Combining the card Stormbind with the card Whiteout allowed a large amount of creature removal, although some versions did not include Whiteout. Some aggro decks are linked merely by their color, but they remain similar enough in style that one may refer to all incarnations of the archetype by a single name effectively. To prevent this, avoid overloading your pauper decks deck with lands and include card-drawing spells to help find more action cards.

When your games are going long, your opponents can surprise you with any sort of powerful creatures, Planeswalkers, sorceries, instants, or combinations of cards that one could imagine. You'll need an answer—or at least a game plan—for beating them all. Whether card games or learning a basic card trick, everybody is familiar with a deck of cards. I remember my grandparents had some old Bicycle Rider decks in their cabinet which probably were there for 40 years. I want everyone to know it is a normal and standard pack of playing cards they could buy at their local store.

Spreading +1/+1 counters across your team enables aggressive decks to attack relentlessly. Shalai and Hallar takes the aggression further by damaging your opponents when you add counters. It also offers some combo lines with The Red Terror and All Will Be One. Alesha, Who Smiles at Death brings an endless fleet of small creatures into play. With options like Professional Face-Breaker, Skyclave Apparition, and Lotho, Corrupt Shirriff, you can build an aggressive yet resilient deck that grinds out games as much as it attacks.

For every card in your deck, choose the most cost-effective option available. While a six-mana 5/5 flier might be awesome, it takes too long to be able to cast (hopefully the game is over by turn six) and isn't the right tool for our job. We do want to be dealing a lot of damage (and a 5/5 hits hard), but we want to do it quickly—and hopefully spend less mana to cast our threats than our opponent does to answer them (and vice versa). Sligh's plan was to play a bunch of cheap, aggressive creatures and back them up with burn spells that could either kill potential blockers or go directly to the opponent's face. The mana curve concept was integral to the deck's success because it helped smooth out draws by giving it the best chance of drawing an ideal opening hand followed up with relevant cards.

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The first Sligh deck appeared during the Ice Age block in 1996. The original deck, entitled "Geeba," was built by Jay Schneider and popularized by Paul Sligh. Okay, what is actually lucky is that you can play Grasping Scoundrel and go full blown sixteen two- power two-drops. There really aren’t that many Sweltering Suns floating around yet, and I’m unsure how many more there can even be. Harsh Scrutiny is a fine answer to Whirler Virtuoso, which is the only other card a low to the ground deck like that is super afraid of. The less obvious part is that this is largely a count of useable cards.

With an aggro deck, you want to be able to decide the game with your opening seven cards plus your first small handful of draw steps. You wouldn't turn down drawing extra cards if you could do so for free, but you cannot afford to sacrifice tempo in order to do it. One challenge aggro decks face in Commander is the need to take out multiple players at once. Commissar Severina Raine addresses this by causing all your opponents to lose life in the combat phase, regardless of who’s getting attacked. That coupled with inbuilt aristocrat synergies makes for a fine Orzhov commander. Aggressive Commander decks have some barriers to their success.

If your opponent’s deck can curve Longtusk Cub into Whirler Virtuoso into

Traditionally, red is the color that lends itself best to building aggro decks. In addition to having lots of cheap, aggressively-slanted creatures, red's removal spells come in the form of burn. As mentioned, aggro decks are all about speed, which makes their mana curve incredibly low. Other aggro decks may be multicolored, and/or be based on a certain tribe. Vampire and Goblin aggro decks are perfectly viable, and having a few "lord" creatures in them can help, too.

Against go-wide decks, Temporary Lockdown and Sunfall can singlehandedly spell doom for the opponent. Despite the majority of Boros Convoke’s cards making it through rotation, some players have taken the opportunity to experiment. With a splash of blue and more multicolor focus, there are a lot of options available to replace the outgoing Convoke engine.

Aside from mana curve, the other way to end up playing card for card with your midrange opponents is literally just drawing the same number of cards as they do. Let’s look again at the Boss Sligh deck as a great example of this. Aggro largely applies to any deck where if given the decision between including a card focused on exchanging resources or focused on profitably attacking or dealing damage, you choose the later. Choosing between these formidable green giants depends on your deck’s mechanism and your preferred style of asserting power on the playing field. Aggro (short for 'Aggressive') decks are focused on dealing numerous, smaller smacks of damage as quickly as they possibly can.

Rewarding you for building a board state can look like a few different things. For example, Marchesa, the Black Rose rewards playing creatures with +1/+1 counters and resiliency. This doesn’t mean you can’t play aggressive decks in Commander. You just need to expand your idea of aggro, move away from the Goblin Guides of the world, and build resilient decks capable of distributing tons of damage. My favourite deck is a [[Grenzo Havoc raiser]] deck, that does exactly this.

game. Maybe it’s plus or minus one due to a mulligan, but in useable card

The most successful incarnation of the Red/Green aggro archetype came when both the Invasion block and the Masques block were legal in Standard. These decks used the card Fires of Yavimaya to give Haste to large creatures like Blastoderm and Flametongue Kavu as well as the tokens generated from Saproling Burst. The most powerful incarnation of Sligh came soon after, with the release of the Tempest set. More modern versions of Sligh have been called "Red Deck Wins". These decks have more control elements than traditional Sligh, and it is debatable whether or not they deserve the title. If you load up your deck with high velocity, low impact cards you can’t afford to only draw a few of them.

Playing with a bunch of defenders doesn’t sound aggressive until Arcades, the Strategist lets your Giant Ox hit like a Sun Titan. The combination of pressure and card advantage makes Arcades a niche but powerful Bant commander; it’s also one of the most beginner-friendly commanders on this list. Commanders that build a board state often do so by pumping out tokens. Cards like Talrand, Sky Summoner and Otharri, Suns' Glory spam creatures to overwhelm their opponents, giving their decks room for cards that synergize with their tokens and push them over the threshold. Tempo, mana efficiency, and cost-effective threats are how aggressive decks win the game. In Sligh, there are eight one-mana creatures, which is actually pretty low for an aggro deck.