Most people are making
The Scarab God
into a basic zombie tribal commander, but I decided it is the perfect commander for a blue-black control deck. It's first ability gives you strong deck filtering and some burn on your opponents that can eventually build up to a win condition by itself. Meanwhile the Eternalize ability gives you graveyard hate that's always relevant in EDH, which also allows you to turn cheap value creatures into relavent threats in the late game. On top of all this, it passively cheats the commander tax with it's return to hand ability, all-in-all making it a triple threat of value. So, how do we use this to help us win?
The Win-Cons:
1)
The Scarab God
+
Mirror-Mad Phantasm
+
Laboratory Maniac
+ Draw source
OK, so this combo work's by eternalizing Phantasm in order to mill your entire deck, since when the token copy of Phantasm would be shuffled into your library it is exiled instead. Then you either eternalize Lab Man or, if you have the creatures, flashback
Dread Return
to bring it back. Then it is just a matter of drawing a card, which can be done via flashing back
Deep Analysis
.
I have recently added
Basalt Monolith
, which works with
Mesmeric Orb
as an additional way to flip your library into your graveyard. This makes it so that the only mana you would need to spend would be the mana required to reanimate Lab Man and to draw to win.
Downsides: fairly mana-intensive without
Training Grounds
, and it is heavily telegraphed once Phantasm hits your graveyard, if they recognize what will happen. On the upside, it is a unique variant of the popular
Doomsday
or
Hermit Druid
Laboratory Maniac
combos that will catch a lot of people by surprise the first time it goes off.
2) SHEER. UNADULTERATED. VALUE.
OK, so all your combos have been shutdown due to graveyard hate, counters, poor plays, or shenanigans. What do you do now? Simple. Use the ridiculous eteralize ability of
The Scarab God
to accumulate massive amounts of value. What's better than a
Phyrexian Crusader
? A 4/4 Phy. Crusader. Want an instant speed flying deathtouch creature that draws you a card? Why not
Baleful Strix
? You just took care of your opponents big value engine? Let's add insult to injury by taking it for ourselves. If it's a creature The Scarab God will take it, and all the while your new undead menagerie will be giving you constant pressure from the burn and scry on your upkeep. That is the best part of The Scarab God. No matter what happens, as long as you are still alive you will always be relevant.
COMBOS THAT WERE CUT:
These combos were previously in the deck and I feel it is up to personal preference whether or not you should run them. As such, I will leave the previous excerpts about them below so that you can decide for yourselves.
3)
Rooftop Storm
+
Grimgrin, Corpse-Born
+
Gravecrawler
This combo is pretty straight forward. Get Rooftop Storm on board to infinitely cast and sac Gravecrawler to Grimgrin making him a huge threat. This can be combined with
Diregraf Captain
or
Plague Belcher
to infinitely ping your opponents to death, or if you have
Dire Undercurrents
in play it can force your opponents into top-deck mode, while you have an infinitely large Grimgrin.
Downsides: This is a sorcery speed combo due to having to cast Gravecrawler, which means it can be easily interrupted. Upsides: this has various ways that it can be assembled, with the only necessary cards being Rooftop Storm and Gravecrawler and a sac outlet.
Ashnod's Altar
or
Phyrexian Altar
can (and should) be included as they allow this combo to produce infinite colorless or colored mana, and will more than likely be added at a future date.
4)
Mindcrank
+
Bloodchief Ascension
or
Duskmantle Guildmage
This combo is probably the most brutal one in the deck. It's easily assembled, fairly mana cheap to activate, instant speed, and once it is live all you need to focus on is keeping Mindcrank alive (and Bloodchief Ascension if you are using it and not the Guildmage). It works by making a feedback loop where the loss of life from Guildmage and Ascension triggers the milling from Mindcrank, which then triggers the loss of life. The best part is that if your opponents casts a spell while this is active it will kill them since the spell hitting the graveyard will trigger the loop!
The only downside to this combo is that you need a way to trigger the loop for each opponent, since the way it is worded prevents a loop on one opponent being swapped over to another. But, all-in-all, that isn't much of a downside.
That's about it for right now. Let me know what you think! Is there anything that I could add? Any value creatures I'm missing? Something janky as hell that no one in their right mind would play?
*f-pre*
*f-pre*