SelesnyaLegendary Creature — Human SoldierTorsten, Founder of Benalia
Mana value7Rank#13,078
The Commander
When Torsten enters, reveal the top seven cards of your library. Put any number of creature and/or land cards from among them into your hand and the rest on the bottom of your library in a random order.
When Torsten dies, create seven 1/1 white Soldier creature tokens.
Guide
Gameplan
Cast Torsten to refill your hand with creatures and lands, then leverage his death trigger to flood the board with seven Soldier tokens. You play a midrange GW Selesnya value/tokens deck that grinds advantage, sacrifices or recurs Torsten to bank tokens repeatedly, then closes with a wide swing or an anthem-fueled alpha strike.
Strengths
- Two-for-one-plus on cast: digs seven deep for free card advantage in a color pair light on draw.
- Death trigger turns removal into a board state, making Torsten incredibly resilient to wraths and spot removal.
- Naturally synergizes with sacrifice, blink, and reanimation engines to abuse both triggers repeatedly.
- Seven tokens fuel go-wide anthems, convoke, and aristocrats payoffs.
Weaknesses
- Seven mana for a vanilla 5/5 body with no evasion or protection on its own.
- ETB whiffs if your top seven are spell-heavy, so the deck must be creature/land dense.
- Tokens are fragile 1/1s vulnerable to sweepers and pingers.
- GW lacks fast interaction and card filtering, so it can be outraced by combo and big mana decks.
Key Cards
- Skullclamp — Turns the seven dying 1/1 Soldiers into a massive burst of card draw, sacrificing them two at a time.
- Cathars' Crusade — Each of the seven tokens triggers it, snowballing your whole board into a lethal threat instantly.
- Phyrexian Altar — Sacrifices Torsten for mana to trigger the death payoff, then recasts him for more tokens and digging.
- Intangible Virtue — Anthems the wide Soldier army into a real clock for cheap.
- Eternal Witness — Recurs Torsten or sacrifice outlets, enabling repeated ETB and death loops.
- Heroic Intervention — Protects the token swarm from the board wipes GW decks fear most.
Upgrade Path
Add reliable sacrifice outlets (Viscera Seer, Ashnod's Altar) and recursion (Sun Titan, Reveillark) to abuse both triggers on demand. Lean harder into token payoffs like Anointed Procession and Parallel Lives to double your output, and tighten the curve with mana rocks and dorks so Torsten lands earlier. Top-end resilience from Teferi's Protection and a Felidar Sovereign or combo finish raises the ceiling against faster tables.
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
- ▸Alpha strike with an anthem-pumped Soldier swarm.
- ▸Convoke or token-based combo using Cathars' Crusade for an overwhelming board.
- ▸Aristocrats drain via Blood Artist effects sacrificing repeated token batches.
- ▸Grinding opponents out of cards and bodies, then closing with go-wide beats.
Archetypes
- Tokens / Go-Wide — His death trigger and ETB-fed creatures build a huge board that anthems turn lethal.
- Aristocrats — Seven Soldiers plus Torsten himself are perfect fodder for sacrifice payoffs and recursion loops.
- Blink / Recursion — Flickering or reanimating Torsten reuses his card-advantage ETB endlessly.
- Midrange Value — His self-replacing card advantage and resilient body anchor a grindy Selesnya creature deck.
Combos
No combos found for this commander on Commander Spellbook.
Related Commanders
Same color identity (GW), by popularity.
