u/Chiefkellyy

Ah Good Ol' Golgari, known for its cheeky graveyard recursion/mana ramping/and massive creatures, this time I sought out to find a Commander that quite frankly didn't utilize any of those typical playstyles. And so I stumbled upon the glorious [[Grismold, the Dreadsower]]

Yes, we are all familiar with the strange yet intriguing troll, but what if we completely stripped the 99 from being built around his +1/+1 2nd ability (Voltron) and instead fully committed to taking advantage of his group hug ability. Even further more, I leaned away from static token hate such as [[Illness in the Ranks]] and decided to see just *how big of a payoff* we could get by encouraging token generation for our opponents before destroying them all in one fell swoop. Which leads us to staples like [[Massacre Wurm]] [[Nemata, Primeval Warden]] [[Culling Ritual]] completely shifting the momentum in your favor.

Then there was the whole dynamic of how we can take advantage of the friendly tokens we generate as well, cards like [[Mycoloth]] paired with [[Chatterfang, Squirrel General]] or [[Primal Vigor]] can quite frankly win the game at your next upkeep if left alive. [[Species Specialist]] + [[Plague Engineer]] is another all-star combo that guarantees a minimum of 3 card draws during each of your turns and still allow you to build a board presence.

And despite our best efforts, Grismold will inevitably still becomes a 10/10 or 20/20 trample without much effort at all. Throw out a [[Windswift Slice]] or [[Fungal Sprouting]] and all of a sudden [[Mirkwood Bats]] is draining 20 life from everyone for creating the tokens and [[Syr Konrad, the Grim]] [[Poison-Tip Archer]] will drain their remaining life once they get board wiped or sacrificed to [[Ashnod's Altar]] or [[Cauldron of Essence]] for even more value.

I honestly did not expect this list/archetype to perform as well as it has, but its some of the most fun I've ever had in Commander and feels like every single card has a purpose and interesting synergy with the rest of the 99. Definitely recommend if you are looking for *yet another* unique Golgari Commander or even just a less-used archetype to surprise your friends. As always, Happy deckbuilding and playing. Here is the decklist!

Anti-Token Love • (Golgari Commander deck) • Archidekt

I will preface this by saying my playgroup is often 5-6 players and quite casual so when I set out to create this deck, I had a few goals in mind.

How can I:

1 - Control the pace of the game without becoming Arch enemy

2 - Somehow combine Group Hug + Slug and make it enjoyable to play against

3 - Use an archetype that is underexplored

Now I will admit, this deck is NOT another [[Nekusar, the Mindrazer]] list. Although, it did help inspire the ideas for what eventually became my 99. The entire philosophy of the deck really boiled down to "I'm gonna put a clock on the game and give my opponents the resources they need to find their WinCons, BUT if they can't pull it off in time I'll win."

We are all familiar with wheel decks, but I truly think much of the synergies are underexplored and there are some very helpful commanders being overlooked(will elaborate in a moment). My deck's main objective is the standard trying to let everyone draw as many cards as possible using cards like [[Seizan, Perverter of Truth]] [[Stormfist Crusader]] [[Zenith Chronicler]] and slowly drain their life through the staples we all know like [[Underworld Dreams]] [[Razorkin Needlehead]]

Where the fun really started to happen was adding in a discard package with strong effects [[Waste Not]] [[Tourach, Dread Cantor]] [[Dark Deal]] and pair them with wheel effects such as [[Winds of Change]] [[Reforge The Soul]] to reinforce my original philosophy with the deck, 'Here is all these new cards! But you only have a turn to use them before I wheel, generate resources, and ping again.' Which really created this hilarious dynamic in our playgroup of serving as a *Deck Check* to determine if their deck was strong enough to win with simply a good hand draw.

I know you didn't come all this way to just read yet another take on wheel synergies, and that's where we arrive to the commander of this deck, the infamous [[Kardur, Doomscourge]] "What??? There isn't any synergy!" And to that I say, let's take a look at the deck's weaknesses. There are two things we aren't strong with in this archetype and that is creatures/board presence and protection, and the beautiful thing about Kardur is he always gives us access to a solution to those problems available right in our Command Zone. What you'll find with this deck is you can quite easily drain opponents for 5-10 damage a turn, but you leave yourself open to attacks and sometimes you only need to stall another turn or two before pulling off a wheel combo to close the match and that is exactly what Kardur allows us to do. In addition to not only protecting yourself, it gives the opponents a chance to eliminate each other or atleast get them to a lower life threshold to eliminate the following turn.

As a footnote, I did want to mention a couple super fun WinCons I discovered throughout my matches that created unique interactions I didn't catch while deckbuilding. [[Underworld Breach]] + [[Burning Inquiry]] is technically an infinite combo so long as we have mana (if nothing else, [[Neheb, the Eternal]] can generate more than enough mana), pair it with any draw pinger and you can one-shot everyone. Another fun one is [[Molten Pysche]] triggering its 2nd ability in addition to draw damage often resulting in 14+ damage to all opponents and rather easy to pull off respectively.

I really just felt inspired to write this post because this deck has become my comfort zone within my playgroup and all my friends enjoy playing against it as well. Will it require some politics to not get targeted in the early rounds? Perhaps, but then again that is what makes EDH so fun and unique. Happy deckbuilding and playing, here is the decklist! (P.S. it can be significantly cheaper than what's shown if getting the normal art version of each card)

Chaos Draw • (Rakdos Commander deck) • Archidekt