Yo yawg, its a Yawgmoth, Thran Physician EDH deck! This mono-black malevolent monstrosity wants to interact with Yawgmoth's two abilities as often as possible, creating obscene value, controlling the board, and eventually bleeding our foes dry and soaking the battlefield with phyrexian completion
The deck has a few paths to victory, but the most supported are Infect and Aristocrats synergies. Looking at Infect first, we run a few infect sources, but we're mostly looking to just tap our opponents with them once, and rely on Yawgmoth's proliferation for the rest of the counters. To that end, nearly all of our infect creatures fly, and we have options to spread Phyrexian Completion without combat damage with cards like
Ichor Rats
and
Decimator Web
. I also personally want to highlight
Tainted Strike
as a really fun combat trick to slide in while our opponents duel each other, with some sneaky utility I'll mention in just a moment...
Looking at our aristocrats synergies, we have the classics like
Blood Artist
,
Zulaport Cutthroat
, the new
Vindictive Vampire
, and even
Psychosis Crawler
, interestingly enough. We run a load of token generators like
Endrek Sahr, Master Breeder
,
Ophiomancer
, and
Ogre Slumlord
to create sacrificial fodder, easily recur-able creatures like
Reassembling Skeleton
,
Nether Traitor
, and
Gutterbones
, and a very spicy Undying package with
Geralf's Messenger
,
Butcher Ghoul
, and
Mikaeus, the Unhallowed
. Don't forget that Yawgmoth's ability to place -1/-1 counters with its sacrifice ability lets us sacrifice any two undying creatures endlessly, so long as we have the life to keep paying for it! A lot of these moving parts work great for us even without other pieces, as Yawgmoth gives us the means to sacrifice them and benefit for doing so. Everything else is gravy, baby! Oh, also! Remember
Tainted Strike
from earlier? If you target
Vindictive Vampire
with it when you're ready to sacrifice some creatures, you're spreading that good good compleation at the same time thanks to
Vindictive Vampire
dealing damage, instead of causing life loss like
Zulaport Cutthroat
. Pretty sneaky!
We run a lot of cards that benefit from Yawgmoth's Proliferate ability, and this part of the deck is what excites me the most. We run cards like
Contagion Engine
and
Contagion Clasp
for consistency, and while there's clear and obvious benefit to running cards like
Astral Cornucopia
,
Black Market
, and
Everflowing Chalice
to ramp us further and further and further, there are some really interesting things you can do with a repeatable on-call proliferate trigger.
Darksteel Reactor
becomes a win condition we can slowly grind out while we accelerate other plans.
Lux Cannon
,
Font of Agonies
, and
Vile Requiem
become really effective removal pieces, and
Spawning Pit
gives us access to even more tokens for our dastardly research.
Necroskitter
and
Archfiend of Ifnir
go berserk with all the -1/-1 tokens we're throwing around and proliferating. We also have
Liliana of the Dark Realms
and
Liliana Vess
to ramp up those loyalty counters. What might be my favorite interaction though, is
Myojin of Night's Reach
! With Yawgmoth's ability to proliferate the Divinity counter on Myojin, we can make all of our enemies pitch their entire hands over and over and over! It might as well read ", discard a card: each opponent discards their hand." which is just... cruelty.
But yes! In closing, I wanna say that this is very much a work in progress. Yawgmoth is a character I've wanted to see represented in the command zone for a long long time, and I'm extremely excited to run wild! Having access to easily repeatable Proliferate in the command zone is an absolute treat, and I can't wait to tinker with this as time goes on and new ways of spreading Phyrexian Completion are revealed. Let me know if you've encountered any other spicy inclusions to further the Great Work, and thank you!
From void evolved Phyrexia. Great Yawgmoth, Father of Machines, saw its perfection. Thus the Grand Evolution began
