Innistrad has returned, and with it another dosage of fun times in the old town tonight. Are you ready for the fun and terror to begin in equal measure?

One of the key returned mechanics for the block is madness. It’s totally flavorful for the setting, and there’s a nice callback to the first two times we’ve seen the mechanic as well. I’ve always had a bit of a soft spot in my heart for all things madness.

Madness is awesome!

The best madness cards are black, red, and then green and blue. Black and red were pushed hard as madness homes in Time Spiral block, when the original Torment had just two in each color. The white ones sucked (Frantic Purification, Strength of Isolation), and we just have the two key green ones: Arrogant Wurm and Basking Rootwalla. While those were hot stuff in Standard way back when, a 4/4 trample for 3 mana is adequate in today’s world, and running green to get those two cards seems pretty minor. Blue has just Circular Logic and Obsessive Search from the old days—nothing too grand. But we have some new entries to consider as well, and it seems blue is getting some Shadows over Innistrad crazy madness. So it seems that the good ol’ Grixis combo of blue, black, and red unlocks the most madness spells.

So whom should I tap for our good deck? Ideally, there’d be someone out there who makes a lot of sense for the concept. None work that much, so I’m choosing Gwendlyn di Corci because she at least can turn a random discard onto yourself if you need to.

Maddening Commander ? Commander | Abe Sargent

• Commander (0)

• Creatures (22)
• 1 Anger
• 1 Avaricious Dragon
• 1 Big Game Hunter
• 1 Bloodghast
• 1 Dreamscape Artist
• 1 Geralf's Masterpiece
• 1 Gorgon Recluse
• 1 Grave Scrabbler
• 1 Incorrigible Youths
• 1 Liliana's Specter
• 1 Looter il-Kor
• 1 Muck Drubb
• 1 Phantasmagorian
• 1 Rakdos Pit Dragon
• 1 Reckless Wurm
• 1 Undertaker
• 1 Urborg Syphon-Mage
• 1 Waterfront Bouncer
• 1 Wolf of Devil's Breach
• 1 Wonder
• 1 Alexi, Zephyr Mage
• 1 Sedris, the Traitor King

• Planeswalkers (3)
• 1 Chandra, Flamecaller
• 1 Liliana Vess
• 1 Tibalt, the Fiend-Blooded

• Spells (38)
• 1 Circular Logic
• 1 Dark Withering
• 1 Fiery Temper
• 1 Forbid
• 1 Forbidden Alchemy
• 1 Mystical Teachings
• 1 Obsessive Search
• 1 Violent Eruption
• 1 Call to the Netherworld
• 1 Chainer's Edict
• 1 Deep Analysis
• 1 Demonfire
• 1 Faithless Looting
• 1 Ichor Slick
• 1 Mystic Retrieval
• 1 Sever the Bloodline
• 1 Syphon Mind
• 1 Unnerve
• 1 Wheel of Fortune
• 1 Anthem of Rakdos
• 1 Compulsion
• 1 Gibbering Descent
• 1 Idle Thoughts
• 1 Mind over Matter
• 1 Nihilistic Glee
• 1 Rhystic Study
• 1 Tortured Existence
• 1 Crucible of Worlds
• 1 Cursed Scroll
• 1 Darksteel Ingot
• 1 Ensnaring Bridge
• 1 Fool's Tome
• 1 Gem of Becoming
• 1 Gilded Lotus
• 1 Grafted Skullcap
• 1 Memory Jar
• 1 Null Brooch
• 1 Sol Ring

• Lands (36)
• 8 Island
• 8 Mountain
• 8 Swamp
• 1 City of Brass
• 1 Command Tower
• 1 Crumbling Necropolis
• 1 Dimir Aqueduct
• 1 Evolving Wilds
• 1 Grixis Panorama
• 1 Izzet Boilerworks
• 1 Keldon Megaliths
• 1 Mana Confluence
• 1 Rakdos Carnarium
• 1 Terramorphic Expanse
• 1 Shivan Gorge

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It’s Mad, Mad World

The obvious place to start with a madness deck is with the madness cards specifically. Some are obvious, such as Fiery Temper and Dark Withering. Everyone understands why they are here. What about some of the other stuff?

