Weekly Sale Commander: Deck the Halls - Part 4 of 6: Red & Green!

Posted on December 15, 2025

Hi folks! Welcome to the Weekly Sale Column! This column will be aimed at showing you some cards on sale that could give you some new ideas for your lists. They will *usually* be Commander lists in Bracket 3 as well so you'll be able to play these in any Bracket 3 (or higher) pods. If you want to play in lower pods, just swap out the Game Changers for other choices and/or add more along with some other competitive combos if you want to compete with Bracket 4 and 5 pods! Keep in mind that the game changers in your deck aren't the only thing that moves you up and down a bracket. Your intent with your deck; inclusions of other interactions, engines, and combos, and overall playgroup should also be factors in your bracket!

For the Deck the Halls sale over the next couple weeks, it's broken up into six total parts over the course of the sale. Each part ends in a couple days, so be sure to get your orders in before we move to the next color! Part 4: Red & Green ends on Tuesday night at 11:59 PM before we get to part 5: Multicolored!

Parts 1-3 can be located here:

Weekly Sale Commander: Deck the Halls - Part 1 of 6: White!

Weekly Sale Commander: Deck the Halls - Part 2 of 6: Blue!

Weekly Sale Commander: Deck the Halls - Part 3 of 6: Black

Hello, friends. It's a new week, and with it I have a spicy one for you! I've been dabbling a little bit in cEDH lately, and the deck that I enjoy the most is the Bracket 5 version of today's list! Today, I bring you Bracket 3's dinosaur extraordinaire, Etali, Primal Conqueror! Etali, Primal Conqueror // Etali, Primal Sickness, the chunkiest dino this side of the Mississippi, is a 7 mana 7/7 Elder Dinosaur with Trample and one of the most fun ETB's in Commander. When he enters, each player flips until they hit a nonland, and you get to cast all of those cards for free. Any that do not get cast or are lands stay exiled too, so you don't have to worry about filling your opponent's graveyard either. For a Green Phyrexian mana and 9 generic, you can also flip this big chunker into Etali, Primal Sickness, an 11/11 Phyrexian Elder Dinosaur with Trample and Indestructible and game-ending damage trigger. When that side deals damage to a player, they also get that many poison counters, so if they can't block at least two of the damage coming in, that player bites the dust!

Any good Etali, Primal Conqueror // Etali, Primal Sickness player will tell you that you don't want to flip him, you just want to keep finding ways to replay and reuse the front side! Our list is similar, just without the relative speed that cEDH versions will have, along with some extra resiliency that you can't have unless you're in Bracket 3! Let's begin!

I Wanna Go Fast

Quoting Ricky Bobby might be the best way to describe this Gruul deck. Most Gruul decks focus on ramping lands and mana and will use their Commander to do so. Once they have those resources, they flood the board with lots of big dudes and usually use win conditions like Avenger of Zendikar or Anzrag, the Quake-Mole to win the game.

We're not doing that, we're hoping to go faster! We play a strong host of ramp that get us some extra lands, like Farseek, Nature's Lore, Three Visits, Kodama's Reach, and Skyshroud Claim. We even play Into the North, because switching to Snow-Basics and including Highland Forest was basically a free include! On top of that, we also play some mana dorks that work well here, from the small ones like Birds of Paradise and Delighted Halfling to the bigger mana ones like Fanatic of Rhonas and Gwenna, Eyes of Gaea. These aren't just good for casting our Commander faster than our opponents, they also just cast some of our midrange spells faster that are great with him, so they're all worth playing. This sale also piqued my interest with Elvish Spirit Guide and Simian Spirit Guide, cards that I play in my cEDH version. They give you that little extra push of mana that you sometimes need for an explosive turn, so I think they're worth playing. If you just want something a little more resilient, feel free to swap them for some simple removal or even just more dorks!

Finally, we also play classic mana rocks, like the usual Sol Ring and Arcane Signet, along with Fellwar Stone, Talisman of Impulse and Cursed Mirror! Cursed Mirror doubles as a future clone effect for Etali, Primal Conqueror, but we'll get to those later. The Fire Crystal, courtesy of Final Fantasy, lets us cast our red spells for cheaper and will also let us copy creatures (like our Commander), so it earns the spot well. My spicy include from my cEDH version is Geosurge. Geosurge has a high pip cost of , but it gives you 7 Red artifact or creature mana, which is exactly enough to cast Etali! Between Geosurge and Treasonous Ogre, you've got two strong ways to cast Etali for basically 4-mana!

