For a good little while now, I've been sitting on a bit of a short list of PreDH commanders I've wanted to cover. I just think some of them are cool, but others are creatures I fondly remember my college friends playing to great effect. Some of the latter, especially, involve Commanders you might not really think much about. Case in point, Experiment Kraj.

One of my friends played a bunch of weird and wacky Johnny decks. I distinctly remember playing against his Niv-Mizzet, the Firemind deck and rather than getting the usual Curiosity kill, I'd find myself staring down some convoluted combo with cards like Inner Fire and Mana Geyser. His Experiment Kraj deck was similar, doing a lot of weird and interesting things by stealing activated abilities. All I remember of it from those days was the way he'd use Simic Ragworm to do some wild untap nonsense to get tons and tons of ability activations turn after turn.

It inspired me to put together a list of my own and share it with you all, but I just didn't know where to really start. Activated abilities are a unique thing and can be harder to search than something like high mana value cards for Jhoira of the Ghitu, high toughness creatures for Doran, the Siege Tower, or specific creature types for commanders that care about them. Because of this, it was a deck that I kept wanting to do but would get sidelined in favor of other things. I'd see it in my list week after week and wanted to do something with it. Now that it's finally getting its first real reprint since Dissension - excluding the Ravnica Allegiance Guild Kits - in Commander Masters, it seems like a great opportunity to finally do something with this weird and unique commander.

Let's check out a list and dive in!

Experiment Kraj | PreDH | Paige Smith

• Commander (1)
• 1 Experiment Kraj

• Creatures (48)
• 1 Acidic Slime
• 1 Arcanis the Omnipotent
• 1 Argothian Elder
• 1 Birds of Paradise
• 1 Bloom Tender
• 1 Budoka Gardener / Dokai, Weaver of Life
• 1 Cytoplast Manipulator
• 1 Devoted Druid
• 1 Ertai, Wizard Adept
• 1 Eternal Witness
• 1 Fauna Shaman
• 1 Fertilid
• 1 Genesis
• 1 Horseshoe Crab
• 1 Hua Tuo, Honored Physician
• 1 Imperious Perfect
• 1 Jagged-Scar Archers
• 1 Joiner Adept
• 1 Joraga Treespeaker
• 1 Jushi Apprentice / Tomoya the Revealer
• 1 Kazandu Tuskcaller
• 1 Knacksaw Clique
• 1 Linessa, Zephyr Mage
• 1 Llanowar Elves
• 1 Morphling
• 1 Murkfiend Liege
• 1 Mystic Snake
• 1 Nullmage Shepherd
• 1 Pili-Pala
• 1 Plaxcaster Frogling
• 1 Priest of Titania
• 1 Prodigal Sorcerer
• 1 Riptide Director
• 1 Sakura-Tribe Scout
• 1 Simic Ragworm
• 1 Spike Weaver
• 1 Sporeback Troll
• 1 Temporal Adept
• 1 Thornling
• 1 Thrun, the Last Troll
• 1 Timberwatch Elf
• 1 Triskelion
• 1 Trygon Predator
• 1 Vedalken Entrancer
• 1 Vigean Graftmage
• 1 Wake Thrasher
• 1 Wellwisher
• 1 Wirewood Channeler

• Instants (6)
• 1 Beast Within
• 1 Counterspell
• 1 Krosan Grip
• 1 Pongify
• 1 Voidslime
• 1 Worldly Tutor

• Sorceries (1)
• 1 Kodama's Reach

• Enchantments (1)
• 1 Asceticism

• Artifacts (4)
• 1 Lightning Greaves
• 1 Simic Signet
• 1 Sol Ring
• 1 Umbral Mantle

• Lands (39)
• 11 Forest
• 7 Island
• 1 Breeding Pool
• 1 City of Brass
• 1 Evolving Wilds
• 1 Exotic Orchard
• 1 Flooded Grove
• 1 Ghost Quarter
• 1 Grand Coliseum
• 1 Llanowar Reborn
• 1 Lonely Sandbar
• 1 Minamo, School at Water's Edge
• 1 Novijen, Heart of Progress
• 1 Oran-Rief, the Vastwood
• 1 Reflecting Pool
• 1 Reliquary Tower
• 1 Sapseep Forest
• 1 Simic Growth Chamber
• 1 Terramorphic Expanse
• 1 Tranquil Thicket
• 1 Vivid Creek
• 1 Vivid Grove
• 1 Yavimaya Coast

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When it comes to building Simic decks, they often feature the same brand of criticism: they provide so much value so easily that they tend to play the same over and over again. This makes them almost too simple to build and pilot with the decks then getting very repetitive in multiple playthroughs. Experiment Kraj is great because while there's a bit of this feeling, it's far less prevalent than in other Simic good stuff strategies. This is because there's such a strong focus on using activated abilities that the deck feels like something you need to work toward as opposed to getting immediate value for just playing your deck. You want cards like Arcanis the Omnipotent and [insert random mana dork here] over cards like Mulldrifter or Coiling Oracle, making for a less autopilot kind of deck.

