If you've seen me talk about Commander and my history with the format, there's one thing that's been pretty consistent over the years. That one thing is my love for my Sharuum the Hegemon deck.

It's a deck that was my foundation and first true experience with Commander and made me fall in love with the intricacies and dynamics of the format. I got to play a deck that felt expressive of myself, my love of artifact-based strategies, and a combination of weird and obscure cards. After a decade of play, it's still my favorite deck and one that I'll break out at a moment's notice. A lot of fans may know me for Elves, but if you ask my friends, Sharuum is the one I'm actually known for the best.

In actuality, though, Sharuum was not my first experience with Commander and was merely my first true Commander experience. A semi-tuned deck with a coherent theme and a somewhat cohesive strategy. My first Commander experience, however, was a lot more akin to someone playing with "cards I own," or a means of play where someone cracks some packs, buys a precon deck or two, and mashes a bunch of random nonsense together. That is what I did when I first put together Sek'kuar, Deathkeeper.

You see, while I first played Magic in 1999 amidst the height of the original Pokemon craze, I actually sold out of the game completely in 2008. I hadn't really had a local shop to play at for some time, events I was able to go to barely fired, and none of my friends played the game. It stopped making sense to keep playing. I came back in 2010 when I met people in college who played the game. My beginnings again were picking up a copy of Duel Deck: Elspeth vs. Tezzeret, Premium Deck Series: Slivers, a few Deck-builder's Toolkits, and a couple rare repacks off of eBay to round out my collection.

Soon after, a friend introduced me to Elder Dragon Highlander - Commander as it was called back in the day - and I started to go through my small newfound collection to build a deck. I only had two legendary creatures to work with at the time: Sliver Overlord, who I got in the Slivers precon, or Sek'kuar, Deathkeeper; who I got from a rare repack. Sliver Overlord was cool and I loved slivers as a tribe, but I didn't have the cards or money at the time to support building it. As such, I grabbed Sek'kuar and tossed a bunch of random on-color cards I owned to make a jumbled mess of a pile for a Commander deck.

About a week or two later, I stumbled onto a random Shards of Alara pack, right as it was on its way out of Standard, and opened Sharuum the Hegemon. The rest, as they say, is history. It happened to click perfectly with the Elspeth vs. Tezzeret cards I'd gotten previously as well as the newer Scars of Mirrodin set that was coming out at the time. And so, I started to slowly build up Sharuum and as a result, Sek'kuar got left in the dust.

Now as we enter winter once again, I find myself thinking about the legends of Ice Age and Coldsnap - leading me to think of Sek'kuar once again. Over a decade later, I think it's only fitting that I come back to the death goblin for another round. With how much I've been discussing Classic Commander lately, the time feels perfect for me to revisit this legendary creature in the context of that older form of EDH. After all, Classic Commander ends right about where I dropped Sek'kuar in the first place. Now I'm in a much better position to strategize and build Sek'kuar, whereas before I didn't really get him. So using that older pool of cards, I've built a list to show how he might've looked if I had the time and money to give him the treatment he deserved.

Let's check out the list:

Sek'kuar, Deathkeeper | Commander | Paige Smith

• Commander (1)
• 1 Sek'kuar, Deathkeeper

• Creatures (36)
• 1 Ant Queen
• 1 Ashenmoor Liege
• 1 Birds of Paradise
• 1 Bloodghast
• 1 Butcher of Malakir
• 1 Carrion Feeder
• 1 Creakwood Liege
• 1 Deathbringer Thoctar
• 1 Doomed Necromancer
• 1 Eternal Witness
• 1 Faceless Butcher
• 1 Fulminator Mage
• 1 Genesis
• 1 Grave Titan
• 1 Hell's Caretaker
• 1 Homura, Human Ascendant
• 1 Ink-Eyes, Servant of Oni
• 1 Joiner Adept
• 1 Kamahl, Fist of Krosa
• 1 Kresh, the Bloodbraided
• 1 Lim-Dul, the Necromancer
• 1 Murderous Redcap
• 1 Mycoloth
• 1 Nether Traitor
• 1 Reassembling Skeleton
• 1 Sakura-Tribe Elder
• 1 Savra, Queen of the Golgari
• 1 Shriekmaw
• 1 Solemn Simulacrum
• 1 Squee, Goblin Nabob
• 1 Vengevine
• 1 Vigor
• 1 Viscera Seer
• 1 Vulturous Zombie
• 1 Woodfall Primus
• 1 Yavimaya Elder

• Instants (4)
• 1 Beast Within
• 1 Krosan Grip
• 1 Putrefy
• 1 Terminate

• Sorceries (6)
• 1 Beacon of Unrest
• 1 Cultivate
• 1 Demonic Tutor
• 1 Dread Return
• 1 Maelstrom Pulse
• 1 Night's Whisper

