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Betor, Ancestor’s Voice is featured inMagic: The Gathering’sAbzan Armor preconstructed Commander deck. However, it doesn’t really fit in that deck, and is often one of the first cards cut. Luckily, Betor, Ancestor’s Voice makes for a very strong Commander deck on its own outside the confines of the precon.
This Abzan (white/black/green) commander is a hybrid deck of lifegain and life loss. Betor, Ancestor’s Voice has useful effects for both gaining and losing life, however, the benefits for gaining life are much easier to trigger as opposed to life loss. As such, the deck focuses more on the lifegain aspect.
Envoy of the Ancestors
Will of the Abzan
x5 Forest
x4 Plains
x6 Swamp
Vault of the Archangel
Woodland Cemetery
This Betor, Ancestor’s Voice Commander deckcontains 31 creatures, nine sorceries, eight instants, nine artifacts, eight enchantments, and34 lands. Most of the cards in the deck can gain life, with others making it easy to lose life, so you can always trigger both of Betor’s effects.
Betor, Ancestor’s Voice
Betor, Ancestor’s Voiceis the commander of the deck and what everything is built around. It canput +1/+1 counters on creatures and reanimate them from the graveyard,depending on the life you gained and lost.
There are a lot of infinite lifegain combos in the deck that are easy to achieve, allowing you to put an infinite amount of counters on a creature.
While reanimation is nice,the ability to put counters on creatures is much stronger. Thebest target for the counters is Betor itself, as it has lifelink to be able to stack up more lifegain later. This also gives you the ability to win through commander damage once Betor has a high enough power.
Unspeakable Symbol
Unspeakable Symbol is an easy way tolose enough life so that you may reanimate anything with Betor(assuming you have the life to lose). As you lose life, you’ll also be boosting up your creatures with +1/+1 counters. There areno limits on how much you can use Unspeakable Symbol, so long as you have life to pay.
Unspeakable Symbol is agreat support if you take the strategy of winning through commander damage. This helps to load up Betor with even more counters, getting to the 18 counter threshold needed on it to take someone out in one turn with commander damage.
Chatterfang, Squirrel General
Chatterfang, Squirrel General, at first glance, doesn’t seem important to the strategy. However,it’s the combos that Chatterfang enables that make it such a key player. It’s theeasiest way to gain an infinite number of life while clearing out the battlefieldof any creatures.
Chatterfangrequires Pitiless Plunderer along with itto enable its infinite combos. These are the only two creatures needed, and depending on the other permanents, cangive you infinite life and infinite burn damage. Here is how the combo works.
Prerequisites: Chatterfang, Squirrel General, Pitiless Plunderer, and two Squirrels (not Chatterfang) are on the battlefield. One black mana available.
Step 1: Activate Chatterfang with one black mana, sacrificing two Squirrels.
Step 2: Pitiless Plunderer triggers, creating two Treasure tokens. Chatterfang triggers, creating two Squirrel tokens.
Step 3: Using one of the Treasure tokens, activate Chatterfang again.
Step 4: Repeat steps 1-4.
Results: Infinite Treasure tokens, infinite enter the battlefield triggers, give all opposing creatures an infinite number of toughness loss.
Enduring Tenacity
Enduring Tenacityturns all of your life gain into burn damage. This allows you to play a bit of a burn strategy on top of all your other paths to victory. With how much life you gain in a Betor Commander deck, Enduring Tenacity will deliver a ton of damage over the course of the game.
A card getting exiled isn’t the same as it dying, so if Enduring Tenacity is exiled it will not return to the battlefield.
There are other cards with similar effects to Enduring Tenacity, butEnduring Tenacity is the most resilient permanent with its effect. Whenit dies, it comes back as an enchantment, forcing your opponents to need to remove it twice to actually get rid of it.
How To Play The Deck
A Betor, Ancestor’s Voice Commander deckis a hybrid of multiple strategies. Itsprimary strategy is the lifegain plan, constantly gaining life while burning with permanents such as Enduring Tenacity, Starscape Cleric, and Sanguine Bond. However, itcanalso fall on a Voltron(putting focus on one creature)game plan once Betor has enough counters.
Lifegain is vital to the strategy of the deck, so cards that offer easy ways to gain life are ones you want on the battlefield quickly. Soul Warden, Essence Warden, and Cleric Class are among the best options.
You wantpermanents that draw you cards at the cost of life on the battlefield as early as possible. This lets you get life loss going for Betor to reanimate anything you toss into the graveyard. Early game, youwant to discard your large creatures to hand sizeso you can reanimate them later.
Thereare three primary win conditions to a Betor, Ancestor’s Voice Commander deck. Thefirst route to victory is through commander damage. Once Betor has 21 power, it can one-shot any opponent if it goes unblocked. Since it has flying, this is easy to accomplish. Thesecond win condition is through burn. Multiple cards deal burn damage when you gain life, and with how much life you gain, this can be very damaging. Thefinal win condition is through combat. You can spread out +1/+1 counters to make all your creatures big combat threats.
Thebiggest weakness of the deck is its speed. A Betor, Ancestor’s Voice Commander deck has a lot of moving parts, andrequires multiple permanents to be on the battlefield to make the most out of every effect. It takes a while to get everything you need on the battlefield, soyou will be defenseless in the early game. Luckily, with how much life you can gain, the life lost early on can be recovered later.