As a result, this means that while you can still snowball in value, you have to work for it a bit more than other decks. Not only are you not just casting cheap cantrips or mana ramp spells - or ones that do both simultaneously - but you have to actually put counters on your creatures with Experiment Kraj slowly. There aren't even many other ways to reliably put counters on your stuff aside from a handful of graft creatures and lands like Oran-Rief, the Vastwood or Novijen, Heart of Progress doing their thing. As a result, we need to do what we can to help maximize the number of counters going around. That doesn't just include your things either, as you can pump opponents' creatures to steal their abilities too, something that makes Kraj extremely unique in how it can play very differently from game to game.

To help get the counters out there, I thought back to my friend's old deck for inspiration and remembered that one innocuous card that went the distance: Simic Ragworm. The benefit here is simple: put a counter on the Ragworm and then Experiment Kraj gains the untap ability, allowing you to untap it as many times as you have Blue mana open. This led me to look for what other untap options were available and it brought me to two old classics from a little set called Urza's Saga that's famous for its fair and balanced gameplay: Horseshoe Crab and Morphling.

Both of these are great since they provide additional untap redundancy, but Morphling is strong because it also can grant shroud and make it harder to dodge removal as a whole. You can even use Devoted Druid for limited boosts that can easily be counteracted by the +1/+1 counters Kraj gives out. I considered Freed from the Real and Pemmin's Aura as well but figured these few were enough, but both make for a good budget option over Morphling if you need one. Each of these effects can grant a ton of untap effects which can greatly increase the amount of counters that Kraj can spit out and, in turn, the amount of things you can then do with Kraj.

The biggest benefit here is naturally utilizing big mana abilities. Some mana dorks will either give you hilariously large amounts of mana (Priest of Titania), amounts that can give you some amount of infinite mana (Bloom Tender, Argothian Elder), or both (Wirewood Channeler). In short, it's not hard to get a big combo off a few somewhat innocuous critters. Even if you get stuck with just a Priest of Titania, you can easily make use of Pili-Pala to aid in filtering out the mana. Even if you only have a Bloom Tender and don't have anything to do with the mana, you can make the infinite tapping and untapping create an infinitely large Wake Thrasher to take down your opponents in a single shot.

But what do you do when you do have infinite mana? Well, take your pick! It's often going to boil down to what you have access to at the moment, which leads to a variety of ways for you to be able to go off. Would you like to draw your deck? That may be a little boring, but both Arcanis the Omnipotent and Riptide Director will help you out there. How about steal your opponents' decks? Knacksaw Clique has your back. Infinite mill? Try a Vedalken Entrancer on for size! Want all of your lands out of your deck? Use a Fertilid! Infinite life? Go with my favorite card in Wellwisher! There's really no shortage of ways to go about it in a deck like this.

It might not surprise you, but I ended up cutting a lot of effects out of the deck even! Echo Mage, for example, seems really cool until your realize how little spells the list plays. If your local meta is very spell-heavy, it's definitely worth looking into! Suncrusher is outright removal but is too costly to stick the landing in most games. Chameleon Colossus is an infinite power up, but so is Timberwatch Elf. Elder Druid is a goofy way to keep your opponents' boards tapped down and is a good lock spout if you have only infinite Green mana. Elvish Piper basically lets you dump your hand in record time and Fleeting Image gives you a sneaky escape route to help avoid needing to pay the commander tax over and over again. That's what makes this one so much fun, though. It's really a puzzle that doesn't simply play as plainly as "play cards, get value."

Beyond the main ability-granting shenanigans, there's a decent number of support options available. Worldly Tutor and Fauna Shaman help you find the things you're looking for, while not necessarily bogging your games down tutoring quite so constantly. Trygon Predator and Nullmage Shepherd act as good repeatable artifact and enchantment hate, while good ol' Acidic Slime works as a solid one-shot effect. Genesis, Eternal Witness, and Hua Tuo, Honored Physician each enable you to get key ability cards back from your graveyard to keep things moving. Lastly, while there's a few activated abilities that help with both, there's a handful of solid removal spells and counter magic such as Pongify and Beast Within for the former as well as Voidslime and Mystic Snake for the latter.

Experiment Kraj remains one of those weirdly unique commanders that makes for such a fun puzzle to build around. This is only in PreDH as well. Could you imagine all the utility you can bring to a game if you played Kraj with the current day card pool? The choices would practically be endless! It's even better when you can steal from your opponents' abilities as well (your mana fixing cards like Pili-Pala, Joiner Adept, and Wirewood Channeler can help here, by the way). Rather than every game feeling similar as tends to be the criticism of Simic decks, here you get something that's almost guaranteed to provide you a fresh experience every single game. It practically assures that whenever you break it out at your local Commander nights, you're sure to have a great time, and that more than anything truly rocks.

Paige Smith

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