Riders on the Storm

Commander / EDH BR (Rakdos)

GuildMcCommunist

Creature (36)

• 1x Carrion Feeder
• 1x Chainer, Nightmare Adept
• 1x Dimir House Guard
• 1x Dockside Extortionist
• 1x Extractor Demon
• 1x Fulminator Mage
• 1x Gonti, Lord of Luxury *f-pre*
• 1x Gray Merchant of Asphodel
• 1x Grim Haruspex
• 1x Imperial Recruiter
• 1x Ingot Chewer
• 1x Massacre Girl
• 1x Midnight Reaper
• 1x Mindslicer
• 1x Ophiomancer
• 1x Pawn of Ulamog
• 1x Pilgrim's Eye
• 1x Pitiless Plunderer
• 1x Plaguecrafter
• 1x Priest of Forgotten Gods
• 1x Priest of Urabrask
• 1x Purphoros, God of the Forge
• 1x Reassembling Skeleton
• 1x Rix Maadi Reveler
• 1x Sadistic Hypnotist
• 1x Shriekmaw
• 1x Sidisi, Undead Vizier
• 1x Sifter of Skulls
• 1x Skirge Familiar
• 1x Soldevi Adnate
• 1x Solemn Simulacrum
• 1x Squee, Goblin Nabob
• 1x Squee, the Immortal
• 1x Stinkweed Imp
• 1x Syr Konrad, the Grim
• 1x Xiahou Dun, the One-Eyed

Land (36)

• 1x Auntie's Hovel
• 1x Badlands
• 1x Blood Crypt
• 1x Bloodstained Mire
• 1x Bojuka Bog
• 1x Canyon Slough
• 1x Cavern of Souls
• 1x Command Tower
• 1x Crypt of Agadeem
• 1x Dragonskull Summit
• 1x Foreboding Ruins
• 1x Graven Cairns
• 1x High Market
• 1x Lavaclaw Reaches
• 1x Luxury Suite
• 1x Memorial to Folly
• 4x Mountain
• 1x Phyrexian Tower
• 1x Rakdos Carnarium
• 1x Reliquary Tower
• 1x Sanctum of Eternity
• 1x Shadowblood Ridge
• 1x Smoldering Marsh
• 1x Sulfurous Springs
• 6x Swamp
• 1x Tainted Peak
• 1x Temple of Malice
• 1x Urborg, Tomb of Yawgmoth

Sorcery (5)

• 1x Demonic TutorGC
• 1x Diabolic Intent
• 1x Faithless Looting
• 1x Living Death
• 1x Toxic Deluge

Commander (1)

Artifact (10)

• 1x Altar of Dementia
• 1x Ashnod's Altar
• 1x Hazoret's Monument
• 1x Phyrexian Altar
• 1x Rakdos Cluestone
• 1x Rakdos Locket
• 1x Rakdos Signet
• 1x Skullclamp
• 1x Talisman of Indulgence
• 1x Thought Vessel

Enchantment (8)

• 1x Attrition
• 1x Dictate of Erebos
• 1x Goblin Bombardment
• 1x Grave Pact
• 1x Heartless Summoning
• 1x Phyrexian Reclamation
• 1x Sneak Attack
• 1x Tortured Existence

Instant (3)

• 1x Chaos Warp
• 1x Entomb
• 1x Kolaghan's Command *f-pre*

Planeswalker (1)

• 1x Daretti, Scrap Savant

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Dominaria has 44 legendary creatures but not a single one has the intricate text that Garna, the Bloodflame does. Garna has a hodgepodge of text that may not seem like a single, streamlined theme, but after figuring out the intricacies, it's apparent: Garna is a fun, unique commander that offers a graveyard-themed deck but in a way that other aristocrats, dredge or simple graveyard value commanders don't.

To start, let's break down Garna as a card, one ability at a time:

Flash Show

Flash is a simple keyword. On Garna, the original intention is most likely to use her ability to save your creatures after a messy combat or a board wipe. However, this is EDH. Messy combats aren't usually an issue and board wipes are almost welcome to an aristocrats, graveyard deck like Garna.

