Meren, The Hateful Necromancer

Commander / EDH BG (Golgari) Competitive Stax

darkark12

Land (23)

• 1x Bayou
• 1x Bloodstained Mire
• 1x Command Tower
• 1x Dryad Arbor
• 3x Forest
• 1x Llanowar Wastes
• 1x Marsh Flats
• 1x Misty Rainforest
• 1x Nurturing Peatland
• 1x Overgrown Tomb
• 1x Polluted Delta
• 1x Prismatic Vista
• 3x Swamp
• 1x Twilight Mire
• 1x Urborg, Tomb of Yawgmoth
• 1x Verdant Catacombs
• 1x Windswept Heath
• 1x Wooded Foothills
• 1x Woodland Cemetery

Utility Land (10)

• 1x Ancient Tomb
• 1x Castle Locthwain
• 1x Cavern of Souls
• 1x Dark Depths
• 1x Gaea's Cradle
• 1x High Market
• 1x Ifnir Deadlands
• 1x Phyrexian Tower
• 1x Strip Mine
• 1x Thespian's Stage

Stax (6)

• 1x Spore Frog
• 1x Collector Ouphe
• 1x Null Rod
• 1x Winter Orb
• 1x Contamination
• 1x Living Plane

Taxing (3)

• 1x Sphere of Resistance
• 1x Thorn of Amethyst
• 1x Trinisphere

Removal (13)

• 1x Caustic Caterpillar
• 1x Nature's Claim
• 1x Abrupt Decay
• 1x Assassin's Trophy *f-pre*
• 1x Smallpox
• 1x Viridian Zealot
• 1x Fleshbag Marauder
• 1x Manglehorn
• 1x Merciless Executioner
• 1x Minister of Pain
• 1x Necroplasm
• 1x Plaguecrafter
• 1x Toxic Deluge

Tutor (11)

• 1x Crop Rotation
• 1x Elvish Reclaimer
• 1x Entomb
• 1x Green Sun's Zenith
• 1x Vampiric Tutor
• 1x Demonic Tutor
• 1x Diabolic Intent
• 1x Fauna Shaman
• 1x Fiend Artisan
• 1x Survival of the Fittest
• 1x Eldritch Evolution *f-pre*

Discard (7)

• 1x Burglar Rat
• 1x Bottomless Pit
• 1x Liliana of the Veil
• 1x Oppression
• 1x Mindslicer
• 1x Rankle, Master of Pranks
• 1x Sadistic Hypnotist

Reanimation (3)

• 1x Reanimate
• 1x Animate Dead
• 1x Apprentice Necromancer

Commander (1)

Ramp (11)

• 1x Chrome Mox
• 1x Mana Crypt
• 1x Arbor Elf
• 1x Birds of Paradise
• 1x Elves of Deep Shadow
• 1x Elvish Mystic
• 1x Fyndhorn Elves
• 1x Llanowar Elves
• 1x Mana Vault
• 1x Sol Ring
• 1x Devoted Druid

Card Advantage (8)

• 1x Skullclamp
• 1x Bloodghast
• 1x Dark Confidant
• 1x Life from the Loam
• 1x Sylvan Library
• 1x Ophiomancer
• 1x Ramunap Excavator
• 1x Yawgmoth, Thran Physician

Utility (4)

• 1x Deathrite Shaman
• 1x Noxious Revival
• 1x Scavenging Ooze
• 1x Eternal Witness

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Maybeboard

Ramp (4)

• 1x Boreal Druid
• 1x Carpet of Flowers
• 1x Blood Funnel
• 1x Sakura-Tribe Elder

Tutor (4)

• 1x Imperial Seal
• 1x Worldly Tutor
• 1x Finale of Devastation
• 1x Birthing Pod

Removal (4)

• 1x Innocent Blood
• 1x Lignify
• 1x Force of Vigor
• 1x Yahenni's Expertise

Utility (2)