• Enchantments (8)
• 1 Attrition
• 1 Beastmaster Ascension
• 1 Goblin Bombardment
• 1 Grave Pact
• 1 Oversold Cemetery
• 1 Phyrexian Arena
• 1 Phyrexian Reclamation
• 1 Shared Animosity

• Artifacts (6)
• 1 Eldrazi Monument
• 1 Golgari Signet
• 1 Gruul Signet
• 1 Nim Deathmantle
• 1 Sol Ring
• 1 Sword of Light and Shadow

• Planeswalkers (2)
• 1 Garruk Wildspeaker
• 1 Liliana Vess

• Lands (37)
• 2 Mountain
• 4 Forest
• 5 Swamp
• 1 Blood Crypt
• 1 Bloodstained Mire
• 1 Bojuka Bog
• 1 City of Brass
• 1 Copperline Gorge
• 1 Dragonskull Summit
• 1 Fire-Lit Thicket
• 1 Grand Coliseum
• 1 Graven Cairns
• 1 High Market
• 1 Karplusan Forest
• 1 Lavaclaw Reaches
• 1 Llanowar Wastes
• 1 Mosswort Bridge
• 1 Overgrown Tomb
• 1 Phyrexian Tower
• 1 Raging Ravine
• 1 Reflecting Pool
• 1 Rootbound Crag
• 1 Savage Lands
• 1 Stomping Ground
• 1 Sulfurous Springs
• 1 Twilight Mire
• 1 Urborg, Tomb of Yawgmoth
• 1 Verdant Catacombs
• 1 Wooded Foothills

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Over the last year or so, I've ended up talking about a lot of sacrifice decks. Turns out, Wizards ended up providing a considerable amount of support in the form of new legends for that kind of strategy. We saw it so much, it's even grown into a major competitive archetype in a number of formats within the last two years, thanks in no small part to Throne of Eldraine. As such, a lot of this may feel a bit familiar to you.

The means to get creatures back is largely the same here as normal with the likes of Reassembling Skeleton, Bloodghast, Nether Traitor, and Phyrexian Reclamation all making their usual appearances. There's also a lot of the regular sacrifice outlets such as Carrion Feeder, Attrition, and Goblin Bombardment. And there's even also the same Grave Pact and Butcher of Malakir effects that turn you sacrificing a creature into everyone sacrificing a creature. That all probably sounds extremely familiar, and it should, given they make up the core of many sacrifice decks, which often only have a handful of ways to utilize these effects.

Where Sek'Kuar stands out from a lot of those lists is the fact that it's in Jund colors. This gives us access to a lot more cards coming together in harmony than you might otherwise see. It's not often that I get to slip Kresh the Bloodbraided into a deck, but here it fits well when you can supercharge Kresh as Sek'Kuar's Graveborn tokens die. What's especially great is they're pretty interchangeable as commanders and the deck will still work well enough. Lieges, Savra, and Vengevine all make wonderful additions here that I haven't gotten to break out in a lot of my past sacrifice decks, which tended to lack the Green element.

What's really cool here, though, is the choices that you see on display. With Classic Commander being such a time capsule from nearly a decade ago, we lose a decent number of the modern cards these sacrifice decks might normally have in them. A lot of times these days, you often won't see things like Doomed Necromancer, Putrefy, Joiner Adept, Homura, or Squee, but they work well in concert with Sek'Kuar. That's not to say they don't show up today, as they certainly do, but looking at this list does feel more like it's exclusive to a specific point in time far more than a lot of other decks.

There're tons of great ways to kill here too. Your Graveborn tokens do a lot of the heavy lifting and can be buffed by your Lieges, Kamahl, Homura's Essence, and more. It's not hard to go crazy and get in for absurd amounts of regular damage. If that fails, then you can always utilize Goblin Bombardment and swiftly whittle down your opponents' life totals. At one point I also had Epic Struggle in here, but cut it. If you find winning by damage difficult, give that one a try sometime. The deck makes so many tokens that it may get you out of a number of tight squeezes to win your games.

Though this list may be an examination of Commander's past, it's also a large "what if?" to my own past. What could've been had I decided to cultivate Sek'Kuar as a list at the time I was introduced to the format, rather than switching over to Sharuum soon after. Sharuum became my primary Commander deck and has remained that way for a whole decade. Maybe it'd be the same if I stuck with Sek'Kuar, but it's impossible to tell now. If you want to try a cool Jund sacrifice deck, though, give Sek'Kuar a shot at your next Commander night. Classic Commander or not, I promise you won't be disappointed.

Paige Smith

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