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Legality
| Format | Legality |
| 1v1 Commander | Legal |
| Archenemy | Legal |
| Big Apple Highlander | 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 |
| Oathbreaker | Legal |
| Pauper | Legal |
| Pauper Duel Commander | Legal |
| Pauper EDH | Legal |
| Planar Constructed | Legal |
| Planechase | Legal |
| Premodern | Legal |
| Quest Magic | Legal |
| Tiny Leaders | Legal |
| Vanguard | Legal |
| Vintage | Legal |
Songs of the Damned
Instant
Gain for each creature card in your graveyard.
DreadKhan on
Meren Sacrifice Shenanigans
1 day 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 Diamond.
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!
Icbrgr on
Budget Cycle Storm
2 months ago
Whenever I see Fluctuator it makes me happy; It is my Premodern deck and I ran Gavi, Nest Warden in EDH!
That being said I highly suggest that cards without cycling get reduced to 4 at the most; including basic lands and payoff cards like Songs of the Damned get reduced to just 1 copy because as you cycle with Fluctuator you'll end up drawing cards that don't cycle (like your other copies of fluctuator) and end up fizzling out. Some budget sauce is a single copy of Dromar's Cavern or any land of that cycle (pun indented) is very helpful and can feel like Lotus Petal in this deck.... and Drain Life is another card to consider at a single copy!
P.S. watch out for the Stabilizer Mafia!
shadowjules on
Budget Cycle Storm
2 months ago
Hey QuantumGeckoGuy! Very cool deck man, I tinkered with something like this for a while as well.
I tinkered with a similar concept for ages. Instead of looking to scale with Drannith Stinger and Marauding Mako, mine had a combo win with Lotleth Giant, and a secondary beatdown plan with Hollow One and Chitin Gravestalker. The deck DESPERATELY needs to cut down as much as humanly possible on any card without cycling. I think running Dark Ritual is a mistake, as you can get similar results with 4 copies of Lotus Petal - when churning through your deck, you can combo off so much earlier with you effectively know you can consistently find free bursts of 1 mana to cast Songs of the Damned. The difference between your bursts of mana costing (1) and costing (0) is huge. Running Lotus Petal is extra good when accompanied by a suite of (1) cost cyclers. Drannith Stinger is a good start, but I would run every creature with a (1) mana cycling ability ever printed - it just adds a crazy amount of consistency. I've found that 38 to 40 creatures with cycling in the deck is ideal for a 1 turn combo kill.
Finding lands is extra easy with cards like Troll of Khazad-dum and Oliphaunt. With the amount of cards that cycling lets you see, you really don't want to mulligan. These landcycling cards are huge because they often allow you a turn 1 tutor of a land in the early game (Troll of Khazad-dum gets you Fetid Pools and Oliphaunt gets you Canyon Slough). You can tutor for a land turn one either with an untapped Ash Barrens or the strict upgrade in Capital City that also filters your mana, or again with a turn 1 Lotus Petal. Later in the game, the land cyclers are never dead draws, because they tutor for a dual land, that also ends up cycling away, letting you see more cards and remove more lands from your deck as you combo off.
Crucially for the combo win, Lotleth Giant only cares about creatures in your graveyard, so do keep that in mind when comboing off. I tend to split my graveyard into two piles - 1 with creatures and 1 with noncreature spells (cycled lands, lotus petals, and so on). The combo turn needs to resolve a Songs of the Damned to cast Lotleth Giant usually, but thats not always super hard. A sideboard tech of Miscalculation really helps protect this here. Also 2 Shadow of the Grave is usually enough to stop your deck from running out of steam, especially since you run out of steam after seeing like around 30-40 cards in your deck. Again, Lotus Petal is so useful here.
Finally, I've found that you CAN run 3 fluctuators and not 4 if you're able to have a split of cycling cards with a low enough curve. This deck really wants to minimize the turns it spends not spending mana, so again, Ash Barrens and Capital City not entering tapped is really important, same for your Lotus Petal. These untapped mana sources, along with 1 mana landcyclers and 1 mana cycling creatures gets this deck to be much more consistent and much faster.
