SultaiLegendary Creature — Spirit DragonTeval, Arbiter of Virtue
Mana value5Rank#10,768
The Commander
Flying, lifelink
Spells you cast have delve. (Each card you exile from your graveyard while casting those spells pays for 
.)
Whenever you cast a spell, you lose life equal to its mana value.
Guide
Gameplan
Fill your graveyard fast with mill and self-discard, then use Teval's delve to deploy expensive spells for a fraction of their cost. Lifelink on Teval (and other sources) offsets the life you lose when casting big spells, while card advantage from the graveyard keeps the engine humming. You close by overwhelming with cheated-out fatties or a single oversized X-spell.
Strengths
- Delve makes huge spells absurdly cheap, enabling explosive turns
- Lifelink + self-mill turns your graveyard into both fuel and a resource engine
- Sultai colors give the best graveyard recursion, ramp, and card draw in the format
- Punishes opponents who don't interact with the graveyard
Weaknesses
- The life-loss-on-cast clause can kill you during a big turn if your lifegain falls behind
- Graveyard hate (Rest in Peace, Bojuka Bog) shuts off your delve fuel and recursion
- Delve competes with other graveyard payoffs—you can exile your own threats
- Five-mana fragile commander with no built-in protection
Key Cards
- Stinkweed Imp — Dredge refills your graveyard each turn to keep delve fully fueled.
- Life from the Loam — Dredges back repeatedly, stocking the yard while ramping with lands.
- Murktide Regent — A delve-friendly finisher that exiles instants/sorceries to grow huge.
- Treasure Cruise — Near-free card draw via delve that refills your hand on a budget of exiled cards.
- Aetherflux Reservoir — Converts the lifegain from lifelink into a one-shot kill while buffering life loss.
- Dig Through Time — Delve digs deep to find your payoffs while the graveyard pays the cost.
Upgrade Path
Add premium self-mill and dredge (Hedron Crab, Golgari Grave-Troll, Stinkweed Imp) so delve never lacks fuel, and pair them with high-impact delve payoffs (Treasure Cruise, Dig Through Time, Murktide Regent, Become Immense). Shore up the life loss with consistent lifelink and lifegain enablers, then add graveyard protection and a backup combo like Aetherflux Reservoir or Thassa's Oracle to convert your engine into a clean win.
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
- ▸Cheating out and attacking with delve-grown finishers like Murktide Regent
- ▸Aetherflux Reservoir burst from stacked lifegain
- ▸Grinding the table out with relentless graveyard-fueled card advantage and big X-spells
- ▸Mill-out or attrition once opponents run dry
Archetypes
- Spellslinger — Delve makes expensive instants and sorceries trivially castable for explosive value.
- Reanimator — Self-mill loads bombs into the yard to either delve away or reanimate.
- Mill/Self-mill Value — Dredge and mill fill the graveyard, the engine that powers every delve spell.
- Lifegain Combo — Teval's lifelink fuels payoffs like Aetherflux Reservoir to win off accumulated life.
Combos
No combos found for this commander on Commander Spellbook.
Related Commanders
Same color identity (BGU), by popularity.
