Imperator Kurkesh

Commander / EDH Mono-Red

Gundam-Tyrfing

Artifact (28)

• 1x Codex Shredder
• 1x Commander's Sphere
• 1x Conjurer's Bauble
• 1x Darksteel Forge
• 1x Expedition Map
• 1x Fire Diamond
• 1x Gilded Lotus
• 1x Goblin Charbelcher
• 1x Grinning Totem
• 1x Ichor Wellspring
• 1x Krark-Clan Ironworks
• 1x Liquimetal Coating
• 1x Magistrate's Scepter
• 1x Mind Stone
• 1x Mindslaver
• 1x Minion Reflector
• 1x Mirrorworks
• 1x Pyrite Spellbomb
• 1x Ring of Three Wishes
• 1x Rings of Brighthearth
• 1x Salvaging Station
• 1x Skullclamp
• 1x Sol Ring
• 1x Trading Post
• 1x Ugin's Nexus
• 1x Unwinding Clock
• 1x Voltaic Key
• 1x Wayfarer's Bauble

Sorcery (4)

• 1x Gamble
• 1x Scrap Mastery
• 1x Trash for Treasure
• 1x Vandalblast

Creature (25)

• 1x Burnished Hart
• 1x Combustible Gearhulk
• 1x Deal Broker
• 1x Endbringer
• 1x Fallen Ferromancer
• 1x Feldon of the Third Path
• 1x Goblin Welder
• 1x Hellkite Tyrant
• 1x Hoarding Dragon
• 1x Iron Myr
• 1x Junk Diver
• 1x Kazuul, Tyrant of the Cliffs
• 1x Kuldotha Forgemaster
• 1x Myr Retriever
• 1x Myr Welder
• 1x Pia and Kiran Nalaar
• 1x Quicksmith Genius
• 1x Scrap Trawler
• 1x Shimmer Myr
• 1x Slobad, Goblin Tinkerer
• 1x Solemn Simulacrum
• 1x Squee, the Immortal
• 1x Steel Hellkite
• 1x Stuffy Doll
• 1x Thopter Assembly

Instant (5)

• 1x Chaos Warp
• 1x Final Fortune
• 1x Pyroblast
• 1x Red Elemental Blast
• 1x Volcanic Offering

Commander (1)

Land (36)

• 1x Buried Ruin
• 1x Darksteel Citadel
• 1x Desert of the Fervent
• 1x Drownyard Temple
• 1x Forgotten Cave
• 1x Great Furnace
• 1x Inventors' Fair
• 1x Kher Keep
• 1x Mage-Ring Network
• 21x Mountain
• 1x Myriad Landscape
• 1x Reliquary Tower
• 1x Sea Gate Wreckage
• 1x Smoldering Crater
• 1x Temple of the False God
• 1x Valakut, the Molten Pinnacle

Planeswalker (1)

• 1x Daretti, Scrap Savant

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Hello and welcome to Imperator Kuresh, of the Onakke Empire, in this decklist I will do my very best to explain the pros, and cons, and the reasoning of why you wanna play best Ogre and of course deal with the elephant in the room when it comes to Kurkesh. If you're unsure what this is well stick around till the end! This is my first list and my first attempt at making an in depth list so this particular list will probably go through a LOT of editing as time goes on. Bare with me and hopefully we can all have a fun time!

But I'd first like to start with who I am and how I came to create our great Imperator.

Hello my name is Gundam-Tyrfing I've been playing Magic on and off since Planar Chaos, I believe I was in middle school at the time and at our LGS there were these starter decks for the set. I remember buying one and a Planar Chaos pack and getting a Pongify and was very transfixed by the art, I played a few games with some of the other kids at the store before basically forgetting about Magic and went back to playing the other big card game at the time Yu-gi-oh! Big mistake there. Throughout High School I played a bit more with friends but it wasn't until College did I really get into the game and found the greatest format, EDH!