• 1x Umezawa's Jitte
• 1x Azusa, Lost but Seeking

Card Advantage (1)

• 1x Dawn of the Dead

Stax (4)

• 1x Damping Matrix
• 1x Runic Armasaur
• 1x Static Orb
• 1x Leyline of the Void

Utility Land (2)

• 1x Command Beacon
• 1x Wasteland

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Meren, The Hateful Necromancer

Description Show

For those who love to hate all other living, and non-living things that dare to enter the battlefield, meren has come to your aid. Be warned, this is not a deck that will make you friends. This is not a decks that plays politics. This is a deck that finds enjoyment in the pain of others, and becomes more powerful the more they hurt. If this sounds like a plan that you can get into, then look no further than here.

All joking and wordplay aside, This version of meren is as hateful as stax gets in a competitive EDH shell. If your playgroup is not cool with full locks and severe hate cards or If you are looking to abuse a more combocentric build of Meren, then check out the other lists at the bottom.

How it Plays Show

Meren is a odd beast. She is both resilient and vulnerable at the same time. Being an engine card all herself, she often relies on key cards like Fleshbag Marauder or Caustic Caterpillar in order to shut down creatures and artifacts before they get out of hand. She then rides her engine until she can establish a lock like Eternal Witness + Smallpox or Minister of Pain + Living Plane or even Null Rod + Contamination + Meren or token generation. For this to be effective I suggest you follow this gameplan:

Step 1. Establish Interaction

In this step your main goal is to get some removal down on the ground and stall the board development of other players as much as possible. The best cards to play during this phase of the game include: Null Rod, Sphere of Resistance and Caustic Caterpillar, as they can tax and remove pesky permanents before your opponents can get the most value from them. It is important to remember that as long as other people are hurt more by a Stax piece than you are, it is probably worth running out.

Step 2. Establish an Engine

Once you have the Stax pieces out to slow the game down, you now need to find a way to work better in the new game-state than your opponents. This is usually done by establishing a work around to what you have played. For example if you are discarding to an Oppression, than it is probably good to get a Meren or Yawgmoth in play to either counteract or benefit from this. Winter Orb in play? Find a Gaea's Cradle. Have a Smallpox? Find an Eternal Witness. etc, etc....

Step 3. Grind them Out

At this point the board should be a miserable place to be in for everyone. To close out the game though you need to demonstrate to the table that they are not coming back. To do this you'll need to find a way to lock them out completely. The most efficient way is to find Minister of Pain + Living Plane + Null Rod while meren is out with 3 experience. This hard locks people out of mana completely and is a good way to finish out the game. Other ways include Smallpox + Eternal Witness, Null Rod + Contamination or Mindslicer + Meren with 4 counters + Yawgmoth, Thran Physician or another sac outlet. Then from this 'Locked' board state it is a simple matter to swing for a few turns to kill everyone at the table.

Card Choices Show

By the very nature of Stax, the deck is never truly done. Based on how your playgroup operates, it will be necessary to tune your deck to accurately hate out those decks. Because of this I have included this handy little list of card 'packages' that I play as well as other viable options to consider.

Current Inclusions

These cards are the non-staple cards or commander specific cards that are included as well as the reasoning behind why they are.

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1. Removal

• Caustic Caterpillar: Basically the best thing ever in this deck.
• Viridian Zealot: Still good, but not as good as the worm.
• Fleshbag Marauder & Friends: Turns Meren into an abyss for everyone else. Yep.
• Smallpox: This is included to form a loop with Eternal Witness. Play pox, sac wit, reanimate wit, get back pox, rinse and repeat.
• Minister of Pain: Combos with Living Plane to lock everyone out of mana forever. Plus it kills all mana dorks in the process. Sweet.
• Manglehorn: The etb artifact removal with a built in stax effect. No-Brainer inclusion but it kinda drags it can't kill enchantments.