At Least One Primal Big Boi

Once we've got our Commander in play, we're hoping to just cast as many of our opponent's cards as we can. Sure, hitting some of our bigger cards in our deck is good, but you'd be surprised how often you can win with your opponent's win conditions. We want to get as many chunky big dino triggers as possible, so we'll use Red's inherent copying, which usually just creates temporary clones! Delina, Wild Mage guarantees that you get to copy Etali whenever she attacks, but 30% of the time (that's 6/20 for you math planeswalkers out there), you get to do it again and keep making more! Jaxis, the Troublemaker lets you discard any card to make a temporary clone of a creature for the low cost of one mana, and one mana for a clone is a great value.

Rionya, Fire Dancer creates a number of temporary clones equal to one plus the number of instants or sorceries you've cast this turn. Hitting this off of an Etali trigger is one of the best feelings you can have, because it guarantees at least one clone, plus more if you used any rituals like Geosurge! Chandra, Flameshaper doubles as a clone maker and some card advantage if you've got enough clone effects going, but most of the time, she's just a repeatable Electroduplicate. Speaking of which, we also play Electroduplicate, along with Heat Shimmer, Molten Duplication, Twinflame, and Devastating Onslaught, so we've got tons of ways to copy Etali; we just have to get our big dino into play first!

"You never had control, that's the illusion!"

There's a whole dinosaur franchise that describes why you shouldn't give control to the Gruul Dino player. On top of our Commander, we play plenty of protection to ensure that we either get to play Etali safely or that we get to protect it afterwards! Spider-Punk and Destiny Spinner are great ways to make Etali uncounterable. Hellkite Courser will let us play an un-taxed Commander even after it's been resent to the Command Zone. The Last Agni Kai is a removal spell that will give you so much mana if you've used Etali for it. Vandalblast is one of the most efficient Red artifact-destruction spells you can play in the format, and Force of Vigor gives us a way to get rid of pesky artifacts and enchantments for free! We also play Redirect Lightning and Bolt Bend, both of which are just the cheaper version of Deflecting Swat. If you've got Swat, you should play Swat, but Redirect Lightning and Bolt Bend are also worth playing, even in counter wars!

We're also hoping to kill our opponents with other cards sometimes, so we've included some great hits in our own deck if you can hit them with Etali. Herigast, Erupting Nullkite gives you some unparalleled value once it's in play due to how powerful Emerge is. Apex Devastator is cool, but casting Apex Devastator for free is even cooler! Kogla, the Titan Ape makes for some great removal, and Temur Sabertooth will let us return some of our useful ETB effects to our hand, including our Commander!

Change the Game!

Our Game Changers in this list are 3 of the same ones I play in my cEDH version! Worldly Tutor can help you have an explosive Etali trigger (by searching for Apex Devastator), or can even act as a ramp spell if you cast it at the end of your opponent's turn for a Elvish Spirit Guide or a Simian Spirit Guide. Jeska's Will, especially on turn two or 3, can give so much mana, usually all that you need to cast Etali. When you flip it off of Etali, you get both modes too, so you get to have 3 extra cards for that turn too! Finally, we play Gamble, a card that will give you so much value because it'll be a low chance that you have to discard what you search for, as long as you have a reasonably-sized hand. I've even used it to search for Electroduplicate when it's the only card in my hand, which basically turns a late-game Gamble into a live draw.

There are a thousand ways you can ramp this deck up to bracket 5. Etali is actually a strong powerhouse in the format (at the time of writing this), so here are my suggestions if you want to dabble in cEDH! First, cut your land count down and add in red rituals like Pyretic Ritual, Desperate Ritual, Seething Song, and Rite of Flame. You'll need some fast mana rocks too, like Mana Vault, Chrome Mox, and Lion's Eye Diamond. Finally, and most importantly, you'll want to add Food Chain and Squee, the Immortal. The combination of Squee, the Immortal and Food Chain gives you infinite creature mana to cast Etali over and over again. Food Chain on its own is probably too strong (in my opinion) for a Bracket 3 Etali, but you can technically include it if you think your playgroup can handle it. Once you add the Squee though, you're probably closer to Bracket 4 and are breaching into 5. I'd recommend looking at Cam from Play to Win's list here for a good reference point for a cEDH version; it was my inspiration for mine (but not all, I've got some tech that y'all would just have to play against me to see!)