Introduction
A couple of years ago, back in 2019, the C19 pre-cons started getting spoiled, and while everyone else was drooling over
K'rrik, Son of Yawgmoth
, I was obsessing over
Anje Falkenrath
. At first, she was just another one of those "it's a new commander, I have to have to have to build around her!" and I was expecting to eventually get burnt out by her like I usually do when building commander decks that way. However, even as I rigorously recreated the deck as new cards were printed or I found old cards hidden in the bowels of ScryFall, I have never enjoyed building around a commander as much as I enjoy building around
Anje
, and it's just as much fun to play. So, after having plenty of time in quarantine to play her on the PlayEDH, she's grown into my favorite commander and my favorite deck in my collection, so I figured, let's make a primer shall we?
The Commander
Let's start by taking a look at the Queen of Madness herself,
Anje Falkenrath
.
Haste
Alright, I can dig it. This way we don't have the play of throwing our commander out on curve and praying we untap with her, nice! Let's keep reading though.
, Discard a card: Draw a Card.
Okay? Eh, not great, but I suppose she has haste so we can do this immediately, but still, I don't know if this is exactly what we're looking for to put into our command zone.
Whenever you discard a card, if it has madness, untap Anje Falkenrath.
OH HOHOHOHOHO! NOW WE'RE TALKING! Okay, this commander is very powerful, the ability to loot through your deck this efficiently and at instant speed? This is a very powerful effect and can be abused in a few different ways. Throw a
Living Death
into your deck and it'll feel like playing old-school modern in EDH. Turn it into a combo deck using Anje as a way to essentially tutor for your combo pieces. This commander also works great at the helm of a
Doomsday
pile! So yeah, there are a lot of ways to build around Anje, and when I saw here I knew exactly what I wanted to do with her.
- like powerful decks outside of CEDH range
- like it when your commander doesn't die to removal too easily
- enjoy playing at instant speed
- like it when you never (and I mean never) miss your land drop
- prefer to kill all of your opponents at once
- don't like being targeted
- prefer slower/grindier games
- don't enjoy taking slightly longer turns
How to Build Around Anje
Anje's
a bit of a special girl when it comes to commander. We've all been taught that the two most important things in commander are ramp and card draw, but if you've already scanned the list you'll notice that, well, we have neither.
The only thing that even remotely counts as ramp is
Songs of the Damned
but that's in there as a way to just make a ton of mana to ensure I can just go off and hopefully win that same turn. Hell, we don't even have
Sol Ring
, a card I had originally had in the list because, well, it's freaking Sol Ring, every commander deck needs Sol Ring, right? Well, not
Anje
, I mean, sure, it can help with a nice and speedy turn 2 Anje, but that's just not worth it in my opinion, so yeah, this is a commander deck without Sol Ring, sacrilege, I know.
Something else we're missing is card draw, and that's because, well...
Anje
just is card draw, personified. She can just wheel and deal you through your deck, getting you to see a ton of cards. She's essentially a repeatable tutor in your command zone, helping you find essentially whatever you need: removal, protection, wincons, or anything else. So because of this, we don't really need any card draw, our commander is our card draw, so we don't need to waste any slots on
Read the Bones
and company.
So, with that in mind, let's dive into the deck itself.
I already touched on our commander but I want to dive into her a bit more.
Anje Falkenrath
is a very powerful commander. We already went over the fact that she is essentially a repeatable tutor effect in your command zone, but she is also far more, in fact,
Anje
is the embodiment of everything I love in Magic: the Gathering.
- Draw-Go
- Toolbox-y
- Hard to Kill Commanders
- Drawing Cards
- Discard Synergy
First off,
Anje
plays at flash speed, I know it may seem like she doesn't, but she does because Madness ignores timing restrictions. What that means is, if you discard an
Anje's Ravager
during your opponent's turn, you can cast it off of Madness even if it's normally a sorcery speed spell, and this is true for all Madness spells. This means that you can really just untap, play your land, and pass the turn,
Anje
is a
Vedalken Orrery
in the command zone, it's awesome, I love it, I love
Anje
so damn much.
Okay, now the term "Toolbox" can have a couple of different meanings in Magic: the Gathering, but I'm using it here in the traditional sense: you have a bunch of different tools for different jobs and your deck is built to find your silver bullets.