2. Stax

• Spore Frog: I include this to hate out a large range of Food Chain and Najeela, the Blade-Blossom combos. It is also very effective against the more grindy decks that will survive your stax, like Yisan, Brago, Some build of Thief, and Blood Pod.
• Null Rod & Collector Ouphe: Shuts down all artifact decks cold.
• Winter Orb & Contamination: These are the most efficient ways to hate on lands in .
• Bottomless Pit, Oppression, & Liliana of the Veil: If you include a discard suite int he deck, which I highly recommend, these are the cream of the crop. Especially Oppression, that card is bonkers.
• Burglar Rat, Mindslicer, & Sadistic Hypnotist: For the creature side of the discard suite. Rat and slicer are good, while the hypnotist is a bit sketchy, but at the same time is the best way to turn meren online while hating out a single player entirely.
• Sphere of Resistance, Thorn of Amethyst & Trinisphere: These cards can completely lock out combo decks from playing the game, and when combined with artifact removal or null rods, can be completely debilitating.
• Living Plane: This is how we actually win the game. Combine this with Minister of Pain and meren to kill all lands and give all future lands summoning sickness. It also turns the fleshbags into free poxs.

3. Ramp

• Devoted Druid: Even though it costs , and therefore does not give us T2 Stax piece, it can kill itself with its ability whenever it want to and therefore can start an experience loop for Meren and gives an explosion of mana on T3 (5 by herself) which can enable things like meren + frog, sac frog, reanimate frog for experience.

4. Tutors

• Fauna Shaman & Survival of the Fittest: These cards pull double duty as discard outlets and tutor engines.
• Diabolic Intent, Eldritch Evolution, & Fiend Artisan: Both tutors and sac outlets.
• Crop Rotation + Utility Lands: Crop rotation gives Meren more hits off the top of the deck by including utility lands. Cards Like Strip Mine can answer an opposing Gaea's Cradle while Phyrexian Tower gives both a sol land as well as a sac outlet.
• Green Sun's Zenith: Grabs what is important most of the time.

5. Utility

• Ancient Tomb, Gaea's Cradle, High Market, Phyrexian Tower, Strip Mine, & Ifnir Deadlands: Tomb and Cradle are fast mana or just plain broken, Market and Tower give good sac outlets, Stip Mine kiils opposing Cradles and Deadlands gives an out to annoying critters in a pinch.
• Yawgmoth, Thran Physician: This guy gives both card draw as well as removal in a single body.
• Bloodghast: A bit slow and underwhelming at times, but when used with cards like Sadistic Hypnotist or Yawgmoth, Thran Physician it becomes an advantage engine unlike anything else.
• Reanimate, Animate Dead, Apprentice Necromancer: These are the best of the reanimation effects available to a non-combo shell of Meren. They are just too good not to play imo.

Notable Exclusions

These cards are viable in the deck, but just missed the cut for me.

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1. Removal

• Beast Within: A bit expensive when ABD and Trophy are available to us.
• Pox: A bit to expensive for my taste, but it may be the better inclusion over Smallpox for some people.
• Death Cloud: A fine finisher, and it completely hoses non blue decks, but really expensive for what it does.
• Dismember or Snuff Out: Only not included because of the sheer amount of removal already in the deck, but feel free to add if need be.

2. Stax

• Azusa, Lost but Seeking + Wasteland: This little group of cards is good at janking a single person out of the game early and keeping them out for a long time. It is fairly resilient to interaction since both of the key pieces here are creatures for Meren to bring back and the lands are hard to interact with. The problem with this inclusion comes down to the land count in this deck being a fairly low, which makes Azusa an unreliable card without Ramunap Excavator. Another option to here is Oracle of Mul Daya, however his power is much lower even if he does add possible card draw.
• Damping Matrix & Runic Armasaur: More of a niche case on these cards. However they do help to disrupt a surprising amount of decks, such as scepter or commanders with activations. Used to run these, but they were too inconsistent and just didn't preform well.
• Leyline of the Void: Good on the first turn, however I prefer more consistent forms of graveyard interaction like scooze.
• Static Orb: An ongoing theme from here on out is that many cards are not included because of the amount of removal in , and this card is no exception. It usually acts as a worse winter orb at best, and complete garbage at worst. Much better in a stax shell than it is here.
• Chalice of the Void: More of a meta pick than anything else, but hoses most decks in some way.
• Tangle Wire: Can wreak havoc in the early game, but falls short in any other time in my opinion. Personally I don't think I can play this card in anything other than Brago now.

