Readers!

This past year and the first part of this year, I've been increasingly pushing myself out of my deck-building comfort zone. Despite it being easier than ever to just play Simic and have the best card drawing and ramp and creatures and spells, I am finding things to like in other color combinations. Not playing Green as often has been scary because without mana ramp like Green has, how am I supposed to keep up? Commander rewards us for playing big, dumb, expensive creatures with powerful effects, after all. How are we supposed to cope with the Green player ramping to 11 mana on turn four and dumping their hand? A Dimir deck can't cough up 11 mana on turn four. So what do we do? It's obvious - we cheat.

And look, it's not like insane ramp isn't cheating. Primeval Titan and Sylvan Primordial are banned for a reason - they put one player too far ahead of everyone else. If their shenanigans are bannable, the cards that didn't get banned are close enough to cheating that we shouldn't feel bad for the corners we cut. Can a deck with no Green cough up 11 mana on turn four to play their huge creature? No, not reliably. So let's just not pay the mana cost.

Reanimator is a deck archetype that proponents pretend is more effective than it is and a weird movie that cult movie fans pretend to like more than they actually did; but, I like both of the types of Reanimator a lot anyway. The great thing about Reanimator (the deck) is that you can have huge creatures without having to pay the mana for them, which is a great way to catch up to the Green player ramping quickly. You only need 1 mana to cast Reanimate on a Consecrated Sphinx, so why clutter our deck with a lot of mana ramp spells when we could jam more delicious Reanimator enablers? There's one issue here - while we don't have to devote space to Cultivates and Burgeonings, we do have to find room for the Buried Alives and the Fact or Fictions. We're just as awkward a deck if we get a draw that doesn't have a good mixture of lands, reanimation spells, graveyard fillers and reanimation targets. Having one of those slots in a holster would be a huge help because it would let us mulligan less often and devote more deckspace to gas. Enter Atris.

At four mana, a 3/2 Menace is pretty reasonable, but Atris won't be attacking much but will rather be filling our graveyard with cards. Will some of those cards be cards we need? Perhaps, but I'm happy to let them hit the bin if we can also fill our yard with the corpses of fantastic beasts, lying in state, waiting for necromancy's icy kiss to wake them from their fitful slumber. Those are real Morrissey lyrics, don't google it. Let's move on.

A few ways to blink Atris or our big nasties and we'll have quite an advantage engine going. Panharmonicon and Conjurer's Closet are going to get a real workout in this deck, and once we get our advantage engine churning, we should be able to wrap the game up in short order. A few Archaeomancer types can ensure we don't get punished for dredging our important spells and if we ever get hit with some nasty graveyard hate spell, don't worry, ours is not the only graveyard.

A hallmark of 75% deck-building is scaling the power level of our deck to that of our opponents and the best way I have found to do that is to steal their stuff. Gonti, Lord of Luxury was born to play around in a Panharmonicon/Conjurer's Closet deck and even more expensive creatures have even more powerful effects. In fact, the majority of the creatures I want to run and reanimate are in a similar vein - Dragonlord Silumgar, Sepulchral Primordial, Agent of Treachery, and Puppeteer Clique are all dying, and reliving, to be part of this deck. Sure, we'll jam a few beaters in there so we have something to do if our opponents aren't giving us the goods but, honestly, if they don't have any juicy creatures to swipe, how were they planning to beat us? Seems like our deck is best when everyone else is doing well, and that's 75% to me.

This deck seems like a ton of fun to play and while it's pretty similar to how I'd build Dragonlord Silumgar, we have a few tricks up our sleeve. Atris is best when cast early and often and both blinking and bouncing are going to be very useful for our deck. Luckily, the creatures we want to run will synergize with these effects. Torrential Gearhulk is a good card to have in a lot of decks but it's extra good if you blink it and get to use the effect again and again, rescuing spells you accidentally dredged and giving you a ton of free value every turn. It won't make much difference to your opponents whether you cast Rise of the Dark Realms with Gearhulk because you accidentally dumped it in a face-down Atris pile or because it was cheaper to cast it for the it costs to activate Deadeye Navigator - they're in trouble either way. A lot of the plays we're forced to make because of the random nature of Atris and the plays we want to make because of the nature of Reanimator are identical and that's the kind of synergy I could get used to. So what does the deck end up looking like?

