Readers!

If you read my Twitter you're no doubt aware that I'm of the somewhat controversial opinion that Flash Hulk wasn't a big deal in our format. Not too many people played that combo in casual EDH and cEDH is a format where you're trying to win on turn two. Flash Hulk was a combo that bothered a lot of people, however, and if it had to go, I'm glad it went because that means the problem is solved and everyone's happy and now there's nothing left to complain about on every single one of Sheldon Menery's tweets. That's cause for a celebration!

Legacy is a fairly high-powered format and anything bannable in that format was something worth considering banning in Commander and Flash was indeed banned for a long time. Three years ago, it was unbanned and last month it was banned again. It was a neat experiment, it made a lot of people mad, it made me laugh and I hope the Rules Committee considers testing some other unbans in the future. That said, I'm the kind of lunatic who wants Rofellos legal, so maybe it's a good thing I don't have a say at all.

I don't want to build Flash Hulk and never did, but perhaps we can take some lessons from that deck. I like the idea of getting a bunch of creatures into play that are just going to die right away, because that's hilarious. Those creatures going right to the bin trigger all sorts of fun cards - Grave Pact, Blood Artist, Harvester of Souls - you can even use Luminous Broodmoth to get a new set of triggers later in the turn. Dealing 120 damage with Blood Artist is going to be a lot more difficult than dealing 32 damage with 4 copies of Disciple of the Vault, but if we look at it as an engine that gives us tremendous value rather than killing someone on the spot, we realize that we can have a lot of fun with this deck. However, even if we run quite a few 0-toughness creatures, we can't have a Protean Hulk in our command zone, so how are we going to make the deck even function? To answer that question, let's look at what we CAN run in the command zone.

Nehtori, a can with antlers and hooves that is coughing a cartoon skull out of his mouth alone in a swamp is the perfect commander for this deck. Whenever you pay his Mutate cost and put him onto another creature, or mutate something onto it, you can return 10 total power (or less) worth of creatures from the graveyard to play. That could be 2 medium creatures, 3 or 4 small ones, or a whole host of creatures like Shifting Wall. We've come a long way since 2007 and our options are far less limited. Best of all, a lot of the creatures we have access to now have utility other than just dying meaning we can play them as regular creatures, get them into the graveyard somehow when they outlive their usefulness and watch them live a second life as a combo piece. Phyrexian Marauder is a bad topdeck but Cryptic Trilobite and Steelbane Hydra aren't. The dual role these creatures can play helps us reframe the deck as a value machine that can occasionally have explosive turns.

I think we should run some mutate creatures because they're good and fun and if they kill Nethroi twice, we will basically never be able to pay the Mutate cost AND the commander tax together, so we'll want creatures we can mutate onto Nethroi. Not only that, if you build a big stack of them, you get pretty good value and they make a tempting target for murder, which is fine with us because our deck is built around stuff going to the graveyard. Necropanther is a snap inclusion, but I like a few others that interfere with their gameplan. I'm going to run basically every single one that blows up their stuff.

I am going to draw heavily from my Teysa Karlov deck for inspiration here because I want that sort of experience a lot of the time. Having access to Green is obviously great, but I want to play like Teysa until we can use Nethroi or Hulk to have an explosive turn. To that end, I'll want Teysa in the deck to double our triggers which will help us go the distance against a whole table. Teysa also reminds us not to forget Ritual of the Machine and Helm of Possession, not that I was going to. Grave Pact and Dictate of Erebos, Zulaport Cutthroat, and Vindictive Vampire will all be joining our merry band as well. We're building quite a roster here.

While we're on the subject of rosters, we need to select our X/X creatures, Nethroi's Death Bois. I like the idea of having the creatures have some utility outside the context of the combo, so if possible, I'd like to avoid Shifting Wall type creatures in favor of Mikaeus, the Lunarch types. I found quite a few good ones, including Walking Ballista, Genesis Hydra, and a card that I was clued into when its price went from "bulk" status to a few bucks - Urza's Legacy bulk rare "Workhorse" which will be just that if we end up having to summon it. Workhorse can filter colorless mana into mana of any color and can even give us more than we put in if we have something like Luminous Broodmoth around. A useful hydra with a good ability can be an actual Magic card if you're not ready to combo and when you are, just throw that scaly boi in the bin and watch him come back a second later like "REMEMBER ME" and then die a second after that because that's the whole point.

Playing creatures and sacrificing them is a bit too slow, so we'll also want to just be throwing handfuls of cards into the 'yard as quickly as possible. Our commander being an important piece of the combo mitigates the danger of dredging too greedily and too deep so we'll want to run some dredgers in the deck. Cards like The Great Henge and Moldervine Reclamation give us opportunities to draw cards, so running Golgari Grave-Troll and Life From the Loam are even better here since we can dredge early and often.