3. Ramp

• Mox Diamond: This card is good, but is also inconsistent. With a higher land count (35-ish), or ramunap it gets a bit better, but not enough to justify while also running Null Rod.
• Priest of Titania: This card has been known to be the heart and soul of elfball strategies, but in here it is lackluster because the point of the deck is to kill all other elfs on the board, not make mana off them.

4. Tutors

• Chord of Calling: Instant speed is nice, but rather unimpressive outside of this.
• Imperial Seal & Worldly Tutor: The big problem with these is that they are slow tutors. In combo decks looking for specific cards, these are great, but here they do not do enough because we lack a true game ending combo. When we tutor, we do so in order to grab answers to the current situation, therefore the tutors we run must be either repeatable (Survival, Fauna, Artisan or Pod), instantaneous (Demonic, Vampiric, Entomb, Eldritch or Intent), or have other utility for what it does (Crop Rotation, Green Sun or Reclaimer). Worldly tutor comes close, but it doesn't grab stax pieces while seal just feels bad at sorcery speed.

5. Utility

• Bojuka Bog: This card is really only good while in the deck for a Crop Rotation. Otherwise it comes down at awkward times and messes with the curve too much. I would much rather run other forms of graveyard interaction like...
• Scavenger Grounds: Another good utility target for CR, but ultimately acts as a nonbo with our commander far to often. If you feel the need to include an emergency stop button for graveyards, then this might be your best bet.
• Blast Zone: This card is good in other colors where removal is less available, but here it is far to slow for true consideration. However if both ramunap and crucible are included its value goes up considerably.
• Scavenging Ooze: This card is good for a variety of reasons, and only just misses the cut for me. If there are a lot of graveyard interactions, or you are going into a meta blind, consider the ooze.
• Crucible of Worlds: A bit slow, but destroys other stax decks.
• Ophiomancer: Might be better than Bloodghast in a vacuum, but I prefer the interactions the ghast gives with other cards like fetches, yawgmoth and entomb.
• Journey to Eternity  : A viable option for another reanimation outlet, especially if you run other etb effects. However I feel it is rather expensive for what it does, as such I run Dawn of the Dead in its slot.

Other Options Show

Other options for a 100% competitive meren deck boils down to whether or not you want to include Razaketh, the Foulblooded or Protean Hulk lines.

Updates Show

June 6, 2020 Show

Overall I was impressed in how this deck preformed as a stax shell, but I shelved it in order to pursue other decks. However, with COVID nonsense, I found that I had an awful lot of free time not to play magic, and so I figured it was time to revisit my favorite lists and revamp them with new ideas and strategies. Thus we are here.

The first problem that this cEDH deck had was dealing with lower budget decks (irony right?) that involved either higher damage output (like voltron/neheb or burn decks) or went wider than my engine could deal with (tokens). To deal with this we needed access to a way to pop tokens with impunity, and the best way to do that is Necroplasm. The slime has odd timing in its wording (at end of turn) so it works well in Meren (who digs it up at beginning of end step) to pop all cost creatures like tokens or lands under Living Plane. The cool part of the slime is that if it sticks around it also deals with elfball strategies that could also outrace this deck with a good start. This addition takes the slot of a wrath so it needed to replace the one that was least valuable.

