Gadrak Deck: Spoiler Musings *PRIMER*

Commander / EDH* Aristocrats Artifact Mono-Red Primer

ilovemydoghisnameistuna

Creature (32)

• 1x Anax, Hardened in the Forge
• 1x Arcbound Reclaimer
• 1x Ashcloud Phoenix
• 1x Burnished Hart
• 1x Combustible Gearhulk
• 1x Dockside Extortionist
• 1x Dross Scorpion
• 1x Firewing Phoenix
• 1x Flamewake Phoenix
• 1x Flayer of the Hatebound
• 1x Foundry Inspector
• 1x Goblin Engineer
• 1x Goblin Welder
• 1x Havoc Jester
• 1x Hissing Iguanar
• 1x Immortal Phoenix
• 1x Jhoira's Familiar
• 1x Junk Diver
• 1x Kuldotha Forgemaster
• 1x Kuldotha Phoenix
• 1x Magus of the Wheel
• 1x Myr Retriever
• 1x Purphoros, Bronze-Blooded
• 1x Rage Thrower
• 1x Rekindling Phoenix
• 1x Salvager of Ruin
• 1x Scarecrone
• 1x Scrap Trawler
• 1x Squee, Goblin Nabob
• 1x Stalking Vengeance
• 1x Steel Hellkite
• 1x Workshop Assistant

Artifact (18)

• 1x Altar of Dementia
• 1x Ashnod's Altar
• 1x Lifeline
• 1x Mind Stone
• 1x Mind's Eye
• 1x Mycosynth Lattice
• 1x Nevinyrral's Disk
• 1x Nim Deathmantle
• 1x Oblivion Stone
• 1x Phyrexian Altar
• 1x Salvaging Station
• 1x Skullclamp
• 1x Sol Ring
• 1x Spawning Pit
• 1x Strionic Resonator
• 1x Thran Dynamo
• 1x Trading Post
• 1x Witch's Oven

Land (35)

• 1x Arch of Orazca
• 1x Bonders' Enclave
• 1x Geier Reach Sanitarium
• 30x Mountain
• 1x Myriad Landscape
• 1x Temple of the False God

Planeswalker (1)

• 1x Daretti, Scrap Savant

Commander (1)

Enchantment (7)

• 1x Goblin Bombardment
• 1x Outpost Siege
• 1x Pia's Revolution
• 1x Pyrohemia
• 1x Sneak Attack
• 1x Underworld Breach
• 1x Vicious Shadows

Sorcery (4)

• 1x Blasphemous Act
• 1x Cathartic Reunion
• 1x Faithless Looting
• 1x Obliterate

Instant (2)

• 1x Chaos Warp
• 1x Pyroblast

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Maybeboard

Creature (3)

• 1x Chained Brute
• 1x Spiteful Prankster
• 1x Terror of the Peaks

Land (1)

• 1x Keldon Necropolis

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This is a deck based around the upcoming commander Gadrak, the Crown-Scourge. This is me talking through all the decision points I got to in this deck, as they came up. It might be weird to read, but I promise there is an end goal to this meandering.

FIRST, READ THIS

The first thing you should know is this: this deck is not very good. It definitely needs work, and the commander may not even be viable on his own. Sad, but true. A mono red aristocrat commander needs a really huge benefit if it is to even be able to try to be a deck. This benefit -- getting a couple treasures, but only if nontoken creatures died, and only on your turn -- is not big enough. If Gadrak were black, we would be having a different conversation, and I probably wouldn't even care about this commander.

Talking about the commander

This commander is really interesting. He is a 3 mana 5/4 with flying for one -- very cheap -- but can't attack unless you control 4 or more artifacts. For this deck I ignore this line -- we aren't planning on getting in with that commander damage. And then the last line of text -- "at the beginning of your end step, create a Treasure artifact token for each nontoken creature that died this turn." This is the line we really want to focus on. Its not a huge bonus, but it gives us ramp in the command zone for only 3 mana. It needs some setup, but can be used to great advantage.

