The Shipwreck by Ivan Aivazovsky (1884). Kraken by Victor Adame Minguez.

Welcome to another installment of my Winning Ways series.

This monthly topic is my way of trying to reach a hand out to Commander players who feel like they never win games. We all play to have fun, but Commander is a game and most of us are probably trying to win. Every game, every player, and every deck is different, so the tips and tricks you'll see in this column aren't silver bullets that will always turn an underperforming deck into a winner. They also won't turn a poor player into a rules wizard and strategy guru, but my hope is to point you in the right direction.

Last month's Winning Ways showed how you can take a weird Minotaur tutor and use it to try to nail down a win. Today I'm going to step back into the world of cards that have that magic words "you win the game" on them. These types of cards aren't a substitute for building effective decks and playing the game well. They are better than throwing a bunch of creatures and spells into a pile and just hoping for the best.

Today's wincon is a card that I've put in a few decks. I don't think I ever managed to pull off a win with it, but it's on my Commander "bucket list" of things I'd like to do someday.

Are you ready for some...

This four mana rare enchantment was printed in Tenth Edition and Torment and has our favorite magic words on it. At the beginning of our upkeep if twenty or more creature cards are in your graveyard, you win the game. That seems like a prohibitively high number for a 60 card format, but in Commander we almost always have more than 20 creatures in our deck. The problem isn't usually loading up our graveyard. There are lots of ways to do that and we can run 40 creatures in a deck without breaking a sweat. It won't be a cEDH deck, but that's OK. This is a goofy, casual wincon for goofy, casual games. Our problems are going to be protecting our graveyard from being exiled and protecting our enchantment from being removed before our upkeep rolls around.

Choosing Our Commander

This isn't likely to be a dedicated Mortal Combat deck.

We are going to build a deck that can try to win with this weird old enchantment but that won't be it's only goal. Our mission will be to build up so large an army that our opponents will be forced to wipe the board. If they don't, we'll overrun them with our creatures. If they play a wrath, we'll be positioned to try to land that elusive Mortal Combat win.

My most serious attempt to build a Mortal Combat deck was a Sultai Sidisi, Brood Tyrant deck that would try to self-mill in dribs and drabs. The goal was to slowly build up a Zombie army and since Sidisi wants to put creatures from our library into our graveyard, it seemed like a good fit to run Mortal Combat. The deck wasn't terrible, but it was slow as molasses and it sure didn't win many games. I eventually took it apart to build something else and haven't gotten around to rebuilding it again.

Rather than retreading an old tire, I'm going to build up a new deck for today's column. I had been thinking about using Syr Konrad, the Grim but his power level is much higher than what I'm looking for. You might start out wanting Mortal Combat to be a part of the game plan but after adding ways to given Konrad infect or make infinite mana and kill the table with "Konrad damage", our wincon du jour would be little more than an afterthought. I do want to build Syr Konrad eventually, but there's a recently reprinted Legendary creature that fits today's plan much better.

This five-mana Legendary Rat Rogue will give all Rats the Fear keyword. That means that your Rats can only be blocked by Black or artifact creatures. Fear was primarily only found on Black creatures and was eventually replaced by Intimidate, which allows a creature to only be blocked by creatures that share a color with your creature or which are artifact creatures. Marrow-Gnawer was the star of the recent Chinese New Year "Secret Lair" product, so I'm hoping this pick will help out some new Marrow-Gnawer players.

This Rat Rogue can tap and sacrifice a Rat to create X 1/1 Black Rat creature tokens where X is the number of Rats you control. Marrow-Gnawer is like the Krenko, Mob Boss of Rats. You want to have at least three rats to start, and like Krenko he is quite capable of creating an infinitely large army with just the right cards added in.

The fact that Marrow-Gnawer has to sacrifice a Rat to double the number of Rats in your army makes him strictly worse than Krenko, but it also gives us a way to fill up our graveyard with creatures. Our opponents might be nervously watching our army grow and not wondering why we're sacrificing non-token Rats when we could be sacrificing our tokens. A smart foe will notice and maybe even ask why we're not sacrificing the tokens. Feel free to make up whatever excuse you like, and there may be times when it does make more sense to lose a token.

I should admit that I used to have a Marrow-Gnawer deck but I took it apart. I enjoyed it but once I had won a game or two I got a little bored with a deck that was basically trying to do the same thing every game. I hadn't yet discovered Mortal Combat. If any of you are going through the same thing with your Marrow-Gnawer deck, I'm hoping that I'll be able to give you a new plan of attack to try with your list.

Thornbite Staff Combo

We may be planning on loading up with creatures and forcing our opponents to wrath the board, but we can't build a Marrow-Gnawer deck without his favorite toy.

