Two cannibals are eating a clown. One of them turns to the other and says "Does this taste funny to you?" and the other says "I don't think the murder of this human being is anything to trivialize. Cannibalism is a sad affair."

I didn't murder and eat a children's entertainer this week but I committed a different kind of cannibalism and it was no less somber. I cannibalized two of my decks and made a third, brand new one and it's a work in progress but I'm happy with how the progress is going. Last week we talked about how two unrelated ideas came together - the fact that I was going to include a core in a Golos deck that was very similar to decks I had already built and that those decks were all pretty similar to each other. This led me on a journey of discovery and caused me to reevaluate the way I approach deck-building from a 75% perspective. Including the same core can make a lot of decks feel "samey" and I decided it was important to me to make sure I included my fingerprint on the deck as well and the best way to do that was to consider the cards you wanted to make sure you played the "core" of the deck rather than the stuff that the deck seemed to call for. Building around a core of Lotus Cobra, Azusa, Lost but Seeking, Oracle of Mul Daya, and Exploration is fine but it can get boring. Those cards will find room for themselves and they're powerful enough not to need a ton of support cards. Instead, I wanted to make sure I had room for the cards I wanted to cast and let the support cards take care of themselves. Shifting my definition of what the "core" (or "nougaty center" as I called it last week) of the deck has helped me make room for the cards that mattered to me as a deck-builder rather than a deck player.

I was right - the support cards did take care of themselves. Lotus Cobra is good in an Omnath, Locus of the Roil deck because Lotus Cobra is good and because it's even better when you play extra lands, something Omnath encourages you to do by letting you draw cards. The core of the deck was a list of cards I made at the end of the article last week and I've been experimenting with them to varying degrees. The list was, for reference:

• Intruder Alarm
• Purphoros, God of the Forge
• Rakka Mar
• Parallel Lives
• Impact Tremors
• Overgrowth Elemental
• Somberwald Sage
• Sakura-Tribe Scout
• Incandescent Soulstoke
• Retreat to Coralhelm
• Kiora, Behemoth Beckoner
• Prime Speaker Vannifar
• Cryptolith Rite

All of this stemmed from a play I liked in the Gruul Omanth deck - strapping Elemental Mastery onto Omnath, Locus of Rage. Adding Intruder Alarm with the addition of Blue only made the deck more fun. But here's why building around this core matters - I included a completely different mana generation suite than I would have if I had thrown in Intruder Alarm as an afterthought. The mana suite I was going to use was going to be a lot closer to the Tatyova deck I tore apart to provide the guts for this Temur Omnath deck and that was going to be a trickier proposition than you might think. I don't know if I've said this before but I hated that Tatyova deck.

Tatyova, the way I had it built, ran 45 lands and routinely ended the game with all 45 of them in play, usually having gone through a Zuran Orb and Splendid Reclamation cycle, pitching Eldrazi so I didn't deck myself. If they killed my Psychosis Crawler, I didn't really have a way to win beyond making Avenger of Zendikar or Rampaging Baloth tokens. For a deck that was essentially a combo deck, that left me with a ton of creatures generated in a turn where I made everyone watch me play by myself for 5 minutes then passed the turn and got my board wiped by a wrath.

It wasn't all bad, though, because there were neat synergies like using Sakura-Tribe Scout and Retreat to Coralhelm to dump any land that I drew. In a deck with a lot of lands, Sakura-Tribe Scout functions very similarly to Llanowar Elves. Putting a land into play triggers a lot of things that simply generating a mana wouldn't do, like giving you more mana with Lotus Cobra, drawing you a card with Omnath or making Gruul Turf actually good. You ever Bojuka Bog someone on their turn with a Llanowar Elves? Didn't think so. Sakura-Tribe Scout paired with Retreat to Coralhelm was something I liked from Tatyova and it was something I wanted to keep. Was Retreat to Coralhelm good in a deck where I wanted to use Elemental Mastery? Basically. Was Sakura-Tribe Scout good in a deck with Intruder Alarm? It could be. Those weren't the designed synergies but they had enough incidental value that the deck would likely hang together better than the Birds of Paradise I'd usually put in the Sakura-Tribe Scout slot of a 3-color deck. If I hadn't been thinking about Intruder Alarm from the very beginning, I might have wasted my own time with Birds of Paradise in the deck because I built with the premise of trying to cast 3 different Cavaliers reliably.

