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Dear Azami – Born To Die

Grimgrin, Corpse-Born is the perfect General for a Zombie deck looking to play with a variety of cool themes like revival, looting, and sacrifice. See how Sean fixes up Ben’s Zombie deck and submit your own for next week!

By

Hi Sean,

Here’s my new U/B Grimgrin, Corpse-Born deck for EDH/Commander. It’s basically built as Zombie tribal (notes follow):

Grimgrin, Corpse-Born
Ben Friesen
Test deck on 10-16-2011
Commander
Magic Arena

Creatures (37)

Lands (39)

Spells (24)

Magic Card Back



The idea is to use various means to Looter yourself repeatedly, fill up the graveyard, and the power it all back into play with a Living Death, Patriarch’s Bidding, Balthor the Defiled, or Grimoire of the Dead. With Noxious Ghoul in the graveyard (or in some circumstances, in play), all those Zombies coming into play will kill nearly everything that might be coming out of someone else’s graveyard.

Failing that, the deck works around the getting lots of card advantage through standard recursion and having lots of tribal lords to pump up (and out) the Zombies to slowly build an advantage. This is a pretty aggressive deck, but one that can keep to itself and look unthreatening until the big guns like Army of the Dead come out, or Graveborn Muse starts letting you draw five cards a turn.

In the future, I might be changing the Commander and adding in a small splash of red (which would mean either Sedris, the Traitor King or Thraximundar) and expanding the Zombies to be more multicolored. Right now though, I like the small “Swamp matter” theme running through the deck with Urborg, Cabal Coffers, Corpse Harvester, and Korlash. Besides that, Army of the Damned is hard enough to cast without having to worry about making enough black mana.

~Ben Friesen

Hi, Ben, and thanks for sending in your Grimgrin deck. I had really been hoping to discuss one of the new Innistrad commanders and yours looked like an excellent starting point for talking about the new set. I liked a lot of what was going on—Grimgrin is the crunchiest and most interesting of the new Commanders, even if I think Olivia Voldaren is more powerful—and there is a fair bit of overlap between what it is doing and what was going on in the last deck we had a look at, for Vish Kal, Blood Arbiter. Commanders who are themselves sacrifice outlets, and who profitably feed on creatures, are very interesting to work with, and that you happened to run with a Tribal—Zombie theme is all the more awesome.

Your manabase needs some more work, not because there is anything wrong with the ‘Swamps matter’ build but because you will wind up not quite having enough blue mana to do what it wants to do, and no utility lands to give you some extra mileage while you’re at it. My read of the deckbuilding budget from what you’ve sent me is for a pretty low level of investment, but you don’t have to spend a lot of money to get a good manabase.

We’ll be shying away of the Watery Grave / Underground Sea / Polluted Delta manabases, but even sticking largely to commons and uncommons (plus the occasional cheap rare) you can have considerably more access to lands that tap for both colors, and I think that is definitely something you want to be doing.

The manabase you sent in was also a couple lands more than you need, and after working through things I ended up shaving one slot entirely to be used for another spell, and replacing one with an Expedition Map that should help find Cabal Coffers or even just a little bit of utility lands like Bojuka Bog or Shizo, Death’s Storehouse, which sounds like an awesome addition to a deck that can attack for 21 in a single swing, as well as a good way to keep your attacking Royal Assassin from being profitably blocked at an inconvenient moment. After all, Grimgrin takes a lot of investment just to be able to untap and attack, so you don’t want him getting blocked by some stupid green creature, right?

