Recently, my feed has been blowing up with deck after deck built around a new li'l guy from Bloomburrow. I've seen budget decks and cEDH decks which can win as early as turn two. The fellow who beat me at the Prerelease had two of them in his deck and used them both to great success (though only one at a time, of course). That guy?

While my limited opponent used him as a high-power for not-much-mana way to go into , and played a fair few Lizards while he was at it, the Commander decks all have one thing in common: Persist combo.

For those of us who remain solidly in the casual camp and tend to avoid combos, especially high-powered ones, let me go over this quickly. When a Creature with Persist dies, it returns itself to the Battlefield with a -1/-1 counter on it. Then, if it dies again with the counter on it, it doesn't come back. However, a while back we made it so a +1/+1 counter and a -1/-1 counter on a Creature will cancel each other out. Since Gev has the ability to give a Creature a +1/+1 counter (heck, it can give a few, depending on how many people are in the game) as it enters the Battlefield, it makes it so the Persist Creature will just... keep entering the Battlefield every time it dies. With a free sacrifice outlet, you can infinitely loop this for any number of things - infinite mana with Ashnod's Altar or Phyrexian Altar, damage with Goblin Bombardment, stuff like that. It's a decent and consistent combo used in a fair number of different cEDH and high-power Commander decks.

I like Gev, and I have no problems with people building high-powered decks. However, I don't see a whole lot of point in rehashing a deck many others have already built, and more importantly built better, than I can. I'm going to stay in my lane and build Gev a little differently. And while there's obviously a Lizard Kindred deck here, that also seems a bit... easy. I mean, get after it if that's what you want, it'll probably be fun - but do you need help to figure out which Lizards should be run and which support cards? I'm betting you can do it.

Nope, I want to lean into his cost and power. Let's build Voltron.

Gev, Scaled Scorch| Commander | Mark Wischkaemper

• Commander (1)
• 1 Gev, Scaled Scorch

• Creatures (9)
• 1 Azra Oddsmaker
• 1 Bloodsworn Steward
• 1 Burnished Hart
• 1 Florian, Voldaren Scion
• 1 Lizard Blades
• 1 Murderous Redcap
• 1 Professional Face-Breaker
• 1 Rabbit Battery
• 1 Silent Arbiter

• Planeswalkers (1)
• 1 Jeska, Thrice Reborn

• Instants (16)
• 1 Abrade
• 1 Antagonize
• 1 Armor of Shadows
• 1 Astarion's Thirst
• 1 Bedevil
• 1 Brute Force
• 1 Dreadmaw's Ire
• 1 Infuriate
• 1 Lightning Bolt
• 1 Rakdos Charm
• 1 Run Amok
• 1 Supernatural Stamina
• 1 Temur Battle Rage
• 1 Terminate
• 1 Two-Handed Axe // Sweeping Cleave
• 1 Unleash Fury

• Sorceries (7)
• 1 Blasphemous Act
• 1 Feed the Swarm
• 1 Last One Standing
• 1 Night's Whisper
• 1 Read the Bones
• 1 Sign in Blood
• 1 Syphon Mind

• Enchantments (10)
• 1 Agent of the Shadow Thieves
• 1 Black Market Connections
• 1 Demonic Embrace
• 1 Goblin Bombardment
• 1 Guild Artisan
• 1 Kaya's Ghostform
• 1 Lord Skitter's Blessing
• 1 Phyrexian Arena
• 1 Sticky Fingers
• 1 Tavern Brawler

• Artifacts (16)
• 1 Beamtown Beatstick
• 1 Blackblade Reforged
• 1 Commander's Sphere
• 1 Diamond Pick-Axe
• 1 Goldvein Pick
• 1 Hero's Blade
• 1 Key to the City
• 1 Lavaspur Boots
• 1 Loxodon Warhammer
• 1 Navigation Orb
• 1 Rakdos Locket
• 1 Rogue's Gloves
• 1 Sonic Screwdriver
• 1 Thran Power Suit
• 1 Trailblazer's Boots
• 1 Whispersilk Cloak

• Lands (40)
• 12 Mountain
• 12 Swamp
• 1 Access Tunnel
• 1 Bojuka Bog
• 1 Cathedral of War
• 1 Command Tower
• 1 Dragonskull Summit
• 1 Evolving Wilds
• 1 Foreboding Ruins
• 1 Forge of Heroes
• 1 Haunted Ridge
• 1 Luxury Suite
• 1 Rogue's Passage
• 1 Shinka, the Bloodsoaked Keep
• 1 Shizo, Death's Storehouse
• 1 Smoldering Marsh
• 1 Terramorphic Expanse
• 1 War Room

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Because Gev doesn't have any built-in evasion, we're going to focus on speed and granting him some ways to sneak through, rather than going for a one-hit kill or anything like that. If we can get him to "kill-in-three-hits" territory, I'll be satisfied.

