Alibou, Ancient WitnessAlibou, Ancient Witness | Art by Matt Stewart

Edge of Eternities – combining classic artifact synergies with new Planets and Spacecraft – encourages us to take a closer look at past commanders that might have new relevance. Alibou, Ancient WitnessAlibou, Ancient Witness, who cares both about artifact creatures and having tapped stuff, appears to be a perfect candidate for a reimagining. It's also included in the Counter Intelligence precon, so I'm guessing more copies will be floating into players' collections, just ready to be brewed with!

What does Alibou, Ancient Witness Do?

Alibou has two main abilities. The first one is simple: your other artifact creatures now have haste. This means a) that we're incentivized to include as many artifact creatures as possible in this deck, and b) that ones with activated abilities that and/or abilities that trigger when they attack are more valuable than usual.

Alibou's second ability has a bit more going on:

Whenever one or more artifact creatures you control attack, Alibou deals X damage to any target and you scry X, where X is the number of tapped artifacts you control.

So we care about:

1. At least one artifact creature attacking (including Alibou itself)
2. Maxing out on tapped artifacts (both creature and noncreature).

The result: we have the ability to repeatedly take out the largest threat at the table or deal hunks of damage to an opponent we're particularly worried about. Additionally, Alibou's second ability enables us to do a lot of scrying. This is great because is typically one of the worst color combinations for card draw and card selection.

What did this deck look like before Edge of Eternities?

Let's use EDHREC's helpful Average Deck feature to get a sense of how other brewers built a deck around Alibou.

Let's go through this decklist and discuss the important card categories for this strategy.

Artifact Mana

Having a strong mana base is a good place to start for any deck in this format. Because Alibou's second ability cares about any tapped artifact at all, artifact lands, like Ancient DenAncient Den, Rustvale BridgeRustvale Bridge, and Treasure VaultTreasure Vault, are at a premium. You were probably already going to put them in any Commander deck, but it's worth noting that the classic Sol RingSol Ring, Arcane SignetArcane Signet, Boros SignetBoros Signet, etc. also have additional utility when combined with our commander. An exciting new card from Edge of Eternities is The Eternity ElevatorThe Eternity Elevator, representing both a powerful mana rock and the ability to maximize tapped artifact creatures (for Alibou's second ability) without risking them in combat. It's also an immediately tap outlet for our non-hasty commander.

Adding New Spice

This rebuilt deck leans into each of the different parts of our commander, including attacking synergiesattacking synergies, doubling up on damagedamage and attack stepsattack steps, a mini-combo with DawnsireDawnsire and Stuffy DollStuffy Doll or Blazing SunsteelBlazing Sunsteel, and lots of cantripcantrip and cyclingcycling effects to make the best use of our big scries each turn.