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All sorts of beings congregate in Baldur’s Gate, from Humans and Elves to Dragons and Vampires. All of these and more are represented inMagic: The Gathering’s Commander Legends: Battle for Baldur’s Gate, which allows you to play some of your favorite characters from Baldur’s Gate 3 in cardboard form.
Astarion Ancunín is one of your companions in Baldur’s Gate 3, and as Astarion, the Decadent he can be at the helm of your commander deck. With abilities to empower both life drain and life gain effects, you can watch your opponents wither away before your eyes.
Sample Decklist
Astarion rewards you for gaining life and punishes your opponents for losing it, so the decklist leans heavily into life drain effects, allowing you to capitalize on both.
Debt to the Darkness
Vault of the Archangel
War Room
The Commander
Astarion is an Elf Rogue turned Vampire, then infected with an illithid tadpole, giving him limited psychic powers and immunity to sunlight, which is why he can walk around in the daytime with you in Baldur’s Gate 3.
In Magic, Astarion, the Decadent is a 4/4 Vampire Elf Rogue with both lifelink and deathtouch. At the end of each of your turns you canchoose to have one opponent lose lifeequal to the life that they lost that turn,or you can gain lifeequal to the life you’ve gained that turn.
These effects allow you to double-up on both life-gain and life-drain effects, turning what are often pretty modest effects into powerful ones. These can be especially effective in conjunction with doubling effects, since they take place afterwards and will thereforeget the benefits of the doubling effect twice.
Astarion, the Decadent is also terrifying when you have effects in your deck that cut a player’s life in half, since doing that twice will kill them.
Building The Deck
Astarion, the Decadent wears his vampiric nature on his shoulder, draining and gaining life to represent drinkng the lifeblood of your opponents. Sticking to a life loss/gain theme can also push you into a vampire theme, since many vampires have similar life-draining effects.
Decks that focus on draining life from an opponent in order to increase their own life can do well in head-to-head games, butcan struggle in a four-player pod. If you target a single player you’ll likley be targetted by the other two before you’re able to accumulate an insurmountable health pool.
to counteract this, you’ll want tofocus on value-building effectsso that you get additional benefits from gaining life, like extra card draw and growing creatures.
Frequently gaining life will provide you with some wiggle room topay for powerful effects, such as the activated ability on Aetherflux Reservoir, which can blast an opponent for 50 damage in one shot. If your life total is high enough, this can become an alternate win condition.
Your growing life and value engines can make you a target, so it’s a good idea to include a bunch of removal and protection effects. Including important effects on artifacts and enchantments will allow you to retain them after one of your board wipes.
Removal is extra important for dealing with the effects that prevent you from gaining life, which are mostly on red and black creatures and enchantments. If you suspect that your opponent has these effects in their deck, hold on to your removal spells.
Draw
Black offers some of the best draw options in the game, often at the cost of life. Since the deck focuses on gaining life, that won’t be an issue, so you can freely include staples like Phyrexian Arena and Night’s Whisper. However,the life-gain focus opens up a lot of draw options.
There are severaloptions that reward you for gaining lifewith optional card draw.Markov Purifierallows you to pay two generic mana at the end of your turn to draw a card if you gained life that turn, and has lifelink to help you gain life regularly.Dawn of Hopelets you pay two generic mana to draw a card any time you gain life, allowing you to draw as much as you can afford, plus creates Soldier tokens with lifelink.
Well of Lost Dreams is the best of these options: any time you gain life, you can pay any amount of generic mana up to the amount of life you gained, and draw that many cards. This allows you to draw at a lower cost than the other listed options.
Cosmos Elixir fills two needs,offering life gain until you exceed your starting total, and then drawing an extra card each turnonce you exceed that number. Since this effect triggers at the end of your turn, you’ll have an opportunity to regain any life you lost to attackers on your opponents' previous turns before checking your life total.
Like Phyrexian Arena, Lunar Convocation allows you to pay life for cards, and rewards you with a 1/1 flying Bat on each of your turns that you both gain and lose life.
Ramp
Black and white both offer some solid acceleration outside the standard artifact packet.
White has several “catchup” ramp options, but none is quite as pervasive as Smothering Tithe. Once it’s in play it will continue to generate value, earning you a Treasure token each time an opponent draws a card unless they pay two mana per card to stop it. It’s a win-win situation for you, either netting you a lot of Treasure tokens or forcing your opponents to pay for nothing.
Black includes multiple mana accelerants, including Crypt Ghast, whichdoubles the mana produced by your Swamps. This type of effect is most powerful in mono-black, where you’ll have a lot of Swamps to play with, but can also be very effective in simple dual-colored decks. Including Urborg, Tomb of Yawgmoth will allow you to turn all of your lands into Swamps to really milk the benefit.
An unusual addition is the Pristine Talisman, whichproduces colorless mana and gains you a little lifeeach time you tap it. This isn’t a useful effect except in a deck like this, which has multiple effects to force your opponent to lose life as you gain it.
Two For One
Gaining life has always been considered a weak effect because a high life total doesn’t win games. This deck leverages life gain by forcing your opponent to lose life mirroring your gains, and if you get multiple effects in play you canforce an opponent to lose up to three times as much life.
Sanguine Bonddemonstrates this mirror ability, but all of these effects have an incredible interaction with Exquisite Blood.Exquisite Blood is the only card in the game with the opposite effect, allowing you to gain life whenever an opponent loses life. With both of these effects in play at once, simply dealing one damage to an opponent will drain their life to zero and add that life to your own.
Damage causes loss of life, so damage does trigger these effects.
There are several weaker effects on cards like Marauding Blight-Priest, whichaffects all opponents but only causes them to lose one lifeat a time, regardless of how much life you gained. Thes effects can stack, however, allowing you to drain a fair amount of life from each of your opponents whenever you gain life.
Double Up
It can be tough to keep up the life gain tempo against three opponents, especially when they see your total creeping up and start to target you. Thankfully,there are several effects available to ramp up your life gain.
Boon Reflection and Alhammarret’s Archive’s bothdouble the effects of your life gain effects, turning one life into four. Using this with something like Beacon of Immortality will stack further, allowing you to multiply your life by eight (and probably one-shot an opponent if you have Sanguine Bond in play). Alhammarret’s Archive also doubles your all-important card draw effects, making it a must-add card!
There are also options to increase your opponents' life loss!Bloodletter of Aclazotzis a 2/4 flying Vampire Demon that doubles the life loss your opponents experience on your turn. This can effectively double the damage all of your creatures deal to opponents, but will not add to the lifelink effect shared by multiple creatures.
Wound Reflection is an even more powerful version, because it isn’t limited to your turn. This means that if one of your opponents attacks another, Wound Reflection will increase the life loss. This effect only triggers at the end of the turn, which means that your opponent has an opportunity to remove it if they realize that the additional life loss will end up killing them.
