Garna Living End
Concept
Using a large number of creatures with cycling, coupled with effects that "rummage" and wheel, quickly fill up the graveyard with creatures that can knock out players in a single attack (preferably with haste).
Development
Garna, the Bloodflame is a deck that can be built in a few different ways.
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You can focus on mass-discard, using Garna to mitigate the damage it does to your hand by recurring some of the cards you discarded. The difficulty with this strategy is Garna's high CMC. Being able to efficiently cause mass-discard, which ideally hurts your opponents in a significant way, while keeping up enough mana to cast Garna is a challenging undertaking. I considered running Conjurer's Closet as a method to consistently trigger Garna's ETB ability each turn. Additionally you can run Hellbent cards and some of the black "if you have no cards in your hand draw extra" effects that don't see much play.
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You can focus on suicidal creatures, using Garna to abuse cards like Viscera Seer, Bog Witch, and Generator Servant who net decent effects when they sacrifice themselves for the cause. squire1
developed this strategy with decent effect in The Trinisphere's Dominaria EDH videos. This strategy is much more mana efficient in that you can play suicidal creatures on different turns to set up the Garna play, rather than having all the mana available on a single turn.
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The third strategy that I settled on was a cycling and wheeling strategy. While playing Whisper, Blood Liturgist in a budget league, I became intrigued with the idea of a cycling reanimator deck. Similar to the discard strategy, the differences lie in the focus on racing opponents to a game-ending board-state rather than disrupting their hands. The biggest strength of reanimation-style decks is their ability to bypass the high-CMC of their creatures similar to green-style ramp decks. In order to reach a critical-mass of cycling creatures, I would need to run almost every single creature that had cycling and aim for quantity over quality.
During the development of this deck, I found that a the number of cycling creatures was not enough to reach critical mass. I padded out the numbers with a handful of "rummaging" etb creatures like Azra Bladeseeker to help dig deeper, and also as ways to sculpt my hand after Living Death, in case my opponents were able to stop me.
Goldfished Games during Development: Near 100. This was one of my most goldfished decks as I was unwilling to give up on Garna.
How It Plays
Garna, who is more of a symbolic commander than a practical one, helms a deck replete with rummaging, cycling, and wheeling effects. The idea is to spend your early turns cycling through your deck and filling up your graveyard as you make your way to Living Death. Favoring quantity over quality, most of the creatures in this deck are individually weak, but have decent ETB triggers or are capable of putting themselves into the graveyard.
This is a singularly minded deck based around Living Death. Using cards like Anger, Ogre Battledriver, and Garna's innate haste-granting abilities, we intend on killing one or more opponents on the turn we resolve Living Death. For this reason it is favorable to put Garna into your graveyard when setting up your Living Death blow-out.
Living End is an alternative to Living Death, although it allows opponents time to prepare. Suspending Living End will allow you the extra mana you need to cast Garna if you do not have a creature in your graveyard to haste your team upon reanimation. Additionally, Goblin Dark-Dwellers - a criminally underrated EDH card - can cast this from your graveyard upon entering the battlefield, so you can rummage away this card early-game in the interest of drawing more relevant ones and de-aggroing opponents.
Card Selection
Filling up the Graveyard
Almost every card with cycling is added to this deck. As long as they were big and could attack, they were considered.
Winning the Battle
Because of our pursuit of numbers over power, opponents are likely to have fewer, BETTER creatures in their graveyards so we need ways to come out on top when we Living Death.
Getting to the Living Death
Postmortem
After playing almost a dozen matches with the deck, I was fairly happy with the results. The deck shocked and impressed opponents who agree that the overall composition of the deck made it more dangerous than they gave it credit for. The sheer amount of cycling, rummaging, and wheeling made the deck very resilient to land-screw and consistent at reaching its win cons. The deck was much faster than people gave it credit for, often capable of a 15+ power board after Living Death on turn 5, and a player-killing board with haste after Living Death on turn 7, and game-ending Living Death shortly there-after.
The biggest shortcoming was the lack of non-creature interaction. Manic Vandal was considered a slot-in to back up Ingot Chewer, but the deck would have benefited hugely with the upcoming release of M19's Meteor Golem. Overall the deck won about a third of the time in a casual-competitive environment, a record with which I was happy.
Competitiveness: 4/10
Casualness: 4/10
Consistency: 7/10
Impressiveness: 7/10
Overall: 6/10
Gameplay
N/A
