Combos
Mairsil, the Pretender
+
Tree of Perdition
+
Hateflayer
= Instakill one player for
Mairsil, the Pretender
+
Soul of New Phyrexia
+
Nevinyrral's Disk
= Wipe opponents artifacts, creatures and enchantments for .
Combo idea credit goes to reddit users McBossly & philosifer
Cage
Mirror-Mad Phantasm
Mill your whole library
Get a
Narcomoeba
into battlefield
Unearth
Fatestitcher
Play
Gravecrawler
from yard as Fatestitcher is a zombie.
Flashback
Dread Return
sacrificing all.
Target
Necrotic Ooze
in your yard.
Tap Necrotic Ooze with
Kiki-Jiki, Mirror Breaker
copying itself (Getting Haste from
Anger
. Make infinite Noozes, untap with
Cinderhaze Wretch
and swing for lethal or sacrifice all to
Mogg Fanatic
.
Necrotic Ooze goes infinite with card:Shauku and
Cinderhaze Wretch
, makes you exile all creatures infinitely.
i like
Grinning Ignus
in mine. its limited to sorcery speed, but it helps recast mairsil from your hand for 1 cheaper plus a mana for somewhere else
card:twisting abomination lets you swampcycle it to make sure of a land drop, then cage it from the yard for regenerate. dodges a lot more removal than people think.
Pestilent Souleater
gives infect which can really deter people form attacking into you for fear of crackback.
Patron of the Moon
ramp in blue? yes please
Magus of the Wheel
and
Jace's Archivist
since you dont care if half your deck is in the yard anyway, why not wheel every turn. play the things that you need to and just cage from the yard. so good.
my favorite one though is
Civilized Scholar
for just a tap, you can loot. and if you discard a creature spell (like 30% of the deck) you get to untap mairsil, ready to do more shenanigans. becuase mairsil doesnt have a back side, he cant transform
Flicker
Flicker mairsil
Mairsil, the Pretender
for survival or to just get another value card exiled.
Haste enablers
Untap
return to hand
Value
Mirage Mirror
I love this card. The possibilities are endless. Copy that
Consecrated Sphinx
when an opponent starts drawing cards, or dodge things like
Cyclonic Rift
by paying to turn into a land. keep in mind tho if
Mairsil, the Pretender
uses
Mirage Mirror
s ability, then
Mairsil, the Pretender
can't use any activated abilities anymore that turn.
More than once per turn
Mairsil, the Pretender
says "you may activate each of those abilities only once each turn." Theese are the cards we use to get around that.
Deadeye Navigator
Quicksilver Elemental
can copy
Mairsil, the Pretender
to get all the abilities. Or
Mairsil, the Pretender
can copy him/herself (if
Quicksilver Elemental
is exiled with
Mairsil, the Pretender
) for to get "another round" of activated abilities.
INspiration:
https://articles.edhrec.com/forgotten-harvest-mairsil-pretending-to-be-a-voltron/
https://articles.edhrec.com/commander-showdown-mairsil-vs-experiment-kraj/
https://articles.edhrec.com/ultra-budget-brews-mairsil-the-pretender/
Notable Inclusions
Infernal Denizen
This doesn’t even see play in the most casual of Demon tribal decks, probably because its equal parts bad and old. The drawback on it is simply brutal, much worse than anything you see on more modern Demons. That being said, its activated ability is great, giving us a way to clear out difficult blockers or beating our opponents in to a stupor with their own win condition.
Quicksilver Elemental
When researching for this article, I read an article by EDHREC’s own Robin Kass, who wrote a great article about
Mairsil, the Pretender
last July. Since he did such a great job, I figured I’d let him explain how Quicksilver interacts with
Mairsil, the Pretender
:
“This is a weird card, and it works with the commander in a very particular way. For example, we cage
Quicksilver Elemental
and
Morphling
. The latter grants a bunch of different activated abilities to
Mairsil, the Pretender
but we can only activate each of them once. However, we can also activate
Quicksilver Elemental
’s ability, targeting the commander itself. This grants
Mairsil, the Pretender
another instance of each activated ability on both of these cards, which of course haven’t been activated yet. This makes for all sorts of crazy infinite combos, and
Quicksilver Elemental
is thus one of the strongest cards in the deck.”