With all of that in mind, what does this pile look like? We're not quite Hulk combo, not quite Nethroi value town but we are all business.

Apex Twin | Commander | Jason Alt

• Commander (1)
• 1 Nethroi, Apex of Death

• Creatures (36)
• 1 Boneyard Lurker
• 1 Chittering Harvester
• 1 Corpse Knight
• 1 Cruel Celebrant
• 1 Cryptic Trilobite
• 1 Endless One
• 1 Eternal Witness
• 1 Gemrazer
• 1 Genesis Hydra
• 1 Golgari Grave-Troll
• 1 Hangarback Walker
• 1 Harvester of Souls
• 1 Hooded Hydra
• 1 Hungering Hydra
• 1 Luminous Broodmoth
• 1 Medicine Runner
• 1 Mikaeus, the Lunarch
• 1 Mindleecher
• 1 Mistcutter Hydra
• 1 Necropanther
• 1 Phyrexian Marauder
• 1 Poison-Tip Archer
• 1 Primordial Hydra
• 1 Protean Hulk
• 1 Renegade Rallier
• 1 Sakura-Tribe Elder
• 1 Satyr Wayfinder
• 1 Sawtusk Demolisher
• 1 Steelbane Hydra
• 1 Stonecoil Serpent
• 1 Syr Konrad, the Grim
• 1 Teysa Karlov
• 1 Voracious Hydra
• 1 Walking Ballista
• 1 Workhorse
• 1 Zulaport Cutthroat

• Instants (2)
• 1 Deathsprout
• 1 Rally the Ancestors

• Sorceries (6)
• 1 Jarad's Orders
• 1 Life From the Loam
• 1 Rishkar's Expertise
• 1 Ritual of the Machine
• 1 Sevinne's Reclamation
• 1 Skyshroud Claim

• Enchantments (10)
• 1 Animate Dead
• 1 Attrition
• 1 Dance of the Dead
• 1 Death's Oasis
• 1 Dictate of Erebos
• 1 Enduring Renewal
• 1 Grave Pact
• 1 Moldervine Reclamation
• 1 Pattern of Rebirth
• 1 Phyrexian Reclamation

• Artifatcs (8)
• 1 Altar of Dementia
• 1 Arcane Signet
• 1 Crucible of Worlds
• 1 Fellwar Stone
• 1 Helm of Possession
• 1 Mimic Vat
• 1 Sol Ring
• 1 The Great Henge

• Lands (37)
• 3 Forest
• 3 Plains
• 3 Swamp
• 1 Canopy Vista
• 1 Command Tower
• 1 Dakmor Salvage
• 1 Exotic Orchard
• 1 Geier Reach Sanitarium
• 1 Godless Shrine
• 1 Grim Backwoods
• 1 High Market
• 1 Indatha Triome
• 1 Isolated Chapel
• 1 Krosan Verge
• 1 Llanowar Wastes
• 1 Marsh Flats
• 1 Murmuring Bosk
• 1 Overgrown Tomb
• 1 Phyrexian Tower
• 1 Reflecting Pool
• 1 Sandsteppe Citadel
• 1 Sunpetal Grove
• 1 Temple Garden
• 1 Temple of Malady
• 1 Temple of Plenty
• 1 Temple of Silence
• 1 Twilight Mire
• 1 Urborg, Tomb of Yawgmoth
• 1 Verdant Catacombs
• 1 Windswept Heath
• 1 Woodland Cemetery

Buy This Deck Export text format

There are a lot of creatures in the deck and that's because it was too hard to cut any. I don't know how many X/X creatures I'll need so I included all of the good ones I wanted in and then I didn't cut them later. They felt too important. I think if you can figure out what to cut, add some mana dorks or something. Mana dorks are good early in a way that something like Farseek isn't and later you can strap it to an Ashnod's Altar or clamp its skull. Also, I don't have Skullclamp. Can you cut Hungering Hydra? I don't know! Test this out and if you can, consider Skullclamp. This is a very rough draft, readers, that's what I'm trying to impress on you.

Don't shy away from using their creatures aggressively. Renegade Rallier and Animate Dead is a nice synergy the deck has access to so if you can keep bringing Rallier back, so too can you bring back Animate Dead. Take their dead creatures as often as you can bring Rallier back, and give them dead creatures with Grave Pact effects.

All in all, this seems like a fun deck and I got to include a ton of my pet cards, which is always a plus. Luminous Broodmoth is an insane Magic card and we should get a lot of playing with it in before everyone else figures that out - we could see the return of Power Level Errata! That does it for me, readers, thanks so much for joining me again this week, and I hope your deck-building is as fun and rewarding as mine even if I am playing a lot less these days. Until next time!