Reanimator | Commander | Jason Alt

• Commander (1)
• 1 Atris, Oracle of Half-Truths

• Creatures (27)
• 1 Agent of Treachery
• 1 Archaeomancer
• 1 Baleful Strix
• 1 Deadeye Navigator
• 1 Diluvian Primordial
• 1 Dragonlord Silumgar
• 1 Evil Twin
• 1 Gonti, Lord of Luxury
• 1 Hostage Taker
• 1 Notion Thief
• 1 Peregrine Drake
• 1 Phyrexian Delver
• 1 Plaguecrafter
• 1 Platinum Emperion
• 1 Possessed Skaab
• 1 Puppeteer Clique
• 1 Ravenous Chupacabra
• 1 Sepulchral Primordial
• 1 Sheoldred, Whispering One
• 1 Sidisi, Undead Vizier
• 1 Snapcaster Mage
• 1 Solemn Simulacrum
• 1 Spellseeker
• 1 Thada Adel, Acquisitor
• 1 Torrential Gearhulk
• 1 Venser, Shaper Savant
• 1 Watcher for Tomorrow

• Planeswalkers (1)
• 1 Ashiok, Dream Render

• Instants (11)
• 1 Arcane Denial
• 1 Cyclonic Rift
• 1 Desertion
• 1 Drown in the Loch
• 1 Essence Flux
• 1 Fact or Fiction
• 1 Ghostly Flicker
• 1 Narset's Reversal
• 1 Siren's Ruse
• 1 Teferi's Time Twist
• 1 Truth or Tale

• Sorceries (7)
• 1 Boneyard Parley
• 1 Deliver Unto Evil
• 1 Reanimate
• 1 Rise of the Dark Realms
• 1 Rite of Replication
• 1 Ritual of the Machine
• 1 Treasure Cruise

• Enchantments (4)
• 1 Animate Dead
• 1 Dance of the Dead
• 1 Necromancy
• 1 Rhystic Study

• Artifacts (14)
• 1 Arcane Signet
• 1 Commander's Sphere
• 1 Conjurer's Closet
• 1 Crystal Shard
• 1 Dimir Signet
• 1 Helm of Possession
• 1 Helm of the Host
• 1 Mimic Vat
• 1 Panharmonicon
• 1 Portal of Sanctuary
• 1 Sol Ring
• 1 Surveyor's Scope
• 1 Talisman of Dominance
• 1 Thought Vessel

• Lands (35)
• 15 Island
• 7 Swamp
• 1 Command Tower
• 1 Dimir Aqueduct
• 1 Drowned Catacomb
• 1 Exotic Orchard
• 1 Fetid Pools
• 1 Morphic Pool
• 1 Mystic Sanctuary
• 1 Polluted Delta
• 1 Reliquary Tower
• 1 Sunken Hollow
• 1 Temple of Deceit
• 1 Underground River
• 1 Watery Grave

Buy This Deck Export text format

This deck is a lot of fun - let's take a look at some specific choices I made and some potential pitfalls.

The average CMC looks higher than it really is - looking at this list, wouldn't you expect it to be over 4? It's actually a slim 3.8 thanks to a lot of cheap mana rocks and spells, which I think will get you through the early game. Remember, we're not trying to slam 4-drop creatures, we're trying to play our commander a few times to till the earth and harvest some monster corpses later. We may find we want some ways to loot in case we draw our big monsters, but I think this is deceptively streamlined and you'll rarely have your hand clogged with a ton of uncastables.

If you like swiping their stuff a lot, there is a card I included that has a lot of synergy with Control Magic effects, and that's Portal of Sanctuary. If you get sick of having a certain creature enchanted with Animate Dead or Necromancy, you can bounce the creature to whosever hand owns the creature and bounce the Animate Dead back to yours. This means you can play your Reanimator spells that are enchantments early and often. If you jam some Control Magic effects as well, they benefit from synergy with Portal as well, which is just dandy.

You could add a few more Reanimator spells - I personally like Vindicate and Dawn of the Dead. Dawn of the Dead also synergizes with the blink effects, which I like. I wanted to keep the Average CMC down but the first card I try out is the last card I cut, and that's Dawn.

I think it would be kind of boring to turn this into Turbo mill and win with Thassa's Oracle like every other deck is doing right now, but that's an option for you if you want. Double down on the blink effects to mill yourself, run Laboratory Maniac, Oracle and Jace, Wielder of Mysteries and have yourself a boring, linear time. Don't let me shame you - if that's your thing, this deck has the bones for it and you won't actually have to make that many modifications. If you go that route, Mesmeric Orb would be OUTSTANDING because you mill them and yourself, all of which will make your Reanimator effects better. Stealing their dead monsters gives you something to do while you wait for your library to empty and it's rare that I don't unearth a Blazing Archon or some other nasty creature to keep me alive when I play decks like this. You can even add your own Platinum Angel to help forestall your doom. You might want to add Angel whether or not you go mill, honestly.

This is fun for me because it's nearly the deck I would build around Dragonlord Silumgar but it also has a fun Reanimator package and has adaptability into other builds as well with minimal changes. We get to do our favorite things, play our pet cards like Helm of Possession to great effect, discover new, fun cards like Portal of Sanctuary and we even get to try out Surveyor's Scope to really stick it to the ramp players. Slow and steady wins the race, and when our turn four tortoise is a Platinum Emperion, all the hares in the world won't save them from your Frankensteinian antics. Raise the dead, raise hell, raise some eyebrows and do it all while playing cards like Boneyard Parley and Crystal Shard. This truly is the best format.

That does it for me, readers. Thanks so much for hanging on in there with me for another year, and don't feel shy about giving me the business in the comments section. I'm really interested to see what you're all building with Theros cards. Until next time!