Grave Pact

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Legality

Format Legality
1v1 Commander Legal
Archenemy Legal
Block Constructed Legal
Canadian Highlander Legal
Casual Legal
Commander / EDH Legal
Commander: Rule 0 Legal
Custom Legal
Duel Commander Legal
Highlander Legal
Legacy Legal
Leviathan Legal
Limited Legal
Modern Legal
Oathbreaker Legal
Planechase Legal
Premodern Legal
Quest Magic Legal
Vanguard Legal
Vintage Legal

Grave Pact

Enchantment

Whenever a creature you control dies, each other player sacrifices a creature.

griffstick on infinite rats

2 weeks ago

You know what. Now that I am thinking of mean cards. Dictate of Erebos and/or Grave Pact would be a good inclusion since your commander can trigger the card very easily.

SufferFromEDHD on A Powerful Rat

2 months ago

This is a really solid rat tribal deck! Don't get distracted like Volrath ("If there is such a thing as too much power, I have not discovered it." - Dark Ritual)

Cut one copy of Rat Colony for the Piper. 25% is a great ratio for your Thrumming Stone engine.

You have 7 non rat creatures... I think you could afford to make 3 cuts:

Gray Merchant of Asphodel is just good stuff. Does nothing for this strategy.

Species Specialist is fantastic! while Erebos, God of the Dead seems lackluster although the static ability is neat. Necropotence does it better.

Sheoldred, Whispering One is an EDH bomb but you are already running Attrition, Dictate of Erebos, Grave Pact AND No Mercy.

Crow-Umbra on Salty Commanders!

2 months ago

Hi grumbledore, I've noticed that quite a few of the following cards are uncategorized, and figured they could fit into some of the following categories you have on site:

This is not an exhaustive list, but some of the ones I noticed from looking at my own deck categories.

DreadKhan on EDH Merens Reanimator

3 months ago

When I built my Meren deck, I found that even with a pretty Black heavy deck, it was nice to run more Green than Black mana sources, since my Green ramp fixed my Black mana. I also cut lands for repeatable (and potentially repeatable) ramp like Diligent Farmhand or the Dawntreader you're considering, these can not only help get Meren out early, they give her something very useful to do with her ability as soon as she's out. There are quite a few now, but I only run ones that can find swamps. I also run a couple cards like Wood Elves, which don't sac themselves but can be sacrificed for value as soon as Meren is out. Using these types of cards allows my fairly low land Meren deck to be extremely rampy if Meren stays out. You can also run lots of 1 mana dorks in Meren, including Elves of Deep Shadow and knock-off Llanowar Elves.

I also find it's hard to run enough card draw, stuff like Grim Haruspex and Midnight Reaper or Beast Whisperer can draw a bunch of cards, and all of them are creatures. This brings me to another point, I found that in Meren that it's hard to run too many utility creatures of various sorts, you can do an astonishing amount of stuff with creatures in Golgari, I presently have 55 creatures in the 99, which makes cards like Lurking Predators insane and Heartwood Storyteller lots of fun, because Meren decks are also pretty good at pressuring the board, it's hard to know how many of the various Demon's Disciple family of cards you should run, but they feel pretty decent in Meren in my experience, if a bit obnoxious. There are also more cards like Grave Pact, Dictate of Erebos, as well as Savra, Queen of the Golgari, these are all super-obnoxious in a deck that likes to sacrifice stuff. One really weird 'one creature toolbox' is Callous Bloodmage, this can do a bunch of stuff and can be worth recurring if you can get it killed.

Not sure if you've ever come across these, they are old and rare even in Commander, but I find Ritual of the Machine and Helm of Possession can do work in Meren, the Helm is a sac outlet that grabs the best creature on the board. It rarely lasts too long, but it's a very strong effect if you're not worried about running artifacts. Ritual is nice and compact, you sac something you want dead to steal the best thing in a way that's hard to interact with for many decks. Final Parting is an interesting card in Meren, you can put a Protean Hulk or Razaketh, the Foulblooded, maybe Sheoldred into the graveyard and a Reanimate into hand, so it's 6 or 7 mana to put your best creature into play from the library.

If you want any ideas about infinite (or non-infinite) combos that can win games, I read a lot of Meren deck Primers, so I might have some ideas if you want to have that option.

Very good deck so far, hope you enjoy testing it!

spaghetti_police on 'Whatcha gonna do about it?'

3 months ago

SirHipHopHippo


Tome of Legends I will definitely try out, a good 2 mana colorless draw engine is hard to find.

Preston, the Vanisher does have a nice ETB doubler but Elesh Norn, Mother of Machines fills much a similar role. I still haven't figured out which card I can remove from the list, that's the hardest part lmao.

Kaya, Intangible Slayer has really nice abilities and you can use all 3 immediately. Planeswalkers work well in a deck full of board wipes and the card draw for 0 is really nice, the scry one for the opponents is political and not too advantageous.

I love Orzhov because of the 'Death and Taxes' theme. I go easy on the 'taxes' so that opponents worry about each other more than myself. The Gain and Drain is what I use to offset the life loss from artifacts and enchantments and card draw, I avoid increasing the cost of spells since I require fast mana to operate. The 'Death' aspect manifests itself in the form of board wipes and creatures meant to be played directly after a board wipe, most creatures I play offer a lot of value individually to control the board alone or in combination. I am a sucker for either Elesh Norn or cards like Ethereal Absolution.


