Whenever a new set rolls around, I try to find a cool new legend or two to build a deck around and talk about. With The Lost Caverns of Ixalan, I thought I'd need to wait until the full set was revealed pretty early on. I remembered the original Ixalan block and how heavily it leaned into "creature type matters" as a theme, which had me expecting more of that here. The same major creature types are still on display, and early previews of The Mycotyrant and the Gishath, Sun's Avatar reprint made me worried, as it's hard to talk about them if you haven't seen every new card with that creature type yet.

Thankfully, The Lost Caverns of Ixalan has provided a number of fairly unique legends to pull from in their own right. Look at something like Sovereign Okinec Ahau with its incredibly unique (if somewhat confusing) ability and the build-around nature of Amalia Benavides Aguirre. I almost actually tried to put something together for Amalia before seeing a sweet new preview pop up on Monday: The Ancient One.

The Ancient One is just about everything I want in a card. It's a huge beat stick that you cast for cheap. It doesn't do a ton on its own at first, but if you build around it properly and utilize it well, you can make its utility go incredibly far. Let's look at a decklist and I'll explain what I mean by that!

The Ancient One | Commander | Paige Smith

• Commander (1)
• 1 The Ancient One

• Creatures (34)
• 1 Avatar of Woe
• 1 Big Game Hunter
• 1 Bloodghast
• 1 Body Double
• 1 Bone Miser
• 1 Chainer, Dementia Master
• 1 Cruel Somnophage
• 1 Dauthi Voidwalker
• 1 Dimir Doppelganger
• 1 Doom Whisperer
• 1 Doomed Necromancer
• 1 Geth, Lord of the Vault
• 1 Glen Elendra Archmage
• 1 Grave Scrabbler
• 1 Havengul Lich
• 1 Hell's Caretaker
• 1 Hostage Taker
• 1 Junji, the Midnight Sky
• 1 Kairi, the Swirling Sky
• 1 Kozilek, Butcher of Truth
• 1 Likeness Looter
• 1 Lord Skitter, Sewer King
• 1 Mindleech Mass
• 1 Nightveil Specter
• 1 Noxious Gearhulk
• 1 Oona, Queen of the Fae
• 1 Ophiomancer
• 1 Phenax, God of Deception
• 1 Satoru Umezawa
• 1 Sheoldred, Whispering One
• 1 Soul of Innistrad
• 1 The Scarab God
• 1 Ulamog, the Infinite Gyre
• 1 Wonder

• Instants (6)
• 1 Counterspell
• 1 Doom Blade
• 1 Drown in the Loch
• 1 Forbid
• 1 Memory Deluge
• 1 Negate

• Sorceries (9)
• 1 Agadeem's Awakening // Agadeem, the Undercrypt
• 1 Beacon of Unrest
• 1 Damnation
• 1 Decree of Pain
• 1 Deep Analysis
• 1 Feed the Swarm
• 1 From Under the Floorboards
• 1 Shadow of the Enemy
• 1 Toxic Deluge

• Enchantments (5)
• 1 Animate Dead
• 1 Leyline of the Void
• 1 Oversold Cemetery
• 1 Phyrexian Reclamation
• 1 The Eldest Reborn

• Artifacts (6)
• 1 Arcane Signet
• 1 Dimir Signet
• 1 Midnight Clock
• 1 Mind Stone
• 1 Sol Ring
• 1 Talisman of Dominance

• Lands (39)
• 6 Island
• 14 Swamp
• 1 Ash Barrens
• 1 Barren Moor
• 1 Bojuka Bog
• 1 Clearwater Pathway // Murkwater Pathway
• 1 Command Tower
• 1 Creeping Tar Pit
• 1 Crypt of Agadeem
• 1 Drowned Catacomb
• 1 Fetid Pools
• 1 Lonely Sandbar
• 1 Memorial to Folly
• 1 Morphic Pool
• 1 Mortuary Mire
• 1 Nephalia Drownyard
• 1 Port of Karfell
• 1 Scavenger Grounds
• 1 Shipwreck Marsh
• 1 Sunken Hollow
• 1 Underground River

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The main thing I love about The Ancient One is how it fills multiple roles all at once. At face value, it reads a bit like a mill card first and foremost. You want to pitch big cards to mill out your opponents, and that's certainly part of it. However, a key aspect to note is the way you end up putting cards into your own graveyard as well. That also makes it very much about doing stuff with your own graveyard - particularly reanimator-style nonsense - while all the while requiring you to maintain a healthy balance of having several permanents in your graveyard. It's a fun puzzle that makes for a great build around strategy. So how do we make that happen here?

