Inalla, Archmage Ritualist Archenemy Commander Guide
By the MagicSAK Team (Hunter)
Meet Inalla
Inalla, Archmage Ritualist is one of those commanders that tend to induce groans and eye rolling when a player pulls out a deck with her at the helm. This is mostly due to her Eminence ability, which lets the player pay 1 mana to get a temporary copy of any nontoken wizard that enters the battlefield; Eminence can be tricky because it's difficult to interact with, and players can get a lot of value from Inalla without ever playing her.
Naturally, the fact that Inalla is widely loathed makes her a great Archenemy commander! With the addition of Scheme cards, we can make her a truly fearsome threat.
What does Inalla do?
Inalla is obviously a wizard tribal commander, but how do we use wizards to win? Wizards tend to be squishy, so they're not naturally the best for beating people down with combat damage. This is unfortunate, since the token wizards that Inalla will generate for us have haste, and will want to attack before they're exiled at the end of the turn.
On the other hand, there are lots of wizards with ETB effects, and many of them involve some form of control (especially in blue wizards). Some examples:
Both of these cards show ETB effects that are powerful as heck in this deck. Aether Channeler gives us the options for drawing cards, creating creatures, or bouncing stuff back to our opponent's (or our) hands, and when doubled up (or tripled up, but we'll get to that later), it presents a lot of choices that let us adapt to the current board state.
Bloodline Necromancer returns a wizard to the battlefield from our graveyard. If you have the mana, pay one extra and you get two Bloodline Necromancers and two wizards returned to the battlefield. Got extra mana still? Pay the one mana for each of those, and you'll get copies of the resurrected wizards; that's 6 wizards for as little as 8 mana, complete with all of their wizard trickery!
So we can see that the wizard tribal can be strong with Inalla, but what else do we have? Inalla is in Grixis (blue, black, and red), so we have access to control and card draw with blue, graveyard strategies with black, and burn damage with red. While she wants you to run lots of wizards, we can support them with even more control and ping damage. Most wizards are fairly cheap, so it might not always make sense to run a lot of reanimation, but a little bit never hurts.
We can also add enchantments, creatures, and artifacts that give us even more tokens and double up on ETB effects, like Panharmonicon, Naban, Dean of Iteration, or Molten Echoes. With all three of these on the battlefield, if we play something like Aether Channeler and pay the extra mana to get the token copy, we will get a total of three Aether Channelers with each of their effects tripled, meaning we can draw 9 cards, bounce 9 permanents, create 9 birds, or any combination thereof. It can take a bit to get all these pieces out, but holy value, Batman.
Which Archenemy Schemes should we play for Inalla?
As always, the specific schemes you choose will depend on your Inalla deck, but I'm going to focus on a creature-heavy wizard tribal -- about 35 wizards, some counter spells and board wipes, a handful of token/effect doublers, some card draw (in addition to the card draw that many wizards provide), a few mana rocks, and a healthy 38 lands.
There are some Schemes that I'd recommend for pretty much any deck, so let's briefly go over some of those:
- No One Will Hear Your Cries acts as a soft boardwipe, wiping out all but one of each opponent's creatures.
- All In Good Time gives you an extra turn, albeit without playing an additional Scheme that turn.
- My Crushing Masterstroke gives us control of each creature on the battlefield, untaps them, gives them haste, and lets us attack the hero team with them.
- Behold the Power of Destruction will destroy all nonland permanents a target opponent controls, which can effectively knock them out of the game for a bit.
There are more to be found in our article about The Top 15 Archenemy Scheme Cards, but let's look at some Schemes that might be situationally good for Inalla!
My Tendrils Run Deep
This Scheme isn't really bad for any deck, but it helps us out quite a bit because we're playing some of the worst mana ramping colors, but we'll hopefully usually have a full grip of cards due to the blue card draw. This can help us ramp up to 6+ lands quickly, but if we already have 6 lands, we get two free cards!
My Wealth Will Bury You
As with My Tendrils Run Deep, this scheme helps us with our ramp game. At minimum, it will create four Treasure tokens for us, but if it's a bit later in the game, chances are good that our opponents will have 10+ artifacts and enchantments. Maybe they even have a bunch of their own Treasures! This can provide us with explosive mana ramp.
Only Blood Ends Your Nightmares
This Scheme is just a fun one in any deck, but considering how often we aim to bounce creatures back to our opponents' hands, this provides us with the opportunity to bounce them and then make our opponents discard them next turn. While we can't predict which Scheme we'll get at the beginning of each turn, cards like Galecaster Colossus can help ensure we're constantly making our opponents recast their creatures. Diabolical!
Only I Know What Awaits
This is another form of ramp, I suppose. We potentially get to put a land out, along with an artifact, enchantment, creature, etc. Bonus points if we have mana left over from last turn, and can pay the extra mana to duplicate a free wizard with Inalla's Eminence ability!
Realms Befitting My Majesty
As I've mentioned, we're not in the best colors for mana ramping. This helps us out there, plain and simple. It's especially important, because while Wizards generally have a cheap CMC, we aim to duplicate each of them by paying an extra mana. This helps us more easily achieve that!
Surrender Your Thoughts
This is another Scheme that helps to ensure our opponents aren't playing with full hands, and can interact nicely with our strategy of bouncing everything under the sun back to their hands. I personally love the nice touch that you're forcing one of your opponents to choose whether they discard four whole cards, or if they selfishly make their teammates discard two each. That's some evil villain stuff right there!
Fear My Authority
Wizards aren't the beefiest creatures, so this gives them a little +2/+2 boost, and fear in addition. All of the sudden, our tiny wizard tokens are actually more difficult to block and can deal more than a few damage in one turn. Respect my authori-TAH!
What does our final Inalla, Archmage Ritualist Archenemy Scheme deck look like?
For Archenemy Commander, the minimum Scheme deck size is 10; generally these games won't last more than 10 turns, but I like to include a couple extra schemes just in case; Inalla can be a bit slower, and you're likely going to be slowing people (and the game) down until you find one of your game-winning pieces like Anathemancer and some token doublers, for example.
Because of that, I'm going to include 12 Schemes in our deck: