Early Commander Building With Phyrexia: All Will Be One

Although we’re still in the middle of preview season for Phyrexia: All Will Be One, the creative oils are already glistening.  Not only have we already seen some exciting potential commanders, the set is already loaded with compelling cards to stuff into the 99.  The time is right for starting to build something new.

Sidebar: Stax 

I’m just finishing up getting together the cards for Maarika, Brutal Gladiator and disassembling my Isshin, Two Heavens as One Stax deck.  I’ll take advantage of one of the Star City Games ordering services and pick up those cards, by the way, at SCG Con Indianapolis.  More on that show in a bit. 

While Stax is a viable archetype at high-powered tables, it’s just not my cup of tea.  I’m going to build a version of Najeela, the Blade-Blossom which pretty much has Isshin as the secret commander.  It’ll be based on a deck built by my friend and Commander Advisory Group (CAG) member Rebell and cEDH wizard Pongo, cleverly called pongo x rebell.  I’ll give it a bit of my own twist, but for the most part I’m going to trust the experts at the turbo-charged end of the format.  I’ll show you a list when I’m done.  For now, let’s get back to the cool new stuff in front of us.

The Grand Unifier

As far as legendary creatures go, we’ve seen a pretty even mix of mono- and multicolored commanders.  Without a compelling reason to go monocolored, I’ll almost always choose the multicolored option.

I’ve never built an Atraxa deck, so Atraxa, Grand Unifier is compelling—for the colors, as much as anything else.  To be honest, just having a 7/7 with flying, vigilance, deathtouch, and lifelink coming out of the command zone is pretty exciting.  That it’ll put a few extra cards into our hand (to include the mysterious battle type) is just a bonus.  I feel like I’d fall into a good-stuff trap with those four colors—which can be a fun enough exercise.  Because of what the card’s trigger does, I might want to actually lean into the idea of just playing all of my favorite cards in those colors.  Let’s put that aside for a moment and focus on one that might be a bit more of a challenge. 

The Crucible Goliath

Artifacts and artifact creatures going in and out of the graveyard have been a thing lately, especially with the Warhammer 40,000 decks.  Combine that with the very card that the Commander Rules Committee (RC) was privileged to preview, and we have a recipe for success. 

Kethek, Crucible Goliath is a 4/4 Phyrexian Beast in Rakdos colors.  It’s meant to cut lives short.  At the beginning of our end step, we can sacrifice another creature.  If we do, we reveal cards from the top of the library until we hit a nonlegendary creature with lesser mana value.  We put that one onto the battlefield and rest on the bottom of the library in a random order.  It’s like a reverse Birthing Pod, going down the chain instead of up.  It really spoke to me because, as those of you who are regular readers know, I love sacrificing stuff and reanimating the graveyard.

A New Approach

There are lots of ways to go with this deck.  When I started taking notes, just with creatures from Warhammer 40,000, The Brothers’ War, and Phyrexia: All Will Be One (just the officially-previewed ones), I got to 40 creatures before I knew what I was doing.  I decided to take a radically different approach to assembling this deck.  It’s really a distant departure from how I normally build.  I picked a card that I knew I wanted to play, looked for a game-ending combo to go with it, and then build outward.  In the metagame I play in, we like for games to go at least seven turns, but more often to get into double digits.  I had that in mind when I started building. 

The card in question, which just fits so nicely with Kethek, is Necrotic Ooze.  Necrotic Ooze has quite a few infinite combos that go with it, so it’s a case of picking and choosing which suits our particular narrative.  I don’t want to play cards that I wouldn’t otherwise play just because they’re part of a combo, Phyrexian Devourer being the noteworthy one with Necrotic Ooze.  If it can go infinite with Kiki-Jiki, Mirror Breaker and Mogg Fanatic or with Endling, Triskelion, and Phyrexian Altar, however, that’s something different.  I started with the latter. 

Combo Maker

One of the things I like about Triskelion is its mana cost.  Even without combo shenanigans, we can take off two counters, then sacrifice it to Kethek at end of turn in order to dial up something awesome.  This idea led me to cards that are expensive because of enters-the-battlefield triggers, but then they don’t do much in combat.  I actually started to use Abhorrent Overlord as an example, but it’s pretty combat-worthy.  Solemn Simulacrum and Canoptek Scarab Swarm certainly fit, although I really wanted to focus on the fives and sixes.  The king here has to be Wurmcoil Engine.  We’ve finally found a spot for it!

In addition to sacrificing things for value, we also needed a reanimation suite so that we could sacrifice those things over and over again.  In addition to the somewhat-normal Reanimate and Animate Dead, we can add Nim Deathmantle as a way of repeatedly returning large creatures for less mana than their power.  We just have to decide which large creatures we really want. 

