Building Ghost Council of Orzhova for PreDH

Posted on October 9, 2024

When I was a kid, I was obsessed with the Ghostbusters series. I'd watch the films over and over again and consumed all manner of material from the films to The Real Ghostbusters show to even video games. It was a pretty common occurrence to go to a video rental store like Blockbuster or Hollywood Video to rent a copy until my parents eventually just bought the first two films outright. Sitting right beside the films I'd always see this weird Bill Cosby movie called Ghost Dad which, as you can imagine, was about a ghost dad played by Cosby. I never saw the film, nor do I have any desire to, but the cover was memorable enough I'd amusingly think of it from time to time.

Then, much to my surprise, several years later in 2006, we got a little set in the Magic world called Guildpact. If you know your releases, you may recall that this is where the Orzhov were introduced in all their ghostly glory. Their hallmark legends for the set were Teysa, Orzhov Scion - who I covered in a PreDH list earlier this year - and the Ghost Council of Orzhova. You may recognize them a bit better as Obzedat, Ghost Council from Gatecrash - a card that saw tons of tournament play for quite some time in its Standard life. In this era, it saw a different life in a little deck that took its name from that aforementioned Cosby flick: Ghost Dad.

This was a deck I remembered hearing about quite a bit over the years. I'd hear people talking about how cool Ghost Council of Orzhova was on Magic Online and later I'd see others still reminiscing on the deck itself. Imagine my surprise, then, that I can't find a single result online of where it actually placed! There is, however, a record of it on the MTG Salvation Wiki as well as a primer written by Ben Goodman over on StarCityGames.com from 2006. Here's an example of what the deck might've looked like:

Ghost Dad | GPT Standard | Ben Goodman

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To put it simply, the way the deck worked was that it utilized synergies with spirits and sacrificing. By using Tallowisp, you could search up a bunch of auras to help control the game and simultaneously make your own creatures that much more formidable. Ghost Council of Orzhova works so well here because it's a huge beater that allows you to sacrifice creatures to evade removal and continue to slowly drain away the opponent's life.

With October and spooky season officially upon us, I thought it would be fun to revisit Ghost Council of Orzhova and maybe utilize this Ghost Dad approach, particularly for the PreDH format. Unfortunately, I found this a bit challenging for a couple of reasons, namely:

The high spirit synergy lacks density in a 100 card singleton format vs. a 60 card format where you can run four of a card. Additionally, this means synergies with Tallowisp are effectively irrelevant.

The deck heavily took advantage of the rules putting damage onto the stack at the time. For example, you would go to the combat damage step of the combat phase, the damage would be put onto the stack, and the active player would get priority. In short: you could have a Kami of Ancient Law put damage on the stack, sacrifice the Kami, and then the Kami would still do damage. This element no longer works here.

As such, I simply opted instead to focus on the actual sacrifice engine to see how much value could be accrued with time. You could even retain some of the deck's controlling elements. Here's the list I ended up coming with as a result of this:

PreDH Ghost Council | PreDH | Paige Smith

Commander (1)
1 Ghost Council of Orzhova

Planeswalkers (2)
1 Elspeth, Knight-Errant
1 Liliana Vess

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The trick with this list was to figure out some way to make it work ideally. In 1v1 competitive gameplay, Ghost Council of Orzhova is such a beating because it's huge and takes large chunks out of your one opponent's 20 point life total. In Commander, though, that life total is doubled and you have three separate opponents to contend with. This is irrelevant for the sake of commander damage, but it's impactful regardless because of the draining effect being only a single point of damage. This would mean that doing it alone you'd need to take dozens of turns - particularly because it's only one target rather than how modern templating would look by impacting each opponent instead.

To compensate for all the issues hindering this, I sought to try finding controlling elements that take advantage of sacrificing creatures. Even this proved difficult, as cards like Dictate of Erebos and Blood Artist aren't legal in PreDH. The original Dictate of Erebos - Grave Pact - is, however, which means there's still some amount of nonsense we can get up to here in terms of controlling elements. You also have Butcher of Malakir in this era, a card that's outclassed by modern sensibilities but was excellent in this era of the game.

Past this there's only a few real payoff options for sacrificing creatures. Black Market gives you lots of Black mana, Proper Burial refuels your life, and you might get some triggers off of both Twilight Drover and Teysa, Orzhov Scion depending on what you sacrifice. The payoffs simply weren't here so much in the era to make sacrificing as worth it, but when you hit them at the right time they can still be fairly backbreaking.

Additionally, while there's not much by way of cards that benefit by way of triggers that care about sacrificing, there are a small handful of advantageous ways to do the sacrificing. For example, the aforementioned Teysa, Orzhov Scion lets you sacrifice three White creatures to exile another creature. Given how most token generators in the deck make White tokens, this is fairly easy. Phyrexian Plaguelord is an outstanding example of a good sacrifice outlet. It's been a long time since I really saw this card make a splash just about anywhere, but it had its place once upon a time. Here you can repeatedly sacrifice your small creatures to pick off your opponents' one by one. Blasting Station can do something similar and you can also use Infernal Tribute to make the sacrifices draw you cards as well.

Now, above I also note token makers, so let's talk about those. While this era doesn't quite have the same caliber of cards that generate tokens, there's still plenty of goodness to be found here. Cards like Emeria Angel, Grave Titan, Pawn of Ulamog, and Darien, King of Kjeldor provide a fairly steady stream of tokens ripe for the sacrifice. If you can protect her, Elspeth, Knight-Errant is an especially potent option, since ultimating her means all of your stuff is indestructible for the remainder of the game. There's also a few one-of creatures like Captain of the Watch and Blade Splicer that make a decent amount of tokens that are great to sacrifice and bring right back into play, thereby making even more tokens.

So, if you wanted to bring these creatures back, how would it be best to do this? Naturally, there's a few of your typical one-time effects. Reanimate feels pretty obligatory and Doomed Necromancer provides a good way to both bring something back while also fueling the sacrifice theme simultaneously. I also opted for Karmic Guide as a creature that you can not pay the echo cost on, sacrifice, then bring back later for more value. This seems better over, say, Animate Dead or Necromancy which you don't really have any means of recurring.

The real meat is finding the cards that are great for bringing back creatures multiple times. Classics like Sun Titan, Phyrexian Reclamation, and Sheoldred, Whispering One are great for this, enabling you to do something like play your Blade Splicer, sacrifice it, and then bring it back every turn. You can also take advantage of some less utilized options like Debtors' Knell and Reya Dawnbringer to do this, though they're much pricier to get them onto the board. If you do, though, they'll dominate the game. If you don't want to go the reanimation route, I also recommend Flickerform as a great way to get repeated value out of your token making creatures.

Finally, we need some creatures that come back easily, and this is the pretty straightforward part of it all. The selection of these kinds of creatures is rather sparse, even nowadays, so there's not a ton that can really be taken advantage of in the first place. As such, it's mainly some of the more usual suspects. Consider this list another one to add the triple threat of Bloodghast, Nether Traitor, and Reassembling Skeleton onto the battlefield. Each of these is really easy to bring back and thus provides you with an excellent set of choices to sacrifice away.

In the end, does this list feel truly reminiscent of the fable Ghost Dad deck? Not really, but again, it's a bit hard to pull that off in the PreDH era of the game. Instead, I hope I've been able to put together a cool and fun build for you to play with themed around one of the classic legends of the mid-2000s. Give it a whirl this October, perhaps on Halloween proper, at your next Commander night and have a ghoulishly good time.

Paige Smith

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