Ashling, the Limitless

Overview

This is an Elemental value engine that converts a keyword drawback into pure card advantage. Ashling gives every Elemental permanent spell you cast from your hand evoke , and every nontoken Elemental you sacrifice becomes a hasty token copy. Your job is to make that shrink toward zero, multiply every trigger in the chain, and let the deck's drain pieces — Purphoros, Impact Tremors, Champion of the Path, Omnath — turn each entering copy into damage at every face.

All lanes are live and interchangeable: drain the table with multiplied enter-triggers, swing wide with hasty copies (Maelstrom Wanderer, Temur Ascendancy, Mass of Mysteries' myriad, Jubilation, Elspeth), assemble the Animar + Greenwarden loop when it arrives, or go nuclear on mana with Nyxbloom Ancient + kicked Rite of Replication. Take the line the game presents.

Mulligan Guide

You are mulliganing for cost reducers and lands. The deck does very little until evoke gets cheap.

Keep if you check most of these:

• 3+ lands, at least one producing green (green is your heaviest pip demand)
• A cost reducer or engine starter: Animar, Urza's Incubator, Herald's Horn, Risen Reef, or a mana rock into one
• At least one Elemental worth evoking early (Mulldrifter, Wistfulness, Solitude, Greenwarden)
• Not four spells that all cost 5+

Mull hands that: have no reducer and no ramp toward one; are land-flooded with no engine; or lean on the expensive top end (Sunderflock, Avenger, Jubilation) with nothing to discount it.

Flamekin Harbinger is a fine turn-1 keep-enabler — it puts whatever the hand is missing on top, and Risen Reef or Herald's Horn will hand it to you.

Game Plan

Turns 1–3 — set up the discount rack. Ramp (Sol Ring, Signet, Nature's Lore, Three Visits — note both fetch any Forest card, including your untapped duals and shocks like Tropical Island or Stomping Ground, not just basics) and land your reducers. Urza's Incubator and Herald's Horn both name Elemental; Incubator alone turns evoke into evoke , and with Herald's Horn it's evoke . Animar reduces it per counter — at four counters every evoke in the deck is free. Cast Ashling when you can protect her or when the engine is ready to run; she's only , so re-buying her is cheap, but Lightning Greaves and Mithril Coat exist to stop paying tax at all.

Turns 3–5 — start the sale. Evoke Elementals for value: Mulldrifter draws, Solitude exiles a creature, Wistfulness loots or eats an artifact/enchantment, Greenwarden rebuys. Each one dies into an Ashling copy that does its enter-trigger again — and Solitude's copy exiles a second creature. Layer in your multipliers as they arrive; the order matters (rule 3). Risen Reef deserves special respect here: every Elemental entering — originals, Ashling copies, Omnath's landfall 5/5s — is a Reef trigger, and Twinflame Travelers, Roaming Throne, Yarok, and Panharmonicon all double it.

Turns 5+ — multiply and close. With one drain piece down, every entering copy is reach: Impact Tremors pings, Purphoros hits for 2, and Champion of the Path makes each entering Elemental deal its own power to every opponent — a single doubled Greenwarden evoke through Champion is 20 damage spread across the table before combat. Omnath drains on the way out too: every Ashling sacrifice and every end-step token you decline to pay for is 3 more damage. When the board is wide, Mass of Mysteries hands a big Elemental myriad (each myriad copy enters — more drain), Jubilation and Elspeth's 0 pump the team, and everything already has haste.

The flash dimension. Vedalken Orrery, Winding Canyons, and Alchemist's Refuge let you evoke at instant speed — and an Ashling copy made on an opponent's turn doesn't face its sacrifice trigger until your next end step, so it untaps with you and attacks first. Evoking Solitude (or flashing Mithril Coat) at instant speed is also your removal and protection at once.

Spend the graveyard. Your evoked Elementals pile up in the graveyard on purpose. Jubilation and Lamentation encore from there for three attacking copies each (every one an enter-trigger for your drain pieces). Greenwarden's enter-trigger rebuys anything. And Living Death is the haymaker: see Key Loops.

How Ashling actually works

Skip nothing here — the whole deck lives in these rules (all verified against official rulings):

• Evoke is an alternative cost, and cost reducers apply to it. Total cost = evoke , minus Incubator/Horn/Animar reductions. A spell's mana value never changes, though — an evoked Sunderflock is still MV 9 for anything that cares.
• Hand only. Ashling grants evoke to Elemental spells cast from your hand. Spells cast off Maelstrom Wanderer's cascades, or encore copies, get nothing.
• You choose trigger order. When an evoked Elemental enters, you can resolve its enter-trigger before the evoke sacrifice — and you can cast spells in between. Mulldrifter draws you two before it ever dies.
• The evoke sacrifice happens even if Ashling leaves. Once you've cast the spell for its evoke cost, killing Ashling in response doesn't save the creature — but you also still get her copy trigger only if she's on the battlefield when the sacrifice happens.
• The token copies the printed card. No counters, no attached Equipment, no pump — but all of its enter-triggers fire again, and "as it enters" choices (Roaming Throne's type, Titan of Industry's modes) are made fresh.
• Nontoken Elementals only. Ashling triggers on any sacrifice of a nontoken Elemental — evoke, Greater Good, Evolutionary Leap, Diabolic Intent, Mondrak's activation, Living Death — not just evoke. Her own tokens sacrificing at end step never re-trigger her.
• Each token's is separate. Keeping three copies costs fifteen mana in exact colors. Chromatic Lantern and Prismatic Omen turn every land into a rainbow; Yavimaya plus your dual-heavy manabase covers most of it; Nyxbloom Ancient makes it trivial.
• Legend rule, solved. Copies of Omnath, Lumra, Maelstrom Wanderer, or Animar would normally force you to bin one — Mirror Box switches the legend rule off and pumps same-named creatures +1/+1 each.

