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Horrors from Beyond

Commander / EDH BUG (Sultai) Reanimator

Tinnuki

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Land (34)

Mana (8)

Value / Card Advantage (17)

Interaction (11)

Reanimation (8)

Commander (1)

Commander: The Mimeoplasm

Graveyard Setup (11)

Mimeoplasm Targets: The Function (10)

Mimeoplasm Targets: The Power (3)

"I have seen beyond the bounds of infinity and drawn down daemons from the stars... I have harnessed the shadows that stride from world to world to sow death and madness..." H.P. Lovecraft, "From Beyond"

Overview

During my early days of learning Magic, I greatly enjoyed the concept of utilizing the graveyard as a temporary holding zone for your cards. This naturally led me to exploring reanimator strategies, including the PDS Graveborn deck released around the same time. I loved that kind of flashy, big-Timmy play.

This deck tries to exemplify that mindset with a focus on early board control and a defensive, under-the-radar style of play while we set up, getting the right creatures into the graveyard to turn our Mimeoplasm into the unstoppable force we need it to be.

Commander damage is only one way to win; we can use our range of reanimation spells to cheat out some of Sultai's best creatures far ahead of curve.

Card Rundown

Eternal Witness: The commander standard for recurring a card.

Fauna Shaman: Basically Survival of the Fittest on a body, she'll help us cycle our big creatures into more immediately-useful ones.

Hermit Druid: Lob large chunks of our library into the graveyard.

Jarad, Golgari Lich Lord: Blowing up an oversized Consuming Aberration or Lord of Extinction is a great backup wincon.

Wonder: Adding that extra little bit of evasion.

Buried Alive, Entomb, Fauna Shaman, Gifts Ungiven, Intuition, Jarad's Orders, and Survival of the Fittest are the type of targeted cards that this deck needs to set up as efficiently as possible.

Dream Halls is particularly useful for cycling our reanimation targets into our graveyard while giving us free spells (including our commander!) for it.

Hermit Druid can be a risky gamble, having only 8 basic lands, but he often provides a nice payoff. A common combo piece for these type of decks, we play him just a bit more fairly.

Grimoire of the Dead can prevent our targets from sitting idly in our hand.

Performing the Ritual

Consecrated Sphinx: Flying is always helpful, and it has the potential to generate a LOT of card advantage.

Gaea's Revenge: Haste, color-coded protection, and 8 power pairs well with our 13-power secondary targets.

Inkwell Leviathan: Islandwalk, Trample, and Shroud means Mimeo is going to be hitting blue players hard, and trampling everybody else.

Jin-Gitaxias, Core Augur: Do I feel bad about including him? Yeah, kinda.

Phyrexian Obliterator: I just think he's neat.

Sheoldred, Whispering One: Trade your opponents' creatures for your dead ones. Swampwalk is nice, too.

Skithiryx, the Blight Dragon: I'm not a big fan of Infect, but hasty Skittles can close out the game quickly.

Spirit of the Night: Flying, Trample, Haste, B-Protection, and conditional First Strike.

Vorinclex, Voice of Hunger: Gives you a boost to your mana and greatly dampens your opponents' plans.

Wrexial, the Risen Deep: Islandwalk, Swampwalk, and the ability to steal tutors, ramp, removal, and whatever else your opponents may have discarded.

Death's Shadow: +13/+13

Consuming Aberration, Lord of Extinction: +?/+?
Yes, the * values hold across all zones.

Winning the Game

Once we have our Mimeoplasm built just as we need, our strategy shifts to beatdown. Using our reactionary spells and calculated attacks, we can easily use the pressure of massive commander damage to methodically mow down our opponents' battlefield presence, until nothing is left standing.

Our reanimation spells such as Animate Dead, Dread Return, Exhume, Living Death, Reanimate, Stitch Together, and Victimize can be used to cheat out some of our targets if we're finding our commander locked down or otherwise inaccessible. Getting a Praetor or two in the first several turns can all but pave our path to victory and swiftly promote us to Archenemy.

As a last-resort wincon, we have a secondary backup commander in the 99: Jarad, Golgari Lich Lord. With a sizeable monster like Consuming Aberration or Lord of Extinction on the battlefield, 1BG can win us the game on the spot.

The biggest flaw I experience with a concerning frequency is the speed of this deck. While I am often able to get the pieces to fall into place by turn 5 or 6 in preparation to cast Mimeo, if I am not able to find the right spells, this deck folds to faster, more aggressive decks. Not only that, but one instance of graveyard hate can cripple this deck, if you don't have the answers in hand.

Though I've been playing Magic since original Innistrad, the Tarkir era was when I started to seriously get into the game, and Commander specifically. The introduction of Sultai both as a clan, and as slang for my favorite three colors of Magic really struck a chord with me. Around this time, I was new to Commander, and only toyed around with making a Grixis deck. After seeing all the great cards coming out of Tarkir, I dropped those prospects and jumped straight to Sultai, settling on The Mimeoplasm as a commander, only narrowly beating Sidisi.

This deck has been with me since around 2012. I aim to keep the spirit of the deck as close as possible to how I originally built it, ignoring all the power creep and technically optimal card choices. It is one of the few decks that I've kept throughout several hiatuses and "breaks" from the game, and it's the one deck that I would truly consider to be "my commander deck."

While this deck has been tweaked and upgraded a little, I've preferred to keep it as close to my original design as possible.

Thanks for reading!

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Casual

95% Competitive