I like to look back at some of the older cards in Magic that you may not have heard of but would want to add to your Commander decks. This time around I took a look at some multicolored cards that would fit in your Black-aligned guild decks. Let's get right to it!

Keldon Twilight

This card ramps up the pressure on everyone to keep the game moving. If they don't attack they are going to lose a creature. This means there will be plenty of times when an opponent will attack into an impossible defense. Why not attack and hope for a miracle rather than just sit there and watch the creature die.

What I particularly like about Keldon Twilight, is that the creature being sacrificed has to have been there since the start of the turn. This means everyone can continue to cast creatures, even if they didn't have one at the start of the turn. It also means that your opponents aren't going to be able to cast a creature just to sacrifice it so another creature doesn't die.

Not only does Keldon Twilight work well as a way to move the game along (and reduce the number of blocking creatures!), the downside for someone running Black is minimal, if even a downside at all. Another creature in the graveyard is generally an advantage for the Black player. Keldon Twilight is another way to ensure your opponents are also filling their graveyards, which is handy when you are looking to reanimate a creature from any graveyard.

I would run this in Goblin decks and other decks that have plenty of creatures or relies on creature combat to win. I know there is an urge to include it in a deck with no creatures, since you will not have to sacrifice a creature, but consider the response from your opponents. If an opponent doesn't like this enchantment, and doesn't have a way to destroy it, you can expect they will throw that attacking creature at you. Be ready for the unhappy Blue player.

Circle of Despair

I have already mentioned Righteous War and Purgatory in the White guilds edition of this series. Both are great cards and really deserve another look. I'm also not going to talk about Vindicate, since that is hardly a "hidden" gem. However, Circle of Despair is a delight! The ability to spend one mana and sacrifice one creature to prevent damage is simply amazing.

If you are trying to attack for the win, you can save your best creature with a creature that was already going to die. You can swing in with everything at your opponents, who know that you can spend one and stop any damage from their behemoth coming at you.

You can mess with other players' combat. Sacrifice one of your own creatures and prevent damage to help an ally, make a new friend, or just make life that much more difficult for a powerful opponent. The political aspect of a card like this is not to be underestimated.

Most importantly though, Aristocrat decks are rampant in Commander and regularly show up in Orzhov decks. This can be the sacrifice outlet you need to start a chain of opponents also sacrificing creatures, and/or players losing life again and again. It is a great way to keep certain creatures alive until it is their time to die

Grim Feast

Grim Feast is better than you think. I know you are looking at the card and thinking that taking a point of damage on your upkeep is a minor compared to all the ways you have to kill an opponent's creatures. One Murder and you are eliminating one of their creatures and gaining four or five life. Every time they lose a creature in combat due to Keldon Twilight or any other manner of loss, you are gaining life. And when you are playing with Black, all that life gain can be used up in other ways. Phyrexian Arena, Bitterblossom, and Phyrexian mana are just a few options. This looks like a great card!

But it is better than that. Check out the Oracle text¹:

At the beginning of your upkeep, Grim Feast deals 1 damage to you.

Whenever a creature is put into an opponent's graveyard from the battlefield, you gain life equal to its toughness.

Do you see the difference? Originally, Grim Feast forced you to choose a target opponent. Still a pretty good deal, but now you gain the life every time any of your opponents' creatures die! The card just became three times as good as it originally was! When someone Wraths away the board, you just gain life equal to the toughness of EVERY CREATURE YOUR OPPONENT'S CONTROLLED. The token player has eight 1/1 creatures. The control player has two 4/4 creatures and the Voltron player has a commander that is pumped into a 10/8 creature. They all die (including the commanders now!) and you would gain 24 life. That one point of damage from Grim Feast on your upkeep seems like nothing now!

One quick warning with Grim Feast. Toxic Deluge and other Black cards that destroy creatures by reducing their toughness to zero are not your friends with this card. You want cards like Pestilence and Butcher of Malakir. Shape the Sands has a whole new use with Grim Feast around!

Unfulfilled Desires

For most of us Phyrexian Arena is a solid card draw spell. You are forced to pay a life on your upkeep and you get to draw a card. It is a given that this is a good card in virtually every deck that runs Black.

Unfulfilled Desires isn't Phyrexian Arena, but in the right deck, it is amazing. Unfulfilled Desires doesn't demand that you draw the card, or demand that you pay one life on your upkeep every single turn. It provides you with the option to pay the life and draw the card whenever you want to. It also doesn't limit you to just one card. As long as you can pay the cost, you can draw as many cards as you want.

The obvious limitation, and the reason it doesn't show up in every Dimir deck is the cost. Paying the mana is often a limitation that can make the card draw less effective. When you are in the early game and you only have four mana out, you may not have 1 mana to spare to draw another card.

I haven't mentioned that you need to discard a card every time you draw, mostly because I don't see that as a downside, but another feature that Unfulfilled Desires offers. Drawing a card and discarding a card (commonly referred to as "looting") is regularly seen in Blue and with just Blue, it can be a little frustrating as Blue doesn't have the graveyard recursion that Black does. However, when you combine the two colors, looting is an opportunity to keep interactive cards and cards that allow you to recur in your hand, while dumping amazing targets into your graveyard!

