Plaguecrafter

Creature — Human Shaman

When this enters the battlefield, each player sacrifices a creature or planeswalker. Each player who can't discards a card.

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
Quest Magic	Legal
Tiny Leaders	Legal
Vanguard	Legal
Vintage	Legal

Discussion (49)

DreadKhan on Meren Sacrifice Shenanigans

1 month ago

I see that you are taking a pretty different angle than I did here, but there might be a few cards that I can suggest from my own Meren and the Golgari Queens. Would Savra, Queen of the Golgari make sense in your list? It's a slightly different Grave Pact, but at 4 mana and easy to cast she can come out earlier, the life gain is a lot less important other than offsetting the payment for the effect.

I think they're about as fun as an untreatable toothache, but Grave Pact effects in my experience like you to run several of the Merciless Executioner type creatures that exist, Accursed Marauder is a great start, but I think Plaguecrafter and Demon's Disciple might fit. I don't know exactly how many you'd 'want', but I'd run 3-5 creatures that exist almost purely to make everyone sacrifice a creature. IMHO if you only run one or the other the Executioners are probably the better include since you can get them out sooner, they stand alone (Grave Pact does nothing if you don't have a creature), and you can recur them with your Commander, but both are INCREDIBLY nasty when combined. In the decks I have that use edicts you really want to reach 'critical mass', so that you both have access to an Edict when it's necessary, but also have enough to continuously pare back the opponent's board.

This is a personal preference more than anything, but when I play Meren my fondest hope is usually to have a creature that ramps me that also kills itself; Sakura Tribe Elder is the 'gold standard' of the effect, but I think you could benefit from Diligent Farmhand and Dawntreader Elk, and maybe Yavimaya Granger. I even run Fertilid and Burnished Hart, but I don't think I'd recommend them to anyone else at this point! Anyways, the idea is you juggle one of these to both gain XP for Meren while ramping yourself, and when you draw something better to reanimate just reanimate that. The ramp is usually very useful to cast either Protean Hulk or Razaketh.

Speaking of Razaketh, I found it VERY useful to have mass untap effect to go with Life/Death, once Life/Death makes all your lands into weenies you can untap them with something like Vitalize or Benefactor's Draught. I also threw in a Songs of the Damned and Dark Ritual to help generate mana when I'm short. Lotus Petal is also a very good Razaketh card if you don't want to spring for Lion's Eye DiamondGC.

Just a little tip I stumbled upon, most Meren decks have very high Black devotion, but they rely heavily on early Green ramp; I really wanted to shave lands for creatures in my list, but since I can find Swamps with Forests via ramp, I ended up running WAY less Black sources than Green. I used 7 Basic Swamps and 2 Swamp/Forest duals, and I find I have very few fixing issues, even with a very low land count, since I almost never need more than 2 lands early on, and I found the deck absolutely hated drawing into them (Meren is a deck where I feel like you're supposed to run all the creature ramp you can, because Meren cares so much about Creatures and so little about non-creature spells, lands are dead draws).

I guess that brings me to the last point, I feel like you should really try to get more creatures into this list; your Commander does absolutely nothing if you don't have creatures in the graveyard. I have 57 in the 99 atm, I feel like having less than 40 in a Meren deck is too few. The nice thing about creatures is that Golgari has a LOT of creature synergies, I love using Lurking Predators or Heartwood Storyteller.

If you want more specific help feel free to ask!

SaberTech on How can you pack enough …

2 months ago

legendofa's comment about assessing that you and your group are playing with the same game expectations and power level is a good point to start with. As for some suggestions about deck and play style:

You are right, you probably won't be able to pack enough removal into a deck to deal with all the potent threats that three opponents can potentially play against you. There's the option of running decks with cards like Grave Pact that give you repeatable ways to remove creatures throughout a game or engines that let you repeatedly reuse your removal like running Plaguecrafter or Foundation Breaker in a Muldrotha, the Gravetide deck. Those can help. However, if you are trying to run a control deck in commander like you would in a 1v1 game then you are probably going to have a tough time. 1-for-1 removal in commander is meant more for saving your skin or shutting down an opponent's key piece/play at an advantageous time, not a long-term plan of preventing an opponent access to any resources at all.

Something to remember is that even if each opponent has 20+ bombs in their deck, they aren't guaranteed to see all of them in a game. It also isn't on your shoulders to keep all threats under control. There are other players at the table who will have to be concerned about threats that get played. You can try to play in a way that puts pressure on opponents to deal with threats while you conserve your own removal for when you really need it. There is also the option of making deals with opponents.

