Before Kaladesh was out, people weren’t sure if crewing vehicles was going to be effortless or a pain. Now that we know it’s totally worth it, it still wouldn’t hurt to have a crew made up of expendable creatures. Even though by all rights they should join their copter in Valhalla if the vehicle they’re crewing goes down in a blaze of glory but don’t, expendable creatures are still fine vehicle crew members. After all, we can use them for other expendable purposes — there are plenty of things we can trigger besides just vehicle crewing. Who are the most expendable of all of the token creatures? That’s debatable. I’m inclined to say Kobolds of Kher Keep given how hilariously effective Prossh, Skyraider of Kher decks tend to be. I’m also inclined to say Merfolk, but only because I love the idea of a Merfolk funeral — there wouldn’t be a dry eye in the house. However, a thread on reddit the promises to be a weekly event inspired me to start thinking about a different kind of disposable creature — rats!

But I digress. Once you get over the logistics of imagining how a 10-inch rat is going to see out the cockpit of a giant airship and just embrace the absurdity, you start to see how much fun it’s going to be to swarm the field with rat tokens. Some of them are going to go on foot and hope for an Eldrazi Monument or Coat of Arms to bolster their bite and some of them are going to head into battle in style in a Fleetwheel Cruiser. Either way, they’re going to overperform what you’d expect their flimsy 1/1 bodies to do. Dwarves are the obvious choice to helm crazy future cars and dirigibles and whatnot but 75% isn’t about obvious. So how would I design a deck where rats are in charge of all mass transit?

Marrow Gnawer ? Commander| Jason Alt

• Commander (1)
• 1 Marrow-Gnawer

• Creatures (19)
• 1 Chittering Rats
• 1 Earsplitting Rats
• 1 Infected Vermin
• 1 Ink-Eyes, Servant of Oni
• 1 Nezumi Bone-Reader
• 1 Nezumi Graverobber
• 1 Ogre Slumlord
• 1 Pack Rat
• 1 Patron of the Nezumi
• 1 Pestilence Rats
• 1 Rancid Rats
• 1 Ratcatcher
• 1 Rotting Rats
• 1 Sinuous Vermin
• 1 Skullsnatcher
• 1 Stronghold Rats
• 1 Swarm of Rats
• 1 Throat Slitter
• 1 Typhoid Rats

• Spells (41)
• 1 Bitter Ordeal
• 1 Decree of Pain
• 1 Lab Rats
• 1 Living Death
• 1 Patriarch's Bidding
• 1 Plague of Vermin
• 1 Rise of the Dark Realms
• 1 Attrition
• 1 Black Market
• 1 Dark Prophecy
• 1 Dictate of Erebos
• 1 Grave Pact
• 1 Painful Quandary
• 1 Palace Siege
• 1 Shadows of the Past
• 1 Vampiric Rites
• 1 Waste Not
• 1 Akroma's Memorial
• 1 Aradara Express
• 1 Ashnod's Altar
• 1 Caged Sun
• 1 Coat of Arms
• 1 Cultivator's Caravan
• 1 Door of Destinies
• 1 Eldrazi Monument
• 1 Fleetwheel Cruiser
• 1 Geth's Grimoire
• 1 Gilded Lotus
• 1 Lightning Greaves
• 1 Obelisk of Urd
• 1 Ovalchase Dragster
• 1 Phyrexian Altar
• 1 Renegade Freighter
• 1 Sky Skiff
• 1 Skysovereign, Consul Flagship
• 1 Smuggler's Copter
• 1 Sol Ring
• 1 Stoneforge Masterwork
• 1 Thought Vessel
• 1 Umbral Mantle
• 1 Urza's Incubator

• Lands (39)
• 24 Swamp
• 1 Bojuka Bog
• 1 Cabal Coffers
• 1 Crypt of Agadeem
• 1 Ghost Quarter
• 1 Lake of the Dead
• 1 Mutavault
• 1 Myriad Landscape
• 1 Reliquary Tower
• 1 Swarmyard
• 1 Tectonic Edge
• 1 Temple of the False God
• 1 Nykthos, Shrine to Nyx
• 1 Urborg, Tomb of Yawgmoth
• 1 Volrath's Stronghold
• 1 Westvale Abbey

Buy This Deck

I like where we ended up here. I like the discard subtheme a lot because when they’re behind, you’re automatically ahead. You should be able to leverage that into staying ahead because . . . cars are fast and . . .  when you’re in control of their hand size you’re not necessarily in control of the board and if you ain’t out of control, you ain’t in control . . .  of the board. Look, I’ll work on that. The point is, making them discard and getting something out of it is rad. If you want to go deeper and jam Megrim and friends in the deck, I’m not sure whether there’s room but you can try.

The rats we have are pretty great and if the creature count looks a little small, remember that our artifact section is full of cards that are all ready to be creatures the second a pint-sized creature with the brain the size of a walnut gets behind the wheel of a mach-speed dragster like a flea-infested Chuck Yeager. The vehicles are going to overperform their power and toughness:casting cost ratio because of the “drawback” of having to cough up an extra rat token or two to turn it on. That shouldn’t be a problem at all.

If we do get wiped, Patriarch's Bidding and Living End will serve us well. We should be able to mount an offensive very soon. If you’re feeling extra saucy, you can complement the Rise of the Dark Realms with a Liliana Vess if you make some room. The mana curve may be low enough to suffer the loss of a basic, although I naturally advocate losing something from the business end. If you do decide to go land-light remember Lake of the Dead and Cabal Coffers are going to more than pull their weight. Crypt of Agadeem is absent from a lot of Black decklists so I remembered to include it here. As usual, I didn’t go too deep in the “tell you how to live your life” department with the mana base — Everglades, Shizo, Gargoyle Castle — whatever you want to jam is probably fine. We can go a little heavier in colorless utility lands since this is Mono-Black and we have Urborg so go nuts.

What do we think? Is this too cute to be good or will the rat shenanigans see us through? Is tribal too weak for 75%? Is pursuing another tribal deck laziness on my part? (I hope you don’t think so — I really wanted to use Plague of Vermin and Skysovereign and I got to use both!) Leave it in the comments section. Thanks for reading! I’ll be back next week where we’ll hopefully have a glimpse at Commander 2016 to mull over. Until then!