Hanging onto interactions I liked and making the deck work around them rather than throwing away things that didn't fit felt like a revelation to me - I had done it sometimes when I built decks without even realizing what I was doing and other times didn't do it because it wasn't a conscious habit. I actually could make the deck work around Intruder Alarm and since I only planned to draw Intruder Alarm 1/x games (where x is the pod size), the deck would be good without it. Cryptolith Rite worked well in this scenario but I wouldn't have included it if I built with a traditional Temur Omnath mana base in mind. Traditionally I would be trifling with cards like Fertilid and Leafkin Druid. Rakka Mar is only in 1 in 10 Temur Omnath decks on EDHREC but if you have Intruder Alarm, you can go infinite the way I used to with Imperious Perfect back in my days grinding Extended.

Here's another consequence of building around cards like Elemental Mastery and Intruder Alarm - I didn't really care that much about Elemental Tribal synergy. This meant I was free to play with cards that synergized with Intruder Alarm and Retreat to Coralhelm rather than worrying about synergizing with Omnath's second-most-relevant ability. Prime Speaker Vannifar isn't in anyone's Temur Omnath lists that I could find, but it's sure in mine, including the ability to hit that spicy Avenger of Zendikar into Craterhoof Behemoth play. Craterhoof isn't an elemental but it's pretty good if you can activate Elemental Mastery a few times in a turn (or an infinite number of times in a turn) and I'm not building around Omanth as much as I am building around cards that are good with Omnath. I was on the fence about Incandescent Soulstoke as anything more than a Glorious Anthem before, but now it can dump a few key elementals from my hand, like Cavalier of Flame, and fuel a combo win out of nowhere. It was even better with Intruder Alarm.

I refused to throw the baby out with the bathwater when I scrapped Tatyova and the result was a deck I could really live with. I kept what I liked about the decks I took apart and instead of building around the new commander, I built around the kinds of cards I wanted to play in the deck and it turns out the cards that played with the commander took care of themselves anyway. I was always going to include Lotus Cobra and Oracle of Mul Daya but I may not have considered Sakura-Tribe Scout or Cryptolith Rite and that's too bad because they do a ton of work.

I built the list out of basically cards I had lying close at hand to see if the Intruder Alarm package was worth it and it's not perfect but here is the version I'm currently goldfishing.

Omnath, the Cannibal | Commander | Jason Alt

• Commander (1)
• 1 Omnath, Locus of the Roil

• Creatures (32)
• 1 Animar, Soul of Elements
• 1 Avenger of Zendikar
• 1 Azusa, Lost but Seeking
• 1 Cavalier of Flame
• 1 Cavalier of Gales
• 1 Cavalier of Thorns
• 1 Coiling Oracle
• 1 Courser of Kruphix
• 1 Craterhoof Behemoth
• 1 Evolution Sage
• 1 Forgotten Ancient
• 1 Incandescent Soulstoke
• 1 Leafkin Druid
• 1 Living Twister
• 1 Lotus Cobra
• 1 Master of Waves
• 1 Mina and Denn, Wildborn
• 1 Omnath, Locus of Rage
• 1 Oracle of Mul Daya
• 1 Prime Speaker Vannifar
• 1 Purphoros, God of the Forge
• 1 Rampaging Baloths
• 1 Ramunap Excavator
• 1 Risen Reef
• 1 Rubblehulk
• 1 Sakura-Tribe Scout
• 1 Skyshroud Ranger
• 1 Tatyova, Benthic Druid
• 1 Titania, Protector of Argoth
• 1 Undergrowth Champion
• 1 Verdant Force
• 1 Vigor

• Planeswalkers (3)
• 1 Nissa, Vital Force
• 1 Nissa, Who Shakes the World
• 1 Nissa, Worldwaker

• Instants (4)
• 1 Arcane Denial
• 1 Beast Within
• 1 Cyclonic Rift
• 1 Growth Spiral