Flash instead in this deck makes Garna perfect for sneaking in value whenever you can. In a format where three other people are looking to stop you, being able to land Garna and do your loop (explained later) at any time is perfect. If your blue opponent is tapped out at the end of someone's turn, that's a perfect time to land Garna for value. If an opponent casts a piece of graveyard hate, get some Garna value in while you can.

Flash is simple, but deceptively powerful, especially in avoiding most traditional hate on this style of deck.

ETB Show

Garna's ETB reads: When Garna, the Bloodflame enters the battlefield, return to your hand all creature cards in your graveyard that were put there from anywhere this turn.

Bolded are the important parts of this ability, and what the entire deck revolves around. Notably, Garna's ability means two things:

1. Garna, with her own ability on the stack, can be sacrificed and will return to your hand with all the other creatures, generating a value loop.
2. Garna can gain value with creatures put into your graveyard from your battlefield, hand or library.

With this as the foundation, the entire deck is built off abusing Garna, who can be recycled with a simple sac outlet, to get as much value as possible, and ideally leading to an infinite combo that wins.

Now, since it says anywhere, the options for getting Garna value are pretty vast:

Sacrifice

Options: Altar of Dementia, Apprentice Necromancer, Ashnod's Altar, Attrition, Blasting Station, Bontu, the Glorified, Burnished Hart, Carrion Feeder, Culling Dais, Dark-Dweller Oracle, Disciple of Bolas, Doomed Necromancer, Falkenrath Aristocrat, Flesh Carver, Fleshbag Marauder, Flesh-Eater Imp, Fulminator Mage, Ghoulcaller Gisa, Goblin Bombardment, Goblin Cratermaker, Grave Pact, Greater Gargadon, Hell's Caretaker, Helm of Possession, Krav, the Unredeemed, Lyzolda, the Blood Witch, Mind Slash, Phyrexian Altar, Plaguecrafter, Priest of Forgotten Gods, Razaketh, the Foulblooded, Sadistic Hypnotist, Shivan Harvest, Slum Reaper, Smothering Abomination, Soldevi Adnate, Spawning Pit, Thalid Soothsayer, Thermopod, Undercity Informer, Viscera Seer, Whisper, Blood Liturgist, Yahenni, Undying Partisan

Selections: Altar of Dementia, Ashnod's Altar, Attrition, Burnished Hart, Disciple of Bolas, Fulminator Mage, Krav, the Unredeemed, Mind Slash, Phyrexian Altar, Plaguecrafter, Priest of Forgotten Gods, Sadistic Hypnotist, Soldevi Adnate, Thermopod

Reasoning: From a brief search, there are 680 cards in black and red that say "sacrifice a creature," so narrowing that down can be difficult.

When deciding sac outlets, you should consider mana efficiency, value generated, and synergy with Garna's other abilities.

The deck can be very mana hungry, often using all its mana every turn or aiming to do so. Garna is a five mana commander which you will be casting frequently, so having a sacrifice effect that's expensive means you're doing less with Garna. While Shivan Harvest may be great at disrupting your opponents, two mana is a high cost. Your five mana Garna loop is now up to seven, and having a repeatable 4BRR: Destroy target land is not as exciting at it sounds.

With that in mind, mana efficient sac outlets are free, low costed or generate mana. For example, one of the most powerful sac outlets in the deck, Soldevi Adnate, turns that 3RB Garna in generating five black mana for a single red. The same idea goes with Altar of Dementia, Phyrexian Altar, Priest of Forgotten Gods and Thermopod. On the other hand, while a card like Razaketh may be great, eight mana for a sac outlet is not where you want to be.

Value generation looks at what sacrificing all these creatures and spending all this mana gave you. One of the most notable exclusions from this deck, for example, is Viscera Seer. Players often are drawn to Viscera Seer because it's a free sac outlet and only costs a single mana. While that is great, most decks that use Viscera Seer are often just using the sacrifice to get a creature in the graveyard rather than the scry. Here, Garna looks to get as much value out of the sacrifice effects since they're easily repeatable. We want our sac outlets to draw cards and generate value, not just put creatures in the graveyard. An easier way to put it: Viscera Seer decks sac creatures to reuse their ETBs. Garna sacs creatures so they can die continually.

