With the release of Ravnica Remastered a little more than a month ago, I knew I wanted to talk about some solid PreDH decks. I love the original Ravnica: City of Guilds block dearly, and there's tons of great legends to revisit there! As it happens, only a couple legends from that original block showed up, which honestly surprised me a little. I half expected another printing of Grand Arbiter Augustin IV or something like Sisters of Stone Death to make an appearance at uncommon.

Those didn't happen but we instead got three classic legends: Teysa, Orzhov Scion, Tolsimir Wolfblood, and Savra, Golgari Queen. I've already written about Teysa, and I've discussed Tolsimir in a few articles as well, so today I want to instead focus on the Golgari legend: Savra.

When I think of PreDH legends, Savra is one I genuinely loathe. In the context of this Commander variant, I like to talk a lot about my memories of playing Commander in the PreDH era. I was in college and it seemed like every week my friends and I were concocting something new to sling at one another. One of the few times where this became extremely frustrating was when one player decided to bring Savra to the table.

Savra seems rather innocuous at first. She actually doesn't do much at all on her own, as she doesn't provide you a way to sacrifice creatures. What's more, you explicitly have to sacrifice creatures, which is drastically different from most sacrifice commanders just wanting stuff to die or else doing the sacrificing themselves. Instead, Savra asks you as a player and deck-builder to find other ways to sacrifice cards. Once you do, though, you provide the table with a truly miserable experience.

This is because Savra is basically a control deck. By getting yourself the right setup of sacrificial fodder and sacrifice outlets, you can lock opponents out by wiping their boards yet still leaving yourself with stuff to do. This can prove fun for the person performing it, but cruel to the pod you're pitting it up against. Still, for the masochists that like this kind of play, I've got a great little deck for you ahead! Let's check it out!

Savra's Sacrifices | PreDH | Paige Smith

• Commander (1)
• 1 Savra, Queen of the Golgari

• Creatures (32)
• 1 Birds of Paradise
• 1 Bloodghast
• 1 Bone Shredder
• 1 Carrion Feeder
• 1 Creakwood Liege
• 1 Doomed Necromancer
• 1 Doomgape
• 1 Elves of Deep Shadow
• 1 Endrek Sahr, Master Breeder
• 1 Essence Warden
• 1 Eternal Witness
• 1 Fleshbag Marauder
• 1 Golgari Guildmage
• 1 Grave-Shell Scarab
• 1 Hell's Caretaker
• 1 Joraga Treespeaker
• 1 Kokusho, the Evening Star
• 1 Llanowar Elves
• 1 Marrow Chomper
• 1 Nether Traitor
• 1 Phyrexian Plaguelord
• 1 Reassembling Skeleton
• 1 Rhys the Exiled
• 1 Sadistic Hypnotist
• 1 Sakura-Tribe Elder
• 1 Sheoldred, Whispering One
• 1 Starved Rusalka
• 1 Vampire Nighthawk
• 1 Viscera Seer
• 1 Wellwisher
• 1 Yavimaya Elder
• 1 Yavimaya Granger

• Instants (2)
• 1 Krosan Grip
• 1 Putrefy

• Sorceries (8)
• 1 Cultivate
• 1 Harmonize
• 1 Kodama's Reach
• 1 Living Death
• 1 Night's Whisper
• 1 Rampant Growth
• 1 Sign in Blood
• 1 Victimize

• Enchantments (8)
• 1 Attrition
• 1 Bitterblossom
• 1 Grave Pact
• 1 Necrogenesis
• 1 Oversold Cemetery
• 1 Perilous Forays
• 1 Phyrexian Arena
• 1 Phyrexian Reclamation

• Artifacts (10)
• 1 Basilisk Collar
• 1 Carnage Altar
• 1 Claws of Gix
• 1 Eldrazi Monument
• 1 Golgari Signet
• 1 Mind Stone
• 1 Pristine Talisman
• 1 Sol Ring
• 1 Sword of Light and Shadow
• 1 Sylvok Lifestaff

• Lands (39)
• 7 Forest
• 14 Swamp
• 1 Barren Moor
• 1 Bojuka Bog
• 1 City of Brass
• 1 Gilt-Leaf Palace
• 1 Golgari Rot Farm
• 1 High Market
• 1 Llanowar Wastes
• 1 Miren, the Moaning Well
• 1 Overgrown Tomb
• 1 Phyrexian Tower
• 1 Reflecting Pool
• 1 Sapseep Forest
• 1 Svogthos, the Restless Tomb
• 1 Tainted Wood
• 1 Tranquil Thicket
• 1 Treetop Village
• 1 Twilight Mire
• 1 Urborg, Tomb of Yawgmoth

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The big key to a deck like this is finding the sacrifice outlets as well as providing sacrificial fodder to toss away to those outlets. In some cases, this is a no-brainer. Cards like Bloodghast, Nether Traitor, and Reassembling Skeleton come back left and right. They're about as standard fare as it gets when it comes to recursive creatures that you can toss away to a myriad of sacrifice outlets. However, those are only three creatures, and you need more consistency, so you have to find ways to get back other creatures as well.

