If you thought I was going to write about Neyith of the Dire Hunt this week, guess what, so did I. Neyith is a beatdown commander, and after having an awkward situation where I didn't want to play a deck that tended to combo off and played my Teysa deck in the slowest, grindiest game of all time, I wanted something that could beat down. The fight mechanic is an excellent one and I love damage-based removal and how it can combine with lifegain to help you get way ahead. Looking at Neyith cards, though, I couldn't figure out a way to do anything 75% with the deck. I can't give you a stock list and pretend I did anything worth writing an article about, but a stock list of Neyith is basically perfect. You run some extra combat step cards to increase the amount you can draw, you run a lot of fight cards and you run big creatures. Even cards I consider relatively novel tech like Mageslayer are all over the stock list. I LIKE Neyith, but if I build it, it's likely going to be mostly a list from EDHREC and you all deserve a little novelty. I was a little disappointed because I wanted to talk about the Fight mechanic, but as I looked through more Jumpstart cards for inspiration, my disappointment turned to distinct but equal disappointment when I realized I slept on the best Fight creature in the set. Fight was right there in the name! How could I have been so blind? The second-best 75% commander in the entire set was right in front of my face and I was too busy chasing Devils and Unicorns to notice.

Great Googily Moogily! Can you see how this would be an excellent 75% deck? If not, I didn't at first, either. I have come across Kels many times before and thought the deck would be kind of awkward. I don't like how mana-intensive it would be to sac something to make her indestructible and have a second mana up to draw cards. I'd like to be sacking tokens in a deck like this to make sure I don't sac anything I care about and White is much better for this. I already have a Teysa deck and it's really boring to play against sometimes because of how grindy it is and the deck would be even more grindy without White to actually give us creatures. "Kels seems like it's in the wrong colors!" I thought to myself. "White gives us everything from Anointed Procession to Cathars' Crusade. What does Blue even give us access to, besides OH MAN I CRACKED IT." White gives us expendable creatures to sac to fuel our dark ambitions in the Teysa deck, giving us triggers on cards like Open the Graves and Grave Pact. Blue doesn't seem like a natural fit for this kind of strategy until you realize that while we won't have tokens, Blue gives us access to something even more expendable than tokens. Blue gives us their creatures. Suddenly I couldn't wait to brew.

If an opponent has two creatures and you have two creatures and you sac one of yours to kill both of theirs with Teysa and a Grave Pact trigger, they have 0 and you have a 2/4 with no combat abilities. Oh, also, they're mad. If you are a Kels deck and you have two creatures and they have two creatures and you steal one and sac your worst creature to kill their other creature with Grave Pact, they have 0 creatures and you have two creatures. They're mad, but you can just beat them down with their own creature. True, you're not doubling the efficiency of Grave Pact with Teysa, but you are drawing a bunch of extra cards and you're growing your army rather than shrinking it. Blue gives you card draw on top of the commander's built-in card draw, it gives you Chamber of Manipulation and Vedalken Shackles and Dimir Doppelganger. Who needs tokens when your hand is always full? You can prevent them from playing spells that slow you down and you have a steady supply of creatures to get some value out of before you mail their cadavers back to your opponent so they can deal with the burial. Sacrificing your own creatures is for suckers and we're not suckers, are we?

Best of all, in addition to giving us the obvious great cards like Grave Pact and Revel in Riches, Black reminds the Blue player in all of us that death isn't necessarily the end. Did they Go for the Throat of your brand new Consecrated Sphinx that you worked hard to take control of? No matter, animate that corpse and watch it live a second life while they're down a removal spell. Making your opponents sac a lot of good creatures to Grave Pact triggers is fun, but doing all of that and then casting Rise of the Dark Realms is even more fun. We don't have to trifle with "cute" cards like Ritual of the Machine because Blue can handle diverting the living while Black handles diverting the dead. Their best creatures won't be safe anywhere with this color combination working hard to recruit their creatures to beat face or get strapped to al Altar to help you pay Kels' bribery cost and dig a little deeper to find your own cards.

We have card draw, we have removal, we have access to infinity Grave Pact effects and payoffs like Open the Graves and if we want, we can jam a few creatures of our own, I guess (Turns out Artifacts are OK at making tokens). It seems like we have a lot going for us and it was kind of silly to sleep on this commander before. Now that I've come to my senses, what am I bringing into battle?

The Fix is in | Commander | Jason Alt

• Commander (1)
• 1 Kels, Fight Fixer

• Creatures (25)
• 1 Blood Artist
• 1 Chasm Skulker
• 1 Grim Haruspex
• 1 Nadir Kraken
• 1 Ophiomancer
• 1 Pawn of Ulamog
• 1 Pitiless Plunderer
• 1 Priest of Forgotten Gods
• 1 Profaner of the Dead
• 1 Reef Worm
• 1 Sifter of Skulls
• 1 Sower of Temptation
• 1 Woe Strider
• 1 Zulaport Cutthroat
• 1 Burnished Hart
• 1 Hangarback Walker
• 1 Myr Battlesphere
• 1 Solemn Simulacrum
• 1 Thopter Assembly
• 1 Wurmcoil Engine
• 1 Jalira, Master Polymorphist
• 1 Sheoldred, Whispering One
• 1 Syr Konrad, the Grim
• 1 Thada Adel, Acquisitor
• 1 Yahenni, Undying Partisan

