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Five Color Cycling

Commander / EDH Combo Reanimator Theme/Gimmick

JohnBTY

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Creature (35)

Land (39)

Commander (1)

Commander: Horde of Notions

Sorcery (8)

Artifact (7)

Enchantment (5)

Instant (5)

Update 7/20/21 - I have built a new version of the deck! (Link here). I decided to keep this list up as well as I gave it to a friend intact as a birthday gift a few years ago

Behold one of the goofiest under-the-radar combo decks you'll ever see! Flummox your friends, enervate your enemies, astound your audience! Turn magic's blandest utility mechanic into a tool of victory!

This is going to sound weird: You want to spend as much as possible of the game doing nothing at all. Play possum, act like you're not drawing anything useful. Cycle on your last opponent's end step as much as possible. Your first goal is to get a decent portion of the deck into the graveyard without attracting more attention than necessary.

There's a couple of main plans to victory that you'll want to work towards.

Plan 1: Draw your whole deck at warp speed with Fluctuator and/or New Perspectives in combination with Alhammarret's Archive and/or Thought Reflection , drop Laboratory Maniac while there's still a few cards in your library and protect him with Decree of Silence . Boring, but safe, and can win through basically any board state on your opponents' behalf.

Plan 2: Fill your graveyard with mostly boring cycling creatures, then reanimate your enitre graveyard with Living Death . Or reanimate EVERYONE'S graveyard with Rise of the Dark Realms - the much more entertaining option! Add some spicy Flame-Kin Zealot / Craterhoof Behemoth action to deliver hasty combat damage on a galactic scale to all opponents; Madrush Cyclops is there to provide a secondary means of giving everything haste, and you can add Urabrask the Hidden or Cyclops of Eternal Fury if you want more redundancy in that department.

The basic rule to playing this deck: Always cycle whatever you can, fill the graveyard and dig through your deck. If an opponent has graveyard hate, then we're on the Lab Maniac plan; if they don't, we're on the reanimate/Craterhoof plan. The only exception is that you don't want to cycle away lands when you can't guarantee hitting your land drops; the deck is extremely mana-hungry and you don't want to fall behind. Half your lands come in tapped, so you're already a half-turn behind everyone else.

Horde of Notions is mostly a red herring, but with a good draw you can whip it out turn 5 and make some noise at the table. Perhaps the most useful thing about the Horde is that it has vigilance, so it'll keep you dry from small sources of damage in the mid-game that might otherwise add up. It's main purpose here is simply to let you play five colors and NOT to provoke your opponents in the way most other five-color commanders will!

The key is surprise, because you're not posing any kind of obvious threat and nobody will likely focus fire on you. This may be a one-time trick with any given opponent, though, once they've seen the kind of blowout wins you're capable of!

Some of the most important cards in the deck are those that let you discard non-cycling cards - Faithless Looting , Careful Study , Frantic Search , Unfulfilled Desires . ALWAYS try to save these cards for when you have a non-cycling creature that's key to the mass-reanimation plan - Craterhoof, Flame-Kin Zealot, Madrush Cyclops (though in the case of UD, you can play it anytime to help break through basic-land clumps or just dig for the final combo pieces). Eternal Witness and Greenwarden of Murasa are there to be played from hand, though the Greenwarden is also fine to discard; it's the one creature in the deck that interacts with Horde of Notions' ability to reanimate it from the graveyard, to take another shot at a crucial combo piece.

Fun interactions abound; While you're ditching all your cycling lands to get through the deck quicker, you're also getting closer to the Splendid Reclamation that'll bring them all into play at once and magnify your mana. With an Amulet of Vigor in play, this can translate to tons of extra mana available that very turn. Amulet of Vigor also combos nicely with Prismatic Geoscope , which should almost always be producing 5 mana; not to mention, it corrects the general problem of so many of the deck's lands coming into play tapped.

Songs of the Damned is fairly self-explanatory, and can produce dozens of mana. The most important combo cards are black, so it's fine by itself, though you can use Gilded Lotus and Prismatic Geoscope to turn that black mana into another color if needed.

The deck has a handful of answers to threats, though they're general overcosted or highly limited due to the cycling ability translating into a casting-cost tax, so use them sparingly and only for things that are immediately preventing you from winning the game. i.e., don't get salty and Expunge any ol' nonblack nonartifact creature unless it's in some way preventing you from drawing extra cards or reanimating your graveyard. Cast Out is your most powerful overall answer, so try to keep it in hand as long as possible and cycle other cards.

Alhammaret's Archive and Thought Refelction supercharge your ability to draw through the deck, and ultimately you will need one or the other to efficiently win via the Lab Man Plan. Try to make sure you've got enough cards left in library to play the Lab maniac and respond to any counterspell with Decree of Silence (hopefully, a free Decree of Silence due to New Persepctives) and not draw out BEFORE the Lab Man resolves.

Whichever path you choose, this deck is a blast and people will be so busy mocking you for playing with terrible substandard cards that hopefully they don't see the Craterhoof Sledgehammer coming their way until it's too late.

Oh, and....happy birthday!

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