Ever since then EDH has been the only format I play and I've never looked back at any other card games. Now as for me and Kurkesh well we go way back to 2014 during the release of M15 where I pulled my copy from my prerelease packs, he seemed interesting but I never saw him as General material. At the time my concept of a Mono-Red General went strictly to Bosh, Iron Golem , and that never came to any real fruition over the years. It wasn't until about 4 or so months ago when I was going through my collection did I stumble across the Ogre again and thought I should maybe make this guy. The next day I was talking on the EDH subreddit and made a post asking for suggestions and the thread blew up with people saying how they always wanted to see him played, to post my list and to go for it and make the deck!

For the people at /r EDH thank you, you guys helped me get the drive to make this deck and gave me lots of suggestions you guys are great!

Now with the background out of the way lets start this show!

Imperator Kurkesh

"Highmaul will never fall. The Gorian empire will not be overthrown by these peasants!" - Imperator Mar'gok

Who is Kurkesh? Well Kurkesh, Onakke Ancient is a 4 cost 4/3 costing 2 and . His stats aren't bad and he's not too costly on colored mana, where he really stands out is his effect.

Kurkesh's effect is: Whenever you activate an ability of an artifact, if it isn't a mana ability, you may pay . If you do, copy that ability. You may choose new targets for the copy.

Essentially he's Rings of Brighthearth the General, just with the stipulation of only costing as opposed to because of this, we can do a TON of busted things with Kurkesh, which will be talked about more in depth later in this build.

Now of course there are better Generals in mono-red, Daretti, Scrap Savant , Purphoros, God of the Forge , and lets not forget the resident king of Mono-Red Godo, Bandit Warlord you could play any one of those hell this list could work with Daretti as your General, I personally think it would suffer though.

At the end of the day Kurkesh has a good effect which can be taken advantage of and I think he's a General just waiting to shine brighter then what people think of him.

Pros and Cons

Pros: Easily abusable effect.

Low CMC.

Effect costs little.

Is an Ogre.

Cons: Requires setup.

Can't reliably deal with creatures.

Can't deal with Enchantments.

No Mass Haste source(cuurently!).

Isn't Tawnos.

So now it's time to address the elephant in the room Tawnos, Urza's Apprentice this card is literally Kurkesh 2.0. Not only does he cost less, but he also copies Triggered Abilities which leads to even more broken plays but he also contains blue! Which leads to better control and more options! Now Tawnos does have to tap himself but really untapping a permanent with blue is pretty easy, and I'm sure there are some Paradox Engine shenanigans you can do.

So if you want a stronger General Tawnos is better then Kurkesh, but Kurkesh himself is still pretty good! But I feel obligated to inform you all that there is a better option then Kurkesh!

Combos.

"You will learn why I am king and you are little more than peasants." - Imperator Mar'gok

Kurkesh himself can execute several powerful combos due to his copying abilities, this can lead to infinite mana, infinite mill, damage what have you! Here I'll list plenty of these combos, now some of them DO need to have infinite mana as well to execute but that's not entirely hard to amass.

Gilded Lotus + Kurkesh, Onakke Ancient + Voltaic Key this is one of the standard combos for Kurkesh and the one that got me interested in the deck this allows Kurkesh to cast his hand or execute some of the other combos.

The Gilded Lotus Combo + Goblin Charbelcher this lets you execute infinite damage, if you do have enough mana and just Goblin Charbelcher + Kurkesh, Onakke Ancient + Voltaic Key you can potentially kill a player but its not 100% guaranteed.

The Gilded Lotus Combo + Codex Shredder this allows for infinite mill on every player.

The Gilded Lotus Combo + Magistrate's Scepter this allows for infinite turns.

The Gilded Lotus Combo + Trading Post this allows for many different combos, infinite life, infinite goats, infinite recursion, infinite draw.

The Gilded Lotus Combo + Stuffy Doll this is infinite damage once again to one player can be combo'd with Trading Post for infinite damage overall.

The Gilded Lotus Combo + Liquimetal Coating this makes every permanent a artifact and allows Vandalblast to destroy the board of every player.

The Gilded Lotus combo and Liquimetal + Fallen Ferromancer this allows for infinite infect to every player.

The Gilded Lotus combo + Pyrite Spellbomb + Salvaging Station this allows for infinite damage, and infinite draw.

