One of the deck types people hate most in Commander is the dedicated combo deck. You know: the deck that doesn’t do anything but search up its combo pieces and then swiftly and consistently take all the players out of the game at once. Combos are often tolerated—much to my and this column’s benefit—but dedicated combo decks are generally reviled.

But I just couldn’t help myself.

Well, it doesn’t only work with Clones. A Skill Borrower could do it, and an Experiment Kraj could do it. Also, one of my favorite cards, Necrotic Ooze, could also do it.

But that’s not all. Let’s add in a Stinkweed Imp. Activate the Necrotic Ooze with Civilized Scholar in the graveyard, replace the draw by dredging Stinkweed Imp, discard the Imp to untap the Ooze, and repeat, milling out the library.

That’s not the easiest way to mill our entire library, but it’s my favorite. Plus, if we do it, that means we have an active Necrotic Ooze on the battlefield having just filled up our graveyard with juicy, Oozable, activated superpowers.

Though this deck isn’t as powerful as some dedicated combo decks, it isn’t fun (for other players) for more than one game every once in a while, so it usually stays home when I head to Commander night.

"Single-Faced Scholar"

• Commander (0)

• Creatures (37)
• 1 Aladdin
• 1 Anger
• 1 Apprentice Necromancer
• 1 Bloodline Keeper
• 1 Cephalid Inkshrouder
• 1 Cinderhaze Wretch
• 1 Civilized Scholar
• 1 Corpse Connoisseur
• 1 Dimir Doppelganger
• 1 Drift of Phantasms
• 1 Dwarven Strike Force
• 1 Enraging Licid
• 1 Havengul Lich
• 1 Jodah's Avenger
• 1 Knacksaw Clique
• 1 Necrotic Ooze
• 1 Nightscape Familiar
• 1 Nivix Guildmage
• 1 Pack Rat
• 1 Riptide Shapeshifter
• 1 Sisters of the Flame
• 1 Skirge Familiar
• 1 Soldevi Adnate
• 1 Stinkweed Imp
• 1 Volrath's Shapeshifter
• 1 Withered Wretch
• 1 Grim Poppet
• 1 Iron Myr
• 1 Leaden Myr
• 1 Palladium Myr
• 1 Pili-Pala
• 1 Silver Myr
• 1 Grimgrin, Corpse-Born
• 1 Olivia Voldaren
• 1 Princess Lucrezia
• 1 Riven Turnbull
• 1 Urabrask the Hidden

• Spells (29)
• 1 Cauldron Dance
• 1 Dark Ritual
• 1 Fact or Fiction
• 1 Increasing Vengeance
• 1 Perplex
• 1 Thought Scour
• 1 Breakthrough
• 1 Buried Alive
• 1 Careful Study
• 1 Deep Analysis
• 1 Diabolic Tutor
• 1 Dimir Machinations
• 1 Dread Return
• 1 Exhume
• 1 Faithless Looting
• 1 Increasing Ambition
• 1 Ponder
• 1 Postmortem Lunge
• 1 Preordain
• 1 Profane Command
• 1 Quiet Speculation
• 1 Reckless Charge
• 1 Seize the Day
• 1 Stitch Together
• 1 Torrent of Souls
• 1 Zombify
• 1 Animate Dead
• 1 Darkwater Egg
• 1 Shadowblood Egg

• Lands (33)
• 6 Swamp
• 8 Mountain
• 9 Island
• 1 Blackcleave Cliffs
• 1 Cephalid Coliseum
• 1 Dreadship Reef
• 1 Drowned Catacomb
• 1 Salt Marsh
• 1 Shadowblood Ridge
• 1 Sulfur Vent
• 1 Sulfurous Springs
• 1 Tainted Peak
• 1 Urborg Volcano

Buy This Deck

Sedris, the Traitor King

The deck has a reanimation subtheme to play along with the Ooze’s synergies and to actually put the Ooze onto the battlefield. One of the most important cards of the deck is Buried Alive, which can find Necrotic Ooze, Civilized Scholar, and Stinkweed Imp, and since two of those three should be in the graveyard to start the combo anyway, you only need to find a way to put the Ooze onto the battlefield from there. And to help find Buried Alive, there are a couple transmute-for-3 spells, Diabolic Tutor, and a couple other goodies.

Another, weirder way to find the Ooze is Riptide Shapeshifter. With Necrotic Ooze being the only Ooze in the deck, you can just name that creature type, find the Ooze, and put it right onto the battlefield. Unfortunately, it doesn’t bring its friends with it, but with all the activated abilities in the deck, and potentially some of your opponents’, there should still be something interesting to do. And hey, if there isn’t anything else, the Ooze can always use the Shapeshifter’s power to sacrifice itself and go search up something else.

Haste

Enraging Licid requires a bit of setup, as you have to have had it on the battlefield since the turn before (it’d be nice if the haste Licid actually had haste), but assuming you do the setup work, it does grant haste for only . As an upside, if you have the Licid in the graveyard with an active Ooze and someone tries to use spot removal (Swords to Plowshares for example) on the Ooze, you can have your Ooze pull a Licid maneuver and transform itself into an Aura. Strangely enough, with the way Licids are currently templated in Oracle, the Ooze will not grant haste to the creature it enchants, but it will render the spot removal useless. Then, just pay to end the effect and go on with your turn. (The Ooze will be tapped despite having just been an Aura, but we have ways to deal with that.)