Anje
works this way in that, again, she is essentially a tutor on a stick. Sure, drawing cards isn't exactly the same as tutoring, but you're drawing as many cards as
Anje
allows you to, it really does feel like you're essentially casting
Tainted Pact
over and over again. Because of this, she is able to help you find whatever tool it is you need at any given time. Sure, it isn't guaranteed that she's going to find what you're looking for every time, but she will help you dig very deep and help you get to it faster in the very least.
While having a commander that's hard to kill only ever comes up in Commander, it is something I always look for in my commanders, and
Anje
definitely checks that box off, but in a very different way.
Marchesa, the Black Rose
is hard to kill because she can protect herself so long as you can keep a counter on her,
Golos, Tireless Pilgrim
is hard to get rid of because he ensures you always have enough mana to pay for his commander tax, but
Anje
is... different.
Anje
is hard to kill for two reasons:
1. She has Haste
2. Because of the deck you play her in
The first one is obvious, she has haste, meaning when you recast her you can immediately use her that turn, giving your opponents no chance of trying to kill her before you untap with her, awesome. On top of that,
Anje
is hard to get rid of because of the nature of her deck. Looking at the deck, we have a lot of recursion, not for
Anje
, but for our Madness spells so that we don't run out of gas, but we can also use them to incidentally get back
Anje
when she dies. Also, she is a very cheap commander at just three mana, so the second time we cast her from the zone isn't even that hurtful if I'm honest. There are some other things in the deck that make
Anje
very resilient to our opponent's interaction, but we'll get into that later.
Anje
is also just a card draw engine in your command zone, and well, who doesn't love to draw cards in commander?
Finally, well, her entire shtick is discarding cards, and I love discard decks! And that's a great segway into the next part of our primer, this deck's wincons: The Secret Six themselves.
Alright, after going over all of the many things you can do with an Anje deck, it's time to finally reveal what my deck is. Drum roll, please! It's a secret commander deck, or rather, a secret
partner commander deck. This deck has six secret "partner" commanders that basically work really well with Anje's ability to draw and/or discard cards. What I love most is that this is an archetype I've always wanted to build, and Anje is a
perfect general for a secret commander deck since she helps you find your secret commander(s). So, with that out of the way, let's take a look at The Secret Six, shall we?
When I saw Anje, this was the first card I thought of, immediately, because I
love
Glint-Horn Buccaneer
, and had tried, to no avail, to make her work in sixty card formats like Pioneer and Historic. I was so sad she didn't have a real home because she looked like so much fun, so when I saw Anje, the first thing I did was grab her and sleeve her up, for I had finally found her a home!
For just you get a 2/4 with Haste that shoots each of your opponents whenever you discard a card. Discarding cards is kind of this deck's thing, so yeah, this guy's damage adds up quick, so quick in fact that in the early testing days I had him on the field for one turn, and dealt about ten damage to each of opponents before I ran out of gas. My opponent immediately
Imprisoned in the Moon
ed my Anje after that bs, and I can't really blame them, this one card is so powerful in the deck it's insane.
She also has this nice ability to loot for , but only when she's attacking, and we don't really want to put her in the red zone too often. However, if we run out of gas but are really close to winning that turn, we can use her as a last-ditch effort to try to end the game if we need to, not to mention, she will trigger herself and out other discard/draw triggers as well when we use her.
All in all, this card is fantastic for the deck, and even some strictly better version of her is ever printed, I love her too much to cut her. I'd cut Anje before I cut this card, I'm just so happy she has a home, and damn but it's a good one.
Brallin, Skyshark Rider
is
nuts. Not only does he splash damage whenever we discard a card, but he freaking
grows at the same time! Imagine dealing 10 damage to everyone in a turn, (not an unlikely occurrence in this deck by the way) and then also announcing that, after all of that, your four mana 3/3 is now a 13/13. Yeah, Brallin is pretty sweet.
Psychosis Crawler
is very similar to Buccaneer and Brallin, except that it triggers whenever we draw instead of discard, which can be an important difference, but usually reads the same. However, this does mean we get a trigger from it for when we draw for our turn as well, which is pretty neat, but in the long and short of it, this is just backward Buccaneer in this deck.
