In this experiment, we use the favor of the God of Passage to force our opponent either to pay the price or to let us walk to the edge repeatedly, bringing cards and Demons each time.

Today, I wanted to write about Ragemonger. This guy gives you the power to cast Minotaurs at a discount, enabling aggressive Minotaur strategies. But I’m more interested in combo strategies, and as you start to make spells free, you start to make combos become more and more possible.

The problem is that the only Minotaurs he makes become free are Apocalypse’s Raka Disciple and Journey into Nyx’s Gnarled Scarhide. Of course, Journey into Nyx could bring more -or-cheaper Minotaurs with it, but we’ll have to wait and see. So instead, I decided to stick with the concept but switch creature types.

Doing some kind of Minotaur–Cleric crossover deck would be sweet, but without Conspiracy, which costs 5, we wouldn’t have much to work with. And if we can’t start until we’re at 5 mana, it kind of takes away from the theme of things being free.

So while we did have to step away from Theros block and its Minotaurs, we are fortunate in that a couple Journey into Nyx previews happen to fit quite well into this deck’s structure. One is just Mana Confluence, a powerful color-fixing land, but the other card even encouraged me to build the deck in the style you’ll see below. Actually, let’s just dive right into the deck this time:

Edgy Athreos ? Casual | Andrew Wilson

• Creatures (36)
• 1 Abhorrent Overlord
• 18 Shadowborn Apostle
• 2 Children of Korlis
• 2 High Priest of Penance
• 2 Weathered Wayfarer
• 3 Rune-Scarred Demon
• 4 Edgewalker
• 4 Athreos, God of Passage

• Spells (9)
• 3 Land Grant
• 4 Beck // Call
• 1 Carnival of Souls
• 1 Elixir of Immortality

• Lands (15)
• 1 Breeding Pool
• 1 Overgrown Tomb
• 1 Temple Garden
• 4 City of Brass
• 4 Isolated Chapel
• 4 Mana Confluence

Buy This Deck

Turn Four

This is turn four, after having played three lands (possibly having cast a Land Grant) and an Edgewalker.

Cast Beck (of Beck // Call). Cast Shadowborn Apostle for 0 and draw a card. Repeat that five times (possibly drawing into requisite Apostles along the way). Pay and sacrifice the Apostles for Rune-Scarred Demon, search, and draw a card. Play more Clerics for 0, drawing cards as you go. End the turn with a 6/6 flying Demon and a hand full of other stuff.

Turn Five

Okay, so that wasn’t terrible. All right; maybe it kind of was. We had to have Edgewalker and Beck // Call and sufficient lands and hit six Apostles. (We can chain just a single Apostle into the rest if we’re super-lucky with Beck draws, but still.) And all we ended up with, for the most part, was an early 6/6.

Let’s imagine that, instead of playing Edgewalker on turn three, we play it on turn four. Perhaps we played High Priest of Penance on turn two to keep away scary stuff, but on turn three, we played another exciting card for the deck: Athreos, God of Passage. Now let’s see how this goes.

Cast Beck. Cast Shadowborn Apostle for 0 and draw a card. Repeat that five times. Pay and sacrifice the Apostles for Rune-Scarred Demon. Our opponent pays 18 life to Athreos so we aren’t able to return any of our Apostles. Fetch Carnival of Souls with Rune-Scarred Demon and draw a card. Cast Carnival of Souls, and play more free Clerics (drawing more cards each time). We are now generating mana as we play Clerics and draw cards, though we’re also paying life. At some point, sacrifice a Children of Korlis to regain all our spent life, and return it to our hand with Athreos. Our opponent already paid 18, so he or she won’t be able to pay again. If the opponent did save some life, we have a backup copy of Children of Korlis. Two more Rune-Scarred Demons will help us smooth things out, and we can even cast them with the from our Carnival.

We’ll be able to reach an arbitrarily high life total with Children, and our opponent will have to contend with our army—both of Demons and of 1/1s. If our opponent doesn’t pay life to Athreos, that means we’ll have to deal more damage eventually, but it also makes our life much easier as we’re trying to combo out.

Demonic Options

Rune-Scarred Demon is the primary Demon when it comes to consistency. Any weird pieces we decide to run this guy can find it for us off just one Apostle activation. He’s also a 6/6 with flying, which certainly isn’t the largest of Demons, but it is quite the contender when compared to most creatures.

