Edh-rack

Commander / EDH* 8-Rack Casual Discard Multiplayer UBR (Grixis)

alias42

Discard (19)

• 1x Bottomless Pit
• 1x Delirium Skeins
• 1x Dimir Guildmage
• 1x Geier Reach Sanitarium
• 1x Leshrac's Sigil
• 1x Liliana of the Veil
• 1x Liliana Vess
• 1x Necrogen Mists
• 1x Oppression
• 1x Pain Magnification
• 1x Painful Quandary
• 1x Pox
• 1x Raiders' Wake
• 1x Raven's Crime
• 1x Rix Maadi, Dungeon Palace
• 1x Shimian Specter
• 1x Sire Of Insanity
• 1x Smallpox
• 1x Syphon Mind

Card Advantage (8)

• 1x Asylum Visitor
• 1x Bag of Holding
• 1x Dimir Guildmage
• 1x Dream Salvage
• 1x Geth's Grimoire
• 1x Jace's Archivist
• 1x Syphon Mind
• 1x Waste Not

Board Wipes (3)

• 1x Cyclonic Rift
• 1x Damnation
• 1x Life's Finale

Ramp (16)

• 1x Chromatic Lantern
• 1x Darksteel Ingot
• 1x Dimir Cluestone
• 1x Dimir Keyrune
• 1x Dimir Locket
• 1x Dimir Signet
• 1x Izzet Cluestone
• 1x Izzet Keyrune
• 1x Izzet Locket
• 1x Izzet Signet
• 1x Obelisk of Grixis
• 1x Rakdos Cluestone
• 1x Rakdos Keyrune
• 1x Rakdos Locket
• 1x Rakdos Signet
• 1x Sol Ring

The Racks (11)

• 1x Bloodchief Ascension
• 1x Cunning Lethemancer
• 1x Davriel, Rogue Shadowmage
• 1x Fell Specter
• 1x Liliana's Caress
• 1x Megrim
• 1x Nezumi Shortfang  ^Flip
• 1x Quest for the Nihil Stone
• 1x Sangromancer
• 1x Shrieking Affliction
• 1x Wheel of Torture

Control (3)

• 1x Ashiok, Dream Render
• 1x Narset, Parter of Veils
• 1x Notion Thief

Commander (1)

Lands (37)

• 1x Bojuka Bog
• 1x Cascade Bluffs
• 1x Command Tower
• 1x Crosis's Catacombs
• 1x Crumbling Necropolis
• 1x Crypt of the Eternals
• 1x Geier Reach Sanitarium
• 1x Graven Cairns
• 9x Island
• 9x Mountain
• 1x Rix Maadi, Dungeon Palace
• 1x Sunken Ruins
• 9x Swamp

Combos (7)

• 1x Angrath's Marauders
• 1x Deathgrip
• 1x Dictate of the Twin Gods
• 1x Douse
• 1x Furnace of Rath
• 1x Leshrac's Sigil
• 1x Painter's Servant

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Rack Attack!

So, fun fact about me. 8 rack is my favorite modern deck. Also probably my favorite 60 card deck ever. All hail the rack.

Another fun fact about me. Edh is my favorite format. So... I figured it was time to bring my favorite deck into my favorite format. And thus, here we are.

Choosing a commander

So, discard control is nothing unusual in edh. Generally I recommend Nath of the Gilt-Leaf for the commander. However, I decided against that for this list because

1) There's already a Nath deck in my meta, and I want to diversify. If everyone plays the same things, it gets stale.

2) I want to run blue for Narset, Parter of Veils and Notion Thief . One of the most intimidating aspects of building this deck was trying to keep people on the rack in a format where everyone and their grandmother draws 12 cards per turn. These were my answers to keeping people racked down, but Nath doesn't have them in his arsenal.

3) While the focus of Nath's decks is generally discard control, when he goes off and is ready to win he generally does it with a swarm of elves. That doesn't feel very 8-rack like. I mean... 8 rack is generally creatureless. Why am I swinging with an army?

So, I looked at every legendary creature that had blue in its identity and some interaction with discarding and eventually decided on Crosis, the Purger , for 3 reasons. Why does everything happen for 3 reasons? I decided against Nath for 3 reasons. I decied on Crosis for 3 reasons...