The odd Odyssey Dwarf Dwarven Strike Force offers more access to haste. With the Ooze on the battlefield and the Dwarf in the graveyard, discarding a card at random will let us get started. The Strike Force also hints at another subtheme of the deck, which is discarding. Doing so randomly isn’t so great, but it is quite handy to give the Ooze additional abilities or to put Anger or the like into the graveyard.

Finally—in addition to reanimation effects that offer built-in haste—we have Urabrask the Hidden. This Praetor probably won’t allow us to use the Ooze on a turn we normally wouldn’t, but if we’re comboing off with it, this guy comes in handy for ending the game.

Ooze: Activate

With both of these guys in the graveyard and the Necrotic Ooze active, we can tap for any activated ability that requires just a tap cost, put a -1/-1 counter on the Ooze to untap with Cinderhaze Wretch’s ability, and then remove the -1/-1 counter with Grim Poppet’s power to put that counter onto another creature, thus resetting the Ooze and shrinking our opponents’ creatures. In this way, we can kill all their stuff and tap for superpowers a whole bunch.

With these two in the ’yard, the Ooze can tap for a Vampire token with Bloodline Keeper’s power and then sac the token to untap and gain a +1/+1 counter with Grimgrin, Corpse-Born’s power. This makes the Ooze as large as we want it to be, ready to attack for any amount of damage. If we run out of opposing creatures to kill with our combo from above, we can start shrinking our own Vampire tokens in order to continue tapping. In this way, we could, for example, create any number of 1/1 flying Vampire tokens (2/2s with -1/-1 counters on them).

With these two artifact friends (actually, I don’t know if Scarecrows and Myr can be friends), Necrotic Ooze can tap for 2 with the Palladium Myr’s ability and then spend that 2 mana for Pili-Pala’s activated ability that untaps the Ooze as a cost. The effect is 1 mana of any color and an untapped Ooze, allowing us to repeat, thus generating infinite mana.

While the Myr can be used to ramp as well as help combo, the Legends and The Dark cards are primarily for style points. However, they can be useful when some cards end up in the ’yard while other—potentially more useful—ones don’t. However, in lieu of Palladium Myr and Pili-Pala, having Grim Poppet, Cinderhaze Wretch, and any one of these can generate infinite mana, though if you want infinite mana of all three colors, you’ll need a combination of the Myr and the Legends legends or The Dark Sisters.

These three are examples of what you might enjoy doing while going infinite. With the Necrotic Ooze’s newfound phenomenal cosmic power, you can cast all of the (colorless, blue, black, and red) creature cards from your opponents’ (and your) graveyards and turn all of their already-on-the-battlefield creatures into Vampires and then gain control of them. With Aladdin, you can gain control of all your opponents’ artifacts, and if you’re really ambitions and want to giggle like a schoolgirl while all of your friends come to hate you, you can use Knacksaw Clique to cast every (colorless, blue, black, and red) spell in all of your opponents’ libraries. Add Urabrask the Hidden, and attack them with their own stuff for good taste.

And if you’re feeling too restricted by the color identity and really want to go for the Knacksaw Clique plan, feel free to switch to five colors or add in Mycosynth Lattice to avoid such things as color altogether.

I’ve had this deck for about a year now, and the only changes I’ve made were after Return to Ravnica, when I replaced Izzet Guildmage with Nivix Guildmage and found a spot for Pack Rat (would you like to make a ton of Necrotic Ooze tokens?). With Nivix Guildmage instead of Izzet Guildmage, the Increasing Vengeance is somewhat unnecessary, but it’s still fun to have around. Basically, cast Seize the Day from your hand or graveyard, use Increasing Vengeance if you feel like it, and use Necrotic Ooze’s imitation of a Guildmage to give yourself infinite (or any number of) attack phases this turn. And if you need to be unblockable, try out Jodah's Avenger to gain shadow.

As I said, the last updates to the deck were with Nivix Guildmage and Pack Rat, but if you want to try out some newer cards, these look quite nice. Aetherling’s powers give you more control over your Ooze’s size while offering another form of protection against spot removal (in addition to Cephalid Inkshrouder and Enraging Licid), though it does set you back a turn. Also, its can’t-be-blocked ability might just be better than Jodah's Avenger’s shadow. Duskmantle Guildmage can let you use your mana to flat-out win the game—or just mill libraries for more stuff to cast with Havengul Lich.

Finally, Goblin Test Pilot seems like my new favorite. Once you’ve utterly gained control of the game with an unstoppable Ooze, and just when everyone starts picking up their cards in concession, tell them, “No, wait. I’ll activate the Goblin Test Pilot ability.” Randomly determine a target, and repeat ad nauseam until you either die or are the last player standing.

Well, I hope you enjoyed today’s look at my one dedicated combo Commander deck. I’m all for strong themes, Pocket Combos, and the like, but I rarely take a hundred-card deck to the extreme like this. Let me know what you think in the comments or by e-mail!

Andrew Wilson

@Silent7Seven

fissionessence at hotmail dot com