I checked out your Obzedat deck, it looks like you have a lot of high synergy within your deck. I would recommend Elesh Norn, Grand Cenobite because of the group buff/opponents debuff, playgroups tend to hate that card though.

Other card to think about would be:

Many of those came from my Karador deck, which has a similar creature ETB playstyle. I listed many with the hope at least one will be helpful. I'm glad I'm not the only one who sees value in this commander still!

Masterful on Necronomicon | Teysa Karlov | Primer

4 months ago

kirbysan Mondrak is very versatile as a creature, but I think I agree with you it doesn't do enough for us as is. We focus more on death triggers than token generation, so it doesn't get as much value in our deck as it would a pure token deck. It also conflicts with Teysa as a 4-drop engine-support card. The sac outlet is nice, but having to sac 2 creatures each time and costing 1 mana makes it sorta awkward. It's a great blocker which is nice, and I wouldn't blame anyone for playing it, but it's not efficient enough.

If you're getting color screwed with the new mana base, that's unfortunate, but even with a perfect mana base you'll be color screwed, flooded, or mana screwed sometimes. Because it takes so long to play EDH games, and everyone's meta is different, getting good experimental data is hard. Sample size is always low, so finding the best strategy relies on theoretical stats. You getting mana screwed right after changing the mana base probably may feel like a strong correlation, but it's still anecdotal and probably a coincidence. I'm yet to be mana screwed and have found the new mana base strong given that it counters a lot of strong cards in the meta, but that's also anecdotal. In theory, this amount of dual lands should be good enough to make sure we aren't color screwed a significant amount of the time. That being said, if your meta isn't playing the counter cards much and you have the fetchlands lying around, or if you like playing fetchlands, play them. It's not a huge difference in the functionality of the deck.

jelwell Weatherlight Compleated is definitely at its best on turn 2, but that also has an opportunity cost of not developing a ramp piece or fodder creature. It takes so long to get online without Teysa that I'm pretty pessimistic about it at this point. If you have a Bolas's Citadel on board, you're really ahead anyway.

I'm not a fan of Transmogrant's Crown since we already have many Skullclamp tutors, and it's much worse than clamp. If I wanted another clamp I'd play Steelshaper's Gift before this one. But if someone is making a budget Teysa list and doesn't have many tutors, crown might be good there.

I still don't know what to do with Sanguinary Priest. If he were 3 mana, he'd be a slam dunk, but 4 is competing with Grave Pact and the likes. Being able to control the board with this much precision could be powerful, but I'm still considering it.

kirbysanjelwell I'm more disappointed in the new dominus than I thought. I was hoping it'd have the same sac-indestructible ability as Mondrak. Not only do we not get a sac outlet, but the indestructible counter is pretty hard to get early on and might hurt us. At 5 mana, he's just a weaker Teysa in our 99, which stacks worse than Luminous Broodmoth. We can't afford to play too many clones of Teysa in the 99 anyway since they're expensive and clog our hand. If we have Teysa out alongside some death triggers, we're already super ahead. Much like Ratadrabik of Urborg, this card is overkill when ahead and super bad when behind.

multimedia on Gisa, Zom Zom Queen *Work In Progress*

4 months ago

Hey, well done so far, but I think you overestimate needing so many buffs (anthems).

All the artifacts for anthem effects is overkill, you have tutors that can get the better anthem. Adding more repeatable draw sources can do more for gameplay than anthems because more reliable draw helps to draw the better anthems. Coat of Arms, Eldrazi Monument and The Immortal Sun are much better than the other artifact anthems here.

In my opinion anthem effects to be worth playing need to also have card quality for the mana cost. Instruments of War and Hall of Triumph are bad cards, only providing a small anthem effect nothing else for their mana cost isn't good enough to take deck spots. Obelisk of Urd is subpar, but at least it can be mana cost reduced even to 0 with Zombies. Bad Moon is only 2 mana, but there's greater two drops that have much better card quality. Heraldic Banner can be a mana rock, but even so you can do better for a three drop.

Adaptive Automaton is a creature who Gisa can sac and who can be a Zombie lord (anthem), but it's a bad card compared to all other Zombie lords who provide another good repeatable effect. Icon of Ancestry and Vanquisher's Banner aren't worth it since there's too many nonZombie creatures here. You can get more reliable repeatable draw from other sources.

You have Crypt Ghast, Cabal Coffers and tutors to get them, you don't need Caged Sun and Gauntlet of Power mana effects. These cards are better in mono white, red or blue because these colors can really use the mana ramp. Liliana's Mastery is a very low budget five drop for Zombies, not needed here.


There's several cards in the maybeboard to consider adding main deck if you have them. Areas to focus on improving with cards from the maybeboard are early game ramp, repeatable draw for only you, reanimation and more Zombie evasion.

Other cards to consider adding from the maybeboard.

Some cards to consider cutting:

Good luck with your deck.

Rhadamanthus on Piper of the Swarm and …

5 months ago

Your opponent will be able to sacrifice the creature you target. Grave Pact will trigger while you're paying the cost of Piper of the Swarm's ability, and that means its triggers will be put onto the stack on top of Piper's ability and will start resolving first. You had to choose a target as part of activating Piper, so your opponent will know that when it's time for them to sacrifice something. The upside is that you can use this as a way to influence what they choose to sacrifice.

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