In some cases, there's a few ways to get them back pretty easily. Oversold Cemetery makes it easy to get back creatures once you fill up your graveyard a little and is thankfully a lot cheaper these days thanks to getting multiple recent reprints. You can also use Creakwood Liege to make creatures every turn and if you can get enough mana, Sheoldred, Whispering One will always put stuff onto your board.

In most other cases, though, there tends to be some kind of drawback. Hell's Caretaker is a great way to loop sacrificial creatures, but it's not so great at actually building the board up. Golgari Guildmage is in a similar boat, but also comes with a pricey activation cost as well. Then there's cards like Bitterblossom and Phyrexian Rebirth, both of which will fill up your board - but at a cost. That cost is life, which doesn't seem like much in small increments, but when you compound that with the amount of life you're losing from Savra's ability to make opponents sacrifice stuff, that number adds up quickly.

Given this, the deck needs some ways to offset that life loss. What I found interesting was that there weren't quite as many decent life gain effects in Black or Green from this era. There's certainly some, like Wellwisher and Rhys can gain you a surprising amount of extra life given how many creatures - including Savra herself - happen to be elves. Doomgape and Sword of Light and Shadow can also provide some pretty hefty swings while also furthering your core game plan at the same time. Most of your other options, though, only provide small boons, like getting in an attack with a Vampire Nighthawk or single life gains off the likes of Pristine Talisman, Starved Rusalka, and Claw of Gix.

You can sacrifice some Green creatures to hit Savra's life gain buffer, but in practice the majority of Green creatures are ones you want to stick around. Cards like Rhys the Exiled, Wellwisher, Essence Warden, and all your mana dorks are all creatures you want to stick around on the battlefield. You can maybe loop an Eternal Witness if you have access to Hell's Caretaker or Golgari Guildmage, but you can't necessarily rely on either of those two. This basically just leaves a couple cards like Sakura-Tribe Elder, Yavimaya Granger, and Yavimaya Druid to fill the void here and get you there, which isn't exactly a lot for this strategy.

I did stumble onto one particularly fun bit of synergy when combing through cards in the form of Marrow Chomper. I've been playing Magic for 25 years now and despite having a fairly encyclopedic knowledge of even the most mediocre cards, this one definitely feels like a card I somehow never saw before. Despite that, I can't think of a card that could be more perfect for a deck like this! Not only does it provide you with the means to sacrifice tons of creatures for a big board wipe, but it also gains you the life back to make sure you can hang around afterward. Oh yeah, and it leaves you with a huge creature to attack in for damage as well.

Marrow Chomper is far from the only sacrifice outlet, though. This was one area I found I needed to really put a good amount of focus on. After all, this is the crux behind Savra: she doesn't give you a means to sacrifice herself, so you've got to find ways to do it yourself. I stuck with several classics for this front, with Carrion Feeder and Viscera Seer being real clean easy picks. I also shoved in the likes of Claws of Gix and Carnage Altar, which sometimes see play in sacrifice decks but it depends on the list and the player. In the smaller card pool of PreDH, though, they excel quite a bit!

Sadistic Hypnotist is a great way to get opponents' hand sizes down, though as always you'll want to be mindful of whether or not they're using a graveyard-centric strategy. Perilous Forays gives you a means of getting extra basics out of your deck in exchange for creatures, which is likely a worthwhile trade given how bad enemy color mana bases were in this era. If creature removal is your thing, you can go with Attrition or Phyrexian Plaguelord instead. Oh, yeah, and I'd be remiss if I didn't mention the lands that let you sacrifice stuff like High Market, Phyrexian Tower, and Miren, the Moaning Well also.

One of the bigger and splashier effects in this deck, though, has to be Living Death. This card has been a Commander staple for years offering both a board wipe and a massive recursion spell simultaneously. When you put this into a deck helmed by Savra, though, it gets even sillier. One of the big risks to playing Living Death is that your opponents can get back creatures too - not just you. When you have a Savra in play, though, all of her sacrifice triggers go on the stack once Living Death finishes resolving. As a result, your opponents will almost certainly lose everything

Once you start putting the deck into practice, it gets very absurd very quickly and you'll find that the synergy is completely off the charts. There's a reason I found it unbearable to play against several years ago and while this has some choices aimed at being perhaps a little gentler, it's still undoubtedly a force to be reckoned with. You might even be able to hold your own pretty decently at a table of modern-day power level decks too! As long as you have a great time at your next Commander night, that's all that matters. Just don't be surprised if they get a little frustrated with you along the way.

Paige Smith

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