The only other Demon I opted for here is Abhorrent Overlord. On the plan of consistency, I chose the one that will potentially give us a large army in the skies. However, the actual key here is that he is at least bringing two Harpies with him, and there will probably be more—from extra Apostles, from Edgewalkers, and from Athreos. And each Harpy is an extra card, assuming we cast a Beck the turn he enters the battlefield, so that means he draws at least thrice as many cards as other Demons—and potentially a lot more.

Griselbrand is kind of the obvious Demon to include, perhaps overshadowing even Rune-Scarred Demon. Lifelink is super-sweet, and drawing seven cards gives us more than Abhorrent Overlord does, and it’s even somewhat close to the Demonic Tutor effect of Rune-Scarred Demon, considering Griselbrand’s activation’s repeatability. Griselbrand even works quite well with Children of Korlis. If you have a copy of Griselbrand, I’d recommend him, though I skipped over this legendary Demon on account of his price tag.

Harvester of Souls is a pretty sweet card-drawing Demon as well. It doesn’t fly, as the Overlord does, however, and it doesn’t draw as many cards upfront. If I felt that I had more room in the deck for more Demons, the Harvester would be near the top of the list.

The first downside is that we have to play carefully with our Edgewalkers, as they will die quickly and are harder to replay. Perhaps activate Pestilence Demon once, cast a second Edgewalker for , activate the Demon again, killing the first Edgewalker and returning it to our hand, cast that Edgewalker again for , and so on, making sure to have only one Edgewalker with damage on it at a time. Carnival of Souls makes plenty of , but it doesn’t supply , so we have to make sure we’re casting Edgewalkers with another Edgewalker’s cost-reduction effect.

The second downside is that Pestilence Demon is a win-more Demon in this case. In all the examples I listed of it being powerful, we already had a bunch of our deck online, whereas Rune-Scarred Demon and Abhorrent Overlord (for its card-draw and blocker-providing) are better as we try to get the deck running.

Questionable Land Count

It’s pretty rough on a deck like this when you start drawing a ton of cards and a significant number of them are lands. To keep the engine going, we need to continually draw free Clerics. Fortunately, we really only need enough mana to cast Edgewalker, Athreos, and Beck // Call, and they can all be cast on different turns. Assuming we cast Beck on the fifth turn (after our spells) and are able to play a follow-up land out of all the cards we draw, we’ll have enough to both activate a Shadowborn Apostle and cast Carnival of Souls, setting us up, essentially, for the rest of the game.

That said, there are concerns about making it to that point. There are only fifteen lands in the deck, and that’s not a lot.

Land Grant is like a free fetch land—it costs no mana and finds whatever color of mana we need in this deck. It can find a Forest, and Breeding Pool (for blue), Temple Garden (for white), and Overgrown Tomb (for black) all fit the bill. The way in which it resembles a fetch land is that it weeds one land out of our library. Once that land it weeded out, it’s on the battlefield where we can use it, and that’s one fewer land we have to worry about drawing while we’re casting free Clerics and draw us cards.

Other Combo Options

That said, I had to make a lot of tough choices in trying to find the right ratio of whosits and whatnots for the deck, and chances are it’s not even close to right. Here are several more cards you could try when putting together lists based on these ideas or when throwing some combinations of these cards into your Commander decks.

Demonic Tutor, Eladamri's Call, Sylvan Tutor, Worldly Tutor – These are all ways to ensure access to Edgewalker and/or Athreos, God of Passage on time. They could encourage a more green-heavy build, but as you’ll see from the next card, cutting blue altogether is quite possible, and a B/G/W list with no budget could be pretty sweet.

Glimpse of Nature – This pretty much takes the place of Beck // Call for those who can afford it. Though it’s banned in Modern, it still demands a $25 price tag. It doesn’t work with Abhorrent Overlord (as it requires we cast the creatures), but it lets us cut a color and costs half as much mana as Beck.

Blood Celebrant – This guy essentially lets us turn all our Carnival of Souls mana into any color we want or need. It solves the problem we had with Pestilence Demon killing our Edgewalkers, but I don’t think it deserves a spot. However, a list that went even crazier with expensive, big, splashy effects of various colors could do pretty silly stuff.

If you’ve ever wanted to make your opponent seriously consider paying 18 life, give this deck a try.

Andrew Wilson

@Silent7Seven

fissionessence at hotmail dot com