Welcome to the
Meren of Clan Nel Toth
decklist. I am no pro at writing deck evaluations OR writing primers. I do hope you stick around for what I lack in general writing skill, I make up for in experience (get it) in playing this commander.
I have had Meren together for about 2 or 3 years now, off and on in lieu of Slimefoot and Muldrotha, I find myself coming back to this Commander for the simple fact that she is very effective for her cost. Now let us take a look into
Meren of Clan Nel Toth
, shall we?
Meren is a 3/4 Human Shaman creature for . The first line of text is a mechanic that was made for a few other commanders in the set, focusing on experience. This happens to read "Whenever another creature you control dies, you get an experience counter." This is all well and good. Black happens to have many effects that involve removing or sacrificing your own creatures for benefits as well as infliction backward progress on your opponents! Let us read on. "At the beginning of your end step, choose target creature card in your graveyard. If that cards converted mana cost (CMC) is less than or equal to the amount of experience counters you have, return it to the battlefield. Otherwise, return it to your hand" I really hope I don’t have to explain why this effect is great. Getting ANY recursion from used or discarded creatures is great. The ability for meren to not exile these cards after they come back is a great gift that we should take advantage of! Playing in EDH, the nature of a single card format seems fair right? Deal with something once, then that’s it! That is true for a good majority of decks. Some may even have abilities to bring back 3 CMC cards. Look at
Sun Titan
and there are many more! The power from this deck comes from using smaller CMC creatures to gain advantage or squeeze out an attrition based early game that will lead us up into a strong late game!
Now before I waste too much time gushing about why this commander is amazing, I will talk about the glaring issues we have with a deck like this. 2 things that really isolate this deck is number 1, the commander. Yes, she is one of her biggest downfalls. Her experience ability does not trigger off her own death. If you re-read the card you'll notice she has no keywords. No hexproof, no fear, no indestructible and no way for her to bring herself out from the graveyard by her own effects. She is a big target and once people see what she can do when she gets going, its likely most removal will be held up for her. We will touch on this later. Number 2 is, the graveyard. Graveyard hate is readily available for most colors and strategies. This is a big issue as well for any deck that plays from the 'yard. Take
Muldrotha, the Gravetide
and
Karador, Ghost Chieftain
so do not expect to be able to run away with a free game or two. Nope, you will have to dig graves and take names to earn your wins. Sometimes, by surprise!
Fear not, however! There are a few ways we can get around these weaknesses. By playing protection in our colors we can offset these losses. Black does not have many ways to protect our commander. Luckily we do have artifacts, creatures, and even a few instants to protect our commander! We can also run redundant effects on our creatures. By having 2 or 3 of the same effects on our creatures, even if we get hit by a
Bojuka Bog
or
Tormod's Crypt
and some creatures move right to exile we arent totally out of the game!
Before I go into specifics, honorable mentions go to
Sylvan Safekeeper
and SporeFrog. These 2 one mana cards keep the deck together and are rather crucial to running our strategy.
Let’s kick off with our list. I won’t talk about every card but I will go over some cards I find to be all stars as well as some of the combos we have in the deck. Most of the deck is stapled to creatures, so keep that in mind. The cornerstone of the strategy is based around dying creatures as well as sacrifice effects, so let's take a look at what that looks like..
High Market
,
Phyrexian Tower
,
Ashnod's Altar
, and a great majority of our effects cause sacrifice at instant speed. This is important for building experience counters for meren as well as dodging effects that cause exile. We can come back from the graveyard, not exile. Altar gives us colorless mana and
Phyrexian Tower
grants us B B,meaning we will be able to generate mana to rocket us to our high end of creatures. Like
Razaketh, the Foulblooded
or
Grave Titan
or
Butcher of Malakir
,
We have our land ramp category. Most of these creatures are green.
Veteran Explorer
lets us nab 2 basic lands at the cost of dying,which is easy to carry out with this deck.
Sakura-Tribe Elder
,
Wood Elves
,
Nissa, Vastwood Seer
and
Solemn Simulacrum
all work well because they are low cost enough to bring back via meren for an early foothold on the table.. Explorer being worse the more you use him, no point in giving the opponents free lands if we can help it.
Next we have the removal package, which is partially non targeted but there are a few options.
Slum Reaper
Merciless Executioner
and
Fleshbag Marauder
all read the same thing. Reaper being at 4 CMC and the latter 2 sitting at 3. This gets around indestructible and hexproof/shroud. Being particularly good at dealing with opposing commanders with
Lightning Greaves
, Usually we will sacrifice this creature to itself so we can return it 2 times a turn as well as gaining 2 free counters off meren. We also include
Maelstrom Pulse
for opposing tokens,
Shriekmaw
Hero's Downfall
and
Putrefy
for creatures.
Reclamation Sage
,
Caustic Caterpillar
,
Bane of Progress
and
Acidic Slime
for opposing artifacts and enchantments. The redundant abilities is what really makes this deck shine in the long run. Eternal witness is not removal but it does buy us another copy of a non creature removal spell and can be sacrificed for counters and brought back, very strong card in this deck. She also allows us to get a grave pact or another noncreature permanent.
So recursion is nice, yes. Synergy is also great. With a slight reanimator sub theme we can aim to drop our
Mikaeus, the Unhallowed
and
Triskelion
combo. Its not a go to combo of the deck but it is good for closing out long games! We also have things like buried alive and entomb to kind of tailor our yard to set up meren lines. A popular line of play for me is to
Entomb
for
Life from the Loam
and dredge off some lands to fill up the yard faster. I run the cycle lands in here as well to get a few extra draws per turn if we need to dig for answers.. I would not recommend this line of play if there is well known graveyard hate prominent at the table. You cannot avoid it all but you can play smart about it and not leave yourself open for the biggest blowout you've ever seen. The deck is resilient but not unbreakable.
There is an alternate soft-lock that can be achieved via
Contamination
and
Llanowar Mentor
or anything that can generate tokens and green mana for you. Locking everyone into only 1 black mana per land is back-breaking to some.and others can deal but it will slow them down. I generally let this happen if im confident to win in the next few turns as people like to PLAY magic, not watch it!
As I stated before, I will not cover all the nuances of the deck but each time I play it I am happy with how it performs and is an all around fun deck to play! Thank you for taking the time and getting this far and I will be sure to update as new sets release and feel free to drop a comment or an upvote as I’m looking to refine this primer and make it the number 1 meren deck on here!