• Sorceries (11)
• 1 Blasphemous Act
• 1 Boundless Realms
• 1 Circuitous Route
• 1 Explore
• 1 Explosive Vegetation
• 1 Scapeshift
• 1 Skyshroud Claim
• 1 Splendid Reclamation
• 1 Sylvan Awakening
• 1 Tempt with Vengeance
• 1 Urban Evolution

• Enchantments (10)
• 1 Burgeoning
• 1 Cryptolith Rite
• 1 Elemental Mastery
• 1 Exploration
• 1 Guardian Project
• 1 Intruder Alarm
• 1 Retreat to Coralhelm
• 1 Sylvan Library
• 1 Temur Ascendancy
• 1 Zendikar Resurgent

• Artifacts (4)
• 1 Commander's Sphere
• 1 Crucible of Worlds
• 1 Simic Signet
• 1 Sol Ring

• Lands (38)
• 11 Forest
• 3 Mountain
• 4 Island
• 1 Blighted Woodland
• 1 Botanical Sanctum
• 1 Breeding Pool
• 1 Command Tower
• 1 Flamekin Village
• 1 Gruul Turf
• 1 Hinterland Harbor
• 1 Izzet Boilerworks
• 1 Oran-Rief, the Vastwood
• 1 Reliquary Tower
• 1 Rootbound Crag
• 1 Shivan Reef
• 1 Simic Growth Chamber
• 1 Steam Vents
• 1 Stomping Ground
• 1 Sulfur Falls
• 1 Temple of Epiphany
• 1 Temple of Mystery
• 1 Windswept Heath
• 1 Wooded Foothills

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In goldfishing, the deck feels very explosive and it's in no small part due to the cards I decided to include. It plays like a combo deck some of the time and like a regular Omnath deck some of the time and that's fine with me. I don't mind flooding the board with tokens from Rampaging Baloths if they let me and being able to pivot if they don't.

Elemental Mastery is strong every time you draw it. Even if you just put out a few creatures at a time, you can power up Omnath's summon trigger, trigger Risen Reef a bunch or win with Craterhoof Behemoth. Draw a Cryptolith Rite? Suddenly the enchanted creature generates a mana of any color equal to its power. It's good with Angry Omnath but it's nutso with the rest of the deck. If you do get Intruder Alarm, you should end the game. If you don't, turns out it's still really good. Retreat to Coralhelm is basically an Intruder Alarm since you can play a lot of extra lands per turn - I was able to Vannifar from a Tatyova straight into a Craterhoof Behemoth with Retreat out. These cards make Incandescent Soulstoke into a way to dump your whole hand and made me add a second copy of Sakura-Tribe Scout in the form of Skyshroud Ranger.

The mana curve is too high and I'm liable to cut slower, clunkier cards like Verdant Force in order to streamline the deck. Verdant Force is cool and all, and it's an Elemental, but it's basically an auto-mulligan in your opener. I never want to draw it. I don't want too much artifact mana and the Simic Signet likely becomes this bad boy in a few months.

I need to add a few more lands, ask myself if Burgeoning is good on turns other than turn one and find room for Somberwald Sage but the deck is closer to where I want it than the version I brewed when Omnath was first spoiled.

I think the lessons we learned from this process are so important that I'd like to enshrine them in a "rule" to add to our 8 simple ones. Something like -

• Begin with the cards you feel are the focus of the deck rather than format staples and let the deck-build itself around your unique ideas

A 75% deck is bound to result when you know what you want the deck to do and, again, even though we didn't start with staples like Lotus Cobra and Oracle of Mul Daya, they found their way into the deck because they synergized with the cards we wanted to play. Rather than synergy with the commander being mandatory and synergy with cards you like being incidental, the opposite is the case but it doesn't make Lotus Cobra any less effective. In fact, it's better in a deck with Sakura-Tribe Scout than a deck with Arbor Elf. Focus on making room for what you want and let the stuff that you are playing because you think you have to justify its inclusion. Don't make the cards you love make a case for themselves and don't be afraid to transfer your favorite synergies from an old deck to a new one if it has even a remote chance of working out.

That does it for me this week. Next week I will have a very special article you won't want to miss and I promise not to bring up Omnath, Locus of the Roil even once. Until next time!