Working on the mana first, I came to the following:

6x Island
15x Swamp
Unholy Grotto
Urza’s Factory
Ghost Quarter
Esper Panorama
Grixis Panorama
Dimir Aqueduct
Tainted Isle
Jwar Isle Refuge
Frost Marsh
Salt Marsh
Darkwater Catacombs
Drowned Catacomb
Cabal Coffers
Urborg, Tomb of Yawgmoth
Bojuka Bog
Shizo, Death’s Storehouse

Dakmor Salvage didn’t seem to be pulling its own weight, and it really didn’t look like you needed 39 lands, so I cut it to 37 + Sol Ring and Expedition Map. Your mana costs are comparatively quite low for Commander decks, and you have a decent amount of card filtering going on that will keep things flowing nicely. I tried to avoid having too many lands that came into play tapped, after adding the Aqueduct and three variations on the Salt Marsh theme, so that means trying out Panoramas instead of the no-mana-activation duo of Terramorphic Expanse and Evolving Wilds. But with a little extra work you get not just a more consistent mix of blue and black mana—your list had 11 lands that made blue, this one has 15 plus an Expedition Map to help out—but can also have fewer lands that don’t tap for black mana overall, your original had 11 nonblack lands, this only has nine that can’t and got some added utility for that change as well while you’re at it.

Next up, I made a pass through the deck and started identifying things I didn’t think fit or which needed an upgrade. And while there is something to be said for Urza’s Incubator in a tribal linear deck, I don’t think you were really getting the work out of it that made it worthwhile, since your creature curve is still very heavily in the three to five range, and tends to have a lot of colored mana besides. What’s the point of cutting the cost on your three-drop by two, if it still costs BB? Looking for things that just weren’t working as hard as I wanted, I made the following list of cards I wanted to replace:

Urza’s Incubator
Breakthrough
Frantic Search
Moan of the Unhallowed
Dark Withering
Bladewing’s Thrall
Bonded Fetch
Brain Gorgers
Entrails Feaster
Grave Scrabbler
Skirk Ridge Exhumer

This was just the first pass through, and others may not survive the later comparison—this was just finding things that weren’t really pulling weight or worth doing, and screamed to me for replacement with more efficient cards that were on-focus. Incubator wasn’t really saving a lot of mana, so being used as a mana accelerator it might have just been better to use an actual accelerator and forget about the tribal synergy, just add Thran Dynamo if that was the kind of savings you really wanted to get. And we also have two slots left open, from pulling out lands, one of which is earmarked as a promise… I said you get an Expedition Map, and a Map you shall have, so we get to add eleven cards right away.

Expedition Map —Expedition Map is slowly winnowing its way deeper and deeper into my heart. I keep trying to figure out what the auto-include cards are in this format, and tend to suspect they are more than just Sol Ring and Sensei’s Divining Top. One of my absolute favorite cards is Winding Canyons, and whether I intend for it to or not the number of Commander decks I have assembled at any one time is the same as the number of Winding Canyons I own. (For this reason, I have more than once gone hunting to purchase more of them, a new Commander deck tends to start with two purchases: a Winding Canyons, and a deckbox.) But since literally every Commander deck plays lands, and the easiest way to profit is to play special lands, Expedition Map is at the very top of my list: you need to be able to explain why you don’t have it, instead of trying to figure out if you should.

Read the Runes —My replacement for your Breakthrough, and one that scales very nicely and spends your mana very well while filling a similar role. Breakthrough is actually quite expensive—I know you have a madness theme, but even at that you’ll find that to make it worth your while and actually have a decent hand afterwards, Breakthrough costs five mana, and with your madness theme you will be wanting to keep two mana untapped besides, which inflates the cost even harder. Read the Runes is one of Sheldon’s favorite cards, and a signature move in quite a few of his decks; for you, it helps draw into your Living Death effects as well as sacrifice your board and discard your creatures in hand in order to profit off of it, and can even just be used as a pure card draw spell in response to a board sweeper. It works perfectly for what you’re trying to accomplish, and is the card you really want.

Compulsive Research —Substitution for your Frantic Search. Throwing cards away is well and good, but you’re not actually so blisteringly fast that the ‘free’ aspect of Frantic Search is worth the card disadvantage, and you can get just as many Zombies in the graveyard if that is what you want to do… or actually pull ahead on cards, by just discarding a land and keeping the benefits of card drawing and filtering to yourself.

Tombstone Stairwell —Moan of the Unhallowed made two Zombies for four mana, and essentially was unable to be flashed back ever, realistically. Tombstone Stairwell, however, is OMG Zombies for four mana, and can even be fed to Grimgrin on every single player’s turn, turning even a small graveyard powering it into a considerably hefty commander. It’s symmetrical, but you are already trying to break that symmetry (and succeeding fairly well at it) and can break it further with things like your Bojuka Bog and other new additions.

Cruel Revival —Dark Withering wasn’t cutting it for me. Madness was cute, but targeted removal wasn’t really doing a lot for you, and you were jumping through too many hoops to make it work. Really, you needed Bonded Fetch to make it worthwhile, and I didn’t even like that card for your deck. Targeted removal that did something else would actually have been great, and thinking back to Onslaught block from whence many of your tribal Zombies come, I remembered this old Limited gem and thought mayhap you might put it to work. Sure, you’ll have to spend the mana when otherwise you were trying to get a deal on it, but its targeting restriction is a lot smaller and you get an actual two-for-one out of the deal, regrowing your best Zombie and killing the best creature in play.

Diabolic Tutor —One of the benefits of being black. A little extra consistency for finding your best spells and creatures, to help set up the Living Death effects you want to be pulling off, at a reasonable price point both mana-wise and pocket-money-wise. Feel free to substitute with Demonic Tutor instead, but I scale to the budget that seems apparent, and thus the cheaper addition will serve just as admirably.

Skullclamp —More synergy is hard to find. Your commander lets you sacrifice at whim, and your deck is already designed to have things jumping in and out of the graveyard at your leisure. Skullclamp lets you try and ‘go off’ if you draw it, just digging a hole for your opponents that is too deep to climb out of. Even over-using it is highly profitable to you, to fill your hand to overflowing and discard a bunch of creature cards only to follow through with mass reanimation that returns both what you ate and what you tossed.

Nezumi Graverobber —It takes a solid argument to include a non-Zombie card in the deck, and Nezumi Graverobber is one powerful little guy that I would like you to make an exception for. He helps cover the opponent’s graveyard nicely, helping to make sure your Living Death effects work the way you want and your Tombstone Stairwell is far larger than the opponent’s. When he is not needed to do that, you can work to flip him and access Nighteyes the Desecrator, who lets you reanimate out of either player’s graveyard as an instant and can be quite difficult to overcome once flipped.

Infernal Caretaker —My only other non-Zombie addition, I would be astounded if the opponent was successfully able to guess what your Morph was. Not too expensive, and an awful lot of cards bought back from the grave late in the game, it’s like Aphetto Dredgings on crack.

Coffin Queen —Guess who’s a Zombie now? Coffin Queen is both another means of graveyard control and reanimation all in one sexy little package, and the gothy Zombie Wizard does some very mean things in Commander with just a little support.

Gravedigger —I’d rather pay the four mana and not jump through the hoops, which is why Gravedigger gets the nod over Grave Scrabbler.

Stronghold Assassin —Another way to use token creatures for fun and profit, and another good way to cover the fact that you are actually quite light on creature removal.

With these substitutions made, I wanted to next have a look at the other cards I wanted to consider for the deck, and line them up against what you already had to see if I wanted to actually swap them in anywhere for a card you were already playing. This short list of Zombies and associated spells was:

Spells: Nihil Spellbomb, Altar of Dementia

Nihil Spellbomb could help break the symmetry of your mass reanimation spells, as well as keep an opponent’s graveyard manageable for the purposes of overwhelming them with Tombstone Stairwell. Altar of Dementia is actually there as an enabler… get your Stairwell online, or draw a Living Death effect, and suddenly you feed everyone to the Altar to mill yourself and wonderfully terrible things happen to everybody else.

