Matzalantli, the Great Door

Legendary Artifact

{T}: Draw a card, then discard a card.

{4}, {T}: Transform this. Activate this ability only if there are four or more permanent types among cards in your graveyard. (Artifact, battle, creature, enchantment, land and planeswalker are permanent types.)

Legality

Format	Legality
1v1 Commander	Legal
Alchemy	Legal
Archenemy	Legal
Arena	Legal
Block Constructed	Legal
Canadian Highlander	Legal
Casual	Legal
Commander / EDH	Legal
Commander: Rule 0	Legal
Custom	Legal
Duel Commander	Legal
Freeform	Legal
Gladiator	Legal
Highlander	Legal
Historic	Legal
Historic Brawl	Legal
Legacy	Legal
Leviathan	Legal
Limited	Legal
Modern	Legal
Modern Beyond Horizons	Legal
Oathbreaker	Legal
Pioneer	Legal
Planar Constructed	Legal
Planechase	Legal
Pre-release	Legal
Quest Magic	Legal
Standard	Legal
Standard Brawl	Legal
Tiny Leaders	Legal
Vanguard	Legal
Vintage	Legal

Discussion (4)

SaberTech on mimeo

1 month ago

I saw your post asking for help with cuts to the deck. Mimeoplasm decks are fun and there's all sorts of interactions to play around with so I get how it's tough to trim the list down.

I don't know what exactly you personally consider fun to play and what cards you are more inclined to keep in, so I think that it might be easier to just highlight what looks to be the core of the deck and try to build outwards from there.

Win-Cons:

• Necrotic Ooze + Phyrexian Devourer: I'm not sure when the change happened, but on Oracle the errata's text for the Devourer's activated exile ability now reads "Remove the top card of your library from the game: Put X +1/+1 counters on Phyrexian Devourer, where X is the removed card's converted mana cost. If Phyrexian Devourer's power is 7 or greater, sacrifice it." Before, you never had to worry about the sacrifice part because it was a triggered ability so the Ooze didn't copy it. Now that the self-sacrifice effect is built into the activated ability it means that the Ooze will kill itself if it activates the ability and ends up going to 7+ power. I don't think this combo is feasible anymore and that you can cut it.

• Blightsteel Colossus: You don't have a way to reanimate or copy this at instant speed in response to its shuffle trigger when it is put in your graveyard, so your only way for it to stick on the board is if you hard-cast it. I don't think that it's worth the effort. And I think that most games will end before you risk decking yourself and needing the Colossus to keep shuffling itself into your library. I'd cut it from the deck.

• Blighted Agent/Skithiryx, the Blight Dragon + big creatures under Mimeoplasm: This is what I would consider your main means of knocking players out. Death's Shadow, Impervious Greatwurm, Lord of Extinction, Titanoth Rex, and Yargle and Multani are your main targets to remove for counters on Mimeoplasm, so these are 7 cards that should definitely be staying.

• Jin-Gitaxias, Core AugurGC: Reanimating this early in the game and getting it to stick is a backup win condition. Buried Alive, Entomb, Fauna Shaman, and Frantic Search are your best ways to try to get Jin into the graveyard. Animate Dead, Necromancy, Reanimate are your best ways to reanimate Jin early. So that's 8 cards you should definitely keep. Victimize helps too but it is a little unreliable early due to needing 2 targets in your graveyard. Still worth running in my opinion.

So that's 16 card + your commander that you know that you want to run to help you win. From there you can mark out the slots for land, ramp, draw, and interaction. What slots are left goes to what best supports you reaching your win conditions. You'll need to really consider which cards help you reach your win conditions and which are there more for fun.

Looking at your list, some things that I can note are:

• You shouldn't count thinks like Conduit of Worlds as ramp since they don't help you get ahead in mana. They just help make your land drop each turn. Matzalantli, the Great Door  ^Flip and Aftermath Analyst also don't help ramp you in the early game. So on the whole your deck is actually suffering from a pretty notable lack of cheap ramp.

• Cards that mill opponents but not you like Mindcrank, Psychic Corrosion, and Ruin Crab do technically help you by getting cards into your opponent's graveyards that you can reanimate or exile with Mimeoplasm. However, they are less useful to you overall than cards that can also mill you because you know that milling yourself helps you reach your deck's build-in win conditions while milling opponents is a gamble.

• Memory Plunder can be fun but you might be better off running a card you are pretty certain that you can use than gamble on useful opponents' cards ending up in the graveyard in a timely manner.

• Archon of Cruelty isn't as impactful in multiplayer games as it is in 1v1. It's still an ok reanimation target if you don't currently have anything better.

firasnake on Kaalia of the Waifu

4 months ago

That's what I'm going for!

For the mana, I think I've been hoping some of the indirect mana sources (blink or reanimate Lobelia Sackville-Baggins, steal mana rock with Yuffie, Materia Hunter, even out land advantage with Knight of the White Orchid, etc) would play out, but I definitely see what you mean. I added Arcane Signet and Orzhov Signet and added back Priest of Gix and Priest of Urabrask.