1) Painter's Servant got unbanned, so the interaction with color specifics felt like a nice way to abuse my new toy

2) Crosis allows me to do everything I want/need my deck to do with his colors

3) Unlock a certain other dragon whom we can't name for lore reasons, he doesnt require an upkeep cost, and only eats 3 of my mana on the turns when I'm able to connect and take out someone's hand.

So crosis it is. The downside? Well, he has to attack... and one of the cards I was most looking forward to using is Ensnaring Bridge , but if I keep 6 cards in my hand to attack, bridge doesn't do much. I could theoretically run the Bottled Cloister combo, but it felt clunky. So I decided not to run the bridge.

Rules/Challenges I set for this deck

1) No win cons that aren't don't feel like something 8 rack would run.

This was the big one to me. As I mentioned above when explaining why I didn't pick Nath, the point of this build is bringing my favorite deck to my favorite format. So if it doesn't feel like I'm playing the rack, it's already a loss for me, even if the deck magically gets to a point where it wins on t1 guaranteed no matter what 7 cards I draw. I'd rather lose playing the rack than win playing any other deck. Now The Rack itself is pretty useless in edh since it only hits one of our opponents. There are some rack-effects that hit all opponents, and they're here, but limiting the number of racks does force me to change my definition of what a rack is. So while ordinarily I'd call a rack things that punish opponents for having no cards in hand, for this deck I am willing to also include things that hurt them as they're discarding.

2) No generic good stuff Again, im playing the rack. I want everything I do to be focused on that. So Consecrated Sphinx is probably the best card advantage engine in edh, but I'm not gonna run it because it doesn't synergize with the discard theme.

3) No infinite combos

One of the reasons I picked crosis is because painter is unbanned right? Since I'm already running painter, I wanted to make other combos to utilize him beyond my commander. A lot of the combos are... extremely unfun when combined with infinite mana, forcing hard locks on the game. I built this deck to be fun, not to make the rules committee regret their decision to unban painter.so I decided either painter combos or infinite combos, and painter won.

I ended up allowing something close to an infinite combo in the form of Furnace of Rath + Megrim + Pain Magnification because it fits so well with the theme of the deck and it's not exactly infinite because it's limited by the number of cards in your opponents hands.

4) No (X) spells.

Not a huge thing, really. Just (X) spells are only really fun to me when I throw like 20 mana into them, and challenge 3 makes that virtually impossible. If it's not fun for me, it's not worth running. Thought for a long time about breaking this for Torment of Hailfire because the card does so much, but decided against it.

5) Deck has to be multiplayer ready

Edh, unlike modern, is not a single player format. As previously mentioned, cards like The Rack that take one opponent out are kind of bad, and don't do much but piss off whichever opponent you put them on. So, I decided all of my win cons have to hit all opponents equally, and most of my discard spells do the same. I allowed a few single target discard spells, some because they get just so much value for their mana ( Vicious Rumors ) and others because they can be recurred ( Raven's Crime ), but in general I try to mess with everyone's hand equally.

I noticed as I was building this deck that most of the cards it needed are rather cheap. I wanted it to have a painters servant, which is expensive, and liliana of the veil is kind of essential, but everything else was looking super cheap. I have more than a playset of lilis already, so I did not count her into the cost, but after seeing how cheap everything was I decided to make the deck relatively budget friendly. No specific dollar amount I wanted to keep the deck under, just wanted to try a deck that doesn't break my bank account and take me years to get all the pieces for. I didn't put this in the challenges because I didn't set out to make this a budget deck initially, but it did end up being budget (by my standards at least). For now I intend to keep it that way, at least until I get tired of it losing to decks that are more tuned. Please keep that in mind as you recommend cards for it.

Also up vote if you like the deck

Date added	4 years
Last updated	4 years
Key combos	Furnace of Rath + Megrim + Pain Magnification
Legality	This deck is Commander / EDH legal.
Rarity (main - side)	3 - 0 Mythic Rares 29 - 0 Rares 27 - 0 Uncommons 14 - 0 Commons
Cards	100
Avg. CMC	3.02
Tokens	Zombie 2/2 B
Folders	Decks