Legendary Creature — Human Wizard Knight

Celes, Rune Knight

Mana value4EDHREC#5,473

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The Commander

When Celes enters, discard any number of cards, then draw that many cards plus one.

Whenever one or more other creatures you control enter, if one or more of them entered from a graveyard or was cast from a graveyard, put a +1/+1 counter on each creature you control.

Guide

Gameplan

Celes is a Mardu reanimator-aggro hybrid: cheat big creatures back from graveyards, and each reanimation event pumps your whole board with +1/+1 counters. You loot on cast to fuel the yard, then loop reanimation triggers to snowball a wide, oversized team that beats down quickly.

Strengths

Card filtering on entry digs toward bombs and fills the graveyard
Mardu colors give the best reanimation, removal, and aggressive payoffs
Anthem effect rewards going wide AND deep with counters
Cheap to recast at four mana, and reanimating one creature buffs everyone

Weaknesses

Counter trigger only fires on graveyard recursion, not normal ETBs
Board wipes erase the counter investment instantly
Graveyard hate (Rest in Peace, Bojuka Bog) shuts off the engine
Relies on having creatures in the yard to trigger payoffs

Key Cards

Reveillark — Returns small creatures repeatedly, triggering Celes's anthem each time it dies.
Karmic Guide — Reanimates a creature, fires the counter trigger, and recurs with sacrifice loops.
Sun Titan — Each recursion from the graveyard pumps the team and rebuilds your board.
Reveillark + Body Double — Persistent reanimation loops generate repeated entered-from-graveyard triggers.
Buried Alive — Stocks the graveyard instantly to set up explosive mass reanimation.
Living Death — Reanimates your whole yard at once, stacking massive counters on everything.

Upgrade Path

Add fast mana and reanimation spells (Reanimate, Animate Dead, Victimize) plus enablers like Entomb and Faithless Looting to set up turn-three bombs. Build a sacrifice-and-return engine (Viscera Seer, Blood Artist, Reveillark loops) to maximize anthem triggers, and include protection like Teferi's Protection or counter-doublers such as Doubling Season to survive wraths and explode the board.

Core Cards

The most-played cards for this commander, built from aggregated deck data (the Mythic Graph). Build public decks to seed it.

Win Conditions

▸Mass reanimation pumping a wide board into a lethal alpha strike
▸Aristocrats drain via Blood Artist effects through sacrifice loops
▸Recursive value engines overwhelming opponents with oversized creatures
▸Combat damage from a counter-stacked army with evasion or trample

Archetypes

Reanimator — The counter trigger specifically rewards creatures entering from or cast from graveyards.
Aristocrats — Sacrifice-and-return loops repeatedly fire Celes's anthem while draining opponents.
Tokens/Go-Wide Aggro — The +1/+1 counters scale across an entire board for fast, lethal swings.
Blink/Recursion — Recur creatures from the yard to continually grow the team.