There’s something great about sitting down with a group of Commander players you’ve never met. Everyone opens their deck boxes, and you look around, trying to see who has which commanders. “Who’s your commander?” becomes our version of, “What’s in the box?”

Also, Commander players often love to push themes. We play suboptimal cards because they have just the right name or flavor for what we’re trying to do. We jam our favorite commanders despite the fact they’re not the most powerful options. We play underrepresented tribes and attempt to make them work even though they’ve never had the love they deserve.

Enter my new editor Evan. In discussion with him, he suggested a series of decks, all built around a specific theme: the seven deadly sins. How awesome is that? Challenge accepted!

We’re going to go in movie order (from Seven), which means we get to start this week with greed. (Movie purists may argue gluttony comes first, and that argument holds some water. In the movie, Greed is found first, but Gluttony died first, so it’s kind of arbitrary what the actual starting order is. I picked greed, but I want to acknowledge those who feel gluttony should be first.) And who’s greedier than this guy, who turns everything into gold with a touch?

We know we’re going to be mono-black, we know we can kill creatures, and we know we want to collect a big ol’ pile of gold—greedy people want to make sure they have more than everyone else, and if we can’t have it, we won’t let them either. That’s a pretty good starting point. Let’s see if we can leverage King Macar’s inspired ability to our benefit, all the while greedily taking as much as we can while denying nice toys to anybody else.

We can also draw a lot of cards, which is great fun when we want all the things. Harvester of Souls, Baleful Force, and Bloodgift Demon just sit there and draw cards for us. Life schmife! Give us the cards! Disciple of Bolas, too, is excellent, and most of our dudes are expendable if it means we get more stuff. Underworld Connections and Greed give us more cards, too, both kind of at the expense of mana, plus, y’know, greed. Decree of Pain and Dregs of Sorrow ( for short) both draw cards, too, but that’s sort of a secondary ability.

What we do really, really well, though, is make sure other players can’t have any creatures. Hero's Downfall, Silence the Believers, and Tendrils of Corruption all kill dudes dead. Hex kills a bunch of things, though there must be six targets, is surprisingly effective at 7 or 15 mana, and a nice suite of Wrath of God effects—including the aforementioned Decree of Pain and the excellent In Garruk's Wake—all do a good job of saying no to anyone who thinks we want to share. Finally, we can clear opposing graveyards with things like Nihil Spellbomb and Bojuka Bog.

It’s worth noting we are pretty terrible at taking care of things like enchantments and artifacts. We’ll make it tough for players to protect their Planeswalkers, so we can just attack them to death, but if your meta focuses on noncreature threats, things like Unstable Obelisk and Spine of Ish Sah might want in.

King Macar is among the best ways we have to make sure everyone else doesn’t get to have his or her fun stuff. He activates when he untaps, and the nice thing is he’ll do that automatically every turn if we just can tap him down. Once may not be enough, but we’ll deal with that in a minute. First off, we have to make sure our little 2/3 commander can reliably be tapped every turn. Sure, maybe someone will have nothing and we can just send him in to attack, but too often, people are going to have the audacity of playing something larger than a 2/2. How dare they!?

The thing is, a single untapping won’t get us where we need to be, which is to have the ability to deny others while we add to our own treasure. Untapping creatures is less common than tapping them, though, so we have to dig a little deeper. Our best one is probably Thousand-Year Elixir. It gives activated abilities haste, which matters with a bunch of our creatures, and for a lowly 1 mana, we are able to untap King Macar, giving us a free inspired trigger. Umbral Mantle is pretty great once we can get a bunch of mana flowing—with something like Paradise Mantle, we can have a whole lot of exilin’ and make a big pile of gold. Sword of the Paruns works the same way, and with a ton of mana, it can do it all itself. Jandor's Saddlebags are old-school, and Onyx Talisman is hilarious if a bit slow.

Enslave is a funny card that starts in just about every black list I build and, most often, is pulled out for being a weird one-of. In this case, though, it’s a pretty cool way to grab something so cool we don’t just want anybody else to have it. Helm of Possession is similar, and Ritual of the Machine can turn a random Zombie or whatever into someone’s, I don’t know, Sun Titan or Seedborn Muse. (That would really be bonkers, actually.)

King Macar, the Gold-Cursed ? Commander | Mark Wischkaemper

• Commander (0)

• Creatures (17)
• 1 Baleful Force
• 1 Bloodgift Demon
• 1 Cemetery Reaper
• 1 Crypt Ghast
• 1 Disciple of Bolas
• 1 Gray Merchant of Asphodel
• 1 Harvester of Souls
• 1 Helldozer
• 1 Herald of Leshrac
• 1 Magus of the Coffers
• 1 Pontiff of Blight
• 1 Reiver Demon
• 1 Royal Assassin
• 1 Burnished Hart
• 1 Chainer, Dementia Master
• 1 Shauku, Endbringer
• 1 Visara the Dreadful

• Spells (42)
• 1 Hero's Downfall
• 1 Murderous Spoils
• 1 Silence the Believers
• 1 Tendrils of Corruption
• 1 Decree of Pain
• 1 Dregs of Sorrow
• 1 Exsanguinate
• 1 Hex
• 1 In Garruk's Wake
• 1 Life's Finale
• 1 Mutilate
• 1 Ritual of the Machine
• 1 Enslave
• 1 Greed
• 1 Underworld Connections
• 1 Caged Sun
• 1 Charcoal Diamond
• 1 Crown of Empires
• 1 Hankyu
• 1 Helm of Possession
• 1 Icy Manipulator
• 1 Jandor's Saddlebags
• 1 Jet Medallion
• 1 Leonin Bola
• 1 Manriki-Gusari
• 1 Mind Stone
• 1 Nevinyrral's Disk
• 1 Nihil Spellbomb
• 1 Onyx Talisman
• 1 Paradise Mantle
• 1 Phyrexian Totem
• 1 Puppet Strings
• 1 Scepter of Empires
• 1 Sol Ring
• 1 Springleaf Drum
• 1 Sword of the Paruns
• 1 Thousand-Year Elixir
• 1 Throne of Empires
• 1 Umbral Mantle
• 1 Viridian Longbow
• 1 Worn Powerstone
• 1 Thornbite Staff

• Lands (40)
• 35 Swamp
• 1 Bojuka Bog
• 1 Encroaching Wastes
• 1 Ghost Quarter
• 1 Reliquary Tower
• 1 Rogue's Passage

Buy This Deck

But let’s be honest. What we really want to do is have a bunch of stuff: a mountain of gold (I suggest gold chocolate coins in a pile), a few creatures that don’t belong to us, and no one else gets anything. Seriously, we may not beat them, but we’ve won if we have all the stuff.

How would you build a deck built around greed? Any other thoughts for any of the sins?

Now go start turning things to gold.

Total cost: $74.86