Syr Konrad, the Grim
is very similar to the first three Secret Six we've looked at, however, he only triggers whenever a
creature is put into a graveyard, but that's
a graveyard, doesn't have to be our own. So yeah, we can certainly get our opponents with this, he'll see creatures die off of a board wipe, and he'll make the Aristocrats player sweat bullets.
However, in the end, he's really just here to trigger whenever we discard a creature, or whenever we buy them back, more on that later. He can dish out a lot of damage, around half of our madness spells are creatures so we certainly have enough consistency with him, and the fact that he sees when our opponent's mill, discard, or kill any creatures is also a very nice bonus.
Bone Miser
is ready! I love Bone Miser, okay, look. I know I just poured my heart and soul out to
Glint-Horn Buccaneer
, and while I do love her... well, I love Bone Miser more. My favorite card ever printed used to be
Waste Not
, but then I found Bone Miser, and I found my one true love.
Whenever we discard a creature card, we get a zombie.
That is actually pretty nuts, so now instead of killing our opponents with damage, we're just swarming them with zombies, awesome! Hell, they even come in untapped so we can use them to block if we need to!
Whenever we discard a land card add .
This is the most unsuspecting part of both Waste Not and Bone Miser. I mean, we've all seen it right? Cast
Mind Rot
on turn three, opponent reads Waste Not, decides to just give you mana daring you to use it, and then you get a turn three Rankle for free. Never give them the mana! Well, the same is true here. While the mana may look like the weakest part, trust me, it's enabled me to just win out of nowhere, literally out of nowhere. "But how?" I hear you asking, "you can only discard one land to Anje every turn, and then she doesn't untap." Just wait, you'll see. You'll see soon enough.
Whenever you discard a noncreature nonland card draw a card. Cool, so now Anje actually is card advantage, we turn one
Fiery Temper
into two brand new cards, awesome, yeah, this mode is also pretty dope. While it doesn't act as a true win condition like the first mode does, it's very similar to the second mode in that it allows us to storm off much more easily. Hell, if we're usually able to chain together around 10-12 cards just by cycling with Anje, then I'm sure you can imagine what can happen when we actually start netting cards.
Overall, I love Bone Miser, he's my favorite one of the Secret Six, and I'm always happy to see him, he's just so much fun, and also quite powerful.
Surly Badgersaur
is Bone Miser but red, and also different,
very different.
Whenever you discard a creature card, put a +1/+1 counter on Surly Badgersaur.
Not bad, similar to Brallin, this sucker just grows over time, until it is a force a to be reckoned with, and that shouldn't take too long to happen to be honest.
Whenever you discard a land card, create a treasure token.
See, red has ramp, you just need to know where to look! While this isn't nearly as explosive as Bone Miser's middle effect, it does allow us to stack up treasures over the course of the game and save them for when we are ready to try and go off. These treasures can also be used to make red mana if we need them to, which is very important considering half of our Secret Six are red creatures. So while not nearly explosive, this does severely ramp us over time, and can help us fix our mana as well.
Whenever you discard a noncreature nonland card, Surly Badgersaur fights up to one target creature you don’t control.
So this is repeatable removal on a stick, awesome. This thing gets big fast with that first ability, and so we can basically order our discard fodder to beaf it up and then start munching on our opponent's creatures. What I love most about this ability is that it can open a path for it to attack once it's grown large enough. So even though it doesn't have trample, we can use the fight ability to clean up any blockers our opponent has and then swing in for a good chunk of damage. Plus, I mean, this is just a way to keep the board very clean as the game progresses, well, on our opponent's side of the table any way.
This card is kind of like upside down Bone Miser. Rather than making an army of little tokens, it stacks itself up to the moon with counters. While it doesn't give us a large burst of mana out of nowhere, it can stack up tokens to be used over time. Finally, while I do love to draw cards, allowing this ever growing creature to fight an opponent's creature whenever we need it to is very powerful, especially when you consider how you can use Anje at instant speed, which can really screw with combat steps. Bone Miser is still my favorite, but I won't lie, Red Bone Miser is also very fun.
