Kastral, the Windcrested | art by Jesper Ejsing

Early birds and night owls

Hello there! Welcome once again to EDHighlights, the mini-series where I build decks for the year's most popular commander for each color combination. As 2024's set releases have finished, I'll take a look at the most popular releases from the past year. 

I've built a deck for each monocolored commander (you can find those at this link), and I'm now moving on to the two-color commanders. We'll be kicking things off this week with an Azorius deck, and our first kindred deck in the series. This deck will be led by… Kastral, the Windcrested!

I love Bloomburrow, I love birds, and I love creature-heavy Azorius decks. This is the first deck in the series that I'm actually considering buying in paper. Needless to say, I'm pretty excited about Kastral.

Kastral is, surprisingly, a bluejay (according to the MTGWiki). Given her name, I would have assumed she's a kestrel, but I guess that the fine folks making cards thought that would be too easy. But, whatever type of bird she may be, she's leading this deck. Let's get brewing!

It's a bird! It's a plane!

Kastral is a 4/5 Bird Scout with flying for 5 mana, and she has an ability that gives us a benefit whenever a Bird bonks one of our opponents. When one of our Birds connects we get to do one of three things:

1. Put a Bird from our hand or graveyard onto the battlefield with a finality counter on it.
2. Put a +1/+1 counter on each of our Birds.
3. Draw a card.

All of these are great, and this deck will work best when we're able to get to make this choice more than once each turn. As for this deck's small twist, we'll be making the most of both Kastral's text and our other typal synergies. Every creature in this deck will be a bird!

A family that welcomes birds of all feathers

Birds of a feather flock together, and Magic's Birds are no different. There are a few cards from both recent and not-so-recent Magic history that work well when we have a board full of Birds. Keeper of the Nine Gales can act as a repeatable bounce spell, for the low cost of tapping two birds.

Another old one, Kangee, Aerie Keeper is SLIGHTLY janky but can act as a great anthem and mana sink in the late game. And, the much newer Knightfisher will make a ton of tokens over the course of the game (and it's name alone makes it worth a slot in this deck).

There's also Crookclaw Elder, which turns each of our creatures into card draw if we'd rather hold them back in combat. We can even negate its high mana cost with our commander's ability, making this avian more advantageous. Similarly, Seaside Haven can sacrifice our birds for cards.

This card is particularly good with our commander in play, because we'll be able to reanimate any birds we throw into the bin. And, although five mana is admittedly a bit much for this effect, Murmuration has found a slot too. It makes Storm Crows, buffs our birds, and is just overall a really fun card to slam on the field.

We've got other, non-Bird-focused flying-synergies too. There's classic anthems like Empyrean Eagle, anthems that get even better if we can put them into the graveyard like Kangee's Lieutenant, and even the second appearance of Kangee as an anthem.

There's also cost reducers, like Watcher of the Spheres and Warden of Evos Isle, and protection for our board in the form of Unsettled Mariner. Overall, birds (and some of their changeling friends) provide a wide array of effects for our lofty battlefield.

Maintaining brilliant plumage

One important thing to note about Kastral is that, while she can cheat out creatures from our hand or recur them from our graveyard, those creatures enter with finality counters on them. If they would die, instead they're just exiled. So, like any good Commander player, I'm going to do my best to get around that.

First, let's talk about the deck's blink subtheme. There's a few cards that really stand out here, like Gossip's Talent. This card fills our graveyard, lets our smaller creatures punch through in combat to trigger our commander, and can blink our creatures to get rid of their finality counters.

Just an absolute all-star in the deck. Meneldor, Swift Savior is great too, it's a bird that can blink one of our other birds every turn. Even though it's only a 3/3 for four mana, its ability makes up for those lackluster stats.

And, finally, Splash Portal can blink a creature and replace itself in our hand for just one mana. If it weren't a sorcery, this would be in contention as one of the best blink spells in Magic.

As an added bonus, this blink subtheme will allow our creatures to re-trigger their enters triggers, meaning that Scouting Hawk, Irregular Cohort and Aerial Extortionist and all our other creatures with ETB effects become even better.

There are two other interesting ways to get rid of finality counters: the recently-revivified Power Conduit and recently-released Senu, Keen-Eyed Protector. Power Conduit can straight up remove the finality counters while making a creature stronger, and Senu actually WANTS to be exiled. Then, admittedly less interestingly, staples like Ephemerate are here too,

Storm crow descending…

Like any good typal deck, Kastral and Co. will be making use of some less-type-specific typal-synergy cards. Kindred Discovery shines here, just like it does in most kindred decks, and puts in extra work when we cheat out a feathered friend with our commander.

I'm also a big fan of the two Bloomburrow village lands that slot into the deck. Lilypad Village can help to fill the graveyard with more targets for Kastral, and Lupinflower Village can put more birds directly into our hand in a pinch.

With that bird's-eye view of the deck, let's take a look at the decklist…

 

 

Everybody's heard about the bird!

That's it for this week's article! As someone who does research on migratory species conservation, and as someone who just loves birds, this was such a fun deck to build. My favorite Bird in this deck is probably Harrier Strix. It's a 1/1 flyer for just one mana, and it can help us filter for more cards if we have extra mana.

In real life, though, my favorite bird is the Pine Siskin. I research these little guys as part of my job, and I think they're just cool looking. What's your favorite bird (in real life or in Magic)? I'd love to know, so let me know in the comments below. I'll see you all next week!