Edgar Markov - Nightlife Ad Nauseam

Commander / EDH mardufam

SCORE: 10 | 7 COMMENTS | 2106 VIEWS | IN 9 FOLDERS

Revisions —March 15, 2019

-1 Olivia Voldaren

-1 Kalitas, Traitor of Ghet

-1 Rakish Heir

-1 Mausoleum Secrets

-1 Slaughter Pact

-1 Praetor’s Grasp

-1 Thoughtseize

-1 Vandalblast

+1 Guul Draz Assassin

+1 Ad Nauseam

+1 Path to Exile

+1 Mox Opal

+1 Tormod’s Crypt

+1 Lotus Petal

+1 Expedition Map

+1 Scroll Rack

Olivia Voldaren is a very sentimental pet card I almost don’t want to cut. It’s a strong haymaker against Green decks with lots of small utility creatures and fatties, and against any deck that’s especially vulnerable to creature theft she does it well. Ramping up to and holding up mana for her abilities is somewhat awkward and slow. Her abilities only indirectly support our go wide strategy.

Kalitas, Traitor of Ghet is another powerful midrange Vampire. The main appeal is the specialized hate for graveyard strategies, and secondly the free value of the tokens. However at 4 mana it’s not hitting the board fast enough to be relevant as anti-grave interaction.

Rakish Heir is arguably our worst Lord, as post combat buffing isn’t the best when you’d much rather have your creatures buffed before combat, not after.

The remaining cards that were cut are all excellent additions to the 99, but they were all cut in favor of the addtional cheap artifacts I needed to slot in.

Guul Draz Assassin is yet another 1 drop Black vampire that we can invest some mana into have removal on legs that can kill annoying creatures or commanders like the new Lavinia and all those pesky hatebears.

Ad Nauseam is an excellent draw spell that I’ve been meaning to try out. A lot of the revisions I’ve made was also to even further slim down the avg cmc in order to make this a safe investment to slot in to the 99. I forsee many games in the future involving me ramping into this and then vomiting a ton of vampires into play using the stupid amount of cards I drew off Ad Naus. Since this isn’t a dedicated combo deck I’ll typically be using this to just draw a fresh hand of ~7 cards or possibly more if it’s worth the risk going all in. If I’m feeling lucky I guess I could possibly use this to dig for the obvious combo pieces too.

Path to Exile is one of the best removal spells in White. One interesting thing is we can turn that downside into a upside by exiling a token to fetch a land for ourselves in a pinch. I dislike the idea of giving opponents mana fixing but if I need something gone this’ll do the trick.

I honestly thought Scroll Rack was some hot garbagefire jank when I first evaluated it but the value of being able to filter our hand for more of the Lords/Anthems/Combo Pieces we may need is really good. We have enough means to shuffle our deck to shuffle away unfavorable draws too. On top of all of that it has excellent synergy with our hands down best Lord, Vampire Nocturnus. It’ll let us stack the deck with multiple black spells to keep Nocturnus online.

Expedition Map may seem an odd choice but if I could plug a card in that cheaply tutors Cavern of Souls to my hand, I’d run it. The biggest hurdle in ramp is getting ourselves to being able to tap out for 3 mana as with that much we can at least cast the large majority of our spells with. Getting this as our 1 drop with at least a couple lands will have us set for early game mana. Having convenient access to Cavern of Souls can make the difference between completely losing and completely winning against anything Blue. It’s really THAT good. Map also grabs Strip Mine for when we really need to get rid of that Glacial Chasm or other really annoying lands.

Lotus Petal. Ritual-esque cards are advantageous to use in Edgar because the free value of the tokens from casting vampires offsets the card disadvantage you’d otherwise have in other decks when using rituals.

Tormod’s Crypt. Quick to play and use, and justified with the amount of graveyard centric decks running amok in my local meta.

Mox Opal. I needed another solid staple mana rock to slot in because there’s always good reason to slot in more efficient fast mana, and my intuition told me I needed a extra mana rock or two anyways. I did my research on optimal artifact count, so the addition of these other cheap artifacts also serve the purpose of making this rock useful. Appearantly ~18 other artifacts is sufficient enough to warrant running Opal.