Yahenni's Expertise --> Necroplasm

To solve the next problem we needed to solve was to block big swings with impunity (outside of spore frog), and this was actually easier than expected. The solution I came up with was to add in the win condition of Dark Depths + Thespian's Stage and another tutor in the newer card Elvish Reclaimer which could reliably make a good blocker and kill a player if need be. The elf was a great addition because it also acted as a (slow) ramp spell or as a way to fix color under Blood Moon or Back to Basics as well as find the Strip Mine to beat out card: Geae's Cradle. The inclusion of depths is strange here since it is really just a dead car, but at the same time we discard enough cards to our stax pieces that I was often able to pitch it away when it wasn't needed. These replaced the less reliable stax cards.

Runic Armasaur --> Dark Depths

Damping Matrix --> Thespian's Stage

Dawn of the Dead (unfortunately) --> Elvish Reclaimer

The next change was dropping the terrible mana dork Boreal Druid because I had been screwed by it one too many times. The biggest problem with it was that it didn't provide color under Contamination, fix colors, or enable a T2 meren like the other ramp available to us. So the addition needed to offer some form of advantage in these ways, and Vault enables a very consistent T2 Meren even if it comes at a price of being locked under null rods and pings us for 1 until eternity. So I opted for the speed of vault, but it may be cut for another ramp spell in the future seing as we have limited options to kill it or gain life.

Boreal Druid --> Mana Vault

The next change is in response to the printing of Thassa's Oracle. The printing of this card incentivized many decks to alter their mana base to include less islands than before, thus dropping the value of Carpet of Flowers. Due to the inconsistency of the card it was always suspect, but the sheer power that it brought to blue matchups validated its inclusion. However, since many of the blue decks I play against have opted into consultation mana bases (no duplicates) the average number of islands in play at any given time has dropped from 2-3 to 1-2 at best for a single player, and that is assuming that they have any at all since yuriko has 4-5 islands in the deck and 4c shells have maybe 5-7, and they often need black over blue and will fetch accordingly if you land the Carpet. The 5 color decks are also not very fast to grab blue these days since green gives them access to 2 silence effects and is a better combo color for them (FC Slivers or Yuriko Combats). In addition to this, since we are playing smallpox it is likely that they will sac their islands to deny us mana. It is still in the maybeboard and it is likely to end up back in the deck, but for now it has been cut for consistency.

Carpet of Flowers --> Devoted Druid

With the inclusion of Druid we really don't need another 2 mana dork, so this warrants the drop of Sakura. It will be missed, but druid can do a very similar trick as the elder, by activating twice to kill itself and offers faster mana, though it grinds a lot worse than the elder and doesn't allow for us to recover from pox as easily, but other includes cover that better. For now it will be removed in favor of another good grind card.

Sakura-Tribe Elder --> Life from the Loam

Imperial Seal and Worldly tutor find what we need, but usually a turn late. With the addition of Fiend Artisan (further down), we actually got more consistent and can get what we need when we need it instead of waiting for a turn. So cutting these in favor of better individual pieces works to the advantage of the deck. Ooze was a notable card not to include, but now that has been remedied, and ramunap acts as both a good include for card advantage or recovering from pox but as a pseudo token generator with Dryad Arbor.

Worldly Tutor --> Scavenging Ooze

Imperial Seal --> Ramunap Excavator

The rest of the changes are inclusions from recent sets or represent a less fundamental shift in the deck or as a quality of life addition.

Birthing Pod --> Fiend Artisan artisan is recurrable and not hit by Null Rod

Forest --> Castle Locthwain Good tutorable draw engine

Forest --> Cavern of Souls Beats blue decks but not auto include and may be replaced by Command Beacon later

Finale of Devastation --> Rankle, Master of Pranks Just the best single stax piece since braids. Would have made the cut over almost any other card.

Date added	5 years
Last updated	4 years
Legality	This deck is not Commander / EDH legal.
Rarity (main - side)	17 - 0 Mythic Rares 51 - 0 Rares 15 - 0 Uncommons 11 - 0 Commons
Cards	100
Avg. CMC	2.07
Tokens	Experience Token, Marit Lage, Snake 1/1 B
Folders	Cedh