Gev is wonderfully inexpensive, and we want him out on turn two quite badly, so our mana base reflects that. We have a few Lands which come into play tapped, but for the most part they don't, and we have a LOT of Basics. A common first two turns will be a Swamp, a Mountain, then Gev. We do have a bit of ramp, but that ramp can often be used for something other than mana later, and will reliably come out after Gev. Commander's Sphere, of course, draws us a card when it's no longer useful, but Sonic Screwdriver is a great one with a lot of utility, mostly making a Creature unblockable for a turn. We're also going to be attacking a lot, so Goldvein Pick and Diamond Pick-Axe join with Professional Face-Breaker and Guild Artisan to spit out Treasure tokens whenever our guy attacks or hits. This can matter a lot - you don't have to make a million Treasure tokens for them to be valuable!

The perfect card-draw solution for this deck is, in my opinion, Rogue's Gloves. It encourages what we want to be doing, and it gives us a free card for our trouble. However, there's only one Rogue's Gloves in the world, so we need to make due with other solutions. When we don't have to, I prefer to draw actual cards rather than impulse draw, but with Black that often means having to sacrifice a Creature, and we don't want to do that either. That leaves only a few choices, including Sign in Blood and Night's Whisper. A little more expensive are Read the Bones and Syphon Mind, which is critically underplayed in this format. Phyrexian Arena and Black Market Connections (a card in desperate need of a reprint) help a lot, and War Room is decent if we have extra mana kicking around. Lord Skitter's Blessing and Tavern Brawler both work with what we're up to, as does Florian, Voldaren Scion. Azra Oddsmaker is a great example of what card draw in Rakdos can look like, and absolutely deserves the slot here. Don't ignore Key to the City, either - it can be worth it to discard at end-of-turn just to get the Inspired trigger and see more cards!

We're going to stick some stuff on Gev and send him into the red zone in an attempt to win, and hopefully we're going to do it early and often. Rogue's Passage is, as always, our best option, but Access Tunnel can be used before we suit him up, and Whispersilk Cloak and Trailblazer's Boots both function well. We could mess around with Trample or Menace, but we don't need to; we'll likely get somewhere. If we don't find something to make Gev unblockable, hopefully at least we get something like Shinka, the Bloodsoaked Keep so we can give him First Strike, or Loxodon Warhammer, for the Trample. We'll find something.

We have a few ways to give small power boosts, like Lavaspur Boots and Beamtown Beatstick. We've got a couple of larger pumps, like Hero's Blade and Blackblade Reforged. I really like Double Strike so we've got that, too, with Lizard Blades and Two-Handed Axe (It doubles power instead of granting Double Strike, but it does what we need, and we can always use Sweeping Cleave as a surprise before dropping the Equipment). The hope is to do at least seven damage per hit so he'll kill in three hits; more than that is kind of gravy. A few Instants finish up our boosts, as Armor of Shadows and Brute Force can be the difference between someone living and dying.

We can certainly kill Creatures. In a deck like this, where we want to be on the offensive early and often, point removal is one of the best ways to stay in the game long enough to win. Terminate, Astarion's Thirst, and Lightning Bolt can all be used to get rid of something trying to hurt us. We don't mind if we take some damage along the way, but that one 8/8 or whatever probably would be better in the 'yard than hitting us. Feed the Swarm and Abrade are concessions to potentially longer games with backbreaking Enchantments or Artifacts, and Blasphemous Act and Last One Standing are panic-button-resets just in case we need them.

Silent Arbiter deserves special mention because his effect is specific here. Keeping others from attacking with multiple Creatures until the Arbiter's been dealt with is really helpful, even for a turn or two, while we wallop away with our Commander.

We are running Goblin Bombardment and Murderous Redcap as a nod to the Persist combo from most decks. With Gev and Goblin Bombardment on the 'field and Murderous Redcap in our Hand and castable, we cast the Redcap and win the game by sacrificing it to the Bombardment. The outlier here is Goblin Bombardment, because we otherwise don't have any real reason to sacrifice our Creatures, so I figured doing damage was the best way. The Redcap is a perfectly reasonable Creature to play without the combo on board, just because it's cool and does stuff. That said, it'd be fine to replace those two cards with two more Voltron pieces and ignore the combo completely, especially if you want to tell people you're not running anything resembling the internet version of the deck!

This is a deck for someone who likes to do different things with familiar stuff. As Gev gains popularity and his place in the cEDH meta shakes out, he may become a commonplace Commander who plays out similarly every game. This is a chance to do something different and show a table you don't have to do the obvious thing to have a fun deck. This Gev deck won't ever be as fast or consistent as a cEDH build with fast mana and tutors, but it can hang at a casual table with a little luck and some solid play. So go have fun with that!

Thanks for reading.