Life is just a number, who's counting?

Commander / EDH* BR (Rakdos)

Megagrayus

Creature (20)

• 1x Anger
• 1x Ball Lightning
• 1x Burnished Hart
• 1x Captivating Crew
• 1x Chainer, Nightmare Adept
• 1x Doomed Necromancer
• 1x Drakuseth, Maw of Flames
• 1x Geth, Lord of the Vault
• 1x Gray Merchant of Asphodel
• 1x Grim Haruspex
• 1x Kokusho, the Evening Star
• 1x K'rrik, Son of Yawgmoth
• 1x Lightning Skelemental
• 1x Rotting Regisaur
• 1x Sheoldred, Whispering One
• 1x Solemn Simulacrum
• 1x Steel Hellkite
• 1x Vilis, Broker of Blood
• 1x Wall of Blood
• 1x Yargle, Glutton of Urborg

Instant (9)

• 1x Act of Aggression
• 1x Chaos Warp
• 1x Fire Covenant
• 1x Rakdos Charm
• 1x Reverberate
• 1x Starstorm
• 1x Tainted Strike
• 1x Temur Battle Rage
• 1x Wild Ricochet

Planeswalker (1)

• 1x Angrath, the Flame-Chained

Land (36)

• 1x Akoum Refuge
• 1x Ancient Tomb
• 1x Ash Barrens
• 1x Blood Crypt
• 1x Bloodfell Caves
• 1x Bojuka Bog
• 1x Cabal Coffers
• 1x Command Tower
• 1x Evolving Wilds
• 1x Luxury Suite
• 10x Mountain
• 1x Myriad Landscape
• 1x Rakdos Carnarium
• 1x Reliquary Tower
• 1x Rogue's Passage
• 10x Swamp
• 1x Terramorphic Expanse
• 1x Urborg, Tomb of Yawgmoth

Enchantment (12)

• 1x Black Market
• 1x Blood Mist
• 1x Dictate of the Twin Gods
• 1x Eternal Thirst
• 1x Gift of Doom
• 1x Necropotence
• 1x Phyrexian Scriptures
• 1x Rite of the Raging Storm
• 1x Stolen Strategy
• 1x Sunbird's Invocation
• 1x Vicious Shadows
• 1x Warstorm Surge

Commander (1)

Artifact (15)

• 1x Basilisk Collar
• 1x Bolas's Citadel
• 1x Butcher's Cleaver
• 1x Commander's Sphere
• 1x Cryptolith Fragment  ^Flip
• 1x Fireshrieker
• 1x Key to the City
• 1x Loxodon Warhammer
• 1x Oblivion Stone
• 1x Rakdos Signet
• 1x Sol Ring
• 1x Thaumatic Compass  ^Flip
• 1x Thran Dynamo
• 1x Whip of Erebos
• 1x Whispersilk Cloak

Sorcery (6)

• 1x Chandra's Ignition
• 1x Gravitic Punch
• 1x In Garruk's Wake
• 1x Insult / Injury
• 1x Phyrexian Purge
• 1x Vandalblast

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Maybeboard

Enchantment (1)

• 1x Repercussion

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“I will flay the skin from your flesh and the flesh from your bones and scrape your bones dry. And still you will not have suffered enough.”

Greven! We want to cut a hated path through our enemy's defenses, pay lots of life to juice Greven's power, and then take our enemies out in a single blow! There are vibes similar to a deck like Shu Yun, the Silent Tempest , but being in black and boosting our power around life loss presents a lot of really interesting choices about how we move forward.

Now, we can pay some life using Greven's ability and sacrificing a creature when we attack, but the card draw is the real value here. Creatures like Ball Lightning and Lightning Skelemental draw us six cards each for only one life, and Rotting Regisaur gets us a full new hand while also putting Greven at 11 power, an important benchmark for double-strike kills. Not only that, but Threaten effects become potent removal spells now that we can ditch the creature to Greven's trigger to benefit from it! Act of Aggression is my personal favorite, since paying the 4 life makes it so that even a lowly X/2 creature will be enough to put Greven at 11 power. I think my favorite card that plays with Greven's sacrifice ability though, is Rite of the Raging Storm . Getting a free Draw 5 pump 1 is already really nice on its own, but the lightning rager tokens everyone else is getting will help open up new attacking paths for Greven, as well as just being a really fun card in general for stallbreaking and mixing things up at the table.

Sacrificing our creatures isn't the only way for us to lose life, and we can be a lot more flexible with how we power up Greven. Pay life effects like Vilis, Broker of Blood and Necropotence are already good on their own, but we can use repeatable effects like these to get Greven's power right where we need it. K'rrik, Son of Yawgmoth and Bolas's Citadel are ways we can advance our board state while also setting up Greven, and cards like Fire Covenant and Phyrexian Purge let us pay what we need to open up a new lane for Greven to attack down while ALSO setting up the power for him to attack with.

We supplement how much life we pay not just by having different ways to do it, but support spells to try and help us reduce the amount we NEED to pay. Damage doublers like Dictate of the Twin Gods let us do double damage while only needing to pay half as much (paying life isn't damage, so the Dictate doesn't double it!) and cards like Eternal Thirst and Loxodon Warhammer give us lifelink, so anything we pay into an effect gets returned to us with five on top when we hit something with Greven. We also run double strike effects like Blood Mist and Fireshrieker so Greven only needs to be boosted to 11 power in order to knock out a player with commander damage. Although, sometimes combat is tough to get through in, so we're also running Chandra's Ignition and Gravitic Punch so we can sneak in a gigantic amount of damage to scrape the life from the bones of all our enemies at once.

Date added	5 years
Last updated	2 years
Legality	This deck is Commander / EDH legal.
Rarity (main - side)	7 - 0 Mythic Rares 38 - 0 Rares 21 - 0 Uncommons 12 - 0 Commons
Cards	100
Avg. CMC	4.02
Tokens	Elemental 5/1 R, Morph 2/2 C