Borborygmos Enraged is an unorthodox commander. One that fits right into his colors, but is still very different. He takes cards that make you question why they were printed, and grants them new and terrifying power. He is a commander for those that aren't afraid to take risks, for those who aren't afraid to use cards for purposes they were never intended to be used for. He is a commander for the bold and the unhinged. When his bizarre methods are fully embraced, Borborygmos offers enormous amounts of fun, satisfaction, and unholy firepower.
There are varying ways to build Borborygmos Enraged. Lands matter that focuses on using a freakishly high land count (60 - 70+), graveyard decks that focus on the land discard aspect, and I've even seen a spellslinger build that used prowess creatures to take advantage of all the ramp spells they were using. I focus mostly on the damage that is dealt by the discarded lands, aiming to pump their damage as much as possible and leaning hard into using them as many times as I can. We do also employ some combos as a backup plan. Our overall doctrine for the deck is this: ramp, protect, draw, kill, repeat.
General Strategy
Ramp: While technically cramming your ramp package full of cheap rocks and dorks will accomplish this in the shortest amount of time, one board wipe and you're left with 3 lands and a distinct sense of dread. Instead, trying to get out as many lands as you can as fast as you can is more reliable in the long term. The only issue is that our damage is dependent on being able to draw and launch as many lands as we can, something that deck thinning and having 20 lands on our board directly works against. We'll go over ways to deal with this in a moment. So while rocks and dorks leave as many lands as possible in your stockpile to weaponize, using them instead of land ramp is only setting yourself up for failure. There are two flavors of land ramp: playing more lands, and tutoring for lands. While you should have some degree of both, I've skewed the list towards tutoring. Other Borborygmos lists have a bunch of cards that fetch lands out of your library and put them into your hand like Seek the Horizon. While there's nothing wrong with these effects, we want to draw into a critical mass of lands rather than just grab 2 or 3, which is something I'll cover later. Because our draw is largely based on using Borborygmos' power stat and wheeling existing cards, drawing into lands to play in order to ramp out our general is difficult, so tutoring lands directly into play is better for us regarding the other parts of the deck. The early game is also where we want to put down our support cards we'll be using later. Don't worry about them getting blown up, because we can hopefully bait our opponents into blowing removal on that stuff instead of our commander. We also want to be spending removal on taking out threats that can be a problem later, since we'll be blowing most of our resources on killing players.
Protect: Your 8 mana commander is now finally out and ready to rumble! Now what? Well, at least one (more likely multiple) of your opponents are probably stopping you to inform that an attempt is being made on his life. While this step won't always be necessary or applicable, you do have some tools to stave off some removal. Not of this World, Bolt Bend are great options that are 1 mana (or less!) to bust out the turn you play him. While we want our general out as fast as possible, waiting for 1 more mana to get both Borborygmos and Bolt Bend out the same turn is worth it. The only other thing to note here is because of our power (and target) based draw, don't use things like Lightning Greaves and Whispersilk Cloak on him or most of your gas will fizzle. Also, don't forget that you can hold back lands in hand for political purposes when you go to cast Borborygmos. Plenty of times I've dissuaded removal attempts by threatening 15 damage as a trade.
Draw: Here's where the real fun happens. We have Borborygmos, he's safe (for now, hopefully), so now we need ammo. Use spells like Garruk, Primal Hunter (-3 and killing him immediately), Return of the Wildspeaker, and Rishkar's Expertise to draw 7 cards or more to try and get a bunch of lands into hand and throw them. Since we use a lot of power based draw targeting Bobo, Xenagos, God of Revels doubles Bobo's power and we can draw 14 cards instead of 7. After you've depleted your hand of lands, use the wheels like Reforge the Soul, Imposing Grandeur, or Change of Fortune to dump the rest and see if you can get more lands. You can draw into 20+ lands chaining some of these mass draw and wheels together, and with some damage multipliers it easily becomes lethal damage for more than one player later in the game. Knollspine Dragon is probably our strongest draw spell and can make you draw half your library with the right turn. Whatever you do, don't rely on Borborygmos' combat damage trigger as your main source of ammo, for the love of god. Its okay to swing and try your luck here or there, but if you're relying on it you've already lost.
Kill: As mentioned previously, our lands are torn between being played, and being drawn and discarded. Because of this, we need to stretch our lands as much as possible. This is where damage multipliers come in. Fiery Emancipation triples the damage we get from land throws, as well as puts Borborygmos in one-shot range for commander damage on players. Dictate of the Twin Gods is a global damage doubler than can create table wide chaos for our opponents to kill each other, but also has the potential to burn us. It does have the ability to flashed in at the right time so we can nuke a player or two with an onslaught of lands to break that damage potential parity. Keep in mind, you don't have to throw everything you've got at players straight away. Only really go for the kill when you can draw into a ton of lands and deal a massive amount of damage. Otherwise it's useful to hold lands in your hand to dissuade removal attempts and to kill concerning creatures.
Repeat: Sometimes things don't go your way. You've run out of lands or are pretty damn close. Maybe you didn't get the damage multipliers out. Maybe despite your best efforts on draws, you're coming up dry. Don't worry, we have options. This is where we reuse our previously spent lands. Creeping Renaissance is great because it can either be used twice, or wheeled away and used later. Praetor's Counsel is fantastic for bringing back everything we've lost, so we can use our wheels and draw spells again. Groundskeeper lets us re-throw a land for 2 mana. Tap down everything you've got to throw one land 8+. With enough mana, this can be about as good as wheel, every turn.
