There has never been a single cautionary tale of a being of higher power using humans for their gain. Not one. In fact, I challenge you; find me one time that some demon, or eldritched being, or scorned God, or demon, or lich, or demon has ever used mankind to manifest themselves and cause mayhem and havoc on the world. While you waste your time, I will help this friendly voice in my head destroy some locks or something so he can be free and return home. I'm sure this cannot possibly end badly...
Jerren//Ormendahl is a tricky commander to build around, but not for the reason one would automatically expect. It isn't hard to lose life in mono-black. Quite easy in fact. Hell if anything it is hard to do anything WITHOUT losing life. No, the problem here will be playing the deck and getting Jerren to flip into his much more intimdating side without killing ourselves in the process. As such, this deck has two settings and hopefully enough cards to fuel both sides of our commander. First, as is fitting, lets talk about Jerren.
Jerren can serve us sufficiently and never has to flip at all to be effective. He works well in aristocrat decks, which hey we have a few cards that fit the theme here. Grim Haruspex, Pitiless Plunderer, Species Specialist and the like will all appreciate the extra fodder that Jerren can create for us. Granted, we need to be losing creature cards and not tokens so unless we have a surplus of cards that want to get the knife, we won't get very far on Jerren's tokens alone. Xathrid Necromancer, Crowded Crypt, and Lolth, Spider Queen will all help chip in and ensure we have something to sacrifice, even if Jerren is out of friends to back stab. But he isn't all cruelty. Jerren can also grant our humans lifelink, albeit one at a time. This can help us recover on life if we start to take too many beats from the opponents jealous of our value, or if we start to hurt ourselves too much. It won't grant us much life from any one creature, as our humans are small, but a blocked, dying creature can still give us a little bit of life on the way out, right?
So now that we know what Jerren can do, lets talk Ormendahl. Ormendahl rewards us with our sacrifice by being a 6/6 beat stick with Flying, Trample and Lifelink AND lets us trade creatures for cards. Sweet deal. But we have to get to our end step with exactly 13 life and Jerren in play if we want the demon to meet us at the crossroads. It is a lot to hope our opponents will attack us in just the right way to allow that to happen, so we have to try to force ourselves into this position. Phyrexian Processor, Minion of the Wastes, and Necropotence can all get us right to the magic number from any life total and each provides us with some other benefit on their own. We also run a suite of other effects we can pay life into with varying increments to hopefully get us low enough to qualify, such as Unspeakable Symbol, Doom Whisperer and Bolas's Citadel. Even if we can't use the smaller life loss cards to cheese our way into Ormendahl, we can still capitalize on their effects. Pairing with our life loss strategy, we run cards like Font of Agonies, and Vilis, Broker of Blood to further make up for our sacrifices as well as other life gain cards like Deathgreeter, Disciple of Griselbrand, and Disciple of Bolas to help us dig ourselves out of whatever hole we might have found ourselves in.
The last trick in our sleeve is life swapping. We can't always rely on having Jerren around to provide us with bodies and lifelink to expliot, nor can we count on Ormendahl to be around to slap our opponents. Cards like Torgaar, Famine Incarnate and Lich's Mirror can bring us back to half health, though the mirror almost guarentee's we are defensless and only activates on our death. Shoutout to Prowling Geistcatcher for being absolutely fun to set up with Lich's Mirror. We can sacrifice our board to the Geistcatcher, exile everything sacrificed, die and shuffle everything not exiled into our deck. The "leaves the battlefield" trigger then returns everything we just sacrificed to Geistcatcher into play, leaving us not quite so badly exposed. Similarily, Stunning Reversal gives us a new 7 to play with and sets us at 1 life if we were going to die. Not the best place to be in, but it is better than nothing and could be the little push we needed. Our last shenanigans are cards like Profane Transfusion and Repay in Kind effects which allow us to swap our life total for someone else's or just make everyone suffer along with us and hope we have enough board presence to end the game from there.
So this is the deck. High risk, high reward and a story as unique as they come (stop searching already, you're embarrassing yourself). It is a crazy dance with our life total, trying our best to thread the needle and turn a card, admittedly more suited to the 99 of other decks, into his own man...kinda...man servent...puppet...yeah that's accurate.
