Four Weeks of Lorwyn PreDH: Rhys

Posted on December 10, 2025

Nearly every person who has ever played Magic: The Gathering has some kind of signature style of deck. Maybe it's something they really like piloting or just happen to be extremely good at. I'm talking about the likes of Craig Wescoe jamming White Weenies, Gabriel Nassif piloting some Control variant, or Rei "Combo for the sake of combo" Zhang playing the most convoluted combo-esque deck you can picture.

If you're reading this article and are familiar with my works, you likely know where I'm going with this. My signature style is without a doubt piloting Elves decks. Over roughly the last decade, it's something I've become best known for when playing Pauper. While I can and have certainly play other decks (see my victory at the Upstate NY Pauper Open this year on Jund Broodscale), I always can't help come back to the old standby.

After all, Elves have been a part of what I've loved about the game since I first picked up Magic in 1999. I remember casting Llanowar Elves in the first game I ever played and opening copies of Yavimaya Granger and Wood Elves from my first ever packs. Heck, I can even picture the amazing DiTerlizzi art of Willow Elf solely because it was featured in the Starter 99 VHS tape I used to help teach myself the game a bit more as an eight year old.

There weren't many others that popped up in the early years that really caught my interest. Only Elvish Piper, Taunting Elf, and maybe Elvish Champion caught my eye. However, in those early days, there simply wasn't enough to make Elvish Champion worthwhile enough which made it fall flat at first.

That all changed, though, when Onslaught came out.

Oh yeah, now we're talking. Onslaught pushed typal themes heavily for the first time in a way that was fun and engaging. Sure, it had been attempted before to some degree in other sets, particularly Fallen Empires' infamous crack at it that fell resoundingly flat. However, none felt quite like the achievement that Onslaught was. The set was packed to the nines with iconic cards for numerous creature types, including my favorite: Elves.

I've talked a lot about cards like Wellwisher - my favorite card of all time - and also Birchlore Rangers and Elvish Vanguard thanks to their tenure with Pauper Elves. I have not talked about how cool cards like Heedless One or Voice of the Woods were at the time. What do you mean I could tutor for any elf with Wirewood Herald? Elvish Pioneer could just give me an extra land drop?! And Elvish Warrior's stats were unbelievable for a simple vanilla at the time - a mighty 2/3 for !

The rest of the block would continue this trend with sweet cards like Gempalm Strider, Timberwatch Elf, Wirewood Hivemaster, and Ambush Commander. There would even be support from Wirewood Symbiote and the Mirrodin block that followed the Onslaught sets.

However, it wouldn't be until 2007 when we'd see a true return to elf typal and the release of Lorwyn. Based largely around Celtic folklore, the set focused once again on a myriad of different creature types with a typal set. Among them were the return of the elves, and this time with tons of freshly powerful cards.

If you're a modern Elves fan in various formats - particularly Commander - you're likely best familiar with many of these. I have a distinct fondness for Lys Alana Huntmaster and Nettle Sentinel thanks to Pauper, but it's hard to ignore the allure of cards like Imperious Perfect and Immaculate Magistrate. Moreover, Heritage Druid and Nettle Sentinel helped form the backbone of Elves decks in Extended, Modern, and Legacy for years to come to generate absurd amounts of mana.

These elves, however, had a dark side in their treatment of other races as being inferior to themselves. This has driven them to be rather controversial, but it's easy to forget that in the darkness of Shadowmoor, they end up providing their brightest spot. They seek to preserve the beauty of nature and the world - something difficult to achieve in the dark and barren world of Shadowmoor.

This leads me to the topic of today's article. Lorwyn Eclipsed is right around the corner and to gear up for it, I'm looking to go back and examine through the lens of PreDH many things that made the set so cool. PreDH, if you missed my previous articles, is a time capsule format involving sets from before the release of Commander 2011. That includes New Phyrexia backwards and Magic 2011 backwards as far as core sets are concerned.

Rhys was an outcast among the elves. His horns were broken and as such, his disfigured state made him unfit for the elvish society that sees this as a disgrace. However, in the world of Shadowmoor, Rhys' horns are restored, as is his connection with his elven kin. This allows him to aid in the defeat of Oona, Queen of the Fae and the salvation of the plane.

This seems like a perfect opportunity to talk about Rhys' two cards - Rhys the Exiled and Rhys the Redeemed - as PreDH Commander decks. Let's start things off with the Elves-focused one of the two, Rhys the Exiled.

Rhys the Exiled Elves | PreDH | Paige Smith

Commander (1)
1 Rhys the Exiled

Instants (1)
1 Putrefy

Buy This Deck Export text

Now I've talked about this a bit before over the years, but I'm not terribly fond of Elves in Commander. The reason for this is simple: with the amount of mana generation, card draw, and tutoring these decks can feature, games continually feel the same. You'll almost always see the same cards and you'll usually end games in very similar ways. Think about how often nowadays games involving an Elves deck come to an end thanks to a Craterhoof Behemoth.

That might be great for competitive 60 card play and is in fact why I love playing the archetype in most formats. However, the fun of Commander is the way games are so often different. Even if you've played with your deck dozens of times, you'll still find cool new ways to make it do something cool and interesting you didn't expect before. Maybe it interacts with different decks in fresh ways that engage everyone else and allow you to have an awesome time.

By comparison, Elves decks usually just end up wanting to do their own thing while ignoring the entire rest of the table in the process. Every game, you snowball, do the same thing, and it leads to minimal variation from game to game. Where's the fun in that?