ZOMBIES: Bone Dancer, Fleshbag Marauder, Ghoulraiser, Gutless Ghoul, Helldozer, Phyrexian Ghoul, Plaguebearer, Sedraxis Alchemist, Skinrender, Stromgald Crusader, Undead Alchemist

Bone Dancer is another after-the-fact Zombie, and it’s a cute card that is an old favorite of Jamie Wakefield that is good at taking advantage of an opponent whose creatures have been eliminated, reanimating them to your side one by one for no mana. Fleshbag Marauder is just there for value to help control the board, and Ghoulraiser is a free card back from your graveyard even if you don’t get to pick which one, still a decent deal for what used to be Scathe Zombies on your mana curve. Gutless Ghoul trades creatures in for life, which could be quite profitable indeed with Tombstone Stairwell and sets up your reanimation effects to maximum benefit.

Helldozer made me smile, because I had completely forgotten he was a Zombie; when we used him in Ravnica limited to kill an opponent’s bouncelands, there was no tribal theme going on so we had no reason to notice, we just knew he was giant and that he was totally in charge of the ‘wrecking their mana’ department. Phyrexian Ghoul is functionally Nantuko Husk #2 if that is what you want, while Plaguebearer can take out inexpensive creatures, token creatures and transformed Werewolves on the cheap.

Sedraxis Alchemist I am not quite convinced you have enough blue permanents to work with, but a little tempo advantage is in the offing if somehow you did. Skinrender is another instance of ‘wait, that guy’s a Zombie?’ because in Scars limited we knew it was kick-ass, not that it had a creature type that was relevant. Stromgald Crusader is a pump knight with a fortuitous creature type, if mana-efficient beater is what you want, while Undead Alchemist is another way to profit off your Zombie tribal affiliation by building your board up considerably.

With these nice things in mind, I went back through your decklist on a second pass, trying to decide if there was anything that suggested itself to be cut on any merits: ‘too cute,’ mana inefficiency, divergence from your intended focus, or just being something I might have missed on the first pass through but which I now wanted to stab in the neck in favor of one of these other shiny things.

Using this new guideline, I had to ask myself to be considerably more realistic than the ever-present optimism that I find I tend to take when it comes to brewing up Commander decks. I’m a pessimist at heart when it comes to thinking something will work, which is great for honing decks to the fine edge of functionality, but kind of depressing when left to play around in the wide-open space that is Commander decks. Asking myself whether these cards were all going to pull their weight, I realized that for a few the answer, unfortunately, was ‘no.’ And that this was equally true of some of my cute additions as it was of cards I had kept on through the first pass.

Second round of cuts were as follows:

Profane Command —Are you really going to win a game with this card? Sure, you can get Coffers + Urborg and get a decent-sized Fireball out of it, but even at that you don’t put a lot of lands into play, so your decent-sized Fireball still won’t pass much beyond the ten mana point in a format where people start with 40 life. Without that, the Fireball + Fear question is presumably your best mode, and I don’t think you want to have a spell that is a finisher when instead you can just build a stronger game-plan to begin with. That leaves this as a weak and expensive reanimation spell, where for less mana you can get back more creatures using other cards.

Cairn Wanderer —Cute? Absolutely. But still a 4/4 for 5, that has ‘counts as a Zombie’ as its only reliable rules text. Even at its best, it still doesn’t do something fancy, so why care?

Corpse Connoisseur and Viscera Dragger —The best way to profit was either to find something to recur, or find Viscera Dragger. Viscera Dragger was only good if you drew your Oversold Cemetery, and you have better things to do than both of these.

Nantuko Husk —Another card I had been overly optimistic about. Are you ever going to kill anyone with this? I suspect not. Even the best-case scenario causes you to walk your entire board of creatures into a single Plow, and gives you nothing back for your troubles. Sacrificing creatures to Grimgrin is far more profitable, and not something you have to spend a card drawn to do.

Nightscape Familiar —Do you need a regenerator? Not really. Do you have enough blue spells to really save mana with this? No.

Phyrexian Metamorph —Cute, but not as cute as Evil Twin.

My cute cards have to get cut too. Upon further reflection, Bone Dancer, Ghoulraiser, Phyrexian Ghoul, Plaguebearer, Sedraxis Alchemist and Stromgald Crusader all end up on the cutting room floor, for you have better things to do with your time, mana, and precious cardboard than play these stinkers.