Krark-Clan Ironworks + Trading Post + Salvaging Station + Voltaic Key this combo is a bit complex but it starts with making a Goat, then untapping it with the Key, then sacrificing the key to get . After that you tap the station to get the Key back to the battlefield pay 1 to untap the key and then sacrificing the key for 2 more mana(this makes you have 3 floating mana) then sacrificing the Goat to get key back to hand untapping the station(2 mana) then play the key and repeat the key to grave and tapping the station for 4 more mana (5 mana).

This process allows for an excess amount of mana at the downside of having you drained by 1 life each time. After reaching an excess of mana and draining a lot of life you can start discarding cards and drawing cards for more life, and for more discard effects. You will still need to occasionally make goats to make more mana and drain some life but eventually you will have all of your deck in your grave and you can build one of the infinite damage combos.

You can add other cards like Kurkesh to this to allow multiple copy triggers for only 1 payment of an effect but then you need a way to make red mana Great Furnace can work here where you can use the key to untap it from a copy trigger to get the one red back. You can also generate infinite red this way but its not very efficient. This state is not ideal but it can happen and you get a huge excess of goats too! Although its not in the deck using Ashnod's Altar or Thermapod can allow you to get rid of them and get untap triggers off the Stations. Liquimetal Coating can also work in this state to make the goats into artifacts and get more value out of them.

Kurkesh, Onakke Ancient + Magistrate's Scepter + Voltaic Key this one isn't so complex but does need a decent amount of mana to go off essentially you need to reach infinite turns, now you can untap the scepter and the key that's 6 mana overall. Now you'd need 12 mana to untap the scepter and key to take an extra turn in one turn. After this happens well....it gets to be gravy. You at first take one extra turn, and then take a second remember you now have 5 charge counters on it at the start of the second turn. You then copy the extra turn phase so you now have a third and fourth extra turn, thus meaning you go infinite.

Scepter Key Kurkesh Combo + Krark-Clan Ironworks + Salvaging Station this is a more efficient version of the combo above its hard to assemble but it is possible.

Lotus Combo + Minion Reflector + Mirrorworks + Kuldotha Forgemaster + Trading Post essentially play all your artifacts in your deck. Your creature sac target is Kurkesh and bringing him back with the infinite mana you have assembled.

As you can see these combo are mostly the Lotus combo, so we have to assemble this fast and have enough mana, there are SOME ways to make this easier.

Assembling the Combos

"My power knows no limit!" - Imperator Mar'gok

So the combos cost a lot of mana and have a lot of pieces, so we need to assemble them which can be done through some of the combos such as the first Krark Station combo dumping our deck to grave, and getting the pieces back to hand from killing goats. But that takes a lot to put together.

This is why we have Kuldotha Forgemaster and we copy his effect with Kurkesh which gets us to infinite mana, we can also use other cards to get Forgemaster back and onto the field such as Trading Post . Now this current build doesn't have a haste source but I am going to soon test it with some in it so you would have to wait rotations to get back to Forgemaster again, and people aren't gunna let us keep the combo.

We do have a way around this though Minion Reflector and Mirrorworks these two cards let us make copies of Forgemaster(We sadly can't copy their effects with Kurkesh because they are Triggers), well Works doesn't let give him haste, Reflector does, and Forgemaster can target himself. This gets us to the Forgemaster combo but in general Reflector and Works will get us our pieces.

Again this is only with the current build once I test a couple mass haste cards we can use things like Feldon of the Third Path to get us what we need as well by make Forgemaster Copies.

Now this is all expensive Mana wise and, we do have the capability of using one of the various loot effects to discard our value artifacts and use Scrap Mastery to build our win cons from there. But that's why we use Kurkesh's effect for maximum value plays!

Value Plays

"The arcane bends to my will, as shall you!" - Imperator Mar'gok

Now we've only discussed Kurkesh's combo potential, what else can Kurkesh do? Well I mentioned before his ability allows for a LOT of abusable effects. This includes getting lands to fuel our engines.

Take Burnished Hart for example, the card on its own isn't so great, its 6 mana for 2 lands, now yes you get a body and in Red well its helpful but with Kurkesh, you turn that into 4 lands for 7 mana. This is of course if you do it all in one turn! If you have it on the field for more then a turn its 4 mana for 4 lands that's some good value!