Built like this, the Hollow Ones / Chitin Gravestalker Beatdown plan is more of a trick to trip up your opponent rather than a primary win condition. When your opponent plans to counter your big combo turn, dumping 2 4/4s and a 5/4 onto the battlefield really early can be backbreaking. THese are the matchups where something like Drannith Stinger is just a lot less useful as a pinger, and I would think of Marauding Mako and Drannith Stinger as plank cards with cycling rather than win conditions.
This deck has trouble against certain kinds of graveyard hate. It never targets anything in the graveyard, and never looks to play things directly out of your graveyard, so cards like Grafdigger's Cage and Soulless Jailer don't do anything. But cards that exile our whole graveyard or stop cards from getting to the graveyard (Rest in Piece / Leyline of the Void / Soul-Guide Lantern) make the Lolteth gameplan obsolete. Sideboarding in Ominous Seas still turns out cycling card draw into massive beaters, and this can still let us combo into two or three 8/8s to threaten a short clock.
The deck has some potential and honestly is a ton of fun to tinker with. I've been iterating on it for ages myself. Here's my list if you're at all curious (Ignore the silly name and out-of-date descriptions, its a little messy and I started it 5 years ago in high school). Deck: deck-large:cycling-coombo-deck
SufferFromEDHD on
4 months ago
Wheel of Fate or Reforge the Soul the gas this deck needs
Songs of the Damned might be useful
Expedition Map > Wayfarer's Bauble
leovolt884_ on
Zubera Zubera ずべら
4 months ago
So since you asked, here's my stupid idea: Mill yourself. a ton. I know, that doesnt really work with the zubera's but there's more. Once you have 6 or more creatures in your graveyard you can profit. With Archaeomancer, Ardent Elementalist, any mana filterer like Prismite and any sac outlet like Makeshift Munitions in play you can win with the red zubera. Cast Ghostly Flicker and return the flicker + Songs of the Damned to your hand. Cast songs, filter 2 black into a blue, cast flicker, repeat. accrue infinite mana. Cast Exhume
or some reanimation spell to return Ember-Fist Zubera to play, sac it, and cast flicker again this time returning the flicker and exhume to hand. Repeat. The zubera don't care how many are in your graveyard, just how many went there this turn. It's like going to an arcade and just pushing a baskteball in and out of the hoop to get a ton of points. This is stupid, and a horrible infinite combo, but its a thing.
These creatures are just horrendously bad. For advice otherwise I can just say play control, maybe some fogs, lots of card draw and ramp. Try to sac your board and maybe do some Songs of the Damned shenanigans to recur one or two but really don't stress about making the strategy good. It's jank, and is quite funny, and holds a special place on the more casual wincons of decks
Crow_Umbra on
Ratica Apocalyptica
8 months ago
No prob Craeter! The only other fairly cheap mana accelerators that I can think of are some of the various Ritual effects like:
capwner on
Oops, All Bugs!! 2: Electric Bugaloo
1 year ago
Thanks SufferFromEDHD! Yeah Songs of the Damned is a pretty core part of our gameplan here :) I've never built belcher in EDH before so this was fun, I'd like to try a 4 or 5 color list sometime. I saw one on here that looked cool where you used 5c Sisay to tutor Inventors' Fair to tutor the Belcher. I think 5c could be a lot of fun just because you could run a lot more mdfc land and build it more like a normal deck. I am also playing around with an idea for a budget version of this deck that uses The Chain Veil to grist ult same turn and kill without needing the Yawgmoth's Will or Lion's Eye Diamond, the main cost for the deck. Thanks for checking out the list :)
SufferFromEDHD on
Oops, All Bugs!! 2: Electric Bugaloo
1 year ago
Nice seeing a unique glass cannon! I have run a boring 4 color Belcher with 4 mountain duals before but this is a unique twist.
Songs of the Damned you need all the mana you can get and this gets big.