I can also see that I'm short on draw, and tutoring doesn't cover it. I strangely cut a few good options all at once and haven't noticed the hit yet, so good catch. I've added back in Matzalantli, the Great Door  ^Flip (which also helps with mana), Minas Tirith, and Shilgengar, Sire of Famine, along with your suggestion of Harvester of Souls, which puts me at 12 card advantage cards. I don't suppose I should go much more than that since my reanimate options are supplemental card advantage, particularly later-game.

Thanks for the insight!

ChocolatePuma on Toshiro

9 months ago

Profet93 Playing the deck has been a very unique experience - having an open board most of the time and cards that accelerate the gameplan at the cost of life creates a glass cannon that either results in an instant win, or a suspenseful game where I'm hoping one piece of a combo doesn't get nuked off the table. My playgroup is wise to the deck's tricks by now, but I always manage to pull a surprise win every now and then at my LGS - the fun of having so many wincons! My biggest struggle with this deck has been balancing how fast I can get to my wins without tutors or less complex combos; the thrill of the setup is the real payoff. I've been considering swapping out Opposition AgentGC with something less oppressive, and possibly replacing Grave Betrayal with Matzalantli, the Great Door  ^Flip for that draw you mentioned. Thank you for your suggestions!

ProgramIncomplete on The Mycotyrant

1 year ago

Sure thing!

When I decided to build this deck I really wanted to lean into the descend theme so I challenged myself to run as few non-permanent spells as possible. I think my initial list had like 1 or 2. Overtime, I ended up adding more since I realized I needed efficient self mill payoff cards like Reanimate and Overwhelming Remorse or else the deck was a little too clunky. Currently I'm running 9 but I'm looking for oppurtunites to cut some without losing power or efficiency.

But still, even though it isn't "pure permanents" I still tried my best to cover all of the deck's bases with permanent spells. We have permanents that can remove threats like Chupacabra Echo and Reclamation Sage; permanents that can draw cards like Skullclamp and Izoni, Thousand-Eyed; permanents that can ramp us like Sakura-Tribe Elder and Aftermath Analyst; permanents that mill like Mesmeric Orb and Ripples of Undeath; permanents that can bring stuff back from the grave like Journey to Eternity  ^Flip and Animate Dead; we even have The Meathook Massacre and Invasion of Fiora  ^Flip as our boardwipes.

One really nice upside to having everything our deck wants to do on permanent spells is that it makes cards like Malevolent Rumble and Cache Grab really consistent at grabbing something useful. And I recently added Revival Experiment which seems like a really nice payoff for going all in on permanents.

Anyway, the basic idea of this deck is self-milling and using my commander's ability to swarm the board with tokens. Usually we want to spend the first couple turns setting up, hopefully getting a repeatable mill effect on the battlefield like Mesmeric Orb or by pairing one of our dredge cards with a discard outlet like Matzalantli, the Great Door  ^Flip or Geier Reach Sanitarium. Once we've got our mill engine set up, then we can cast our commander. We want to make sure he triggers his end step ability the turn he enters so we can start getting our tokens online.

The tokens really are the core pillar of the deck. They can be sacrificed for value with cards like Skullclamp and Wight of the Reliquary; we can turn them into mana dorks with Insidious Roots; they can gain us a ton of life off of Essence Warden and Ayara, First of Locthwain; and they can present lethal by giving our Craterhoof Behemoth an army to buff. We also have the ability to drain the table to death with the aforementioned Ayara or Mirkwood Bats if we manage to mill enough cards. And of course, since they pump our commander, we can also win with commander damage.

Since we're milling so much the deck also has a reanimator subtheme. Reanimate and Animate Dead can bring back wincon creatures like Craterhoof and Ayara. Squirming Emergence can reanimate any permanent so it's an awesome way to put planeswalkers into play or snag an engine piece or even wipe the board with Invasion of Fiora  ^Flip. Similarly, Rise of the Witch-king let's us bring back any permanent while also forcing our opponents to sack a creature which is nice.

A new card that I'm actually testing right now is Chthonian Nightmare. The fact that it's a repeatable reanimate effect for only 2 mana seems really strong. And even if you don't "charge it up" by repeatedly reanimating creatures that cost less than 3, roughly 75% of the creatures in my deck are 3 or less anyway and among those are some really impactful targets like Eternal Witness, Reclamation Sage, Six, and Accursed Marauder just to name a few. Very excited to see how it performs!

Alongside the reanimator subtheme we have an aristocrats subtheme. As mentioned earlier the tokens make great fodder for stuff like Skullcamp and Wight. And we have creatures that either sack themselves, like Sakura-Tribe Elder and Aftermath Analyst, or want to be sacrificed, like World Shaper. All that sacrificing can net us additional value off of Liliana, Dreadhorde General or Mirkwood Bats since he triggers on token sacrifice as well. We also have Disciple of Freyalise  ^Flip, a great reanimation target that can draw us a ton of cards by sacrificing our creatures that grow in size as our graveyard does like Splinterfright and Souls of the Lost.

So yeah, that's the deck. It can be a bit slow and the lack of instant speed interaction is definitely a drawback but overall I like it a lot and it can have some explosive turns. You just have to be careful not to mill yourself out which is why I added in Kozilek, Butcher of Truth. He's a bit random so I might replace him with Elixir of Immortality. We'll see.

P.S. Apologies for the long winded reply, hopefully it was insightful.