Unfulfilled Desires is great early in a Commander game. You have plenty of life and it gives you a place to use up all the extra mana you are not using every turn. If I have four lands and play Unfulfilled Desires, I may not have any use for that last mana. Now, I can use it at the end of my last opponent's turn to tap our and draw a card. If I have two, three, or even five extra mana, I can put my best cards in hand and am readying my graveyard. This level of card draw helps get me a land drop every single turn.

The Scarab God | Commander | Bruce Richard

• Commander (1)
• 1 The Scarab God

• Creatures (26)
• 1 Apprentice Necromancer
• 1 Champion of Wits
• 1 Corpse Connoisseur
• 1 Death Baron
• 1 Dimir Informant
• 1 Doom Whisperer
• 1 God-Eternal Bontu
• 1 Gray Merchant of Asphodel
• 1 Gyruda, Doom of Depths
• 1 Liliana's Reaver
• 1 Midnight Reaper
• 1 Mirror Image
• 1 Nightscape Familiar
• 1 Nightveil Sprite
• 1 Phyrexian Delver
• 1 Phyrexian Ghoul
• 1 Plague Belcher
• 1 Plaguecrafter
• 1 Possessed Skaab
• 1 Returned Reveler
• 1 Sedraxis Alchemist
• 1 Shepherd of Rot
• 1 Undead Augur
• 1 Vengeful Dead
• 1 Whisper Agent
• 1 Woe Strider

• Planeswalkers (3)
• 1 Liliana, Untouched by Death
• 1 Liliana, Waker of the Dead
• 1 Teferi, Master of Time

• Instants (8)
• 1 Chemister's Insight
• 1 Counterspell
• 1 Dark Ritual
• 1 Go for the Throat
• 1 Mission Briefing
• 1 Price of Fame
• 1 Prismatic Boon
• 1 Sinister Sabotage

• Sorceries (6)
• 1 Aether Gale
• 1 Discovery // Dispersal
• 1 Enter the God-Eternals
• 1 Kindred Dominance
• 1 Thought Erasure
• 1 Windfall

• Enchantments (6)
• 1 Disinformation Campaign
• 1 Monastery Siege
• 1 Paradox Haze
• 1 Search for Azcanta
• 1 Training Grounds
• 1 Unfulfilled Desires

• Artifacts (10)
• 1 Altar of Dementia
• 1 Bontu's Monument
• 1 Charcoal Diamond
• 1 Dimir Signet
• 1 Fellwar Stone
• 1 Mind Stone
• 1 Star Compass
• 1 Strionic Resonator
• 1 Wayfarer's Bauble
• 1 Worn Powerstone

• Lands (40)
• 12 Island
• 12 Swamp
• 1 Darkwater Catacombs
• 1 Dimir Aqueduct
• 1 Dimir Guildgate
• 1 Dismal Backwater
• 1 Drowned Catacomb
• 1 Esper Panorama
• 1 Evolving Wilds
• 1 Fetid Pools
• 1 Grixis Panorama
• 1 Jwar Isle Refuge
• 1 Submerged Boneyard
• 1 Temple of Deceit
• 1 Temple of the False God
• 1 Terramorphic Expanse
• 1 Warped Landscape
• 1 Watery Grave

Buy This Deck Export text format

As the game progresses, it gets better. You can churn through chunks of your library to find the card(s) you need. It can keep your life total just a little lower than everyone else's to discourage players from attacking you². It can help you refill your graveyard when someone exiles it away. Unfulfilled Desires is a solid card. Oh, and be sure to search for the "Love Song of Night and Day" as it shows up on plenty of cards³!

Flooded Woodlands

I'm sure some of you are looking at this card and asking how is this a gem when it only works if an opponent is running Green. I'm sure the rest of you are looking at the name of the card and the art and are just as stunned as I am that this isn't the name of a dual land!

Cards that target a particular color are rarely seen nowadays. Wizards hates printing a card that are useless in some games and shockingly good in others, and this is one of those cards. However, this is Commander and things are different. We have three opponents, not just one. We regularly run decks with more than two colors in them. When was the last time you played a game of Commander that didn't include someone playing Green? It will be rare when you draw this card and it doesn't have an immediate effect on the game.

In the late game, when the Green player usually has lands to spare, they will be able to swing in a limited way. They are not going to try to win via overwhelming numbers though, so again, the limits are there.

Flooded Woodlands is not a lock by any means. What it does is buy you time. When you play it in the early or mid-game, you'll take far less damage and force the Green player to use up their enchantment removal to restart their plans. Since you are playing Dimir, you are likely looking for a longer game that you can set up your lock. This card will come out of nowhere and buy you the time you need to make it happen.

I hope you enjoyed our walk through some of the hidden gems from the early days! There are plenty of wild cards for your Black guild decks to abuse from early Magic!

Bruce Richard

@manaburned

¹ Oracle text is the official text of a Magic card. Most cards that are older have a different text than what is written on the card due to changes in the rules or formatting. In some cases, like Grim Feast, the card itself is changed.

² Yes, I know that good players will recognize that you are a threat based on the number of cards you've drawn, but it is amazing how even good players will pay less attention to the player with the lowest life total.

³ Thanks to the folks in the comments for the blue hidden gems for suggesting this one!