Well said.
Shifty Doppelganger
This card allows you to cheat expensive creatures in to play, flickers
Mairsil, the Pretender
, and puts creatures into the graveyard so that they can be caged. It’s an absolute home run in this deck and is not a card you’re opponents are likely to have seen before, giving you those sweet, sweet hipster points.
Morphling
This card is essentially a cheaper
AEtherling
that untaps instead of blinking. If that doesn’t sound like it’s worth the $12 price tag, you’re right. It’s only that expensive because it’s on the Reserved List. That being said, it is great in this deck and if you want to power it up, this card definitely does the trick.
Tree of Perdition
Remember
Tree of Perdition
’s drawback of only setting your opponent’s life to 13? What if you could set it to 4? How about using
AEtherling
or
Torchling
and setting them to actual
Lightning Bolt
range instead? If that sounds fun, it’s because it is. This card seems like the exact kind of party I want to invite all of my friends to.
Hateflayer
A
Spikeshot Elder
that has an easier-to-activate cost and also untaps is exactly the sort of creature this deck wants. Wizards, reprint the untap symbol, please.
Gilded Lotus
This card is a bit overrated in most non-artifact-based commander decks, but the ability to make colored mana is huge. Most of the best possible turns with
Mairsil, the Pretender
somehow involve
Gilded Lotus
and because of its recent reprinting, it should be easy to find and acquire through trades.
AEtherling
+ card:Nevinnyral’s Disk: card:Nevinnyral’s Disk has a lot of uses, especially in Planeswalker decks, since it destroys all nonland permanents except planeswalkers. However,
Mairsil, the Pretender
uses Disk in ways even Planeswalkers can barely fathom. Take careful note of the Disk’s wording: it doesn’t sacrifice itself as part of the activation cost. Thus, if
Mairsil, the Pretender
activates his Disk ability, you can hold priority, and then activate the
AEtherling
ability. This will blink
Mairsil, the Pretender
off the battlefield, then destroy all nonland, nonplaneswalker permanents. After the carnage,
Mairsil, the Pretender
returns safely at the beginning of the next end step, and can cage another card along the way. You can continually keep the board clear of all pesky permanents until you’re ready to win the game. Alternatively, you can use
Soul of New Phyrexia
’s ability to make all of your permanents indestructible, leaving only your board intact but demolishing everyone else’s!
Finally, direct your attention to the cards
Mairsil, the Pretender
can’t cage.
Buried Alive
,
Fact or Fiction
,
Faithless Looting
,
Windfall
, and several more. These cards are
Mairsil, the Pretender
’s lifeblood.
Mairsil, the Pretender
needs to find his precious underlings before he can cage them. He’d rather not cage a card from his hand; if he enters the battlefield and exiles a card from your hand, but immediately falls to a
Terminate
, you’ll have paid a whole lot of mana to discard a card. That doesn’t feel good.
Instead,
Mairsil, the Pretender
uses his spells to put his precious treasures in the graveyard, while drawing other useful cards along the way. Use
Faithless Looting
and friends to discard your
Morphling
s, where
Mairsil, the Pretender
can exile them later. Looting effects help supply your commander with targets while keeping you up on card advantage.
Lastly, I have to quickly highlight a card I’ve already mentioned in a prior combo:
AEtherling
. This is the #1 card for
Mairsil, the Pretender
, showing up in 89% of
Mairsil, the Pretender
decks on EDHREC. That’s a higher percentage than
Sol Ring
, which is at 86%.
Quicksilver Elemental
and
Havengul Lich
can do more than just copy activated abilities: if Mairsil is on the field, they can borrow his activated abilities.
Looking at the decklist below reveals the large number of artifacts in this Grixis build, so it makes sense to include
Syndicate Trafficker
, both for the easy +1/+1 counter, but also the protection of indestructibility it can grant to
Mairsil, the Pretender
when caged. It sees play in 248 decks, but offers some much needed protection in this deck to our critically important commander.