Finally, synergy implies that a sac generate more value off of Garna's powerful ability to get creatures back from anywhere. The perfect example of this is Altar of Dementia, where milling yourself means drawing more creatures for Garna. Another small note with this is that in order to bring Garna back to your hand with her ability, she needs to be sacrificed at instant speed. Additionally, since this deck values being able to "go off" on other peoples' turns with Garna's flash, instant speed outlets are even higher on the list. While avoiding restrictions like Sadistic Hypnotist and Mind Slash is key, these two are invaluable to protecting your loop, even if it isn't 100 percent synergistic with Garna.

With these criteria hammered out, all you need is a rather standard set of sacrifice synergy pieces which let the deck pivot between conventional aristocrats and a Garna combo deck.

Selections: Dictate of Erebos, Grave Pact, Midnight Reaper, Grim Haruspex, Reassembling Skeleton, Squee, the Immortal, Squee, Goblin Nabob, Sifter of Skulls, Pawn of Ulamog, Vindictive Lich, Pitiless Plunderer, Extractor Demon, Judith, the Scourge Diva

Reasoning: Sacrifice synergy cards are chosen with mostly the same criteria, to be mana efficient

Hand

Hand implies discarding, which is not the most common ability in the game. However, there are a lot of powerful outlets that make Garna's ability crazy.

Discard Outlets: Skirge Familiar, Tomb Robber, Volrath's Stronghold, Bog Witch, Chandra, Flamecaller, Cryptbreaker, Deal Broker, Dismissive Pyromancer, Geier Reach Sanitarium, Greel, Mind Raker, Hammer Mage, Hazoret's Monument, Hazoret, the Fervent, Insolent Neonate, Jaya Ballard, Jaya Ballard, Task Mage, Key to the City, Latulla, Keldon Overseer, Liliana of the Veil, Mad Prophet, Mindless Automaton, Mortiphobia, Necromancer's Stockpile, Notorious Assassin, Pack Rat, Rix Maadi, Dungeon Palace, Rix Maadi Reveler, Sarkhan, Fireblood, Seismic Mage, Skirge Familiar, Smuggler's Copter, Tomb Robber, Tortured Existence, Undertaker, Volrath's Dungeon, Zombie Infestation

Spells: Cathartic Reunion, Faithless Looting, Ill-Gotten Gains, Insidious Dreams, Pirate's Pillage, Reforge the Soul, Tormenting Voice, Wheel of Fate, Wheel of Fortune, Wild Guess

Cycling/Channel/etc: Faerie Macabre, Hollow One, Horror of the Broken Lands, Jiwari, the Earth Aflame, Archfiend of Ifnir, Chartooth Cougar, Gempalm Incinerator, Gempalm Polluter, Igneous Pouncer, Monstrous Carabid, Street Wraith

Selections: Faerie Macabre, Hazoret's Monument, Faithless Looting, Tortured Existence, Street Wraith, Dismissive Pyromancer, Tomb Robber, Skirge Familiar

While this seem isn't as present as sacrifice, it's still a powerful option that's ripe for abuse. Cards like Dismissive Pyromancer, Hazoert's Monument, Faerie Macabre and Street Wraith represent cheap, extra value when you do your Garna loop, while the real power in these cards lies with Skirge Familiar and Tortured Existence.

Skirge Familiar is a powerful enough card to warrant its own paragraph and will, a majority of the time, help you win the game. Familiar helps you either reduce, break even or net mana on your Garna loop, leading to the inevitable infinite combo. A typical Skirge Familiar situation goes like this: You have Garna and an Altar of Dementia. Every turn, you use the Altar to mill yourself, accruing creatures every time. Eventually, Skirge Familiar comes down, and now you're discarding five creatures for five black mana, turning Garna's 3RB into a single red netting you a black (and all the Garna value). Add in a Thermopod, Phyrexian Altar or Pitiless Plunderer and you've reached infinite mana, turning your Garna loop into an infinite win condition.

