Yawgmoth is a pretty cool dude. Future master of Phyrexia and Father of Machines, he's also great at converting resources: 1 Creature + 1 Life = 1 Card + 1 -1/-1 counter placed? Sign me up. And turning every card in your hand into a split card with the other half being a instant that reads "Proliferate"? That's fairly hot stuff too. Proliferation can get you lots of things. What Yawgmoth is not great at is dictating a win-con from the command zone. I'm totally convinced that he's a strong commander, because of how versatile he makes your board and your deck, adapting to various scenarios... but he's secret and subtle enough that the path to victory isn't one that's immediately apparent. Especially in mono black, he's better at playing a grinding game, perhaps with some light lock elements, and that's represented here. But what do you do to decisively end your opponents when you've got incremental advantage? Well, Yawgmoth is good at generating death triggers, so maybe you want to capitalize on that. But how best to do so? Let me introduce you to a little card called
Tombstone Stairwell
.
Tombstone Stairwell, at first glance, looks like any cruddy card from its era. What, it's an Enchant World? That's all kinds of goofy, and usually not synonymous with a good time (Some examples from Legends aside). And it's got cumulative upkeep to boot, what good card was that mechanic ever printed on? Exactly! So, it makes tokens. Tokens that go away when Tombstone Stairwell goes away, or even just at end of turn. And if temporary tokens wasn't enough, it's symmetrical too? Laaaame. Get that nice and friendly junk out of here, we're not playing the purple hippo!
Look closer, though, and you'll see a very different truth. Tombstone Stairwell is not a sad little slice of an era, long since outdated. It's not a senior citizen, sitting in the back of a cardboard box playing Bingo with a complete set of Homelands. Tombstone Stairwell is more like a dragon -- its age gives it power, hailing from a primordial epoch where the standards and practices that restrict the new didn't exist. And Tombstone Stairwell is not a hugbox kind of card. Tombstone Stairwell is not your friend.
Tombstone Stairwell may be forgotten by some, but for those who remember, it is one of the most shocking and stylish engines for a multiplayer table. Why?
It fires every upkeep.
This makes it, perhaps, the single most efficient card in the game at generating death triggers. Let's say you have, oh, four creature cards in your graveyard when you cast Tombstone Stairwell. Seems reasonable, especially after a wrath, or when you're discarding and sacrificing like a fiend. So you cast Tombstone Stairwell and pass to opponent A. You get four Tombspawn. Your opponents get Tombspawn too, if they have any critters in their graveyard, but graveyard exiling can minimize that if you care, and they're just going to go away, right?
Yawgmoth turns those four Tombspawn into four shiny new cards for you. And four triggers for your
Blood Artist
or other such effects that you should already be running. Then you go to opponent B and do it again. You've drawn 8 now! Opponent C comes next. Four more shiny new Tombspawn. Then your turn comes around. You pay the cumulative upkeep (2 mana) and get four more Tombspawn. In a single cycle you've generated 16 tokens and, consequently, 16 death triggers and up to 16 card draws. Your grip is overflowing, and with a single blood artist you've lost nothing and some other poor sap is down almost half his starting life.
In a single turn cycle with just four creatures in the grave, Tombstone Stairwell has generated more expendable value than
Grave Titan
would generate in an average game with its much-beloved enters-or-attacks trigger. Your opponents are dropping like flies and you're holding all the answer, and no one knows what's going on except for Tombstone Stairwell grinning like the Cheshire Cat.
If you care about death triggers across the board, it gets even more insane. Let's take the scenario above and guesstimate that, when you have four dead critters, two of your opponents each have three and the last guy is more about noncreatures and has just two. Because the Tombspawn are destroyed, not exiled, they ALL hit the grave. That means that in addition to your own twelve death triggers BEFORE your turn, you've see twenty-four enemy death triggers. With Blood Artist, you've gained up to 36 life (though you've netted less) and done as much damage, quite possibly knocking some unlucky sap out of the game. If you had a
Sangromancer
, you gained 72 (a huge pad even in EDH).
Black Market
has at LEAST 36 counters on it, giving you insane gobs of mana to work with on your turn to actually use those 12-16 cards drawn off of Yawgmoth.
There are so many cards that care about death triggers that they make even utterly worthless Tombspawn tokens somewhere between incredible and downright lethal when enough are being generated and, of course, dying immediately after.
While, without a doubt, the deck's most sudden and lethal engine, Tombstone Stairwell isn't the only game in town; there are other cards that Yawgmoth goes absolutely insane with that bear mentioning.
Tetravus
is a surprising one: by fracturing off two Tetravites, you can draw two cards and then spend those cards to Proliferate, putting two counters back on Tetravus, digging through your deck with no loss to the Tetravus.
Pentavus
,
Triskelavus
, and
Thopter Squadron
, the heirs to the Tetravus Dynasty, work the same way in concept. The difference is that they need mana to break off a token, but can do it at any time. Having multiple means your token/counter sum can grow, rather than depleting, even if you sometimes keep a card rather than just pitching everything to proliferate. Other reliable token generators like
Ophiomancer
,
Nuisance Engine
, or even
Serpent Generator
also become reliable draw engines in the presence of Yawgmoth.
Since Yawgmoth can draw absurd numbers of cards with Tombstone Stairwell, or only slightly less absurd numbers without it,
Skirge Familiar
is a useful bit of alchemy that lets you turn them into mana if you're short. With the Skirge, or general big mana like
Cabal Coffers
,
Extraplanar Lens
, or
Black Market
,
Torment of Hailfire
becomes a viable kill condition in the event that you don't have damage-on-death sufficient to end the game.
Ichor Rats
is another very viable way to end the game. Since it gives everyone a poison counter, the world is on a nine-proliferate clock the instant the rats resolve. Other poison counter tech like
Serpent Generator
or any number of infect creatures can help, but the rats give one to everybody and can then be properly sacrificed for a card. Given the card and mana generation in a Yawgmoth deck, 9 cards and 18 mana is not that tall an order. It's less than ideal, because it will probably take a couple turns during which you're threat #1, but it's an alternate closer that doesn't rely on Tombstone Stairwell.
If your back is truly against the wall, though, and all you can do is make a few tokens, Yawgmoth has some final cards to play.
Smokestack
alone doesn't make a stax deck, doesn't even rate with a small party of other symmetrical sacrifices, but it does let you turn a couple tokens into oppression against the board.
Contamination
is arguably better, since it will paralyze any nonblack deck and weaken anything not mono-black. Similarly, while you usually want to go for the throat,
Archfiend of Ifnir
is brilliant while you're behind, denying your opponents the ability to have a creature-based board state as you proliferate. Of course, this works well with Smokestack, clearing out expendable cheap creatures and forcing more painful sacrifices. The assortment of Madness creatures work well with Yawgmoth in general and better with the slow game since they can be discarded to proliferate and still sacrificed to draw.