This also works with Liquimetal Coating and Myriad Landscape which turns 2 lands for 2 mana for 4 lands for 3 mana. We can do this with Wayfarer's Bauble and Kurkesh for 2 lands for 3 mana, and so on and so forth. This is all JUST for getting lands though, what else can we do?

Kurkesh + Ring of Three Wishes that's 2 cards for 6 mana not super great but in red? That's some value!

Kurkesh + Grinning Totem this lets you mill specific cards form an opponent's deck if you can play them go for it! Special note you CAN get lands, so sure you copy and get two cards, don't got a land drop? Get a high value land, and their Sol Ring . This list can go on but you get the idea!

Kurkesh + Mindslaver you know that awesome feeling of Mindslavering someone? Why not do it to two different people? Control over half the table and keep you and a player of your choice safe or if a 4th person was knocked out just control the board. You can even use their spells to give you some help, just remember to tap them out!

Kurkesh + Commander's Sphere this is a personal favorite, its simple but its 2 cards for 1 mana tapping the Sphere for a then sacrificing it and copying the sac effect. You lose the rock yes but if you desperately need the cards it can be great!

Kurkesh + Codex Shredder using its second ability for 6 you can get two cards back from your grave to hand this can let you assemble more combos or just make more value. It is hefty at 6 mana but its like casting 2 Eternal Witness but without the cast triggers!

Kurkesh + Mind Stone this one isn't like the Sphere play but you can copy this one as well its 2 mana for 2 cards so it'll set you back a mana plus you can't tap the rock for a mana so really its setting you back 2 but you do get 2 cards which again can be great and even let you win the game.

Kurkesh + Deal Broker Let's you do two loot effects and can let you stack your grave with artifacts for Scrap Mastery

Kurkesh + Trading Post Pure value, nothing more needs to be said.

You can also do this with the combo pieces if they are on the field without their other pieces to just generate some extra charge counters or draw triggers.

Card Analysis

"Learn your place." - Imperator Mar'gok

So here I will discuss the cards that are my personal touch, you can gloss over this section but I want to give my reasoning and thought process for why some of the cards are in this deck.

Burnished Hart I don't really think I have to speak much on this but getting lands in Red is pretty important its not the most efficient think Solemn is a part card since it gets you the card right away, and I run it as well. But another way to grab lands is good and it can be a copy target.

Endbringer When I saw this card I saw it as pure tech, its something I might cut in the future but with the right cards on the field it can be a good value engine, I think there might be an infinite with this card but I haven't assembled it or thought on it that much. I will update the list if I can find said combo, but otherwise you can draw cards off it and ping things, the can't attack or block isn't that great except for maybe swinging with Gearhulk.

Iron Myr I know there are part dorks you can get for red, Palladium Myr comes to mind and has been recommended to me, but really I like this guy more. Mostly because he comes in fast and he taps for a so he can be the mana you need to do a Kurkesh effect. This guy could potentially get cut haven't decided 100% though.

Kazuul, Tyrant of the Cliffs This guy use to be an idea I had for a Mono-red deck way back since I liked the idea of a deck that can deter someone from attacking with a tax effect. Sure flying gets around him but he can be sorta useful, in a few scenarios especially with Trading Post if he's helped amass a decent amount of tokens. Also he's an Ogre so you know he's got that going for him.

Myr Welder This guy really doesn't need to be talked about but gunna mention it, take your enemies stuff copy your stuff this guy can do a lot for you. Like A LOT, he can be an important combo piece when you need it, a value engine because he can become a piece I love this little dude.

Pia and Kiran Nalaar Well one of the more costly sac outlets for artifacts in the deck I think these guys can really shine, not only do they bring two thopters out with them but they can shock something important down. I've hit a few dorks before that have really slowed the game down for some players, solid card to me but I think there could be different things but if it works it works.

Stuffy Doll I haven't mentioned Stuffy at all mostly since he's like a discount combo piece but he can be used for some combos they are more costly but he can fill in for some you just might need Trading Post to recur him to hand to then target another player. The main downside again comes from the lack of a haste source so he has to wait a turn to bomb someone. I think with a haste source it dramatically improves Stuffy's addition to the deck.

