Welcome back, readers!

Last week I did my Ikoria set review and while I may or may not do one for the new cards in Commander 2020, I'm not inclined to do two back to back. Luckily, there are actually too many commanders right now and we will be making decks out of them until we're allowed to play paper Magic again. It's also lucky that there are a lot of commanders I actively want to build a deck out of from Ikoria and Commander 2020.

People have been messaging me for a few days about Gavi, Nest Warden decks that use Gilded Drake and Astral Slide to pick off the opponents' entire boards one by one. That's right up my alley and while I considered doing that deck today, I'm not sure what sort of improvements I could even make. I'm not trying to make someone else's exact deck and if I can't add anything new or put a 75% slant on something, what am I even doing here? Instead of rehashing someone else's great idea, I decided to see if I could dig a little bit and find a non-Blue way to steal a lot of creatures using cards from Commander 2020 and/or Ikoria. It didn't take long before I found something promising.

A card that I love to play in Black decks because it breaks the color pie and lets me steal creatures in a non-Blue deck is Ritual of the Machine. Ritual has a cost, four mana and one of your healthy, alive creatures, but what you get for your investment is so much more. You get one of their creatures if they can't sac it or counter your spell. Getting one of their creatures is all I ever wanted in a Magic card, and being able to do it in Black is even more fun because no one sees it coming. Playing Ritual of the Machine is fun and all, but what if you could play Ritual of the Machine more than once? Getting it back and replaying it would be a lot of fun, and if I can do that a lot, even better. My plan? Recurring Eternal Witness. Since we also need a victim to sac to our Ritual, I'd like a deck where we have a lot of creatures, or can get them back. We could sac Witness to Ritual then play Ritual, get Witness back and get Ritual back if we can figure out a way to keep getting Witness out of the 'yard. Magic, like life, uh, finds a way.

This nightmare beast is one of the most exciting Abzan commanders I have seen because it rewards you for doing two things Abzan is good at - putting counters on stuff and graveyard shenanigans. This is the peanut butter meeting chocolate of Abzan decks and this would be a great shell for our Ritual machinations. Since I don't like the idea of tutoring for Ritual, I think we should have a deck that does a bit more than just loop Eternal Witness. Luckily, I have a plan for that, and it's one that luckily coincides with how well Tayam works with creatures that have Undying and Persist.

As I was looking at sets where creatures getting counters was a mechanic, I naturally found Shadowmoor. I have very good memories from Shadowmoor Limited - Fate Transfering counters off of Grief Tyrant, putting Elemental Mastery on said Grief Tyrant, the card Blowfly Infestation in general. Grief Tyrant wasn't the only fun place to stash Elemental Mastery, though, because Shadowmoor had creatures that untapped themselves and if you had a few copies of Fate Transfer, you could really rack up counters and tokens. We don't have Fate Transfer here, but we do have a hungry, hungry nightmare beast who wants to snack on our sadness and feeding it some tasty -1/-1 counters will help us churn through our deck.

Devoted Druid can't have more than one -1/-1 counter placed on it, and people have been circumventing that with cards like Vizier of Remedies. However, Vizier of Remedies is really atrocious in a Tayam deck, so we need to think a little harder about what to do. One option I considered was finding a way to boost Druid's toughness and while that's an option, I found other cards from the same cycle that can help. Our colors allow us to play Barrenton Medic and Cinderhaze Wretch, another one of my favorite places to put an Elemental Mastery back in the day. I looked for other cards like Pili-Pala that might help and struck out there, although Order of Whiteclay is going to do some work in the deck and I was happy to come across it because we're going to use it to make mana. Devoted Druid is the only creature in the cycle that taps for mana on its own, but if there's one thing that's becoming increasingly clear as I continue to write articles, I love Cryptolith Rite and I will probably put it in a deck next week just like I did last week. With Rite and Earthcraft we can tap for enough mana to activate Tayam, but why stop there? These colors and wanting counters gives us access to Rishkar, Peema Renegade and Jiang Yanggu, Wildcrafter. Throw Citanul Hierophants on top and you've got a recipe for mana from all of our creatures, but extra mana from our Shadowmoor friends.