Tortured Existence, a long standing pauper staple, proves to be one of the most interesting ways to recur creatures and rebuild your options Garna can get back. Early in the game, creatures will often die through just getting standard value for them or typical removal/wraths. You don't always want to cash in Garna for a smaller effect early in the game. However, Tortured Existence lets you "requeue" your earlier dead creatures. The simple way to look at it is to discard a creature to get one back, with the discarded creature coming back anyway with Garna's ability. However, you can start cycling all these creatures to get almost every creature in your graveyard back into your hand.

For example: you discard a Midnight Reaper to get back a Fulminator Mage you used to stop a Gaea's Cradle on turn three. Then you discard that Mage to get a Solemn Simulacrum that you sacrificed for a free card earlier on. Then you discard that Solemn to get back a Dusk Legion Zealot. Now, at the end of all that, you get four cards back.

On its own, Tortured Existence is already a strong card, turning unnecessary creatures into more relevant ones, all for the cost of a one mana enchantment with a one mana activation. With Garna, the card turns into an incredible card advantage engine.

Library

Putting cards from your library into your graveyard often implies self milling. However, this also means cards that tutor cards into your graveyard get better.

Self-Mill: Altar of Dementia, Balustrade Spy, Extractor Demon, Heretic's Punishment, Liliana, Death's Majesty, Liliana, Untouched by Death, Perpetual Timepiece, Stitcher's Supplier, Undercity Informer, Codex Shredder, Charmed Pendent, Golgari Thug, Milikin, Stinkweed Imp, Darkblast

Graveyard Tutor: Buried Alive, Entomb, Final Parting, Corpse Connoisseur

Other: Grenzo, Dungeon Warden, Sin Prodder, Moonlight Bargain

Selections: Altar of Dementia, Extractor Demon, Buried Alive, Entomb

The most notable aspect of these selections is the lack of dredge cards. Dredge seems like a perfect mechanic for Garna, putting a lot of cards in the graveyard for not much of a cost, plus it synergizes with discard outlets. However, personally these cards have underperformed, and here's why.

Garna's flash is important to making Garna playable, allowing you to navigate around other peoples' turns. Dredge, since it mostly will happen on your turn, basically forces a Garna loop on your turn. This opens you up to more disruption on your turn and for things to go horribly awry. Since dredge pushes through your library so quickly, a single Tormod's Crypt or Relic of Progenitus could lock you out of the game.

Additionally, the deck utilizes its mana well, so drawing lands and noncreature spells is desired, especially considering how easy it is to get creatures out of the deck anyway.

As for the inclusions in the deck, Garna excels with cards like Entomb and Buried Alive. Turning a Buried Alive into a three mana draw three is pretty powerful, and if you wish to take the deck another route, putting in combo cards like Kiki-Jiki and Zealous Conscripts means it can tutor up a win out of nowhere.

The great part about mill outlets is that they can turn from being a value engine to winning the game. Once your Garna loop goes infinite, you can start aiming your Extractor Demon and Altar of Dementia at your opponents to mill them out, while early on they're just digging up creatures with Garna's trigger.

WIP

Top Ranked	Achieved #13 position overall 6 years ago Achieved #1 position in Commander / EDH BR (Rakdos) 5 years ago
Date added	6 years
Last updated	5 years
Legality	This deck is not Commander / EDH legal.
Rarity (main - side)	7 - 0 Mythic Rares 45 - 0 Rares 22 - 0 Uncommons 15 - 0 Commons
Cards	100
Avg. CMC	3.19
Tokens	Eldrazi Scion 1/1 C, Eldrazi Spawn 0/1 C, Emblem Daretti, Scrap Savant, Morph 2/2 C, Snake 1/1 B, Treasure
Folders	Current EDH Decks, EDH, EDH, Garna, To Build, Saved decks, EDH Decks, Interest, Card ideas, Commander