General
This deck is my favorite deck that I personally own and also my favorite style of play, sacrificing creatures for value. The general idea of the deck is to sacrifice something to gain something. For example with Sek'Kuar, Deathkeeper when a nontoken creature dies we get a Graveborn token. The deck is built around this type of effect, whenever a creature dies X happens. Now because we are built around this we want ways to kill our own creatures, so we play cards like Goblin Bombardment which allow us to sacrifice our creatures. Our biggest pay off for sacrificing creatures is drawing off of them with cards like Grim Haruspex and also making tokens with cards like Anax, Hardened in the Forge. The deck is mostly a sorcery speed deck with only a few instant cards, so it might take some getting used to if you play a lot on your opponents turns. Most of the time what we're going to be doing on other players turns is sacrificing anyways.
Draw
There's two things this deck really wants, it wants to have a draw engine in play and a sacrifice outlet. First we'll go over the draw engines we want. Elemental Bond, Smothering Abomination, Grim Haruspex, Midnight Reaper, Ulvenwald Mysteries, Fecundity, and Skullclamp. Skullclamp and Elemental Bond are especially good cards with our commander that are also good in the deck in general. Since Sek'Kuar makes 3/1 creatures we can easily get value off of these cards.Elemental Bond tends to be and all star in this deck, just the amount of cards you can get off of this thing is crazy. Skullclamp has always been a powerful card in most decks and it's definitely no different in this deck.
Fecundity and Smothering Abomination are one of our few draw on death effects that don't care whether or not the creature is a token. Fecundity does have a slight downside, it also gives your opponents cards when their creatures die as well. Now we will be able to abuse it a lot more than them but it's still something to keep in mind. Smothering Abomination is a pretty unique card that specifically cares about the creature being sacrificed instead of dying while also sacing a creature at the beginning of our upkeep. You do have to be careful with this because it will sacrifice something including itself so make sure you have a few creatures out when you cast it.
Midnight Reaper, Grim Haruspex, and Ulvenwald Mysteries are our nontoken creatures dying package. Reaper and Harupex are very simple and similar cards the only difference is Reaper deals you 1 damage and counts itself dying as well, and Haruspex can morph itself although since it's the only morph card in the deck it's not really worth doing that. Ulvenwald Mysteries is the slowest draw engine in the deck but it also comes with some extra value. Sacrificing clues to deck tokens is very good adding more things to die for various effects in the deck which we'll get into later.
Sacrifice Outlets
Now onto another important deck of the deck our sacrifice outlets, there are different types of pay offs with each one. First the free sacrifice outlets, Spawning Pit, Goblin Bombardment, Yahenni, Undying Partisan, Carrion Feeder, and Viscera Seer. Spawning Pit and Bombardment are the two best free sac cards in the deck. Spawning Pit creates tokens for us to sac later to get more value out of our other cards in the deck. Bombardment does all kinds of things pings creatures, opponents and planeswalkers, allowing us to kill creatures, planeswalkers and kill our opponents quite effectively. Carrion Feeder and Viscera Seer are the cheapest and most simple sac outlets. Carrion Feeder gets really big fairly quickly to be a decent threat to someone, only downside is that can't block but that doesn't matter too much. Seer allows us to scry to try and set up better draws and potentially getting rid of bad cards for the moment. Yahenni is the last free sacrifice outlet, it shares some qualities with Carrion Feeder in that it can get big quickly. We have a lot of ways to kill creatures that our opponents have so having Yahenni makes sense. It also is hard to kill being able to gain indestructible, a very good card overall a resilient creature that sacs our stuff what's not to like.
On to the other sacrifice cards, Izoni, Thousand-Eyed, Lyzolda, the Blood Witch, Krav, the Unredeemed and Jarad, Golgari Lich Lord. Izoni, Lyzolda, and Krav all share one thing in common they draw cards but they do some other cool things as well. Izoni has the Undergrowth mechanic where she makes token equal to the number of creatures in our graveyard. Which is a very powerful effect since we will be filling the yard up, and we can sac those for cards sounds like a deal to me. Lyzolda cares about the color of the creatures we sac to her, if it's black we draw a card if it's red we shoot something for 2. Most of the deck it black so we'll likely always be able to draw a card. Sacrificing a red creature doesn't happen as often but if we have Sek'Kuar in play we'll have a nice supply of them. Krav is one of my favorite creatures in recent times. This card is nuts it does a ton of stuff, drawing tons of cards, getting really huge and gaining you life and all for the low price of one black mana. Lastly Jarad, he is here for whenever there is a board stall or when we just can't get damage through. He allows us to essentially fling our creatures hitting everyone for some damage, he pairs nicely with our big creatures like Kokusho, the Evening Star and Wurmcoil Engine.
Packages
We have three different packages in the deck, reanimation, token, and aristocrat styles of play.
Reanimation is very key to being able to make a lot of tokens with Sek'Kuar and reusing some etb effects. First off we have one time reanimation like instants and sorceries,
Victimize,
Necromancy,
Reincarnation,
Torrent of Souls and
Journey to Eternity
. Victimize is a very efficient reanimation spell getting back two creatures for the price of one, which supports how we play so it's very good. Necromancy is a very old enchantment that allows us to get any creature from anyone's graveyard and it can be cast at instant speed at a cost. It allows us some extra utility by being able to get any good creature we want at any time use the card wisely.
