Arcane Foundry › Commanders › Liliana the Repentant

Liliana the Repentant

Legendary Creature — Human Warlock · {1}{B} · Black commander

Whenever another creature or planeswalker you control enters, mill two cards. Exhaust — {5}{B}: Return target creature or planeswalker card from your graveyard to the battlefield. Put a +1/+1 counter on Liliana. Activate only as a sorcery. (Activate each exhaust ability only once.)

Build a Liliana the Repentant deck →

What Liliana the Repentant actually does

Read off the card by the same engine the Forge and Analyzer use — this is the mechanical classification, not a summary.

• Triggered ability · etbWhenever another creature or planeswalker you control enters, mill two cards.
• Activated ability{5}{B}: Return target creature or planeswalker card from your graveyard to the battlefield. Put a +1/+1 counter on Liliana. Activate only as a sorcery.
• Keyword · exhaustexhaust

What a Liliana the Repentant deck needs

Plays as ETB value. What the commander asks of the other 99 — read from the card and checked by hand.

• creatures and permanents entering every turn — cheap bodies, blink and recursion (its trigger fires on each one)
• counter doublers and proliferate (it grows only itself with +1/+1 counters)
• self-mill, discard and recursion (the graveyard is a resource its text reads)
• mana rocks and dorks beyond the curve (its ability turns spare mana into value)

The Liliana the Repentant deck plan

The roles the Forge fills for this commander, and how many cards of each.

• 10× Mana from a NONLAND permanent — a commander that doubles nonland mana gets nothing from lands
• 16× A permanent whose value is in its enter-the-battlefield trigger — the payload a blink deck reuses
• 6× Put your own cards into your graveyard as a resource
• 6× Put +1/+1 counters on creatures you control, or multiply the ones already there
• 6× Exile a permanent you control and return it — the button a value-ETB deck presses
• 5× Actually remove one problem permanent — preventing its damage is not removing it
• 9× Find the exact card the plan needs
• 1× Answer a whole board at once
• 7× Refill your hand

Best cards for Liliana the Repentant

Ranked by an engine that reads what each card does — its real cost, its delay and how reliably it works — rather than counting how often other people play it.

Build this deck in the Arcane Forge →

Arcane Foundry is free to join and every tool is included: the Arcane Forge deck builder, the ARCANE Analyzer that scores a deck by simulating games rather than counting staples, a card scanner, a collection vault, and live webcam Commander tables. Read the guide · Browse all commanders · Pricing