Almost Half the New Giada Decks Add a $1.46 Lyra. The Crowd's List Sits Exactly on the Bracket 3 Line

Commander · by Nora Kessler · October 22, 2026

Giada leads a new Foundations precon and is EDHREC's fourth most-built commander this month, and almost half of the new Giada decks add a $1.46 Lyra that puts a counter on every Angel for every lifelink hit. The crowd's list stops at three Game Changers. Ours had four, and one tutor made it a Bracket 4.

Almost Half the New Giada Decks Add a $1.46 Lyra. The Crowd's List Sits Exactly on the Bracket 3 Line

Giada comes down on turn two, attacks on turn three, and then taps for the white mana that casts your next Angel. That Angel enters with an extra +1/+1 counter for every Angel you already control, Giada included, so by the fourth one the table is looking at a board that grows every time you cast a creature. That's the old pitch for Giada, Font of Hope, a 2/2 that costs 56 cents. What's new is how many people are building her again. Since October 2 she's the commander of Calling All Angels, one of the five Foundations Commander decks, and on EDHREC she was the fourth most-built commander of the past month, with 5,656 new decks. New Giada lists more than doubled, from about 100 a day in late September to well over 200 a day in October, a stretch that covers the precon and Reality Fracture alike. (EDHREC's figures are external, pulled on the morning of October 16.)

The new card those decks add most costs $1.46, and it isn't in the precon. Lyra, Archangel of Dawn from Reality Fracture puts a +1/+1 counter on each Angel you control whenever you gain life, and EDHREC counts her in 2,931 of the 5,960 Giada decks built since she came out. That's almost half.

The other thing to sort out before your next game is the bracket. EDHREC's average Giada deck, the crowd's list, plays exactly three Game Changers, the most Bracket 3 allows. The list we built in DeckCortex plays four. The same engine, mostly the same Angels, one tutor more, and that tutor is the whole difference between a 3 and a 4.

What Giada actually does

Her second line reads "Each other Angel you control enters with an additional +1/+1 counter on it for each Angel you already control." The official ruling settles the two things people ask: Giada counts herself, and it doesn't matter when the other Angels arrived. The second Angel gets one counter, the third gets two, the fifth gets four. The order doesn't change how many counters you hand out in total, but it does decide who ends up biggest, so cast the Angel you want huge last.

The mana is the other half: ": Add . Spend this mana only to cast an Angel spell." She has vigilance, so attack first and tap her in your second main phase. In our list that mana almost always has a target, because 31 of the 33 creatures are Angels, Giada included. The two that aren't, Bishop of Wings and Starnheim Aspirant, are Human Clerics that care about Angels. Tokens count as well: every 4/4 Angel token the deck makes enters through Giada with its counters.

Two cheap artifacts and a creature turn the curve into a staircase. Urza's Incubator (naming Angel) and Starnheim Aspirant each make your Angel spells cost less, and Herald's Horn takes off more. With the first two out, Lyra Dawnbringer costs , and Giada pays half of it.

The $1.46 Lyra and the rule that makes her

Lyra's text is one line: "Whenever you gain life, put a +1/+1 counter on each Angel you control." On its own that's a decent three-drop. What makes her special is her official ruling: "If more than one creature you control with lifelink deals combat damage at the same time, Lyra's last ability will trigger once for each of those creatures." Archangel of Thune has the same ruling, and Thune puts its counter on every creature you control.

Lyra Dawnbringer is the third piece. Her last line gives your other Angels +1/+1 and lifelink. And yes, both Lyras can sit on the battlefield together. The legend rule only looks at permanents with the same name, and these two have different ones.

Now attack with Giada, Lyra Dawnbringer, Archangel of Thune and the new Lyra. Dawnbringer and Thune have lifelink of their own, Dawnbringer gives it to the other two, and all four connect. That's four life-gain events, so Thune triggers four times and Lyra triggers four times, and every Angel you control gets eight +1/+1 counters out of one combat. (That's our reading of the two rulings. One lifelinker hitting several things at once, with trample or a double block, is still a single event.)

You don't need combat to get it going. Bishop of Wings gains you 4 life whenever an Angel you control enters, and Righteous Valkyrie gains you life equal to the entering Angel's toughness. The ruling on Valkyrie says that toughness is checked as the trigger resolves, so Giada's counters count. Angel of Vitality adds 1 to every gain. Exemplar of Light takes a counter from each one and draws a card the first time each turn, and it draws as it enters, too, because an Angel entering with Giada's counter has had counters put on it (rule 122.6). Once you're 7 life above your starting 40, Righteous Valkyrie's last line gives your creatures +2/+2 on top of all of it.

Life on every turn: the end-step Angels

Five cards in the list turn a turn's life gain into another Angel, and four of them check at each end step, not only yours:

Their rulings agree on two details. Life you lost the same turn doesn't matter, and life gained during the end step is too late, so get it in before the end step begins. Each card makes one token per end step, no matter how much you gained.

So the deck wants life on other players' turns, and it has ways to get it. Block with a lifelinker. Or lean on Authority of the Consuls, which gains you 1 life whenever a creature an opponent controls enters and makes those creatures enter tapped. That second half has a nasty follow-up in Ob Nixilis, whose enter trigger reads "destroy all tapped creatures your opponents control. You gain 1 life for each creature destroyed this way." A creature that entered under an opponent's control since their last untap step is still tapped when your turn comes around, unless something untaps it.