Thopter Assembly Honestly I'm thinking of cutting this guy, yea he makes some tokens you can sac BUT really I'm not that interested in that I think I can put better cards here and it doesn't do much for the deck overall.

Conjurer's Bauble Another card I don't really feel I need to talk about but I will anyways. It's value with Kurkesh and it can recycle cards and get you card advantage.

Ichor Wellspring Much like Bauble its here for the draw etb and ltb, but its also a sac target for things like Forgemaster or with Ironworks for some quick mana.

The Cycling Lands: These three exist purely for their cycle effects late game, early game I might drop them onto the field but I always hope to see these later so I can try and maybe pull a better card.

Drownyard Temple This card is actually a remnant of another play I wanted to use involving Aggressive Mining to keep cycling this thing back from the grave. Sadly I don't have Mining in the deck but I kept the Temple around as a loot target and a way to play multiple lands a turn if there's nothing else to do.

Mage-Ring Network Its some slow ramp for use on turns you don't have much to do or early game, this makes some of the more costly combos a bit less costly its slow yea but if you got nothing to spend mana on might as well funnel it in!

Final Fortune Sometimes in life you just need to bet it all on one thing, Final Fortune is that thing. This is the all or nothing give yourself one last out to win, someone counters combo piece but you can recur it next turn? Drop this and risk it all.

Pyroblast and Red Elemental Blast in most games this will be to defend you from those blue players in others its just a loot target, sometimes it feels like a dead draw but these things have saved me so many times in the past.

Volcanic Offering Outisde of Warp our only way to interact with creatures and bomb lands outside of combos. Helps you make friends and cripple people you don't want around, bonus points if it comes down to you and one other player it can set them back a lot.

Notable Exclusions and Potential Upgrades.

As you can see this deck can be a bit more optimized and I'm going to update the build shortly when I can test out some new cards.

One of the things we're missing is a haste source, Anger or Ogre Battledriver could do the trick although Anger seems to be the safest option since it can be done easier via looting.

We also might want some actual sac outlets that can target creatures and make us mana, Ashnod's Altar Phyrexian Altar or Thermopod are all good options, I'm leaning more towards Therma but mostly since I've run him in some other decks and he's been a good all star in them. But if you wanna go all out Phyrexian is undoubtedly the best option.

Boseiju, Who Shelters All Theres one big pay we never want countered and that's Scrap Mastery this is a card I will DEFINITELY pick up for the deck sometime soon although my Masterys have never been countered its only a matter of time before it happens, and if you don't got one of our counters you're completely out of luck.

Mycosynth Lattice Another card I want to run and I think I'll be putting it in the deck it lets us use Ironworks as an Ashnod's and lets Vandalblast do its thing. Also gives us an indestructible board with Darksteel Forge

Final Thoughts and Feedback

Well there you have Imperator Kurkesh, I hope everyone enjoys reading through this deck and I would appreciate any and all Feedback for this deck! Thank you all so much for reading this list!

Date added	6 years
Last updated	5 years
Key combos	Gilded Lotus + Kurkesh, Onakke Ancient + Voltaic Key Krark-Clan Ironworks + Salvaging Station Goblin Charbelcher + Kurkesh, Onakke Ancient + Voltaic Key Pyrite Spellbomb + Salvaging Station Kurkesh, Onakke Ancient + Magistrate's Scepter + Voltaic Key Krark-Clan Ironworks + Trading Post Salvaging Station + Voltaic Key Minion Reflector + Mirrorworks Kuldotha Forgemaster + Trading Post
Legality	This deck is Commander / EDH legal.
Rarity (main - side)	9 - 0 Mythic Rares 37 - 0 Rares 21 - 0 Uncommons 12 - 0 Commons
Cards	100
Avg. CMC	3.39
Tokens	Copy Clone, Emblem Daretti, Scrap Savant, Goat 0/1 W, Kobolds of Kher Keep 0/1 R, Ogre 3/3 R, Thopter 1/1 C