You know what absolutely rocks in Magic? Reanimation! Getting stuff back from your graveyard to either cheat it out or otherwise recur the same cards over and over again for incremental value. It's an absolute staple of the game and you can find variations in just about every format. I've played it quite a bit in Vintage Cube drafts and even a decent amount in Legacy where my old testing partner played the deck as his main focus. I especially love doing this in Commander, though. My main deck is Sharuum due to the shenanigans you can get up to with the graveyard recursion, and there was once a point where I had to stop myself from writing about graveyard-centric decks because I was doing so many of them!

Well, today, I'm back to talk about one, but this time, I'm taking a somewhat different approach. I'm taking it to Pauper Commander and using one of the new uncommon legends from The Lost Caverns of Ixalan to do so.

Akawalli, the Seething Tower caught my eye somewhat quickly when looking through the uncommon legends in the set. The big reason was just how unexciting it felt when looking at the card at first. It's basically just a vanilla creature that gets a bit beefier the more full your graveyard is. Well, that got me thinking about finding ways to approach utilizing the graveyard itself with the Pauper card pool. I could talk about reanimation and recursion spells all day in regular Commander (and I probably will in the coming weeks) but the options are way more limited at common.

Then I thought about this little card and realized that I could probably do something:

Tortured Existence is one of the biggest fan favorite decks in Pauper. It utilizes various dredge cards as well as the namesake card to sift through tons of cards, gaining incremental advantages, all the while picking apart the opponent's gameplan. You don't see it very often in the current metagame, though, due to how grindy it gets. Games can often go to time, and it's worse online where you have a set 25 minutes and have to fight against an old and arguably dated UI. The deck made me think I could do something along those lines while having a monstrous Commander to back it up and bring the beats.

So, let's see how things look and how that list came out!

Akawalli Descent | Pauper Commander | Paige Smith

• Commander (1)
• 1 Akawalli, the Seething Tower

• Creatures (33)
• 1 Arrogant Wurm
• 1 Avenging Hunter
• 1 Blastoderm
• 1 Bog Badger
• 1 Brindle Shoat
• 1 Broodrage Mycoid
• 1 Carrion Feeder
• 1 Crash of Rhino Beetles
• 1 Dreg Mangler
• 1 Ecstatic Awakener // Awoken Demon
• 1 Elves of Deep Shadow
• 1 Elvish Mystic
• 1 Faceless Butcher
• 1 Falkenrath Noble
• 1 Fleshbag Marauder
• 1 Generous Ent
• 1 Gray Merchant of Asphodel
• 1 Greater Mossdog
• 1 Krosan Tusker
• 1 Llanowar Elves
• 1 Persistent Specimen
• 1 Phyrexian Rager
• 1 Rhizome Lurcher
• 1 Sakura-Tribe Elder
• 1 Sanitarium Skeleton
• 1 Sporemound
• 1 Springbloom Druid
• 1 Stinkweed Imp
• 1 Street Wraith
• 1 Thorn of the Black Rose
• 1 Troll of Khazad-dûm
• 1 Walker of the Grove
• 1 Writhing Necromass

• Instants (5)
• 1 Cast Down
• 1 Deadly Dispute
• 1 Harrow
• 1 Reaping the Graves
• 1 Sprout Swarm

• Sorceries (6)
• 1 Dread Return
• 1 Drown in Sorrow
• 1 Night's Whisper
• 1 Sign in Blood
• 1 Urborg Repossession
• 1 You Meet in a Tavern

• Enchantments (8)
• 1 Crawling Infestation
• 1 Font of Fertility
• 1 Ill-Gotten Inheritance
• 1 Omen of the Dead
• 1 Omen of the Hunt
• 1 Seal of Doom
• 1 Seal of Primordium
• 1 Tortured Existence

• Artifacts (9)
• 1 Arcane Signet
• 1 Armillary Sphere
• 1 Blood Fountain
• 1 Commander's Sphere
• 1 Executioner's Capsule
• 1 Golgari Cluestone
• 1 Horizon Spellbomb
• 1 Mind Stone
• 1 Nihil Spellbomb

• Lands (38)
• 9 Forest
• 9 Swamp
• 1 Ash Barrens
• 1 Barren Moor
• 1 Bojuka Bog
• 1 Cave of Temptation
• 1 Command Tower
• 1 Darkmoss Bridge
• 1 Desert of the Glorified
• 1 Desert of the Indomitable
• 1 Evolving Wilds
• 1 Foul Orchard
• 1 Golgari Rot Farm
• 1 Haunted Fengraf
• 1 Jungle Hollow
• 1 Mortuary Mire
• 1 Opal Palace
• 1 Polluted Mire
• 1 Riveteers Overlook
• 1 Slippery Karst
• 1 Tranquil Thicket
• 1 Witherbloom Campus

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Right up front, I think I should say it: the intention may have been to make this a Tortured Existence style list, but it really fell away from that quickly. I started thinking of the kinds of cards that deck would run. Golgari Brownscale and Stinkweed Imp both came to mind quickly, thanks to their utility as dredge cards to help fill up your graveyard while also fueling Tortured Existence. Sanitarium Skeleton fills a similar role, being something you can regularly toss away for juicier cards while being able to constantly get it back. I considered cards like Crypt Rats and Grave Scrabbler, but ended up cutting them out.