Key Loops & Interactions

• Sundial of the Infinite — keep everything, pay nothing. At the beginning of your end step, let the token sacrifice triggers go on the stack, then activate Sundial: exiled abilities never resolve, and those delayed triggers are one-shot — they never come back. The tokens are yours permanently, for . It also works one step earlier: respond to an evoke sacrifice trigger with Sundial and you keep the original creature at full price of -minus-reductions. (Cost: you skip the rest of your turn — do it after combat.)
• Living Death — cash in the whole graveyard. All your battlefield nontoken Elementals get sacrificed (each one an Ashling trigger — doubled by Throne/Twinflame, tokens doubled again by your token doublers) while every creature card in your graveyard returns for a mass enter-trigger burst through Purphoros, Tremors, Champion, Risen Reef, and Temur Ascendancy. The sacrificed originals stay in the graveyard — fuel for Greenwarden, encore, or the next Living Death. This is frequently the kill.
• Greater Good / Evolutionary Leap — the end-step valve. Tokens you can't (or won't) pay for don't have to die for free: in response to the sacrifice trigger, feed them to Greater Good (a copied Titan of Industry is seven cards) or Leap. Sacrificing nontoken Elementals to these instead is even better — Ashling replaces the body with a copy while you keep the cards.
• Champion of the Path — the drain multiplier. Every entering Elemental you control deals its power to each opponent — that's every evoke, every Ashling copy, every Omnath landfall token, every myriad copy from Mass of Mysteries. Behold's exile cost comes back to hand when Champion leaves, and evoking Champion himself means his copy re-triggers on everything that follows.
• Maelstrom Wanderer for . Cascade triggers on casting no matter what cost you paid, and always looks below mana value 8 — so evoking Wanderer is two free spells for four mana, and his Ashling copy still gives the team haste. Remember the cascaded spells themselves were not cast from your hand, so they get no evoke.
• Lumra — landfall detonator. Lumra's returned lands are each a landfall trigger: a 5/5 per land off Omnath, a counter wave off Avenger of Zendikar (whose own Ashling copy re-makes a Plant per land you control). Mill plus fetches plus Crop Rotation keep her fed, and as a copyable enter-trigger she's one of the best things to evoke late.
• Sunderflock — the one-sided-ish reset. With any large Elemental out he costs almost nothing, and he bounces all non-Elemental creatures — every opposing commander, but also your own Mondrak, Roaming Throne, and Purphoros (Purphoros usually isn't a creature and dodges it; time the others or re-play them for more enter value). His Ashling copy doesn't bounce anyone — the trigger checks "if you cast it."
• Wistfulness — pay the generic cost in colors. Ashling's granted evoke is generic, so pay it with and both enter modes fire: exile an artifact/enchantment and loot. Its own printed evoke only ever turns on one.
• Aura Shards + the token stream — every creature entering, tokens included, is a Disenchant. With Ashling running, artifacts and enchantments simply stop existing across the table.
• Free protection, always held up. Fierce Guardianship and Deflecting Swat are free with Ashling out; Heroic Intervention and Teferi's Protection blank the board wipe that would otherwise eat the engine (your tokens phase out through your own end step trigger with Teferi's — they come back, triggers already missed). Crop Rotation finds Cavern of Souls (uncounterable Elementals), Yavimaya, or the flash lands at instant speed.

Combos

Both are late-game "take what you're given" lines — either one that arrives is the right one.

Animar, Soul of Elements + Greenwarden of Murasa (+ any drain piece) — the exemplar

Produces: infinite enter/death/sacrifice triggers, infinite hasty Greenwarden tokens, infinite storm, your whole graveyard to hand. Needs: Ashling + Animar with 4+ counters, Greenwarden in hand.

1. Cast Greenwarden for its Ashling-granted evoke , reduced to by Animar's four counters. Animar triggers: +1 counter.
2. Greenwarden enters — resolve his enter-trigger (return any card from your graveyard to hand), then the evoke trigger: sacrifice him. Decline his death trigger's exile — the card must stay in the graveyard.
3. Ashling triggers: a hasty token copy of Greenwarden enters. Its enter-trigger returns Greenwarden's card from your graveyard to your hand.
4. Recast for free. Repeat.

Every loop is an Elemental entering (twice), dying, and being sacrificed: with Purphoros, Impact Tremors, Champion of the Path, or Omnath on the battlefield, that is lethal to the table on the spot. Without a drain piece it still banks infinite Animar counters, an army of Greenwarden tokens (they're hasty — swing), and Risen Reef digging your whole library's worth of lands. The loop needs no mana at all once Animar hits four counters.

Nyxbloom Ancient + Rite of Replication (kicked)

Produces: near-infinite mana. Needs: , Nyxbloom on the battlefield.

Kick Rite of Replication targeting Nyxbloom: five token copies (ten with a doubler — they're nonlegendary, no Mirror Box needed), and every permanent you tap now produces 3⁶ = 729× its mana — effectively unlimited. Sink it into paying for every token forever, encore both Incarnations in one turn, hard-cast the entire hand, or overload Cyclonic Rift with everything else.