The first thing is to simply put in the standard Reanimator package. With this build, I tried to take a somewhat different approach with the targets. There's a couple mainstays in the mix here, such as Noxious Gearhulk and Sheoldred, Whispering One. You'll pretty commonly see both in a lot of lists. You might also see Avatar of Woe a decent amount too, however unlike most lists, it's much easier to cast thanks to the additional mill angle as well. This works great with the likes of Havengul Lich, The Scarab God, and Geth, Lord of the Vault as well, since you can get stuff from opposing graveyards as well as just your own. There's even Oona, Queen of the Fae as a means of further pushing the mill strategy without filling their graveyard and simultaneously giving you a bit of board presence as well.

A couple of the more unusual choices here, though, include the likes of Soul of Innistrad and Mindleech Mass. Admittedly, I just wanted to put Mindleech Mass in here because it seemed like a neat card that could do fun, splashy things in games of Commander that will surprise many people who run into it. Soul of Innistrad on the other hand can be pitched and then turn into a mega Raise Dead in a pinch. If you actually get it on the board, then it allows you to do this over and over again, which provides you a way to keep refilling your hand to pitch cards to The Ancient One and further mill your opponents.

Soul of Innistrad is hardly the only way to do this, though. Phyrexian Reclamation will do so - though at a price, so you'll likely need to be cautious in just how many times you utilize it. If you want something a little less risky, Oversold Cemetery has become quite readily available over the last year and does a great job at refilling your hand after you fill up your graveyard. If it truly comes down to it, the deck also features copies of Kozilek, Butcher of Truth and Ulamog, the Infinite Gyre to pitch them, mill for a ton, and then recycle your graveyard into your deck. That and, you know, if you're able to cast them they're absolutely bonkers.

There's a handful of options to get them straight onto the battlefield as well. You've got reasonable one shot spells like Animate Dead and Doomed Necromancer that will bring creatures back to life no problem. You can also use the likes of Hell's Caretaker to sacrifice your small creatures - say, an Ophiomancer snake token, for example - and get something out that's big and beefy. Both Chainer, Dementia Master and The Scarab God will get them back with some serious frequency. If you aren't really feeling like reanimating something, however, maybe try utilizing Satoru Umezawa instead with your other creatures so as to cheat them into play. Getting someone with a sneak attack Mindleech Mass will especially feel great.

You don't just get to do silliness with your big reanimation creatures, though, which is a big reason why I love how this Commander plays. It just so happens that you get to utilize Madness and Flashback to great effect with The Ancient One, and I was able to squeeze in a couple notables such as Big Game Hunter, Grave Scrabbler, and Deep Analysis into the mix. They're small role players but just have such great play that they're hard to not include. Memory Deluge can be pitched and just cast for the big play side, while From Under the Floorboards will mill a decent amount and grant you however many zombies you need. You can even take advantage of the discard to put a copy of Wonder into your graveyard, thereby giving all of your creatures additional evasion. I'd also be remiss if I didn't mention Bone Miser, a reverse Waste Not on a creature that goes hand in hand with The Ancient One and absolutely drowns your opponents in value.

The big question, though, is with all this milling, how do you deal with your opponents' graveyards? Well, for one, I'll point out that The Ancient One targets one player as opposed to impacting all players, so you can focus on the ones least likely to abuse their graveyards on their own. If you really need to stop shenanigans from happening, though, your obligatory copies of Dauthi Voidwalker and Leyline of the Void have you covered. Lord Skitter does good work here too, slowly picking away at graveyards with precision as you mill stuff away. Lastly, there's the big spell of Shadow of the Enemy that outright exiles your opponents' creatures in their graveyards while granting you the ability to make use of them instead.

All of this is to say that The Ancient One makes for a tremendously interesting and unique approach to both reanimation and mill simultaneously. There's lots of great cards you could play with as well should you feel like it, and I had to cut many along the way in order to trim down to this build. Stuff like Asylum Visitor, Mortivore, Necrotic Ooze, and Lazav, the Multifarious can all be outstanding cards if you build around them right. You can even go deeper on what I tried to avoid and add in more options to mill all your opponents at once, such as Consuming Aberration and Altar of the Brood. It's a unique legend that lets you do things your way and that rocks. Build it how you want and take it to your next Commander night for a great time!

Paige Smith

Twitter: @TheMaverickGal

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