At the end of the day, what I realized was that there weren't really a lot of ways to utilize this core package. What's more, Tortured Existence is just one card. In 60-card Constructed, this is fine since you can run a full playset, meaning that if you build your list right, you should be able to find it reliably. In Commander, though, it's only a one-of, and in a 99-card deck, that makes it extremely hard to find. It's simply not something you can rely on here. Similarly, you can't fall back on many other reanimation spells either. Pauper doesn't have access to Reanimate, Necromancy, or Animate Dead. You have Exhume, but it's very risky in a multiplayer setting, and cards like Rise Again or Summon Undead are just too expensive to rely on.

Given all of this, I went and tried to make something a little more in the vein of Aristocrats - the kind of strategy where you sacrifice creatures for value. I looked at things like Carrion Feeder, Mortician Beetle, and Rot Shambler as building blocks. There's no shortage of decent sacrifice outlets and there's even a couple ways to dole out damage when you sacrifice with cards like Falkenrath Noble and - if you're playing tokens - Nadier's Nightblade. If you went down that token route, you also gain access to the use of Mirkwood Bats as an additional way to chip away at life.

The problem with this strategy in the context of Pauper Commander is that you don't have the density of creatures that can be easily recurred. Sure, you have Sanitarium Skeleton and Persistent Specimen, as well as the aforementioned Dredge cards and Tortured Existence itself. However, they're not reliable enough to truly fuel a proper Aristocrats strategy the way you could in traditional Commander. There you gain access to drain effects like Blood Artist, Zulaport Cutthroat, and more (depending on your color) while you get easily recurable creatures like Bloodghast, Gravecrawler, and Bloodsoaked Champion. You don't even have many ways to make tokens either - even with the likes of Sprout Swarm in the mix - to reliably utilize Nadier's Nightblade or Mirkwood Bats.

What I realized, though, is while neither of these strategies is good enough to make a whole deck around on their own, they still work quite decently together. There isn't enough ways to make a Tortured Existence-style strategy work fully on its own? Fine, but the recursion effects still work great with sacrificing cards. Similarly, even without the density of Aristocrats-style plays to make it a main focus, just utilizing Carrion Feeders and Falkenrath Nobles is good enough even in small doses to make it work well. To that end, I opted for more or less just a good value deck with a little bit of a focus on making sure the graveyard can get filled up so as to benefit the Commander. This actually made me think about the cards I included and I found it to be a more interesting element to deck-building than trying to shoehorn in a typical strategy like the aforementioned two.

Consider this: what are some of your typical Commander staples you'd expect to find. For ramp - especially in Green - you'd probably want Rampant Growths and Cultivates, right? Maybe removal like Doom Blade on the Black side of things? Well, why not get a little creative with that? When it comes to ramp effects, try stuff like Font of Fertility, Armillary Sphere, and Harrow. All of these do the same kind of thing as your traditional ramp spells while simultaneously filling up your graveyard with permanents in the process. On the removal side, you can utilize Executioner's Capsule and Seal of Doom to very similar effect. For more niche abilities, Seal of Primordium is a solid Naturalize while Omen of the Dead is a respectable Raise Dead.

I even managed to find a couple interesting options on the creature side too. Turns out, there's some pretty solid cyclers out there, meaning you can run cards like Troll of Khazad-Dum and Generous Ent to solid effect, as well as Krosan Tusker and Street Wraith. Walker of the Grove lets you have a creature while filling your graveyard, or just go in for both creatures if you have the mana. One of the more interesting creatures here that I found, though, had to be Blastoderm. This classic creature comes down and gets in for a ton of damage. After a couple turns, it dies, making for somewhat of a drawback in most games, but here it still benefits your core strategy by buffing up your Commander after it leaves in the wake of its devastation.

Most of your usual game enders are here too. Gray Merchant of Asphodel is the usual way players like to close out games. You won't always go off too hard with it in a deck like this, but if you can pull off a combo involving Carrion Feeder and Tortured Existence, you can win things outright. You can also always swarm the board with, well, Sprout Swarm, and then overrun opponents with the help of something like You Meet in a Tavern. If all else fails, just slam a Crash of Rhino Beetles into the long game and go in for outrageous amounts of damage.

It's funny, because normally when I write articles on Commanders, I usually end up focusing heavily on the Commander itself. In this article, though, I barely talked about Akawalli, the Seething Tower itself. This is partially because it's honestly kind of boring, but it still provided the basis for a really fun and interesting examination into building a unique kind of deck. But I should say: Akawalli can be an absolute house, and if you fill your graveyard up quickly enough, it will take over games. Try it out for yourself at your next Commander night for yourself and you'll see what I mean. You'll have a great time!

Paige Smith

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