Laelia, the Blade Reforged
The design trick here is that two separate exile clauses feed one counter, and they don't have to be the same exile. Attacking exiles the top card and lets you play it, which is the impulse-draw engine every red "cast from exile" commander wants. But the counter trigger fires on any exile from your library or graveyard, whether Laelia caused it or not. That decoupling turns the card into an engine rather than a beater: every exile effect you can find, from graveyard hate to escape costs to a second impulse-draw spell, grows her and refills the attack. The one-turn window on the exiled card keeps the loop honest: you either use the card the turn you flip it or lose it, so the aggression and the card advantage are the same action. A 2/2 with haste that starts pressuring on the turn it lands, then compounds into a real threat as the graveyard and library churn, is a tighter package than the rate suggests. Red commanders that reward exile-based card advantage had circled this space before (impulsive draw was becoming red's answer to blue's card economy), but Laelia welds the payoff directly onto the body doing the attacking, so the counters and the resource generation never compete for a slot.