This is made that much worse by the fact that this format is PreDH. With about 18 years to pull from featuring less sets per year there's surprisingly not many cards to pull from. What's worse, is many of these are from the game's earlier sets and as a result are quite weak by today's standards. No one is going to want to play cards like Elvish Archers, Elvish Scout, or Elvish Ranger in their Commander decks, after all.

In the case of Rhys the Exiled, this is made all the worse by just how few Black-aligned elves there are at this point in the game. Only fifteen of the 210 elves with a Golgari color identity feature Black in their colors and a handful of others like Elves of Deep Shadow include the color in their overall identity. That's not a lot, and most of them don't do much to differentiate the experience of your typical Elfball strategy.

Compare this to the Ezuri PreDH list I wrote about several years ago or fellow CSI author Stephen Johnson's own build. You'll notice a lot of the selection for the elves themselves is quite similar to the list I posted above. Personally, if you were to build a PreDH Elves deck, Ezuri would be my first choice. Still, Rhys can have some fun uses, like how his life gain and sacrifice make cards like Phyrexian Reclamation and Phyrexian Arena not have a huge drawback. Additionally, the life gain this provides allows you to run cards like Sanguine Bond to great effect.

Despite this, it's still not a huge push for what makes a Golgari Elves deck worth playing. Take a look at the Lathril, Blade of the Elves list I wrote about around the time of Kaldheim. The article was quite popular, being among my most read of all time, and in it I note how much more I appreciated building a Golgari Elves deck like this. Thanks to multiple Ravnica sets, Commander Legends, and then Kaldheim, there was a surprising amount of versatility in what a Golgari Elves deck could look like that you just can't get out of the PreDH card pool.

Still, Rhys the Exiled makes for an awesome deck, and one I recommend checking out for an interesting take on what a PreDH Elves list can look like. That said, I'm a bit more excited to talk about one of my other major loves of Magic: tokens. It's time to talk about Rhys the Redeemed!

Rhys the Redeemed | PreDH | Paige Smith

Commander (1)
1 Rhys the Redeemed

Buy This Deck Export text Export Arena

When I was really getting into Magic at first in the late 90s/early 2000s, tokens were still little more than a novelty most of the time. You'd see a handful of cards make some from time to time with notables including Call of the Herd, Decree of Justice, and Rith, the Awakener, but most of the time there just weren't many uses for them. So while they were fun, there weren't many ways to make a full strategy around them.

That changed in 2005 when Ravnica: City of Guilds hit store shelves. It's really hard to express just how much of a slam dunk that set was. Even me playing at a time when there weren't many Magic players in my area, it was infectious just how beloved the set - and in turn the block as a whole - was. I quickly fell in love with the Dimir as, funnily enough, I was messing with Blue-Black Underworld Dreams decks a ton in that era.

Then on Christmas that year I woke up to find something cool in my stocking: a Ravnica preconstructed deck. The deck in question? Selesnya United.

The deck was packed to bursting with tons of tokens and cool ways to make good use of them. Once you swarmed your board with cards like Selesnya Evangel, Fists of Ironwood, and Scatter the Seeds, you could convoke them for even more value. Better still, you could use the likes of Selesnya Guildmage, Tolsimir Wolfblood, and Overwhelm to make your tokens huge and win the game.

The moment I first played with this strategy, I was hooked. Making tons of tokens was all I wanted to do and that continues to this day. I love me a good token deck and Rhys the Redeemed is excellent at it.

What's funny is how few token doublers exist in this era. Best I can tell, it's basically just two cards: Doubling Season and Rhys himself! Parallel Evolution does it as well, but it's a one-shot effect rather than something which you can use repeatedly. As such, it's hardly the most exciting when you can just do better out of your command zone. The next actual token doubler wouldn't come until Innistrad with Parallel Lives, which lands just outside of the time period for PreDH.

It's funny how some effects just aren't available in the format. For example, there aren't really any Blood Artist effects either or Panharmonicon style abilities. Impulse draw? Forget that! The fact is that a time capsule format like this predating these effects puts way more restrictions on the format, allowing for a more creative gameplay experience that makes it fun.

Rhys is a great example of this. While there aren't many ways to push out more tokens besides Doubling Season and Rhys himself, there are still innumerable ways to make tokens outright. For example, I ended up leaving out lots of great options such as Luminarch Ascension, Captain of the Watch, White Sun's Zenith, Presence of Gond, Squirrel Nest, and Nemata, Grove Guardian. That's just a small sampling of what ended up on the cutting room floor as well.

The stuff that did make it in provides some pretty cool opportunities in some cases. Sure, Avenger of Zendikar and Emeria Angel are staples, but what about Master of the Wild Hunt being a sweet removal option in addition to a token generator? How about Verdeloth, the Ancient's instant swarm maker effect? Or better still, you can invest a large chunk of life into Phyrexian Processor to make several huge creatures turn after turn and then double up with Rhys's activated ability.

This is what has made Rhys the Redeemed such an endearing commander. There is no shortage of ways to build him to your preference - especially when he's a card you can put on the battlefield as early as turn one. There's a lot of room to have fun with this one, so go nuts and build it however you feel like doing! It's not even that hard to upgrade for modern Commander sensibilities either, so it makes for a great launching point for that format as well.

While we've yet to see him, Rhys was a critical player in the original Lorwyn/Shadowmoor story, having a death pact with Maralen should Oona return. Will the Rhys we inevitably see in Lorwyn Eclipsed live up to the reputation of these classic cards? We'll have to wait and see in just a few weeks' time.

In the meantime, take one of these for a spin at your next Commander night and have an awesome time. Who knows? Maybe one of them will become your signature strategy.

Paige Smith

Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/themaverickgirl.bsky.social

Twitch: twitch.tv/themaverickgirl

YouTube: TheMaverickGal