The List (So Far)

Pending what comes out the rest of the week from the new set, a draft list looks like this:

This deck is suited to the more battlecruiser-style environments.  It’s not exceptionally fast, but if it should get going uninterrupted, it’ll do some things.  In addition to the previously mentioned finisher, this deck wins by grinding out value via its sacrifices.  It can make Treasures via Dockside Extortionist, Pitiless Plunderer, and Professional Face-Breaker, but that’s more about having big mid-game turns than early ones. 

Mikaeus

Mikaeus, the Unhallowed enjoys a famous combo with Triskelion, but it’s also a great card in combination with Kethek, netting a second use from our creatures.  Even better, we can give one of them what’s effectively vigilance.  After we’ve attacked with it and sacrificed it at end of turn to Kethek, it will enter the battlefield untapped, ready for blocking duty.  The presence of Mikaeus nearly led me to include Lifeline in the deck, but that needs way more setup to take advantage of.  It also provides too much value potential for opponents.  It would, however, lead to some wacky battlefield states.

Biotransference

Biotransference does two things.  First, it gives us more creatures and a higher artifact count for the cards that can take advantage of them—like dealing piles of damage with Marionette Master when they go to the graveyard or simply providing something to sacrifice to Goblin Bombardment. We can then pay life to cast any creature via Anrakyr the Traveller, which pointed me in the direction of Bolas’s Citadel.  Second, it more easily enables the alternate win condition of Hellkite Tyrant, which should be doing some heavy lifting anyway.  What I like about Hellkite Tyrant (in addition to the obvious) is that it keeps an opponent from piling up Treasures. If they don’t have any interaction, they’ll be forced to sacrifice them all or let us have them. 

Mayhem Devil

Speaking of alternate win conditions, while Mayhem Devil might not count in the same way as Hellkite Tyrant does, it provides a way of getting there.  It triggers whenever anyone sacrifices a permanent, which happens a great deal in Commander games.  If I ever have the card altered, it’ll be to look like Dean Winters, the actor from the insurance commercials (who was excellent in arguably the first of the great HBO original series, Oz). 

Sacrificing creatures made me think momentarily about putting Grave Pact and/or Dictate of Erebos onto the list, but I play the two of them enough that I wanted to use the slots for other cards.  The same thought process led me to avoiding Syr Konrad, the Grim, which is one of those cards one could put in any black deck and have it provide value.  All of those cards are efficient and might be the right choice for a fully optimized deck—but sometimes it’s okay to go in another direction. 

Imotekh the Stormlord

Eight legendary creatures in the deck might seem high since Kethek passes them by, but each of them is worth something to the deck’s overall plan.  I’ve already mentioned Mikaeus and Anrakyr.  Imotekh the Stormlord is the Syr Konrad stand-in, netting us two more artifact creatures whenever we reanimate something, or lots of them should we be on the wrong end of Bojuka Bog.  In addition, it buffs another artifact creature and gives it menace, which is possibly a way to a commander damage kill with Kethek. 

Because we’ll end up sacrificing so many permanents, Juri, Master of the Revue will likely deal out a chunk of damage.  I’ll confess that Kiki-Jiki, Mirror Breaker is there because I happened to see one as I was sorting through some cards.  You can’t have KJ just sitting around.  Liberator, Urza’s Battlethopter also combos with Biotransference and, even when it’s not around, lets us cast artifact creatures as though they have flash. 

Phyrexians Old and New

Sheoldred, Whispering One is a concession to an old favorite, which I’ve taken out of some decks, but just enjoy playing.  Slobad, Iron Goblin will provide a mana burst along with a method of getting artifacts (mostly creatures) into the graveyard for later use.  It also protects against someone stealing them. 

As there are still loads of cards for us to see from Phyrexia: All Will Be One, this deck is definitely a first draft.  It has the bones of something that I’m going to want to play, so whatever else we see in the next week can only make it better.  For a fuller draft, I’ll probably cut a few creatures to add more interaction, but for now it serves as a great starting point for what I trust will be an excellent build. 

See You Soon?

As I mentioned earlier, I’ll be at SCG CON Indianapolis (3-5 February) as one of the Featured Guests, alongside Gavin Verhey.  The two of us are cooking up some features that will enhance the value of your Command Zone badge and are things that I don’t think have been done before.  They’ll go along with the normal joy of just hanging out and playing with the folks who show up.  I’m pretty sure that I can speak for Gavin and say that we’ll look forward to seeing you there. 

Always remember that we have a channel on the Commander RC Discord server dedicated to discussing my articles.  It gets pretty lively in there sometimes.  I’d love to hear about features that you’d like to see, material you want more coverage on, or even things that you think just aren’t working.  I’m all ears.  Join nearly 9,000 friends for discussion of not just this piece, but on a wide variety of topics—both Commander-related and not.