So that's the Secret Six:
Buccaneer
,
Brallin
,
Psychosis Crawler
, and
Konny
are all here to burn our opponents out,
Bone Miser
allows for some very explosive turns, and
Surly Badgersaur
will make the entire table hate you as you feed it their creatures. These are our win conditions in the deck, and while it may seem slim pickings to just run six, trust me, Anje always knows where to find them.
Every deck needs some removal, and while we are pretty chalk full of it with our Madness spells (more on that later), it is nice to have some less conditional ways to fight board states and protect our own. So, here are our interactive spells.
-
Archfiend of Ifnir
is our only real sweeper in the deck, but it's a doozy. -1/-1 counter on each we don't control whenever we discard a card, so in other words, this puts a target on our back real fast, so be careful when you play it! It gets around everything: indestructible, hexproof, shroud, even protection, though a
Solemnity
effect can be a tilt, and we can even cycle it if we're just trying to go for the win. I love me an Archfiend of Ifnir.
-
Chaos Warp
is unconditional removal at instant speed for just three mana. Granted, it does have the downside of possibly turning someone's
Managorger Hydra
into a
Nissa, Who Shakes the World
but it's worth the risk as such an incredible rate.
-
Feed the Swarm
is a disenchant in black that can also kill creatures! I don't think I need to say anything else.
-
Hagra Mauling
is a
Murder
that usually costs more to cast, but it's worth it because it doubles as a land, which is fantastic in the earlier turns.
-
Pyroblast
and
Red Elemental Blast
are one mana counter spells in red. Granted, they're very conditional, but tell me the last time you played a game of commander where no one at the table was playing blue? Hell, these can even deal with
Imprisoned in the Moon
effects after they've hit the table, they're great.
As you can tell, this removal suite is mainly here to protect our commander and the rest of our board.
Chaos Warp
,
Feed the Swarm
,
Pyroblast
, and
Red Elemental Blast
are all here to stop our commander from turning into a
Frog
or worse.
Hagra Mauling
is here as a removal spell that can also be one of our earlier land drops to make sure we get Anje out on curve, and
Archfiend of Ifnir
is just here to fill the slot of a board whipe. While only running one sweeper may seem pretty risky, Anje will definitely help us find him, and we have plenty of other interaction if we don't. Overall, this is a fine removal suite to keep our opponent's boards in check while also protecting our own.
Here we just have some toys that are great in the deck but don't really slot into any specific category, so let's go over each of them, shall we?
-
Kaya's Ghostform
is a one mana aura that protects or commander from, well, pretty much everything outside of a
Terminus
, and she even re-enters untapped so she can start looting again right away.
-
Malakir Rebirth
is a way to protect a creature from any removal spell for just and two life, and even doubles as a land to help us get Anje out by turn 3.
-
Mausoleum Secrets
is like an instant speed
Demonic Tutor
in this deck that's also only about a buck! Considering maybe replacing this with
Varragoth, Bloodsky Sire
since we can use Anje to immediately draw the card he tutors for, but I do really like the fact that Secrets is an instant, so I'll have to do some testing before I make the swap.
-
Putrid Imp
is in here as a free discard outlet. This is really just here to allow us to dump all of our lands out to trigger
Bone Miser
and
Surly Badgersaur
to make a million mana and/or treasures.
-
Songs of the Damned
is an incredible ritual in the deck to allow us to just make a ton of durring our crucial turn to help us go off and hopefully end the game.
-
Valakut Awakening
can be used to throw away a bunch of lands (which we stock pile rather quickly in this deck) to refuel on Madness spells, and also can be used as a land drop to help us get out Anje on time.
The saddest thing to happen with this deck is running out of gas, so let's make sure that
never happens! Every card here allows to refill our hand with Madness spells we've already discarded to keep the discard train a'rollin,' so let's break them all down.
-
Bag of Holding
is the best card in the deck, without a doubt. The Secret Six may be our wincons, but Bag is the best card we have. For just one mana we get a net that catches everything we discard and we can later spend to crack it buy all of those cards back, it's amazing, just be careful not to let it get it removed before you can pop it.
-
Empty the Catacombs
is incredible, returning everyone's creatures from their graveyard to their hand, and sure this is symmetrical, but trust me, we benefit from this most of all. Four four mana this could end up essentially drawing us ten or more cards out of our graveyard, and then allow us to get back to rummaging with Anje and triggering our Secret Six.