Main Combos:
We have a few combos we can pull out. While they're not the main focus of the deck, they're always available if you manage to assemble the pieces.
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Borborygmos Enraged + Snake Umbra/Keen Sense + Abundance/Scouting Trek: When Bobo is enchanted with Sense or the Umbra, when we throw a land at an opponent, the draw clause is triggered. We can use either Abundance choosing lands every time to draw all the lands in our deck eventually, or use Scouting Trek to search out all our lands and put them on top of our library. Be warned that this is not infinite and you might lack the land count to actually finish off the table.
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Borborygmos Enraged + Surly Badgersaur + Life from the Loam + Tranquil Thicket/Forgotten Cave: With Bobo and Badgersaur out, with at least 2 lands in your hand and a cycle land throw the first two at whatever you want to trigger Badgersaur's clause to make treasure tokens. Then cycle your cycling land, but instead of drawing from your library dredge for Loam if it's in your grave. You should now have 3 treasures. Sac 2 to cast Loam bringing back the cycle land and 2 lands of your choice. Use the last remaining treasure to cycle the cycling land and dredge for Loam again. We can use this to deal damage as long as we still have cards in our library.
Backup Combos:
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Valakut, the Molten Pinnacle + Scapeshift: A classic win con for lands decks. Blow up all your lands with Scapeshift and then drop down everyone's favorite volcano along with as many mountains as you can. Dryad of the Ilysian Grove would be great in here since it can make all our basics count as mountains so we won't have to worry about coming up short. Thespian's Stage and Fiery Emancipation do a good enough job when available at boosting us to lethal though.
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Dark Depths + Thespian's Stage: Another classic land based win con. Use Stage to turn into a copy of Dark Depths, but it has no ice counters on it so you immediately get a 20/20 flying indestructible fatty to sling across the table. We can use Kessig Wolf Run to pump it even further and give it trample.
Generally Useful Tech
Scouting Trek: This card is probably useless in 90% of other decks. Here, it's a wonderful way to stack our deck to wheel/mass draw our way into straight gas, as well as to enable main combo #1.
Grafted Exoskeleton: Great against high life totals and great for killing indestructible creatures. Can be used as a frightening political piece and can put Borborygmos almost in 1 hit K.O range in combat. Just beware of it's detachment clause that makes it risky to equip, because smart players will wait for you to equip it and then break it to kill Borborygmos.
Basilisk Collar: Life gain is good because of the beats we can take early game, but it's the deathtouch that really shines. Trample + Deathtouch is already really great in combat, but it giving lands in our hand the effective text of "Discard a Land Card: Destroy Target Creature" with Borborygmos out is awesome for politics.
Nylea's Intervention: Gives us a few lands to play in the early game, or we can just slam another belt into our machine gun in the late game. A decent X value with a damage doubler is usually enough to kill a player. It can also tutor for specific lands we may want like Glacial Chasm, Detection Tower, our cycle lands, Dark Depths, Valakut, the Molten Pinnacle, Thespian's Stage, or any others.
Detection Tower: Removing hexproof from creatures is good, but removing it from players too makes an otherwise tricky scenario a non-issue.
Notable Exclusions
Illusionist's Bracers: Undeniably a great card for Borborygmos, as it copies our thrown lands so we can hit more targets. I've excluded it from the current list since while it doubles Bobo's damage, it doesn't do anything to boost the power of Valakut, which a general damage doubler will also hit.
Storm Cauldron: A goofy stax piece that can certainly be used to our unique advantage while slowing down our confused opponents, and is a great way to get played lands back to hand. I've excluded it because in order to pull it off we need Borborygmos out and to have plenty of extra lands in play to bounce back. Putting it down early ahead of Bobo with the rest of our support pieces just slows us down too, and if Bobo gets blown up it also starts to slow down our recovery speed. So it can definitely work, it can just be a dead card a lot of the time.
Excluded Combos:
Brallin, Skyshark Rider
and Glint-Horn Buccaneer used to be in the deck and were used for the following combos. I personally found myself not using these combos very often and they were not terribly reliable with the list I'm currently running. That said, I still want to make a note of them in case anyone else wants to use them in their own Borborygmos lists.
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Brallin, Skyshark Rider
/Glint-Horn Buccaneer + Keen Sense/Snake Umbra + at least 8 cards in hand: Enchant Brallin or the Buccaneer with Sense or the Umbra. If you have more than 7 cards in hand on your discard phase, you're forced to discard down to 7, triggering the discard pinging clause of either of the creatures, which with the enchantments will cause you to draw a card for each opponent. Since you must discard down to 7 without increasing max hand size, we can ping for infinite damage.
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Brallin, Skyshark Rider
/Glint-Horn Buccaneer + Grafted Exoskeleton + any wheel effects: Equip the Exoskeleton onto any of the discard pingers and then wheel as needed to kill the table with infect without needing Bobo.
Any suggestions are welcome and encouraged. While I've worked on and played this deck for years, there are many other who are far more knowledgeable about this commander than I. This small guide is merely meant to be a helpful introduction to help those that want in on the fun to get their foot in the door. And perhaps to provide new ideas for the experienced.
Here are a couple other very good primers for Borborygmos that I've referenced many times in making my list:
- https://tappedout.net/mtg-decks/borborygmos-enraged-the-breaking-of-the-world/
- https://www.moxfield.com/decks/15HMKmz_Xkae-l9LbuT83A
