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Muldrotha, Tides of Madness

Play a lot of cheap permanents that interact with opponents and your boardstate by sacrificing them. They allow you to blow up artifacts/enchantments, kill creatures fetch lands or other resources, protect your commander, prevent attacks, you name it. The downside to these cards is usually that these are one-shot, tempo-based effects that aren’t powerful enough for a multiplayer game where bigger and better things are happening.

Enter Muldrotha, the Gravetide

The fun starts here and it

Does.

Not.

Stop.

Your commander allows you to use your graveyard as additional cards in hand, as long as they are permanents (one of each type per turn). Now you’ve basically got infinite lands, removal and protection from attackers (as long as your graveyard isn’t exiled).

The most important thing is keeping Muldrotha on the battlefield. Protect her with cards like Lightning Greaves , Kaya's Ghostform and Sylvan Safekeeper or just let her die and bring her back with reanimation. Seal of Removal and Command Beacon can help circumvent commander tax.

Once you untap with Muldrotha the game begins for real. You will be able to play any permanent type from your graveyard once per turn!

You should be able to get at least a land and one or two of the other permanent types, easily outpacing any value games your opponents may be playing. Since there’s a lot of cheap, permanent-based spells it should be possible to play a blocker and some protection for muldrotha in the same turn, while reanimating something (yours or theirs) too.

Keep replaying your lands (like fetches, Wasteland , Glacial Chasm and Crystal Vein from the graveyard.

Recur your sweepers. ( Pernicious Deed , Oblivion Stone ) Nasty!

Muldrotha is all about the graveyard so you want enablers for her. You won’t always have your commander on the battlefield though, so you’ll need other payoffs too. Because of this, almost all cards play well with the graveyard. Here’s the (non-exhaustive) lists of fillers and payoffs:

Graveyard fillers

Multi-card / tutor:

Single-card:

  • All permanents with a self-sacrifice ability (think fetchlands, the 2 seals, our sweepers, edict creatures, sakura-tribe elder, etc)

The current payoffs are mostly reanimation spells as well as Muldrotha of course

Graveyard payoffs

"What's a gun doing in your trousers?"

"It's for protection."

"Protection from what? Zee Germans?"

Commander protection

When you cast Muldrotha you want her to stick around. There’s a couple of ways to do so:

*Player protection * The idea is that you should be able to stave off attacks by one or more opponents. This is usually a one-shot fog effect or something very pricy, but our Lady makes these effects recurring:

Removal

Board wipes

You don’t exactly need specific wincons with muldrotha because you often establish full control, after which incremental value will eventually seal the deal. The problem here is that people play commander for fun, and when you’ve established control, your friends prefer not to sit through another hour of grinding, begging for death. Besides that, anything can happen in commander, especially if you’re the archenemy, ergo: a clock is nice.

Sidenote: We prefer playing without blatant 2 or 3 card infinite combo’s, especially when tutors are involved, hence the different approach:

Death by drain:

  • Kokusho, the Evening Star is a great way to finish off a whole table while keeping yourself alive. With muldrotha and a sac outlet, it’s 5 per turn, gaining 15. It becomes even better when you can use reanimation (enchantment), Phyrexian Metamorph (artifact) and Kokusho herself or another clone (creature), to drain opponents for 15 per turn, gaining 45.

  • Massacre Wurm has a similar effect, but is better when your opponents fill up the board with tokens or other small stuff. You don’t gain life, but having it enter twice for -4/-4 is often enough to deal with most go-wide stuff.

  • Syr Konrad, the Grim Can ping the table for every creature you recur / kill / sacrifice / mill

Death by their own cards

  • Villainous Wealth is my absolute favorite way to end games. It’s just so splashy, and there’s always that dragons / big-spell player who’s like “O shit”

  • Agent of Treachery is not directly a wincon, but it sure is rough to overcome this effect more than once. And guess who’s saccing their agent and recurring it?

Death by empty heads

  • Altar of Dementia is an excellent self-mill card, but it’s also a decent way to deal with decks that gain too much life to drain out

Death, the old-fashioned way

  • Grave Titan is one of those cards that just gets out of hand. Eat zombies

Infinite anyway?

Oops. Hasn’t come up yet and maybe it’s convoluted enough, but 4 cards, one of which is the commander and one of which can be any sac outlet might be “too easy” for our standards. Guess we’ll see:

I noticed that Muldrotha + Kaya's Ghostform + Lotus Petal + a sac outlet = infinite muldrotha ETB/Die triggers. This allows you to keep playing permanents from your graveyard since every “new” Muldrotha resets the permanent count you’ve played. Then:

  • If the sac outlet is Phyrexian Altar , you have infinite mana (due to replaying the petal) and can replay your whole graveyard over and over. Any card that has self mill on it then allows you to mill your deck and play it all.

  • If the sac outlet is Altar of Dementia you can mill your opponents out (If they play eldrazi and you have 3 spare mana, instead mill yourself until you hit Phyrexian Altar , play it for infinite mana, play eternal witness, then villainous wealth for each player to exile or play their libraries instead)

  • If the sac outlet is Viscera Seer you can stack your deck. It doesn’t win immediately, but should enable you next turn. If you have a way to draw a card and some spare mana, you can put one of the above options on top of your deck, draw it, and still win.

Then there’s a bunch of cards that are just very good value, mostly with ETB or death triggers, so that they always provide the value you want, while being good sacrifice/cannon fodder later on. The artifact type adds some extra value because that seems to be the type we can recur the least, as most of them just stick around on the battlefield.

Feedback, +1’s and suggestions more than welcome!

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92% Casual

Competitive

Revision 63 See all

(3 years ago)

+1 Swamp main
-1 Urborg, Tomb of Yawgmoth main
Top Ranked
  • Achieved #13 position overall 6 years ago
Date added 6 years
Last updated 3 years
Legality

This deck is Commander / EDH legal.

Rarity (main - side)

9 - 0 Mythic Rares

45 - 0 Rares

21 - 0 Uncommons

17 - 0 Commons

Cards 100
Avg. CMC 3.02
Tokens Beast 3/3 G, Zombie 2/2 B
Folders Interesting Decks to Study Better Later, Muldrotha, Ideas, Commander ideas, Wish list, EDH Decks, Commander decks
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