BantLegendary Creature — Human ScientistEllie and Alan, Paleontologists
Mana value5Rank#14,108
The Commander
, Exile a creature card from your graveyard: Discover X, where X is the mana value of the exiled card. Activate only as a sorcery. (Exile cards from the top of your library until you exile a nonland card with that mana value or less. Cast it without paying its mana cost or put it into your hand. Put the rest on the bottom in a random order.)
Guide
Gameplan
Fill your graveyard with creatures, then tap Ellie and Alan each turn to exile one and Discover X equal to its mana value, cascading into free spells. You build card and mana advantage every turn while recurring big payoffs, snowballing into an overwhelming board or a value engine that buries opponents.
Strengths
- Repeatable free card advantage and free spell casts every turn via Discover
- Bant colors give access to ramp, blink, recursion, and the best removal/protection
- Scales naturally with self-mill and reanimation strategies
- Discover X means you fully control the mana value ceiling for guaranteed hits
Weaknesses
- Engine is slow: tap-only, sorcery-speed, one activation per turn
- Heavily commander-dependent and vulnerable to removal once you commit resources
- Discover can whiff into useless hits if your curve is poorly tuned
- No built-in protection or evasion; offers no immediate board impact on cast
Key Cards
- Eternal Witness — Discovering into it loops creatures back to fuel future activations and recursion.
- Mulldrifter — A clean Discover hit at five that draws cards and adds a body, refilling graveyard fodder.
- Stinkweed Imp — Cheap, repeatable self-mill via dredge stuffs your graveyard with exile fodder.
- Splendid Reclamation — Pairs with self-mill to ramp hard, and big creatures milled become huge Discover values.
- Craterhoof Behemoth — A top-end Discover hit that ends games when you've built a wide board.
- Wall of Roots — Early ramp and a defensive body that helps you survive to grind with the engine.
Upgrade Path
Tighten the curve so Discover reliably hits impactful creatures, then add self-mill (Mesmeric Orb, Hedron Crab, dredge cards) to load the yard fast. Layer in protection like Heroic Intervention and Lightning Greaves plus efficient ramp, and add a clean reanimation/blink package so big milled creatures become Discover fuel and immediate threats. Top it off with a deterministic finisher and tutors to find your payoffs.
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
- ▸Discovering into Craterhoof Behemoth or another overrun finisher for a lethal alpha strike
- ▸Grinding overwhelming card advantage until opponents run out of answers
- ▸Reanimating and recurring threats to dominate the board state
- ▸Comboing off via repeatable free casts and recursion loops
Archetypes
- Value Midrange — Discover every turn generates relentless incremental advantage that outpaces opponents.
- Reanimator/Self-Mill — Filling the yard with high-mana creatures both enables reanimation and maximizes Discover X.
- Blink — Bant's flicker effects reuse Discovered ETB creatures and protect Ellie and Alan from removal.
- Combo — Eternal Witness loops and free casts can assemble engines that chain repeatable payoffs.
Combos
No combos found for this commander on Commander Spellbook.
Related Commanders
Same color identity (GUW), by popularity.