In casual commander games, part of controlling opponents comes from just being able to match their boards with your own. An opponent shouldn't try trading off threats with you if all it does is weaken the two of you while your other two opponents are unaffected. Make attacking you look like a bad deal. A threat that is never aimed at you is one you don't have to think about how to remove, and hopefully it gets aimed at another opponent instead.

For a more dedicated control strategy, cards that deny actions may be more worthwhile over some pieces of single-target removal. Effects that tax opponents' mana to do things can slow down the game and give you time to get your own win-cons online. With both denial and removal, being able to hit/affect cards that each of your opponents control with only a single card is the sort of value you would prefer if you can manage.

Cards that let you permanently steal an opponent's card on board let you you spend one card to build up your board state while removing a resource from an opponent. That's better than just trading cards 1-for-1 and potentially giving your other two opponents an edge. The cards that do that on their own tend to be 4+ mana though, so not always the most cost efficient. Setting up synergies between cards that let you do that sort of thing repeatedly is one way to go. As an example, I run Tergrid, God of FrightGC  ^Flip in my Vaevictis Asmadi, the Dire deck to get more value out of Vaevictis's ability.

At the end of the day though, the most effective way of taking a bunch of threats out of the game equation at once is player removal. You can't just focus on keeping opponents' boards clear of threats, you need to be building towards your own win-con as well. Defeating an opponent means no longer needing to deal with their threats. There can be advantages to sometimes being slower to play out your threats than your opponents but if you know you aren't running enough ways to deal with all of their threats in time then being able to take out an opponent may be your best option for controlling the flow of the game.

DreadKhan on Rachel's Liesa Commander Deck

2 months ago

It's about as fun as having a 'kick each other in the nuts' competition for game night, but I feel like this Commander would benefit from some stuff like Merciless Executioner, Plaguecrafter, and Accursed Marauder. The idea is you just play one of the many variants on the theme (there are many more), sacrificing itself each time, and then get it back to play again next turn. I had to limit myself in my Meren list to only 3 of them (and no Grave Pact enchantments), but depending on your play group it could be a significant inclusion.

DemonDragonJ on Angrath's Rampage or Gravelighter?

1 year ago

RiotRunner789, I actually already have Plaguecrafter in that deck, so I agree that Gravelighter would be nice, for the redundancy.

RiotRunner789 on Angrath's Rampage or Gravelighter?

1 year ago

Angrath's rampage is a sorcery speed that has good utility at a cheap cost but doesn't target what you want removed. It works best when they only have 1 of something.

Gravelighter synergizes better since everyone sacs something (while you probably sac gravelighter). However, I don't like the draw card or sac clause. This could be easily manipulated by an opponent with removal or a sac outlet.

Out of the two, I'd go with the latter but would choose Plaguecrafter or one of the other half dozen variants to gravelighter.

Necramus on D-Rank Elder Dragon Hunts

1 year ago

Fog

Assassin's Trophy

Rise of the Witch-king

Poison-Tip Archer

Eternal Witness

Plaguecrafter

Demon's Disciple

Bala Ged Recovery  ^Flip

Timeless Witness

Arcane Signet

Sol Ring

Talisman of Resilience

Just some good synergies, generically good cards in your colors!

DemonDragonJ on Diabolical Machinations

1 year ago

I have replaced Consuming Aberration with Plaguecrafter, which reduced the average converted mana cost of this deck from 4.40 to 4.37, because the latter creature better fits the theme of this deck than did the former creature; this deck does not generate any tokens and has only a minimal focus on creature reanimation, so I shall need to sacrifice Plaguecrafter to its own ability, more often than not, but that shall still hurt my opponents and help advance this deck's strategy, which is a good thing.

Gidgetimer on Should I Keep Consuming Aberration …

1 year ago

The Mimeoplasm seems like the type of deck that Consuming Aberration would thrive in. I would cut it from the other 2 decks.

I'm not sure how much my replacement suggestions are going to be to your liking since I feel like your decks need mana ramp and you have been resistant to that suggestion in the past. So I would add a talisman to each deck. Since they are replacing a UB creature Talisman of Dominance is the easy one to name off, but any from the "pain lands, but as artifacts" cycle would do. To fulfil your "preferably creatures" requirement I'd say Grand Abolisher in Sen Triplets and Plaguecrafter for Thraximundar.