• Planeswalkers (1)
• 1 Liliana, Dreadhorde General

• Instants (9)
• 1 Arcane Denial
• 1 Cyclonic Rift
• 1 Desertion
• 1 Drown in the Loch
• 1 Fierce Guardianship
• 1 Living Death
• 1 Rise of the Dark Realms
• 1 Victimize
• 1 Village Rites

• Enchantments (10)
• 1 Animate Dead
• 1 Bastion of Remembrance
• 1 Chamber of Manipulation
• 1 Control Magic
• 1 Corrupted Conscience
• 1 Dictate of Erebos
• 1 Grave Pact
• 1 Revel in Riches
• 1 Rhystic Study
• 1 Treachery

• Artifacts (17)
• 1 Altar of Dementia
• 1 Arcane Signet
• 1 Ashnod's Altar
• 1 Commander's Sphere
• 1 Dimir Signet
• 1 Fellwar Stone
• 1 Genesis Chamber
• 1 Helm of Possession
• 1 Krark-Clan Ironworks
• 1 Mind Stone
• 1 Phyrexian Altar
• 1 Retrofitter Foundry
• 1 Skullclamp
• 1 Sol Ring
• 1 Talisman of Dominance
• 1 Time Sieve
• 1 Vedalken Shackles

• Lands (37)
• 10 Swamp
• 5 Island
• 1 Academy Ruins
• 1 Bojuka Bog
• 1 Cabal Coffers
• 1 Command Tower
• 1 Darksteel Citadel
• 1 Dimir Aqueduct
• 1 Drowned Catacomb
• 1 Fetid Pools
• 1 High Market
• 1 Morphic Pool
• 1 Myriad Landscape
• 1 Mystic Sanctuary
• 1 Phyrexian Tower
• 1 Polluted Delta
• 1 Reliquary Tower
• 1 Seat of the Synod
• 1 Sunken Hollow
• 1 Temple of Deceit
• 1 Underground River
• 1 Urborg, Tomb of Yawgmoth
• 1 Vault of Whispers
• 1 Watery Grave

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This is a great start because it will give us a basis to get a few games in and tune it up. I have a few suspicions and I will need some testing to bear them out but I'll let you in on them now.

I suspect that there aren't enough Artifacts to use Time Sieve without Thopter Assembly. I am fine with this because it's a combo that can end the game when you take a bunch of turns in a row or Sieve is a sort of medium card. I wanted to include it but it's likely to be a bit unwieldy. I have a lot of artifacts but not nearly enough. It was very hard to cut creatures from this deck since they're all so good and so suited to this deck, so we'll have to figure something else out. That said, just sacrificing a bunch of Hangarback tokens to take an extra turns seems quite strong considering you can draw a bunch of cards with Kels before you take that extra turn, so I think even if you end up shredding a few of your mana rocks, it's likely worth it.

You may want to consider a card like Acquire or Master Thief if you find yourself a bit short on rocks - I almost went really nuts and added Master Thief and Gonti and ways to gate your creatures but I dedicated slots to the Artifact subtheme instead. This could work as a bounce deck, especially with cards like Sower of Temptation but I opted to go a different way. Taking their mana rocks is a great way to fuel this mana-hungry deck with its Rise of the Dark Realms and Myr Battlesphere and Sheoldred. I have a lot of rocks, but more are always welcome.

I suspect there will be games where you shut the board down and no one can get creatures to stick and you counter a spell or two aimed at your Grave Pact but you struggle to win. I experienced games like this with Teysa. I will say in a deck like this, you will draw far more cards than did the Teysa deck and that will allow you to either let their creatures stick because you can steal them or will allow you to play a bunch of creatures out and attack some empty boards. A Corrupted Conscience on a bigger creature can end a game like that quickly, especially if you take some extra turns.

I suspect this will be annoying to play with on webcam. Grab some sleeved blank cards and write on the sleeves in dry erase marker like I do or grab some InfiniTokens. I don't have a ton of cards like Bribery or Praetor's Grasp like I might normally because I am cognizant of the fact that I mostly play on webcam. It's annoying enough having to exile a card off camera because someone grabbed it with Sower - it's way more annoying to put your whole deck near the camera and tell everyone else not to look. If you don't play with people who can hand you a decklist before the game, don't play cards like Bribery on camera, as much as I like them. When I Thada people, I almost always take their Sol Ring first and Commander's Sphere second so it's not that big a deal, usually.

As always, I would test and tune this list a bit but I think this at least plays distinctly from a stock list and like I want it to play. I think this likely replaces my Teysa deck because it runs a lot of the same cards but allows me to steal their stuff rather than kill everything indiscriminately and draws a ton of cards so you're more likely to find a way to wrap things up if Grave Pact is making everyone run out of gas. Drawing your Rise of the Dark Realms or Corrupted Conscience sooner benefits everyone, or at least that's the case I'll try to make if I find myself winning more than 1/x games.

That does it for me this week. Join me next week where I will be brewing something else I probably slept on, to my chagrin. Remember to hit me up in the comments section and share this on social media. Until next time!