(Kona, Rescue Beastie | Art by Brian Valeza)

A heart of gold and a nose for danger

Hello! Welcome back to EDHighlights, the mini-series where I build decks for the year's most popular commander for each color combination. Now that 2024’s set releases have finished, I can take a look at the most popular releases from the past year. I'll be starting off with the mono-colored commanders, and each deck in this series will have its own special twist to make it stand out just a little bit from the crowd. This series will go in order, and today we're onto the last mono-color: Green. This deck will be helmed by… Kona, Rescue Beastie!

Despite having released very recently (just a few months ago as of the time of writing), Kona has been extremely popular. It beat out Bristly Bill, Spine Sower by just 500 decks to become the most popular Green commander from this year, and its easy to see why. Commander players love cheating out gigantic threats ahead of schedule, and Kona provides a reliable way to do that every single game. So, let’s see how we can build around this beastie.

Land ho!

Kona is a 4/3 for four mana, which isn’t great. But, that’s not what we’re here for. Kona’s “Survival” ability triggers if she’s tapped at the beginning of our second main phase. If she is, we get to put ANY permanent card from our hand onto the battlefield. This could be a high-mana value permanent like Terastodon, or just a humble Forest. At its worst, our commander is simply an overcosted Exploration!

I’ll try to maximize the amount of big permanents I’m putting onto the field, that’s the spirit of any self-respecting mono-Green deck after all, but we need lands to cast the rest of our spells too. So, instead of presuming that we’ll always have a crazy-powerful permanent in hand to slam onto the board, this will be a lands-matter deck that can take advantage of those times when our Commander just lets us play an additional land. With any luck, we’ll actually be able to cast the high mana value permanents in our hand, instead of relying on our commander’s ability to get them out!

So, with this deck’s unique theme in mind, let’s get brewing!

There are always more scute bugs

There’s two main categories of things that we want to be slamming on the board with Kona: things that care about lands entering (Landfall triggers) and things that care about the amount of lands we have.

Let’s start with the Landfall group: the classics are, of course, here. Scute Swarm will make a countably infinite number of insects quickly, and Avenger of Zendikar and/or Rampaging Baloths can end games quickly with their larger tokens.

Some newer additions find a home here too, with Springheart Nantuko making copies of our other best Landfall creatures, Mossborn Hydra getting pretty large pretty fast, and Territory Culler acting as a great card advantage engine.

Three of my favorite cards round out this part of our list. Horn of Greed is a genuinely busted card that gets overlooked because it also helps our opponents. Given that we have many ways to get many lands into play, it’ll hopefully be helping us a lot more than it’ll be helping our pod members. Greensleeves, Maro-Sorcerer is another awesome card, becoming a huge threat over the course of the game AND providing a reliable stream of tokens. This card is crazy good, and works well if it hits the board in the late game or the early game. Last up is Scythecat Cub, which can either make itself a looming threat or turn something else into a looming threat. The best part is that this card only costs two mana, meaning that it can be played easily in the early game and slowly turn our board into a winning one.

Calling forth a primeval army

The other cool category, cards that care about the number of lands we control, has some interesting cards too.

There’s quite a few cards that have power and toughness equal to the amount of lands we control, and all of them shine in this deck. The best option here is Cultivator Colossus, a massive trampling creature that helps us add even more lands to the board. The brand new Braulios of Pheres Band is similar, serving as both a big creature and a way to get more lands on board. Foundations’ Loot, Exuberant Explorer gives another way to cheat big things on board, while also providing another land each turn. Now that I’m thinking about it, Foundations and the new version of Jumpstart have provided even more gas to the already strong mono-Green lands strategy. That just makes this deck even better!

There are a few other cards for this group, too. Wayward Swordtooth can hit the board early and attack as a 5/5 soon after that. Ashaya, Soul of the Wild is yet another big creature, but also provides even more mana by letting our creatures tap to add . This is also good for our commander, who really wants to be tapped down. And, last but not least, Multani, Yavimaya's Avatar can return lands to our hand so that they can be played again later!

Other than the creatures that care about lands entering and the creatures that care about the amount of lands on board, there are some generically cool cards filling out the rest of the 99. Nyxbloom Ancient (and other, similar mana multipliers) are great, turbo-charging the game if they stick around for a full turn cycle or longer. Ghalta, Stampede Tyrant can completely empty our hand onto the battlefield, ending the game in short order. And, last but certainly not least, Ancient Greenwarden can double the effectiveness of a lot of our other cards. It’s definitely a win-more card, but I’m willing to abide by it because it can be cheated out for free.

Running on laughing gas

To make the rest of the deck work, Kona needs to be tapped at the beginning of our second main. She can just attack, but given how scary her ability is, she’ll almost certainly be blocked and killed in combat. So, there’s 3 ways I’ve included to tap her down: crewing a vehicle (like the somehow eternal-legal Clown Car), convoking a spell (like the possibly-free tutor Chord of Calling), or adding mana (through some dork like Jaspera Sentinel).

With all the key components explained away, here’s the decklist:

 

Go to my second main, trigger Kona!

And that closes out the last mono-colored edition of EDHighlights! Although I didn’t mention it earlier, I really like the planeswalkers in this deck. Wrenn and Seven does a little bit of everything that this deck wants, Garruk, Primal Hunter can either draw a ton of cards in a burst or reliably provide creature tokens, and Nissa, Ascended Animist is a great way to end the game through a clogged board state.

While slamming down Eldrazi or other generically powerful creatures with Kona is awesome, and does provide a clear path to victory, I think this is a fun take. Using Kona as a way to put some higher mana-value permanents on the board in pursuit of a larger, big-mana focused strategy is more cohesive and adds a clearer direction for the deck when our commander is inevitably removed from the board.

Did the lands-focused strategy power down this deck too much? Just the right amount? Let me know in the comments below!

I’ll see you all next week, when we start looking at the most popular two-color Commanders from 2024!