Marrow-Gnawer AristoRats

Commander / EDH Mono-Black Rats Sacrifice Tokens

Artificer12

Creature (34)

• 1x Ayara, First of Locthwain
• 1x Blood Artist
• 1x Chittering Witch
• 1x Crypt Ghast
• 1x Crypt Rats
• 1x Falkenrath Noble
• 1x God-Eternal Bontu
• 1x Ichor Rats
• 1x Ink-Eyes, Servant of Oni
• 1x Nezumi Bone-Reader
• 1x Ogre Slumlord
• 1x Okiba-Gang Shinobi
• 1x Pack Rat
• 1x Piper of the Swarm
• 11x Rat Colony
• 1x Septic Rats
• 1x Skullsnatcher
• 1x Species Specialist
• 1x Swarm of Rats
• 1x Syr Konrad, the Grim
• 1x Throat Slitter
• 1x Vindictive Vampire
• 1x Yahenni, Undying Partisan
• 1x Zulaport Cutthroat

Artifact (16)

• 1x Ashnod's Altar
• 1x Blasting Station
• 1x Bolas's Citadel
• 1x Commander's Plate
• 1x Commander's Sphere
• 1x Hall of Triumph
• 1x Herald's Horn
• 1x Heraldic Banner
• 1x Lightning Greaves
• 1x Skullclamp
• 1x Sol Ring
• 1x Stoneforge Masterwork
• 1x Strixhaven Stadium
• 1x Thornbite Staff
• 1x Throne of the God-Pharaoh
• 1x Vorpal Sword

Land (33)

• 1x Cabal Stronghold
• 1x Evolving Wilds
• 29x Swamp
• 1x Temple of the False God
• 1x Terramorphic Expanse

Instant (4)

• 1x Deadly Dispute
• 1x Doom Blade
• 1x Foul-Tongue Shriek
• 1x Village Rites

Commander (1)

Sorcery (8)

• 1x Blood Divination
• 1x Crippling Fear
• 1x Eaten Alive
• 1x Exsanguinate
• 1x Gruesome Fate
• 1x In Garruk's Wake
• 1x Killing Wave
• 1x Plague Wind

Enchantment (4)

• 1x Black Market
• 1x Dictate of Erebos
• 1x Greed
• 1x Vampiric Rites

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Marrow-Gnawer: Aristorats

It's aristocrats! With rats!

The idea, unsurprisingly, is to make a bunch of rats and do some useful things with them. Marrow-Gnawer can dump a bunch of little rats onto the field that we can buff to hurt people or sacrifice to hurt people (or help us).

Here's how we do it

1) They gotta come from somewhere

Marrow-Gnawer is obviously gonna be the largest source of rodents when we get rolling, but we need a few on the field in order to reach that point.

• Ogre Slumlord: Makes our rats great defensive threats and gives us a regular source of the buggers
• Rat Colony: Our chaff rats. There's 12 of them, they're cheap to play and we'll be seeing more than a few
• Piper of the Swarm: Lets us dump mana to make rats, and dump rats to steal things

2) We don't need an exterminator

We'll do our own population control through some sacrifice outlets that we'll have plenty of fodder for

• Ashnod's Altar: To no one's surprise, this is really good when you have a bunch of expendable tokens. We've got a couple things we can spend the mana on
• Vampiric Rites: Trade the life of a rat for our own life and a card. Good trade.
• Yahenni, Undying Partisan: Free outlet that gives us a hard to remove board presence

3) Exterminators wouldn't help anyway

We don't need to just kill our own rats to get value out of them, we can pump up and take advantage of our numbers and Marrow-Gnawer giving fear to make for a potent combat force

• Heraldic Banner: It's mono color, so all our creatures benefit, plus it's a nice mana rock
• Swarm of Rats: We will hopefully have many rats, making this a lot of damage that's tough to block
• Stoneforge Masterwork: Since most of our creatures will be rats, we'll have some excellent recipients of this

4) Nobody misses a rat

Beyond that fact that they're easily replaceable, we're okay with our creatures dying, since we'll have plenty of ways to get value from it

• Thornbite Staff: This equipped to Marrow-Gnawer, with one other rat on the field allows you to make an arbitrary number of rats (1 at a time. 2 other rats means we grow exponentially)
• Blood Artist: As expected, we can turn all our rats into life draining pings. We have a few of these effects
• Dictate of Erebos: Turns our dead rats, which we don't care about, into a form of removal, which we do care about

5) Strength in (diseased) numbers

Sometimes even just having a large number of creatures is a threat in and of itself, even if we don't have a way to "use" them

• Gruesome Fate: Just a ton of life loss for doing what we want to do anyway
• Foul-Tongue Shriek: The rats don't have to get through to make combat valuable
• Throne of the God-Pharaoh: We can have a whole bunch of tapped creatures at our end step

6) Rats really are just deadly

Just to really round out our toolbox, we also have a useful ways to cause our opponents to lose the game that might be a bit more sudden

• Strixhaven Stadium: We can have a decent defensive line to prevent losing points while putting up a good offense to gain points. Also, mana
• Vorpal Sword: Fear is hard to block, so we can pretty reasonably sneak an armed rat through to end someone
• Septic Rats: Hard to block from fear combined with a nice number of pump effects mean that we can usually infect someone out in short order

Date added	4 years
Last updated	2 years
Legality	This deck is Commander / EDH legal.
Rarity (main - side)	3 - 0 Mythic Rares 21 - 0 Rares 25 - 0 Uncommons 22 - 0 Commons
Cards	100
Avg. CMC	2.97
Tokens	Copy Clone, Rat 1/1 B, Treasure