Reincarnation another very old card and an interesting one too. The creature that you choose with this when that creature dies the owner of the card gets to choose a creature to put into play from their graveyard. The creature could even be the same one you targeted, now of course you're going to be targeting your own cards with this one, I don't think I'd give anyone get value off it. Torrent of Souls is one very good card in this deck with a decent sized board. It's kind of like a overrun for this deck that also gets back a creature, in some cases this card will win you the game or at least kill someone, other times it's a nice spell to get something back. Journey to Eternity while technically a one use enchantment when we flip it, it turns into a really nice land that you pay five mana and tap to get a creature from you graveyard back. A very nice value card allowing us to get another etb effect or a another dies effect, then turns into a really good land.
Next we have cards that can be used to get creatures back more than once, Meren of Clan Nel Toth, Chainer, Nightmare Adept, and Dawn of the Dead. Meren a very scary card to see someone play because this card can really do some work. Once she gets enough experience counters she can just start returning creatures from the graveyard into play. She definitely allows us to do some nasty stuff with Fleshbag Marauder and his brothers. Chainer is a card I've really got to loving pretty quick it does a lot cool stuff, fills the yard for reanimation and also can reanimate as well and giving haste is a really thing too. We can usually keep our hand pretty full so we shouldn't have any issues activating him. Dawn of the Dead I won't lie is a pet card of mine but I really find this card pretty good and fun. You lose 1 life for the privilege of getting back a creature with haste! But if that card is in play at the end of turn it gets exiled, well shouldn't be too difficult to sac that creature to put it back into the yard so we can keep it for later.
The last two cards that I want to talk about really don't fit into either category for the reanimation, they are Doomed Necromancer and Apprentice Necromancer. Technically these are single use card but since they are creatures they can be reanimated themselves, another cool thing is with Sek'Kuar we get a Graveborn and that creature they brought back. Doomed Necromancer puts the creature directly into play without any pro or con, Apprentice Necromancer give the creature haste but it gets sacrificed at the end of turn. These are two really cool cards that work really nicely in the deck and they have rarely failed me.
In the deck there's a little bit of a token theme, besides the other cards shown previously and Sek'Kuar himself there's four other cards.
Sifter of Skulls,
Pitiless Plunderer,
Pawn of Ulamog, and
Anax, Hardened in the Forge are those four cards. Sifter of Skulls and Pawn of Ulamog do pretty close to the same thing, whenever a nontoken creature we controls dies we get either a Eldrazi Spawn or Scion. Scions are slightly better having 1 more power but they both serve one purpose, which is sacrificing themselves. Both Pawn and Sifter are great cards and work nicely with
Dictate of Erebos and
Butcher of Malakir which allows us to mow down everyone else's board.
Pitiless Plunderer is a very interesting card, it gives a treasure token whenever a creature we control dies it also counts tokens. Since we have a lot of creatures and can make a lot of tokens this card basically just gives free mana for us. Anax differs from the other token creatures, he's a bit closer to Sek'Kuar. He makes Satyr tokens that can't block so he wan't us to be on the aggressive with these tokens. Anax's power won't be too high since there's not that many red cards in the deck. Another cool thing about him is if the creature had 4 power or more when it dies Anax gives two Saytrs, allow some more sacrificing and more face beating.
So the decks last theme is Aristocrat cards and what that means is these cards ping for damage when a creature dies, we'll have creatures dying a lot so it's only natural to have these cards.
Blood Artist,
Falkenrath Noble,
Poison-Tip Archer,
Syr Konrad, the Grim,
Zulaport Cutthroat, and
Judith, the Scourge Diva are the ones we chose to put in the deck. Blood Artist and Falkenrath Noble are two of the original aristocrats, whenever a creature dies they drain life from a target player and we gain life. Now these do only target a player and don't hit each opponent like some of the other ones but they do count every creature so that makes up for not being able to hit everyone. The life gain of those cards fit in really nicely for keeping us alive and also mitigating some of the life loss cards we have.
Poison-Tip Archer and Konrad are by far and away the most powerful of the aristocrats, both trigger on each creature dying and hit each opponent. The damage they can potential do is very high, Konrad also triggers on anything entering the graveyard other than dying. Like discarding, milling or processing, it also counts cards leaving our graveyard so it's a little bit of graveyard protection and for some reason he has more text for 2 mana he can mill everyone for one card. Konrad is just a power house filling the graveyard, dealing huge amounts of damage and in a way stops people from exiling our yard or you know they pretty much die. How this card in an uncommon just confuses me and he is an excellent card with Living Death.
Last up we have Zulaport Cutthroat and Judith, the cutthroat is basically a more modern version of Blood artist. It drains each opponent but only triggers off of our creatures dying, which is still very good we are built for killing our stuff definitely a welcomed addition for redundancy. Now Judith is very different from the other cards she doesn't care for tokens dying, she won't trigger off of them. But she also can shoot creatures and planeswalkers unlike the other ones which only hit players. Another cool thing about her is she pumps up creatures we control by +1/+0, it doesn't seem that impressive but we like to go pretty wide so pumping our creatures allows us to kill faster. Plus she really works nice with Elemental Bond and Anax, giving us cards when a 2 power creature enters because it gets the buff and make more tokens off of Anax for the same reason.
Closing
This deck at least in all my time playing it is a very fun deck that I've loved playing and hope it would inspire people to try it out. There are some cards that I am testing out to see how they are, those cards are Jarad, Golgari Lich Lord and Lyzolda, the Blood Witch. The deck had a bit bigger creatures before so I don't know how good Jarad is currently in the deck now, and Lyzolda is a very recent addition to the deck that still needs some testing to see how well it performs. I also added in some cards to think about adding depending on what you want in the deck, these are only the few cards that I've been debating on but there are plenty of other cards you could potentially add in. That is all for this deck, I really hope this caught your eye and looks cool enough for you to delve more into this style of deck and really love this archetype in commander.