From creatures of (some) size to the cantrip fun-times of Obsessive Search, I put it all in here. The only major exception you might have expected is Nightshade Assassin. But it has two knocks against it. First, this is a three-color deck that may not have enough black cards in hand to matter, and second, this is a deck that seriously blows through the hand.

I’ve played a lot of madness decks, and let me tell you something very important.

One of the key things to understand in playing a madness deck is the serious lack of cards in your hand that results. If you do it right, you are playing a bunch of self-discard effects that discard cards for various effects and then play the spell, too, but that means you aren’t keeping a full grip of cards. In fact, there are times when you wind up in top-deck mode long before others.

I want to push this concept. First of all, I want to force my foes to discard enough cards to keep the game roughly even. Since Gwendlyn does that already, we’re good to go with her. But I began to toss in support cards such as Liliana's Specter, Unnerve, and Syphon Mind.

Now, a lot of hellbent cards are pretty weak outside of a Standard or Limited environment. They just get bigger or gain a modest ability—Demon's Jester and Jagged Poppet are good examples of such a thing. But there are enough Demonfires and Rakdos Pit Dragons to make it work.

There’s one card I want to focus on: Anthem of Rakdos. First, it’ll pump up your stuff when you want to bring some serous heat. (It’s not as though you’ll usually care about the life lost.) Do you have hellbent? In that case, it’s a one-sided Furnace of Rath for just you. Everything from your Shivan Gorge to your Cursed Scroll is going to double damage, including your creatures, after being pumped +2 in the front. It’s pretty potent smashery.

If you like that, get ready to hold onto your butts. I tossed in both Avaricious Dragon and Grafted Skullcap. You can draw one extra card at the price of losing your hand. Now, I still included a handful of cards that are instants and do things, but for the most part, you can draw stuff and then smash hard. Want another angle of attack? What about Ensnaring Bridge? No one can attack you with anything while it’s out and you are handless unless it has a power of 0. But you have a lot of small-power stuff. Draw two cards from something like the Skullcap or Fool's Tome (use it during your upkeep), and the swing with a lot of your small stuff, and then drop those two cards. Swing away!

Okay, now that we’ve looked at the hand-light aspects of the deck, let’s look at the discarding fun-times of our deck!

One of the ways to help this deck is to run various effects that either have an option to discard a card or downright require it. A card like Faithless Looting fits perfectly because you can play it cheaply and then blow stuff out with it on the flipside by using madness. That’s the sort of effect I’m looking for. Now, we have a card like Memory Jar that’ll draw you seven and then discard those seven if you didn’t cast them, giving you a chance to madness them instead. Cards like that are well suited to what we are doing.

Other discard triggers are here as expected, from Compulsion to Chandra, Flamecaller to Looter il-Kor. We have all the good stuff that’ll make you happy as punch.

Since we are discarding our hands and such a lot, doesn’t it make sense to use the graveyard as a nice resource? Not only self-recursive creatures, but flashback seems to be a pretty solid adjunct to this deck. There are countless strong flashback options in our colors. I chose cards like Forbidden Alchemy, Chainer's Edict, Sever the Bloodline, and Deep Analysis. If you discard them, don’t worry. The world’s not over. You have other options. There are a lot of additional cards you could later include, such as Army of the Damned, Devil's Play, Dread Return, and Fervent Denial.

Another card to use the graveyard is Crucible of Worlds. Let’s be honest—you’ll be discarding a lot of lands to things. You may as well still ensure a land drop every turn with the Crucible, right? Right!

Do you know what that is? That’s pretty much a deck!

There are certainly a lot of other directions to explore. You could add in discard effects like Chandra Ablaze, tutoring support such as Diabolic Tutor, and then rock cards like Terminate to kill creatures or Vandalblast to deal with artifacts. More reanimation would be perfectly suitable. Perhaps cards that use your graveyard in other ways intrigue you.

Use your own ideas and cards!

Are you ready to mad this thing up? We’ll see you on the flipside of Magic soon enough!