Notes about the deck

A couple notes I want to make:

1.) THIS IS NOT AN ARTIFACT COMMANDER. I don't care that he has the words "artifact" and "treasure" on him, he only needs them to attack. Spoiler alert, you really need artifacts for him to work and I end up taking him that direction anyway, but once the mono red aristocrat package is filled out a little more, I will move away from this strategy. LET ME BE CLEAR. THIS DECK USES ARTIFACTS OUT OF NECESSITY, NOT BECAUSE THAT IS WHAT THE COMMANDER IS ASKING FOR.

2.) Yes, he's big for his cost. And he has evasion. Still, I don't think voltron is a good idea; mono red just can't handle the hate.

3.) Mono red ramp in the command zone! This is new and a pretty cool way of doing it. I hope the set adds more cards to the red aristocrats package, but it is already fairly sizable if you are okay with adding some cards on the higher end of the curve, like Stalking Vengeance.

4.) Unfortunately, this guy has one word we don't like -- YOUR. Ugh. He only triggers during your end step. However, since he creates tokens for each nontoken creature that died, we can get a pretty sizable amount of mana out of this guy.

5.) This leads us into the next word we don't like: NONTOKEN. He won't trigger off goblins (thank god). This gives us some difficulty, especially without access to cards like Reassembling Skeleton, Nether Traitor, etc., and it will be difficult to just pump out creatures to die the way Purphoros can, but I think it won't be too much trouble to get him to work the way we want.

6.) And the final disadvantage is obvious -- we don't have black. I am actually happy with this as it will give us some more interesting and difficult things to do. Although I will say, mono red is DEFINITELY not equipped for this kind of deck. Don't expect too much.

Aristocrats?

Okay so I looked on EDHREC at the aristocrats page. These are the top cards that can fit in a mono red shell for aristocrats:

Skullclamp, Ashnod's Altar, Anax, Hardened in the Forge, Phyrexian Altar, Altar of Dementia, Spawning Pit, Nim Deathmantle, Desecrated Tomb. That's the top 8 excluding card draw and boardwipes like Faithless Looting and Blasphemous Act. Sooo ... artifacts, plus Anax. The pickings are slim. Then we went into a Gatherer card search and searched +when, +creature, +dies, !white, !blue, !black, !green. This (currently, as of 21:20 06/05/2020) comes to 112 cards, a bunch of which talk about themselves instead of other cards. ... Still not ideal.

Phoenixes?

By this point I bet we are all thinking the same thing: Is Gadrak the next phoenix tribal commander? And my answer is: well ... let's try it out! I made another search for all phoenixes in the game of magic -- and there are only 24, and its possible some of them have other colors like green or black. Sooo ... not tribal? but we can still use some phoenixes to fuel our strategy of nontoken creature reanimation.

Yeah, there aren't very many playable phoenixes unfortunately. I put as man as I could into the list, but it was just hard to find good reasons to put in any given firebird.

Some cool interactions with phoenixes

Unfortunately a bunch of phoenixes return themselves to hand when they die instead of to battlefield, meaning we have to spend more mana to get them back than the commander will give us. Fortunately, there are several cards in the history of Magic that can help with this problem, most notably Sneak Attack and Purphoros, Bronze-Blooded. We can get a ton of mana out of these cards with other cards like Immortal Phoenix: Play the phoenix for cheap with Purphoros or Sneak Attack, sacrifice at end of turn, Gadrak sees the death, gives us another treasure. Repeat next turn. If we have another sacrifice outlet like Phyrexian Altar we can go infinite:

: Pheonix comes out with Sneak Attack.

Sacrifice Phoenix to Altar for , Phoenix returns to hand.

Repeat.

If we have a Rage Thrower or something, we win!

Yes, we are otherwise essentially storing mana for later, but ... I'm really reaching here.

Reanimator ... in mono red

So yeah, the last direction to go is reanimator.

This, like aristocrats, will be VERY difficult in mono red -- probably more so than aristocrats. It will involve several artifacts, just like aristocrats used all the altars.

