Well, I messed up. I suppose there are numerous ways to go around the two-color enemy-pairs, but not a single one of them starts with Izzet.... which is precisely where I started. Definitely meant to start with Orzhov. So, backwards we go!

Orzhov, for anyone following, is my favorite color pair. I love the slow, grindy games it creates. I love the flavor of the two colors together. I love how it takes my favorite parts of Mono-Black - namely killing everyone else's creatures - and makes it better, but killing everyone else's everything.

And we can look to a brand-new Commander to get even more value out of killing our opponents' stuff. Let's see what happens when the God of Passage decides to join our team.

We're twice as expensive as the original Athreos, God of Passage, and we gain three points of toughness and lose a point of power. He's still not a creature much of the time, but every single turn we get to pick a creature we'd like to have. We put that coin counter on it, figure out a way to kill or exile it, and poof! It's ours. I think we can work with this.

Athreos is six mana, and we don't want to cast him late, so 40 lands, as per usual. A couple of notable points exist here, though. First, we've got more sources of colorless mana than normal, and second, we're running more destruction lands than normal. Because we're basing our entire game plan on stealing other peoples' stuff, we don't want them taking it back every turn with a Homeward Path, so we've got numerous ways to deal with that particular card. Some Standard ramp is here, but the real standouts are Kor Cartographer, Solemn Simulacrum, and Burnished Hart. The first two can get a coin counter and be sacrificed to immediately return and give us their extra lands. Burnished Hart sacs itself for the two lands and returns to be sac'd again. With a ramp spell on two or three, one of these on four, and Athreos on five, we're going to get plenty of mana. Arcane Lighthouse is particularly important to us, too, because if someone has something with Hexproof or whatever that we'd like, that helps us get it.

White is pretty terrible at drawing cards, but Black does it well, so we're leaning there and enlisting an old artifact to generate an advantage. Mind's Eye is an oldie but goodie, putting that excess mana to good use. Sign in Blood and Ancient Craving both do fine work. Moriok Replica is like a Burnished Hart but for cards. Sorin, Grim Nemesis is a Dark Confidant that kills everyone else instead of us.

Of course, that stuff needs to die... or get exiled. So we've got a metric ton of ways to do exactly that. It all starts with things like Banisher Priest; because we can put coins on our own stuff too, we can play a Banisher Priest, banish something else with a coin on it, sacrifice the Priest, then get the Priest back to do it all again. Banisher Priest is much sweeter when it is repeatable. We've got a few creatures that do exactly this, as well as several enchantments like Oblivion Ring. The difference there, aside from no Athreos shenanigans, is most of the enchantments will exile a permanent, which gives us an out to deal with troubling non-creatures.

After the enchantments come the good old fashioned kill spells. However, Terror is too limiting: we want Hero's Downfall. We've got exile spells from White (like Path to Exile) as well. If we've got a coin on something we want, we'll almost certainly be able to kill it. Then there are some wipe effects to clear the entire board. We should wind up with at least a couple things, but sometimes someone gets frisky with a bunch of Goblins or something and everything just needs to die.

The second is Eldrazi Displacer, which is the reason for all the colorless mana. If we get it, we really want to be able to cast and activate it, because that's an instant we-put-a-coin-counter-on-something-and-now-it's-mine card. To power up this deck, replace the draw with tutors and go get Displacer and the Resonator. It'll get going.

We've got a fair number of sacrifice effects, because sometimes people are going to try to take their stuff back with flicker or bounce spells and we don't want them to get their cards back, but also sometimes we just want our stuff to die so we can bring it back.

Finally, we've got a Revel in Riches and an Approach of the Second Sun. Both of these cards serve as win conditions, with different characteristics. Revel in Riches will keep people from playing creatures even more than the Athreos engine, so it will buy us time and draw out the game (of course, we might get lucky and stick this and a board wipe on the same turn and just win on our next upkeep). Approach of the Second Sun is a nod to fellow commander writer Stephen Johnson, who's started an excellent series on win conditions. When he pointed out Approach in his most recent column on the subject, it seemed this was a great shell for it. No, we're not going to hurry the second casting of the card, but we have so much removal we can probably just survive that long. That means it's likely our opponents will start actually doing things to try to stop us, which means we'll have more creatures to grab.

