Battlebond has been fully spoiled at this point, and there was one clear winner in my mind when it came to new legendary creatures to build a deck around: Najeela, the Blade-Blossom.

Najeela appears to be a mono red creature at first glance, and were that the case she wouldn’t be nearly as exciting of a prospective general. She, like General Tazri before her, is a mono-colored commander that has a 5-color activated ability, and it’s a good one. Being a WUBRG commander means we have access to all of the strengths of each color, along with the best warriors in each color. We want this to be a warriors matter deck, mainly because of her abilities. When Najeela is on the battlefield, any time a warrior attacks (including herself) you get to create a 1/1 warrior token that’s tapped and attacking. So basically you get an additional creature for each creature that attacks. To top this off, for WUBRG you get an additional combat phase with each creature getting trample, lifelink and haste. Even more busted, this activated ability doesn’t cause Najeela to tap, meaning it can be use more than once per turn as long as you have the mana. If you can swing with 5 warriors, you’ll actually be swinging with 10, then you pay WUBRG and swing with those 10 to get 20 and well, you get the picture. Being a 5-color deck, we’ll need to work on ramping and mana fixing, so here’s some tools to do that with:

Ramp:

Besides mana rocks and the usual green ramp spells, we have some other support here. Radha in both of her forms will provide green or red mana depending on some circumstances, but can be valuable mana for post combat main phases. Ditto Neheb, though you’ll want to keep some of the other colors open so that you can cast additional spells. Chromatic Lantern gives all of your lands all colors of mana, and Cryptolith Rite gives the same to your creatures (think about using the tokens you’re producing for additional mana). Lastly, Mirari’s Wake and Zendikar Resurgent will make your lands produce double mana, while also buffing creatures and drawing you cards. There are other great Warriors that do different things so let’s take a look at those now:

Warriors:

It seems that every color represents the warrior tribe fairly well, except for blue which is only present in multi-colored warriors and the lone Nimbus Champion. Still, there is a lot of good stuff here, most of these warriors being rare or mythic rarity means they tend to have pretty good effects on them. Some are better than others, but you can see the synergy. We’ll be creating tokens left and right, and we can use those tokens in various ways. Like I mentioned earlier, with Cryptolith Rite you’ll be able to tap those little 1/1’s for mana and that’s a boon for any 5-color deck. You can also sacrifice warriors to Brion Stoutarm (fling them at targets) or Blood-Chin Fanatic (extort effect), and as a bonus if you have Butcher of Malakir out at the same time enemies will have to do some sacrificing as well. There are far too mana effects to go over here, but you should look over the cards. There are many options out there that I didn’t use, but I found that these to be some of the best effects on Warrior bodies out there. The only two that I added from Battlebond are the Decorated Champion and Nimbus Champion, both who have warriors-matter effects. One of the main themes of the deck besides being tribal is extra combat steps, so let’s look at the support section of the deck:

Support:

From being able to take extra combat steps (Relentless Assault, Savage Beating, World at War), to buffing your creatures (Overwhelming Stampede, True Conviction, Cathars’ Crusade) to Warriors matter (Raiders’ Spoils, Secure the Wastes), to standard tribal includes (Kindred Discovery, Coat of Arms, Vanquisher’s Banner), you’ll find a ton of synergy and should be making a ton of tokens and buffing your creatures quickly — then take as many combats as you need in order to smash you opponents. I’m not sure where Najeela will fit on the tier list (probably around tier 3) but I think this deck will be fun to pilot nonetheless. You could also go a completely different route and still make use of her extra combat ability, but I think tribal warriors is the way to go! You can see the full deck list here.