And every one of those tokens enters through Giada and Bishop of Wings: counters on arrival, 4 more life, more counters from Thune and Lyra.

Wipes that leave the Angels standing

Mono-white gets to break the symmetry of a board wipe, and the list has four ways to do it:

One card needs care. Austere Command has you choose two modes, and "Destroy all creatures with mana value 3 or less" takes Giada with it, along with the new Lyra, Righteous Valkyrie and Bishop of Wings. The "4 or greater" mode spares those and kills Archangel of Thune and Lyra Dawnbringer instead. If you want to keep your board, artifacts plus enchantments is the safe pair.

Bracket 3 or 4: count to four

Here's the part to settle before you sit down. Our list plays four Game Changers: Smothering Tithe ($58.03), Teferi's Protection ($45.24), Enlightened Tutor ($37.92) and Farewell ($6.04). Bracket 3 allows three. DeckCortex's Bracket Fit, run on the exact list with the app's live settings, puts it at Bracket 4, and the Game Changer cap is the only reason. It found no combo lines, no fast mana and no mass land destruction, and the only tutor is Enlightened Tutor.

The crowd's list plays the other three and no tutor, so the same check says Bracket 3. Calling All Angels out of the box plays none of the four; when we checked the five Foundations precons, the stock Giada list landed at Bracket 1. On EDHREC, Enlightened Tutor is in 7,475 of 37,584 Giada decks, about one in five, while Smothering Tithe, Teferi's Protection and Farewell each show up in roughly a third.

The bracket isn't a speed reading here. DeckCortex's power sim, the app's own code, rates our list 2.2 out of 10 and the crowd's list 2.3, and all of them get a Salt Score of 1.2, which is low. The tutor didn't make the deck faster. It added a fourth card to a count that stops at three.

So what do you tell your pod? There are two honest answers:

If you'd rather keep the tutor, cutting Farewell ($6.04) also gets you to three Game Changers. Your sweepers are then Wrath of God, Austere Command and Kindred Judgment, and none of them exiles.

What the list costs

At the printings in our list, the deck comes to $669.84. Six cards are $264.46 of that: Smothering Tithe, Cavern of Souls ($50.74), Teferi's Protection, Nykthos, Shrine to Nyx ($39.39), Enlightened Tutor and Avacyn ($33.14). None of them is part of the counter engine. The engine is cheap: Giada at $0.56, the new Lyra at $1.46, Lyra Dawnbringer at $0.50 in our printing, Bishop of Wings at $6.21, Righteous Valkyrie at $5.43 and Ob Nixilis at $1.33. The one expensive engine piece is Archangel of Thune at $50.99, and it's the first expensive card we'd buy.

The list in DeckCortex

The full 100 is in DeckCortex with a primer. Open it, copy it, make your cuts, and run Bracket Fit on your version.

Rules you'll get asked about at the table

The decision

| You want | Change | Cost (our printings) | Game Changers | DeckCortex Bracket Fit | Power sim | |---|---|---|---|---|---| | Our list as built | Nothing | $669.84 | 4 | 4 | 2.2 / 10 | | Our list at Bracket 3 | − Enlightened Tutor, + Mind Stone | $632.16 | 3 | 3 | 2.2 / 10 | | The crowd's list | EDHREC's average Giada deck | — | 3 | 3 | 2.3 / 10 |

If your table plays Bracket 3, cut Enlightened Tutor. The deck keeps every piece of its engine, loses one tutor for artifacts and enchantments, and you get to say "three Game Changers, no combos" and mean it. If your table plays 4, keep everything, and know that a 2.2 power sim makes you one of the slower decks at that table. Either way, the first card to buy for Giada right now isn't a Game Changer. It's the $1.46 Lyra.

Data notes: Our list is the DeckCortex deck embedded above as of October 16, 2026. The crowd's list is EDHREC's average Giada, Font of Hope deck as served at about 10:05 UTC on October 16, 2026; average lists change during the day. EDHREC ranks, deck counts, daily new-deck counts and inclusion counts are external figures retrieved the same morning; "built since she came out" is EDHREC's count of Giada decks that could include Lyra, Archangel of Dawn. They show what new Giada decks contain, not why people build them: the Calling All Angels precon and Reality Fracture both arrived on October 2. The precon's release date and its stock-list Bracket Fit come from our Foundations Commander check of October 6, 2026. Prices are Scryfall paper-aggregate prices for the printings in our list, retrieved October 16, 2026; Reality Fracture cards are new and their prices move daily. Bracket Fit, the power sim and the Salt Score come from DeckCortex's own app code, run on the exact lists with live settings on October 16, 2026; Bracket Fit's number is a floor built from Game Changers, two-card combos, mass land destruction, fast mana and tutors. Combo lines come from DeckCortex's spellbook engine, which finds zero complete lines in all three lists. Rules readings follow the Oracle text, the official rulings on Giada, Lyra, Archangel of Thune, Righteous Valkyrie and the end-step cards, and the Comprehensive Rules; the eight-counter combat is our reading of those rulings. DeckCortex's tournament data has no Giada story: seven cEDH lists in the last three weeks.

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