Athreos, Shroud-Veiled | Commander | Mark Wischkaemper

• Commander (1)
• 1 Athreos, Shroud-Veiled

• Creatures (13)
• 1 Angel of Despair
• 1 Ashen Rider
• 1 Banisher Priest
• 1 Burnished Hart
• 1 Disciple of Bolas
• 1 Eldrazi Displacer
• 1 False Prophet
• 1 Fiend Hunter
• 1 Kor Cartographer
• 1 Moriok Replica
• 1 Ravenous Chupacabra
• 1 Sepulchral Primordial
• 1 Solemn Simulacrum

• Planeswalkers (1)
• 1 Sorin, Grim Nemesis

• Instants (4)
• 1 Hero's Downfall
• 1 Mortify
• 1 Path to Exile
• 1 Swords to Plowshares

• Sorceries (13)
• 1 Ambition's Cost
• 1 Ancient Craving
• 1 Approach of the Second Sun
• 1 Austere Command
• 1 Day of Judgment
• 1 Fumigate
• 1 Hour of Revelation
• 1 Merciless Eviction
• 1 Ruinous Path
• 1 Sign in Blood
• 1 Vindicate
• 1 Winds of Abandon
• 1 Wrath of God

• Enchantments (15)
• 1 Attrition
• 1 Banishing Light
• 1 Cast Out
• 1 Conclave Tribunal
• 1 Faith Unbroken
• 1 Flickerform
• 1 Grasp of Fate
• 1 Hidden Stockpile
• 1 Oblivion Ring
• 1 Parallax Wave
• 1 Prison Realm
• 1 Quarantine Field
• 1 Revel in Riches
• 1 Stasis Snare
• 1 Thopter Arrest

• Artifacts (13)
• 1 Ashnod's Altar
• 1 Carnage Altar
• 1 Guardian Idol
• 1 Hedron Archive
• 1 Mind Stone
• 1 Mind's Eye
• 1 Orzhov Locket
• 1 Sol Ring
• 1 Spawning Pit
• 1 Strionic Resonator
• 1 Thran Dynamo
• 1 Trading Post
• 1 Worn Powerstone

• Lands (39)
• 6 Swamp
• 9 Plains
• 1 Arcane Lighthouse
• 1 Bojuka Bog
• 1 Castle Locthwain
• 1 Command Beacon
• 1 Command Tower
• 1 Concealed Courtyard
• 1 Desert of the Glorified
• 1 Desert of the True
• 1 Dust Bowl
• 1 Encroaching Wastes
• 1 Fetid Heath
• 1 Field of Ruin
• 1 Forsaken Sanctuary
• 1 Ghost Quarter
• 1 Hall of Heliod's Generosity
• 1 High Market
• 1 Isolated Chapel
• 1 Mystifying Maze
• 1 New Benalia
• 1 Orzhov Guildgate
• 1 Reliquary Tower
• 1 Scoured Barrens
• 1 Temple of Silence
• 1 Temple of the False God

Buy This Deck Export text format

That said, the deck is in a pretty good place for casual play as-is. If people are playing mostly fair and not trying to wipe the table out in the first five turns, we should give them a run for their money by taking their stuff.

There are a couple of things specifically about this deck I think are worth mentioning. The first is how "Exile" is changing. When the game started, "removed from game" meant exactly that - it was gone, never to return. Recently, the Pooh-Bahs at Wizards of the Coast have started to mess with Exile more and more as a zone in the game we need to remember. Eldrazi pull things back to the 'yard, and more and more abilities supersede exiling. Athreos is a great example: instead of Path to Exile being a final removal spell for a pesky Rampaging Baloths, our commander is a way for it to stay around, albeit under an opponent's control, but now any number of spells can return that Baloths to its owner, leaving that Path to Exile weakened, at the very least.

The other is how this commander changes the way your opponents play. I find when playing Meren of Clan Nel Toth my friends just stop playing things because they don't want to bother having to sacrifice it immediately. This version of Athreos isn't quite that nasty, but still could encourage not interacting with the board state due to fear of loss. Ever experienced anything like that?

My first thought this week was to do Arvad the Cursed and play a ton of Legendary creatures. Figure out a way to give him First Strike and he's a force to be reckoned with, plus Sheoldred, Whispering One and Elesh Norn, Grand Cenobite are both Legendary, so that could be a pretty cool deck. But Athreos called to me from the new set.

How would you build Athreos? Which commander from Theros: Beyond Death are you most excited about? How in the heck to I give myself multiple end steps in Orzhov? Let us know in the comments!

Thanks for reading.