Maybeboard


Reworking Underway

I've pulled out the Knight combo for the time being, replacing it with Chatterfang. I'm not sure how I'll rework the deck's RP elements, but the other combos/pieces are staying in (though I still want to throw in a Lotus Petal or Elvish Spirit Guide for Razaketh fuel, it's just hard to cut an actual card for either, they're way more situational than Life/Death or Dark Ritual, and Benefactor's Draught has a ton of potential upsides stapled to it).

The Theme Song Show

This is a semi-competitive Meren list, mixing control elements with combo to grind out wins. The deck can technically win early, but that's not normal, but it is normal for it to cripple the opponents' boards before I can assemble a combo. This deck is generally a toolbox oriented deck, using it's quality tutor package to remove problematic cards or pieces to win. The ideal scenario for this deck is to have a Steve, enough mana to play it, and for that to get us to casting Meren, allowing her to recur our Steve for use next turn potentially. Recurring Steves can actually make Meren quite rampy, easily making up for a lower land count while simultaneously adding XP. The Magic Numbers for Meren's XP are 3 and 5 generally, with 3 letting me reanimate a Merciless Executioner or any Steve, while 5 lets me reanimate Sidisi, Undead Vizier the turn I cast her, which should be enough to put me in very good shape, while also getting me to 7 XP which will allow me to bring back Protean Hulk to win off of.

Meren is fairly control heavy, excelling at keeping the board clear or having the best creatures out. This deck is not very fast at winning via creature damage, but the deck does have access to infinite tokens. It prefers to win via aristocrat pay offs, as this tends to be faster and harder to interfere with. The deck has some resiliency due to Meren reanimating/recurring stuff, but there is a reasonable amount of backup reanimation in here. The most versatile/powerful is Demon of Dark Schemes, it has big synergy with our combo pieces (and also with Mitotic Slime naturally), but Sheoldred, Whispering One and Hell's Caretaker complete my back up suite of repeatable drawback free reanimation. Gravecrawler is a great card when combined with Hulk, letting me generate infinite sacrifices from one Hulk pile, with easy access to the 2nd usually. Coffin Queen is a weird card that can reanimate stuff, but I prefer to use it vs opponent's creatures, since it will exile them if they die, so she can hate on a graveyard.

Gradually working on trying to get alternate art for female cards, or for cards where it looks way better. Feel free to make suggestions! This deck could also be called 'All the Pretty Girlgari', so we'll see.

This deck struggles if it truly needs a wipe, but it can usually pressure the board very hard with it's various forced sac sources, even if the deck has skimped on the budget here, running neither Grave Pact nor Dictate of Erebos, just Savra, Queen of the Golgari and creatures that force sacs on ETB. The deck has 2 wipes for smaller things, but can struggle vs a deck that has to be wiped, but if I'm truly desperate I might be able to repeatedly get Demon of Dark Schemes' trigger, if I can hit -6/-6 most stuff would be dead I guess?

For non-creature permanents I run Caustic Caterpillar and Foundation Breaker as low to the ground options. I run Visara the Dreadful because I often found myself in need of some targeted removal that didn't eat up my reanimation slot for the turn, and figured the good ol' Gorgon could do me a solid, and so far I've not been disappointed. It's very much 'what's on the tin', but that happens to be a very good label. Card draw is a tad low I think, but the deck's easy use of the graveyard gives it the feel of having a much larger hand, though there can be card quality concerns if you draw poorly (no tutors or card draw). The deck does feature 2 repeatable fogs, one that doesn't even use reanimation (but enables it via discard) in Spore Frog and Dawnstrider, an underplayed gem in a Meren deck for sure (especially if you expect you might need to fog an aggro player most games, as you can make their life difficult with forced sacs). The deck rarely feels hopeless, but it tends to have only a couple solutions to a given problem, leaning hard on recursion to get by, so if your graveyard is repeatedly exiled it will be a true slog.

I'd like to get the creature count even higher, but it's hard to cut the remaining non-creature spells. This is already an ungodly number of creatures, but the deck is also creature synergy at this point. I also wonder if I should throw in some 'high power' tutors, but do I really want Demonic Tutor over a tutor that gets 2 cards for only 4 or 5 mana? I kinda doubt it.

Suggestions

Updates Add

In go Warren Soultrader and Wight of the Reliquary, out go Pawn of Ulamog and Sadistic Hypnotist, Pawn is just way worse than Warren, and Wight is still a sac outlet (and Warren is a better one than Sadistic fwiw), so this ultimately felt pretty reasonable. This will make the deck a bit more rampy, but Warren is almost exclusively a combo piece, I can't imagine I'll use it as a value piece THAT often, whereas Wight is never a combo piece. Oh well!

Comments

91% Casual

Competitive

Date added 4 years
Last updated 1 month
Legality

This deck is Commander / EDH legal.

Rarity (main - side)

8 - 0 Mythic Rares

44 - 0 Rares

13 - 0 Uncommons

13 - 0 Commons

Cards 100
Avg. CMC 3.04
Tokens Emblem Vraska, Golgari Queen, Experience Token, Morph 2/2 C, Ooze 1/1 G, Ooze 2/2 G for Mitotic Ooze, Pest 1/1 BG, Snake 1/1 B, Squirrel 1/1 G, Treasure, Zombie 2/2 B
Folders EDH Deck Templates, X - EDH Inspiration - GOLGARI GRAVEYARDS, Possible Builds, decks, Follow, Commander/EDH
Votes
Ignored suggestions
Shared with
Views