Well. If we want to reanimate a creature in mono red ... we have to use artifacts. So ... I'm embarrassed to say this, but we are actually going to build an artifact deck. BUT NOT BECAUSE THE COMMANDER SAYS ARTIFACT ON IT. We are building an artifact deck because it is too difficult to build mono red aristocrats or reanimator, so we need artifacts to perform the goal of the deck. And if we decide that we can use artifacts, our options become FAR better:

(Note: for this I'm using the term "reanimator" very loosely. I basically mean, getting creatures/artifacts out of the graveyard.)

Some reanimators for artifacts: Arcbound Reclaimer, Daretti, Scrap Savant, Goblin Engineer, Kuldotha Phoenix (hey, we managed to use that one!), Pia's Revolution, Salvaging Station, Scarecrone, Scrap Trawler ... just to mention a few. That's a lot better!

This leads into a kind of strange deck: It uses artifacts to reanimate ... artifacts and other stuff. We can still use things like Nim Deathmantle for reanimation of other creatures that aren't artifacts, so this gives us a little more flexibility in terms of what can actually go into the deck, while using artifacts to reanimate stuff like Burnished Hart to get the ramp going and start getting treasures from the commander.

So ... why should we build this deck at all?

I think this is an interesting commander that will only go up in power level as time goes on and as the red aristocrats package is added to. WOTC seems to be leaning into aristocrats for red to get some of it's card advantage/ramp, so the more they do that, the easier this commander will be to build around. For now, though, the reward he gives you is not as large as if he were black. If I were to put a well-tuned Gadrak deck across the table from a mono black or Orzhov aristocrats deck like Shirei or new Teysa ... there would be no question about how this deck would perform: I'd bet it would do what it wants to do, but that just isn't enough in the face of other aristocrats.

One More Idea

My final idea for this commander is another archetype that is difficult in red: control. I think this guy could lend himself pretty easily to a deck meant to make sure your opponents can't get on top of the hill. In this more grindy shell, I think you could actually threaten people with commander damage as a way of shoving them down if they fight back too hard against your strategy. The reason this would work is because he counts all creatures that died, not just yours; If you activate Pyrohemia three times every turn, you could get one explosion of treasures and then lock out everyone's 3-toughness creatures for a long time (basically as long as you have enough mana to activate it without your commander dying).

This could even lead into a stax-type deck: waiting for enough creatures to come out, dropping a Pyrohemia, blasting everything out of the way, loading up on treasures, and then dropping Impending Disaster, Wake of Destruction, Ruination, or some other mass land destruction. After this we would put out some true stax pieces like Winter Orb. By this point, you hopefully still have Gadrak out and he can start swinging, especially if he has a Darksteel Plate or something to make him a little less vulnerable. Not a fun deck to play, but it is a possibility. I would only be worried about getting blown out:

"I'll activate Pyrohemia 10 times, killing everything, and then play Impending Disaster."

"In response, I Path to Exile Gadrak."

This play pattern would really screw with your plans; red is not green or black or blue. It can't recover very quickly from a shut down like that.

Spoilers?

Also, as cards for the deck are spoiled, I will list them here before they are added to the site:

Mayhem Jester -- 4R, creature -- Devil. Whenever you sacrifice another permanent, this creature deals 1 damage to any target. 5/5.

Please ask questions or make suggestions or comments! I saw this guy at the same time you did.

Top Ranked	Achieved #33 position overall 3 years ago Achieved #26 position in Commander / EDH 3 years ago Achieved #1 position in Commander / EDH Primer 3 years ago
Date added	3 years
Last updated	3 years
Legality	This deck is Commander / EDH legal.
Rarity (main - side)	5 - 0 Mythic Rares 41 - 0 Rares 18 - 0 Uncommons 6 - 0 Commons
Cards	100
Avg. CMC	3.65
Tokens	2/2 C Artifact Creature Spawn, City's Blessing, Elemental 0/1 R, Emblem Daretti, Scrap Savant, Food, Goat 0/1 W, Morph 2/2 C, Satyr 1/1 R, Treasure
Folders	Gadrak, EDH