What I think I love most about Commander is also what I love most about Legacy as a format.

Being able to play the deck you want to play is a real draw for me, and it’s why I like Legacy a lot. I just like to jam Punishing Maverick even though it hasn’t been the consensus “top” deck basically ever and hasn’t really been as well positioned lately as it had in the past. I am more concerned with being able to jam a fun deck that I enjoy playing and which can do powerful things and win out of nowhere. In this way, Legacy resembles Commander. There is a moderate amount of “groupthink” in the Commander community about what is “optimal,” but at the end of the day, you can just jam whichever deck you like, and as long as your deck has a strategy it can execute, you always have a shot of winning, irrespective of what the other players are doing.

The best part about /u/MrAxel asking about Golgari is that someone responded with every Golgari commander and made a case for his deck. You may not think of Vhati Il-Dal and his odd ability being super-solid, but /u/EsperMagic made the case for his Vhati deck with cards like Night of Souls' Betrayal. Still, after the thread had been up for a few hours, no one had mentioned one Golgari commander, and it was one I was interested in: Sisters of Stone Death!

The Sisters are not going to lend themselves to being a dredge combo deck. What they will do is allow me to do something I love to do but almost always end up having to run red and/or blue to do: allow me to steal opponents’ stuff! Stealing their stuff helps our deck scale to the power level of their decks by not giving them anything they can’t handle and giving you access to more powerful stuff the more powerful their decks are. And while black is not traditionally known for stealing stuff, there are quite a few black cards that do this. Why not jam a bunch of them on top of having a functional Sisters of Stone Death deck? We can scale while we’re doing things, we won’t be a boring combo deck, and we will do my favorite thing in Commander: making a lot of players pick up our commander and read what it does. I am excited about this deck. But what would it look like?

Sisters of Stone Death ? Commander | Jason Alt

• Commander (0)

• Creatures (21)
• 1 Acidic Slime
• 1 Avenger of Zendikar
• 1 Birds of Paradise
• 1 Creakwood Liege
• 1 Dread Cacodemon
• 1 Eternal Witness
• 1 Fleshbag Marauder
• 1 Grave Titan
• 1 Herald of Leshrac
• 1 Llanowar Elves
• 1 Nirkana Revenant
• 1 Puppeteer Clique
• 1 Rune-Scarred Demon
• 1 Sepulchral Primordial
• 1 Woodfall Primus
• 1 Duplicant
• 1 Wurmcoil Engine
• 1 Chainer, Dementia Master
• 1 Glissa, the Traitor
• 1 Nath of the Gilt-Leaf
• 1 Sheoldred, Whispering One

• Planeswalkers (2)
• 1 Liliana of the Dark Realms
• 1 Liliana Vess

• Spells (36)
• 1 Beast Within
• 1 Doom Blade
• 1 Fated Return
• 1 Go for the Throat
• 1 Putrefy
• 1 Slaughter Pact
• 1 Tendrils of Corruption
• 1 Beacon of Unrest
• 1 Bramblecrush
• 1 Cultivate
• 1 Death Mutation
• 1 Exsanguinate
• 1 Gruesome Encore
• 1 Harmonize
• 1 Innocent Blood
• 1 Kodama's Reach
• 1 Maelstrom Pulse
• 1 Nature's Lore
• 1 Praetor's Grasp
• 1 Rise of the Dark Realms
• 1 Ritual of the Machine
• 1 Skyshroud Claim
• 1 Tooth and Nail
• 1 Animate Dead
• 1 Enslave
• 1 Mana Reflection
• 1 Nature's Will
• 1 Phyrexian Arena
• 1 Darksteel Plate
• 1 Golgari Signet
• 1 Lightning Greaves
• 1 Mimic Vat
• 1 Nemesis Mask
• 1 Sol Ring
• 1 Swiftfoot Boots
• 1 Sword of Feast and Famine

• Lands (40)
• 12 Swamp
• 17 Forest
• 1 Cabal Coffers
• 1 Command Tower
• 1 Golgari Rot Farm
• 1 Llanowar Reborn
• 1 Overgrown Tomb
• 1 Reliquary Tower
• 1 Temple of the False God
• 1 Woodland Cemetery
• 1 Shizo, Death's Storehouse
• 1 Urborg, Tomb of Yawgmoth
• 1 Volrath's Stronghold

Buy This Deck

Herald of Leshrac doesn’t even strike me as a big violator of our policy of, “Don’t screw with their mana!” because they take the lands right back, and Herald is easy to deal with. He’s just a cool card. I honestly could see playing him in quite a few Commander decks because I think he’s fun, and he’s a target, so keeping him alive will be fun and challenging.

If I can find more cards to take out, I might want to jam a Bear Umbra in here. It’s a way to keep your commander from dying if it smashes into a big pile of an opponent’s dudes, and it gets those lands untapping. Still, Nature's Will and Sword of Feast and Famine are going to get us some serious mana. We want serious mana because the Sisters are expensive to summon from commander jail, especially if they have died a few times. The mana abilities are thirsty as well, forcing you to get your mana act together.

All in all, I think this is a deck that uses an old commander and teaches it some new tricks—no tutors, no combos, just pure value town. What could be better?

That does it for me this week. Join me next week, when I hope one of you will have sent me a decklist! Until then!