Nihil Spellbomb —You have enough of this sort of effect now at this point with your other additions, and are already better at taking advantage of your Living Death and Tombstone Stairwell effects than the opponent ever will be.

Bone Dancer —Cute, not effective.

Ghoulraiser —Too much random, not enough card benefit. ‘Better than Scathe Zombies’ is still a scathing compliment to receive.

Phyrexian Ghoul —I cut his cousin, he gets cut too.

Plaguebearer —Too much mana for the job you do worry about, and the job you could perform cheaply is already neatly covered by things like Noxious Ghoul.

Sedraxis Alchemist —Not a lot of blue permanents going on here. Cut.

Stromgald Crusader —Mana-effective attacker, in a format where you would have to spend an additional 76 mana to pump his power enough to kill someone. Just not good enough, as many two-drop beaters prove to be.

And next we have the new additions:

Evil Twin —Evil Twin is much more fun to play than Phyrexian Metamorph. The downside of never copying an artifact, or getting to play it for three colorless instead of 3U, is made up for by the upside of getting the ability to gun down creatures you’ve copied. Also: the best way to copy a Primeval Titan that I know of, short of kicking Rite of Replication.

Fleshbag Marauder —A good Zombie to recur with all your Dredgings and Chants.

Gutless Ghoul —Better to gain two life for sacrificing your creatures, than to try to deal two damage and fail. Turns your late-game Tombstone Stairwell into not just aggression, but a life buffer. I strongly dislike lifegain, and tend to be suspicious of it, but Gutless Ghoul works nicely for what you are trying to accomplish.

Helldozer —Hell yes.

Skinrender —Mana-efficient creature removal, also another good thing to be able to return to your hand repeatedly throughout the course of a game.

Undead Alchemist —Another way to generate Zombies, and a card that can keep Kozilek and Ulamog from permanently locking you out of the mill plan. Mana-efficient even if it seems to give the opponents more life to work with, after all they start at 40 and 99, but while they can gain life they can’t really find a way to put more cards back in their library very easily, and he hoses the two cards most likely to be purposed towards that task.

Altar of Dementia —An excellent addition to your Plan A. Sacrifice all your creatures to mill yourself before Living Death, sacrifice all of your tokens from Tombstone Stairwell to mill yourself and get way, way more tokens the next turn, suddenly your cards combine much more usefully to generate a LOT of resources with which to kill the opponent.

That gives us the following final decklist:

Grimgrin, Corpse-Born
Sean McKeown
Test deck on 10-16-2011
Commander
Magic Arena

Creatures (36)

Lands (36)

Spells (26)

Magic Card Back


As always, for your participation in this week’s Dear Azami, you will find in your email box a $20 coupon to the Star City Games online store, to potentially help pay for any replacements and substitutions you might want to make. The cards I suggested for addition to the deck have the following prices, for your consideration:

I have a little bit of additional good news for the readership of Dear Azami. You may have noticed this article comes in a day earlier than you’re used to—I’ve shifted from Tuesday publication to Monday, letting us start the week off in enjoyable fashion with a nice discussion about Commander. What you’ll notice next week is that Dear Azami is now going to be a weekly publication here at Star City Games rather than the bi-weekly schedule it had previously been filling. We’ve eased into things nicely at this point—next week’s article will be #20 for the series—and now that I am comfortable with writing it and know where it’s going, I can write it every week much more easily and talk about twice as many people’s fun decks! So we’ll see you back here next week, and every week thereafter for the foreseeable future!

— Sean McKeown

Want to submit a deck for consideration to Dear Azami? We’re always accepting deck submission to consider for use in a future article, like Andy from CommanderCast’s Savra, Queen of the Goglari deck or Josh’s Elephant-themed Phelddagrif deck. Only one deck submission will be chosen per article, but being selected for the next edition of Dear Azami includes not just deck advice but also a $20 coupon to the StarCityGames.com Store!

Email Sean a deck submission using this link here!

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