"Now it's your turn to hide"
Welcome to the Undercity of ravnica, dear planeswalker. If you look around you, you'll see rot and death. Here, that's our pride and treasure.
Now, this deck is a thing of beauty. It has all the flavor from the Golgari Guild and it packs a lot of power. It's a deck that aims to do what golgari does best: Fill your grave, ramp like there's no tomorrow, and then start using the stuff in your grave to pummel your opponents down.
Originally a
Jarad, Golgari Lich Lord
deck, the best thing about this deck is that it works with any of the other commanders in the deck, so let's get to that first.
The Commanders
Jarad in EDH is a thing of beauty. His ability to sac and close out games is what makes him such a reliable commander if you want to get to the lategame and win without having to attack once. To go with him, he's brought a few snake friends (
Hooded Hydra
and
Lifeblood Hydra
) and the tree dude, Mr.
Mycoloth
. They all work wonders together, and will be your main goal with Jarad in the command zone. Cast big snek, chomp snek.
The frog is probably the most reliable of all of the commanders, due to the built in ramp and draw. This frog-looking dude's best friends are a small snek (
Ramunap Excavator
) and some lands (namely
Terramorphic Expanse
,
Evolving Wilds
,
Dakmor Salvage
&
Fabled Passage
if you have the bucks). But his soul-mate, the one card that completely pushes Gitrog over the edge is
Underrealm Lich
. With little to no effort, you can mill your entire deck in a single draw, and that usually ends up being a game-winning state for you. Overall, Gitrog is probably the strongest of them all.
This one is hella overpowered. Experience counters are hard to remove, and with her on your command zone you end up with more than you care to count. You'll be looking for
Ashnod's Altar
,
Glowspore Shaman
and other small drops with etb effects to ramp up the experience counters and fill your grave so you can start bringing the big guns early, namely
Abhorrent Overlord
,
Avenger of Zendikar
and
Archetype of Endurance
to clog up the boardstate and hopefully push the game in your favor. Meren is a bit of overkill as your commander, and she'll probably get the most hate out of the whole table, so watch out.
This one is here mainly for the flavor, but with the absurd amount of mana you can produce, you can exile all of your opponent's creatures and create a beautiful army of stolen shit. With her in the command zone, you'll be looking for
Karametra's Acolyte
,
Magus of the Coffers
and all the ramp you can get in order to maximize the usage of her ability. Overall clunky, but she can be reeeaaaally scary in the lategame.
Izoni is probably my favorite to play. She wants you to self mill as much as you can in order to fill up the board with little dudes, and then use those dudes to either keep digging for answers or smack your opponents faces. Izoni's best friends are
Deadbridge Chant
,
Underrealm Lich
and
Path of Discovery
. She is super fun to play around, she doesn't feel overpowered and she wants you to self mill, so I like her the most out of all of the other commanders, despite being bellow them in power level.
Savra is evil incarnate, and I love her for that. With the right hand, you'll get absolute control over the battlefield. You are mainly looking to play a sac outlet like
Ashnod's Altar
, a token generator like
Creakwood Liege
or
Abhorrent Overlord
and then play a
Butcher of Malakir
to add insult to injury.Play her in creature heavy metagames and you'll lose all your friends while you laugh because you have 3 1/1 assasins from
Vraska the Unseen
with
Vraska, Golgari Queen
's emblem and you just popped
Vraska, Relic Seeker
to make sure your opponent's are d-e-a-d. Just like your friendship with them.
Those are all the commanders, all of them have their pros and cons. You can make an argument to include
Mazirek, Kraul Death Priest
as one of them, but i currently have him on Detective Damia, on Duty and will probably add him to my korvold deck.
Now, let's talk about the rest of the deck.
The Lands
This is the most important part of the deck, and usually you'll want to mull aggresively in order to find one of three things: a
Burgeoning
, a
Ramunap Excavator
+
Terramorphic Expanse
or a sol-ring. Any other ramp spell works as well, but those are ideal.
Wayward Swordtooth
allows you to make an extra land drop per turn, same with
The Gitrog Monster
. Then you have a few shennanigans with your land base. First, there's a
Claws of Gix
so you can sac the lands in order to either replay them, trigger the frog, or feed the graveyard with lands for a
Worm Harvest
. Then, I also have the trifecta of mass land reanimation:
The Mending of Dominaria
,
Splendid Reclamation
and
World Shaper
. The last one is the most interesting to me, since you can sac him + all of your lands to
God-Eternal Bontu
to draw an insane amount of cards AND return all your lands to the battlefield, which can lead to your
Avenger of Zendikar
plants to grow out of control really quick. Then, to top it off, there is a
Zendikar Resurgent
to maximize your X cost spells and abuse the fact that you can get 20 lands in play in a single turn.
The other stuff
Now, let's talk about
Seedborn Muse
and how broken it can be with the right setup.
First, we have
Vedalken Orrery
, which turns your muse into the good old
Prophet of Kruphix
but better. Then, there is
Atzal, Cave of Eternity
,
Journey to Eternity
's flip side. As long as they do not exile your gy, you can get absurd prophits and make them waste all their removal on a muse you can get back each turn. This usually ends up in a lock, inwhich your opponents struggle to do anything to destroy your things because they just keep coming back, and since the difference in mana will be huge because you are basically playing an extra turn for each player on the table's endsteps, you end up grinding your wins one way or another.
Besides that, the deck just has a lot of good removal like
Casualties of War
,
Gaze of Granite
,
In Garruk's Wake
and so on to make sure you don't get out-tempo'd by faster decks.There is also a bunch of good recursion engines, like
Eternal Witness
+
Golgari Findbroker
+
Victimize
, to make sure you can get anything you want back in a pinch, and a huge stompy finisher in the shape of
Finale of Devastation
.
And that's pretty much the deck. It works wonders, it barely ever stumbles to do it's thing and it can grind your opponents down really easily with the right setup. Plus, playing an
Underrealm Lich
vs a Nekusar deck always feels good.