Another way we can make a lot of mana is with Altars. If you can get a Persist creature and slap it on an Ashnod's Altar, it will come back with a -1/-1 counter, which we will need, and we'll have two of the three mana we need. If we can get another persist or undying creature in the mix, we can generate enough mana to put our entire deck in the 'yard and start bringing back every creature with CMC 3 or less. We can kill them with Blood Aritst and Zulaport Cutthroat, or get Concordant Crossroads down and swing with our entire team. We'll want to run Juniper Order Ranger and Good-Fortune Unicorn which is great with Undying because it gives us a second counter and not as much of a non-bo as you think with Persist. The counters cancel each other out, but you can generate infinite colorless mana that way and find a source of counters elsewhere to get Tayam back online.

Finally, we have my plan to loop Eternal Witness to rebuy our important spells. I thought of a slightly more complicated scheme involving Eternal Witness, Skullwinder and Victimize, but abandoned it because making a bad version of a workable deck isn't necessary to make a deck 75% - it's the thought that counts. Merely including Ritual of the Machine in the deck is enough to make me happy, but the deck has another secret weapon, and it's the reason I didn't include Skullwinder - Animate Dead. We can take creatures from their 'yard and if they die, we can use Tayam to re-buy Animate Dead. We can also loop it if we have enough mana and counters to abuse something in their 'yard with an ETB effect. We'll need to win the turn we do it since we're decking ourselves, but we should be able to manage if we can do anything infinitely.

This is pretty dangerously close to a Laboratory Maniac deck, but a lot can go wrong, it's going to be fairly mana-hungry, and if they can keep us off of our commander, we're pretty boned. I think this can be powerful but difficult to play and I like that in a deck. Let's see where we end up.

Tayam what Tayam | Commander | Jason Alt

• Commander (1)
• 1 Tayam, Luminous Enigma

• Creatures (34)
• 1 Barrenton Medic
• 1 Birds of Paradise
• 1 Blood Artist
• 1 Butcher Ghoul
• 1 Cinderhaze Wretch
• 1 Citanul Hierophants
• 1 Cruel Celebrant
• 1 Devoted Druid
• 1 Eternal Witness
• 1 Evolution Sage
• 1 Fiend Artisan
• 1 Geralf's Messenger
• 1 Good-Fortune Unicorn
• 1 Grim Haruspex
• 1 Hapatra, Vizier of Poisons
• 1 Juniper Order Ranger
• 1 Kitchen Finks
• 1 Knight of Autumn
• 1 Luminous Broodmoth
• 1 Lurrus of the Dream-Den
• 1 Mazirek, Kraul Death Priest
• 1 Order of Whiteclay
• 1 Putrid Goblin
• 1 Reclamation Sage
• 1 Rishkar, Peema Renegade
• 1 Safehold Elite
• 1 Sakura-Tribe Elder
• 1 Spore Frog
• 1 Strangleroot Geist
• 1 Viscera Seer
• 1 Winding Constrictor
• 1 Yahenni, Undying Partisan
• 1 Young Wolf
• 1 Zulaport Cutthroat

• Planeswalkers (1)
• 1 Jiang Yanggu, Wildcrafter

• Instants (4)
• 1 Anguished Unmaking
• 1 Beast Within
• 1 Mythos of Nethroi
• 1 Swords to Plowshares

• Sorceries (5)
• 1 Cultivate
• 1 Eerie Ultimatum
• 1 Eldritch Evolution
• 1 Ritual of the Machine
• 1 Victimize

• Enchantments (13)
• 1 Abzan Ascendancy
• 1 Animate Dead
• 1 Attrition
• 1 Aura Shards
• 1 Bastion of Remembrance
• 1 Concordant Crossroads
• 1 Cryptolith Rite
• 1 Death's Oasis
• 1 Earthcraft
• 1 Hardened Scales
• 1 Helix Pinnacle
• 1 Necromancy
• 1 Pernicious Deed

