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Herbert Grist, Reanimator

Commander / EDH BG (Golgari) Bracket 1 Budget Casual Insect Mill Reanimator Tokens Undergrowth

TheMeadiator

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Creature (32)

Sorcery (14)

Instant (9)

Artifact (2)

Planeswalker (1)

Commander (1)

Commander: Grist, Voracious Larva  Flip

Land (35)

Enchantment (6)

Maybeboard

Creature (34)

Sorcery (9)

Instant (4)

Enchantment (3)

Artifact (1)

Move over West, there's a new bug in town. This decklist evolved from my bug tribal deck with Izoni, Thousand-Eyed at the helm. Izoni was too high costed and too slow for the decks at our table, so I decided to speed things up by dropping my commander's mana value from 6 to 1. Grist, Voracious Larva   is a fun little bug who flips when either he or someone else enters the battlefield from the graveyard. I wanted to change up the playstyle of the deck as well (I ended up making a much better token matters deck by making all the bunnies in the world with Cadira, Caller of the Small) and focus on the reanimation aspect of Grist. All that to say, a simple commander swap ended up changing the whole deck.

The main idea of the deck is this: get your bugs in the bin with mill, sacrifice, or plain old combat damage. Play Grist, Voracious Larva  , then reanimate a bug or two to make Grist flip into Grist, the Plague Swarm  . As a walker, Grist generates more tokens and copies all the bugs in the graveyard as his ultimate. So, yes, it's still a token deck, but I think it's going to play much different than Izoni did! I still have yet to playtest it, but I am anticipating it being quite fast and aggressive.

Grist should stick around pretty well with all the tokens to block for him. Plus I made it so almost all of the spiders and spider-themed spells provide pretty good protection with keywords like reach and deathtouch, the ability to block more than one creature, fog effects, or turning off activated abilities. Even if Grist dies, send him to the bin instead of the command zone and reanimate him and pay a green to immediately flip him on cast. He seems like he'd hard to get rid of!

I will have to playtest it a bit to make sure I'm getting real value out of Grist's ultimate. I have to make sure the bugs I'm throwing in there still have value as 1/1 token copies. True primer to come after a few playtests.

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Made some utility swaps — Sept. 9, 2025
Edit

I traded out some of the more lacklustre bugs for some insects from Edge of Eternities, which all had awesome static abilities that work well as Grist's token copies. I haven't playtested this newer version, but I'm proxying it up to see how it goes. More to come soon!

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93% Casual

Competitive