this card, if it's exiled, you may cast it without paying its mana cost. If you cast a creature spell this way, it gains haste until end of turn." Then remove a time counter from each other card you own in exile.
Guide
Gameplan
Tap Alaundo each turn to draw a card and suspend something from your hand, building a stack of free spells in exile that all tick down each activation. As your exile pile grows, multiple cards' time counters hit zero on the same turn, letting you cascade out free fatties, instants, and value spells for explosive, snowballing turns. You win by deploying a free army or game-ending bombs faster than opponents can keep up.
Strengths
- Massive card advantage and free spell value every single turn once online
- Cheap low-MV cards come back almost immediately, enabling free counterspells and removal at instant speed
- Synergizes brutally with proliferate and cost reducers to dump time counters
- Snowballs hard — each activation accelerates everything else in exile
Weaknesses
- Slow to set up; the engine takes a few turns to pay off and you're behind early
- Heavily reliant on Alaundo staying alive and untapped through summoning sickness
- Suspended cards are stranded if Alaundo dies — you lose tempo and they tick slowly
- Vulnerable to graveyard/exile hate and to being out-tempo'd by faster combo decks
- Removal of Alaundo before activation wastes your whole turn's setup
Key Cards
- Jhoira, Weatherlight Captain — Adds another draw engine for cheap historic spells, complementing Alaundo's exile value.
- Karn's Temporal Sundering — Free extra turns from exile mean more Alaundo activations and unbeatable advantage.
- Lighthouse Chronologist — Extra turns let you activate Alaundo repeatedly and crash your whole exile pile down.
- Murktide Regent — A huge free threat that gains haste when cast off Alaundo's trigger.
- Seedborn Muse — Untaps Alaundo each turn so you can activate it multiple times across the table.
- Clockspinning — Proliferate and counter manipulation accelerate suspended cards to zero instantly.
Upgrade Path
Add untap enablers (Seedborn Muse, Wilderness Reclamation, Quick Sliver-style effects) and proliferate (Inexorable Tide, Flux Channeler) to activate Alaundo more often and accelerate counters. Lean into high-impact free hits — extra-turn spells, Eldrazi, and game-ending bombs — plus protection like Heroic Intervention and Lightning Greaves so Alaundo survives. Tighten the curve with cheap interaction you can recast for free to control the table while the engine snowballs.
Core Cards
The most-played cards for this commander, built from aggregated deck data (the Mythic Graph). Build public decks to seed it.
Win Conditions
- ▸Chaining free extra-turn spells into overwhelming card and board advantage
- ▸Cheating out giant creatures with haste to swing for lethal
- ▸Grinding opponents out with endless free spells until they have no answers
- ▸Assembling proliferate/untap loops to crash the exile pile and deploy a full army at once
Archetypes
- Spellslinger / Suspend Value — Alaundo turns every card into a free suspend spell, rewarding cheap impactful instants and sorceries.
- Big Mana Ramp — Free casting bypasses mana costs, letting you cheat out expensive bombs and Eldrazi early.
- Control — Recurring free counterspells and removal from exile let you protect the engine and grind out the game.
- Combo — Free extra-turn spells and cost reducers chain into infinite-feeling value loops.
Combos
No combos found for this commander on Commander Spellbook.
Related Commanders
Same color identity (GU), by popularity.
