While the card type got off to a rocky start back in 1993, creatures are now a major part of MTG. The majority of decks, across the majority of formats, rely on creatures to lead their game plans. This is especially true in Commander, since players have access to their chosen legendary creature at all times. If you’re sick of creatures dominating in your MTG playgroup, then Aether Barrier is an obscure enchantment you may want to check out.
Aether Barrier MTG
While Aether Barrier is in play, it adds an extra dilemma every time someone wants to cast a creature spell. Now, each creature cast comes with the additional cost of sacrificing a permanent, or paying one mana. While the latter is clearly preferable to the former, neither is ideal.
This is certainly a powerful effect, but it’s also, regrettably, symmetrical. Because of this, the first step of taking advantage of Aether Barrier is trying to break that symmetry. While simply using the card in a creature-light deck is one solution, Aether Barrier also works well in decks that can get creatures into play without casting them. Token producers like Talrand, Sky Summoner and Sai, Master Thopterist, for example, create creature tokens that get around the cast clause. Alternatively, you can lean into cards that cheat creatures out without casting them, like Quicksilver Amulet or Show and Tell.
If you’d prefer to keep creatures in the mix, you can also build around Aether Barrier by including cards that make it easy to pay its additional costs. The best way to do this is probably to run cheap artifact token producers, like Obsessive Pursuit and Academy Manufactor to pay for the ‘sacrifice a permanent’ cost. Alongside cards that trigger when sacrificing tokens like Eloise, Nephalia Sleuth, this can actually become a benefit.
Friends Across The Barrier
Naturally, Aether Barrier is most at home in Stax decks, where you’re already trying to deprive your opponents of resources anyway. Commanders like Lavinia, Azorius Renegade and Grand Arbiter Augustin IV are ideal fits in this regard. While a lot of Stax pieces are creatures, and therefore affected by Aether Barrier, you’ll have time to pay extra mana with how much you’re slowing the table down.
To take things in a different direction, Aether Barrier actually makes an interesting sacrifice outlet in Aristocrats-style decks like Wilhelt, the Rotcleaver. In decks like these, you have plenty of disposable tokens to sacrifice to Aether Barrier, as well as payoffs like Morbid Opportunist that reward you for doing so. Similarly, the card feels excellent in Muldrotha, the Gravetide lists, as a way to sacrifice any permanent you want to replay. This can get you additional land drops for Landfall, or extra value out of artifacts like Ichor Wellspring.
Throw in applications in Enchantress decks like Zur the Enchanter, and there’s a surprisingly wide range of good homes for Aether Barrier. It’s not universally useful, since plenty of decks would rather play their own creatures unencumbered, but it’s better than its current low play rate suggests.
A Fine Vintage
Right now, according to EDHREC data, just 4.88k Commander decks in total run Aether Barrier. Considering it’s a powerful card, in a range of lists, this is a surprising statistic indeed. While some of this is undoubtedly down to the card not being a good fit in every deck, the sheer age of Aether Barrier likely factors in here too. This is a card with just a single printing, in 2000’s Nemesis, so it’s not exactly well-known.
Despite its age and the low supply that comes with it, Aether Barrier is actually still a very affordable card. Near-mint copies start at around $3 on TCGplayer, which isn’t budget, but it’s not expensive either. If you want to slow the pace of your Commander games a tad, this is an easy pickup at the current price.
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