-
Footbottom Feast
,
Forever Young
, and
Gravepurge
all do basically the same thing: stack our library with creatures we've already discarded. These are fantastic because, while they don't really net us any card advantage like our other buy back effects do, these can stop us from incidentally decking ourselves, which can be more relevant than you might think.
-
Restless Dreams
is an interesting one. It allows us to dump a bunch of crap we don't need to get back an equal ammount of Madness creatures. What's interesting here is that we can use this as a weird flip effect with
Syr Konrad, the Grim
in play to dish out a ton of damage. Basically, assume we discard five creatures to get back five creatures, then discard those five creatures to Anje. That's 15 damage from just , which is pretty nutty, but mostly this is here to pitch a bunch of lands, maybe trigger
Bone Miser
or
Surly Badgersaur
a few times, and get back to wheeling with Anje.
-
Shadow of the Grave
is nuts in this deck! Two mana buys back everything we've discarded in the same turn we cast it, everything! What's really neat is, if we have more than seven cards in hand (which happens) and go to our discard phase, if the discard phase puts some triggers on the stack from one of our Secret Six, we can cast this in response to those triggers, and then start it all over again. Weird interaction, yes, but also very useful in a deck like this.
These are all here to make sure we don't run out of gas, but we can also use them to get back fallen members of the Secret Six or even Anje herself, so these are very useful in the deck.
I know it's labeled Discard
Fodder but quite a few of these Madness spells are actually very useful, so let's look at the important ones and go over why they're so good.
-
Alchemist's Greeting
is a nice way to deal 4 damage to any creature, which can deal with quite a few commanders out there, or even just a problematic creature, like, oh I don't know,
Hullbreacher
.
-
Avacyn's Judgment
can be used to splash a few X/1's with damage to hose a board or even just kill one big threat we need to take care of.
-
Big Game Hunter
can come down and destroy any beafy creature for just .
-
Biting Rain
is very conditional, but if you ever wanted to make the elves player cry, this is one way to do it, and hey, it even leaves Anje at one toughness, how convenient.
-
Dark Withering
is a one mana Doom Blade, and if
Shriekmaw
is playable in some blink decks, this certaintly good enough in a Madness deck.
-
Fiery Temper
is bolt that also cantrips, simple as that.
-
Ichor Slick
, while not very efficient, can still kill a creature or even just severely mess with someone's combat step.
-
Muck Drubb
can come down and protect any one of our creatures from any single targeted removal spell, from
Lightning Bolt
to
Darksteel Mutation
, this little guy is here to defend our team from our opponent's interaction.
-
Murderous Compulsion
can very often times just be read "two mana, destroy target creature," so yeah, it's quite good in a deck that use it as an instant.
-
Nightshade Assassin
is a fun way to screw with combat or just kill a creature depending on the situation.
-
Psychotic Episode
, while rarely relavent, can be used to check out the blue player's hand to make sure the coast is clear on our critical turn when we are planning to just win the game.
-
Psychotic Haze
kills X/1's and might be able to mess with a combat step but other than that it's not super relavent.
-
Strength of Lunacy
can be used to counter any white spell that's targeting one of our creatures.
-
Violent Eruption
is a removal spell, albeit a bit of a costly one.
-
Archfiend of Spite
can act as a way to either dish out a ton of damage to your opponent or make them sacrifice quite a lot of their board, whatever they choose, while also stopping an incoming attack.
-
Gorgon Recluse
is a nice flash speed deathtoucher against nonblack creatures.
-
Grave Scrabbler
can buy back any creature we need from our graveyard.
-
Squee, Goblin Nabob
is just a free discard every turn for when we run out of gas.
Closing Thoughts
Anje is my favorite commander of all time. I never get sick of playing with her, and she is just the embodiment of everything I love in Magic: the Gathering. She is very fun to play if you enjoy this style of deck, and it can be really fun having all of these random tricks up your sleeve with all of these Madness spells that you cast at instant speed with her. And again, this is not the only way to build Anje, there are quite a few, and I'm sure there are plenty of ways to abuse her draw/discard ability that aren't used in my list, hell, just look at Amonkhet! So if you really like Anje as a commander and just not this style, trust me, I'm sure there is an Anje deck out there that you'll enjoy, you just need to find it.