• Artifacts (9)
• 1 Altar of Dementia
• 1 Arcane Signet
• 1 Ashnod's Altar
• 1 Golgari Signet
• 1 Heartstone
• 1 Phyrexian Altar
• 1 Skullclamp
• 1 Sol Ring
• 1 The Ozolith

• Lands (33)
• 2 Plains
• 5 Forest
• 5 Swamp
• 1 Canopy Vista
• 1 Caves of Koilos
• 1 Command Tower
• 1 Evolving Wilds
• 1 Exotic Orchard
• 1 Gavony Township
• 1 Godless Shrine
• 1 Indatha Triome
• 1 Isolated Chapel
• 1 Llanowar Wastes
• 1 Marsh Flats
• 1 Nurturing Peatland
• 1 Overgrown Tomb
• 1 Phyrexian Tower
• 1 Sandsteppe Citadel
• 1 Sunpetal Grove
• 1 Temple Garden
• 1 Temple of Malady
• 1 Verdant Catacombs
• 1 Windswept Heath
• 1 Woodland Cemetery

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This deck might very well want a Contagion Engine. You could target yourself with it, or just use it as the typical boardwipe it was intended to be and use it to build your own tokens when you activate it. You could do quite a bit of damage with Hapatra and get a lot of mana snakes to go to work in the Cryptolith Rite factory. Having lots of mana is always good and mana begets mana if you're using yours to loop a creature with Persist or are going off with Devoted Druid.

Wall of Roots may deserve a look. One advantage of Wall of Roots is that the -0/-1 counters aren't wiped out by +1/+1 counters the way -1/-1 counters are, so you could use Wall of Roots n times a turn cycle but keep it alive with +1/+1 counters, making it a nice farm for counters later if one of your nice loops gets disrupted.

Speaking of loops, I should detail them.

Luminous Broodmoth can bring things back easily and if you manage to strip that flying counter off, you can loop the creature with a sac outlet. This is a workhorse in the deck but you basically need to have Tayam active since it's tough to get the counter off otherwise.

Persist creatures loop with a sac outlet plus Juniper Order Ranger or Good-Fortune Unicorn, but you won't accrue counters this way. You can mill the table with Altar of Dementia or make infinite mana with your other altars. I included fewer Persist creatures than undying ones because this interaction can cause problems, but I don't know if gaining an arbitrarily large but finite amount life with Kitchen Finks and passing the turn is THAT bad. I think we're doing OK.

Undying creatures are a little better since they get an extra counter to strip off and 2 of them plus Ashnod's Altar is all you need to put your whole deck in the 'yard and bring it all back.

Remember to kill Grim Haruspex or cut it out of your deck if you can't remember the triggers. It's a bit of a liability if you see yourself as a combo deck but I like this as a sort of grindy, card advantage deck and it shines there. Don't mill yourself out and realize you have a card draw trigger on an empty deck to contend with.

If you can't go infinite, I like using Animate Dead, Necromancy, or Eternal Witness to swipe stuff from their graveyard. You may want to consider looking at a few more cards like Dance of the Dead if you like this strategy, in which case you may want a Grave Pact effect or two. Their yard will be well-stocked and their board will be clear. Altar of Dementia as a sac outlet does a decent job of finding you good stuff to swipe, but this keeps the creatures they do summon out of your hair to boot.

All in all, I think this has a few directions you can choose to pursue more. This is very creature-heavy and with the high number of Enchantments I like to run, Instants and Sorceries suffer, as usual. However, since this is a permanents-based deck, it's better to have an Aura Shards you can bring back from the yard than a Beast Within you can't, anyway.

That does it for me this week. Next week I will have a very, very spicy brew that will involve a companion, so check in next week for that. Thanks again for reading, hit me up on twitter@jasonealt) and we'll see you next time!