This two mana staff costs four to equip and gives the equipped creature the ability to pay two mana, tap and deal damage to any target. That's cute and works nicely with deathtouch, but it isn't why Marrow-Gnawer loves his Thornbite Staff. It also has the ability to untap the equipped creature whenever a creature dies. Since we'll be sacrificing a Rat to use Marrow-Gnawer's ability we'll simply hold priority as we tap Marrow-Gnawer, double our Rats and then untap him when the sacrifice trigger resolves. This happens to be typed as Shaman Equipment and can be attached to a Shaman creature when it enters the battlefield, but that's unlikely to matter in a Marrow-Gnawer deck.

As long as you have at least two other Rats and there isn't an effect preventing creatures from going to the graveyard, you can keep doing Marrow-Gnawer's ability until you feel like stopping. Three rats (including Marrow-Gnawer) become 2, which then get doubled and become four Rats. If you do it again, your four rats become three, which then get doubled and become six Rats. You get the idea.

Since we're embracing combo in today's build it's worth adding a few more trinkets to the mix. Sword of the Paruns and Staff of Domination both let you untap a creature for the cost of a few mana. Our currency is our token creatures, so we need a way to turn those furry little bodies into mana. Ashnod's Altar will do the trick nicely, but we have to have at least five Rats when we start.

With these cards we'll have to pay three mana if we're using Sword of the Paruns and four mana for Staff of Domination because we'll pay three to use the Staff and another one to untap it so we can use it again. Ashnod's Altar can give us four mana if we sacrifice two Rats, so our baseline is that we need two extra bodies to pay for our untap.

With four Rats we sacrifice one to give us three and then double our army, giving us six. Then we sacrifice two Rats to make mana to untap Marrow-Gnawer, bringing us back to four Rats. If we're using Sword of the Paruns we can generate an extra mana each time we do this, so after two iterations of the cycle we'll get to use two of that mana in place of one of the rats, allowing us to go infinite with the Sword but not with the Staff.

It's a little easier on the grey matter if we start with five Rats. We sacrifice one to give us four Rats and double our army, leaving us with eight. Then we sacrifice two Rats to make mana to untap Marrow-Gnawer and we'll be at six, which means our army is growing every time we do this. If you're in a meta where there are in-house restrictions on how many times you can iterate a loop, this might matter, but in most games this simply means you can shortcut the combo and have as many Rats as you want.

Shiny Things

We all know Rats are supposed to collect shiny things, so no Rat tribal deck would be complete without a few more artifacts to help our game plan.

If you've got an opponent foolish enough to leave an enter-the-battlefield damage source lying around, Mirage Mirror will let you pay two mana to turn your Rats' ETB triggers into damage without even having to go to combat. It will also serve as a backup copy of Thornbite Staff if someone tries to save the table and blow that up.

Mirage Mirror won't work as a backup copy of Mortal Combat, as it will revert to just being a Mirage Mirror at the end of each turn. Both Mirage Mirror and Mirror of the Forebears will gladly become a copy of one of your Rats, allowing you to maybe catch the table thinking you don't yet have enough Rats to use Marrow-Gnawer's ability.

If we're making Rats but we're not able to combo off, we still want to be able to present a threat to our opponents. While we don't have access to Cathars' Crusade or Beastmaster Ascension outside of having a Mirage Mirror copy of an opponent's, there are some ways to buff our team that don't care what color we're in.

Anyone familiar with tribal decks should be familiar with the double-edged sword that is Coat of Arms. Our Rats will get huge, but we'd better hope we're not sitting across from a tribal Goblins deck or - heaven forbid - a tribal deck that can just fly over our vermin with an army of Dragons, Angels, Sphinxes or some other flying threat. With enough creatures on the field even a Drake or Bird tribal deck would be able to wipe us out. Normally, Rats can't fly.

Did I just write "Rats can't fly"? Akroma's Memorial will give our creatures flying, first strike, vigilance, trample, haste and protection from Black and Red. It's expensive at seven mana, but having our Rat army get all those keywords has to help our cause. But wait! Does protection from Black prevent us from using Marrow-Gnawer's ability? It's a reasonable question with an easy answer. Protection from Black means our Rats can't be blocked, targeted, dealt damage, enchanted or equipped by anything with a Black color identity. Marrow-Gnawer's ability requires that we sacrifice a Rat but nowhere do we see the word "target", so it works just fine.

Our last little toy for Marrow-Gnawer's Rat army is Eldrazi Monument. It will give our creatures +1/+1, flying and indestructible, but will require us to sacrifice a creature at the beginning of our upkeep. Since we're planning on going very wide, this shouldn't be a problem. There will be games where we can't get out from under a small number of Rats and wind up having to sacrifice down to zero so we can get it off the battlefield and try to rebuild. Stuff happens, but this is too good a card not to include. For the record - you can sacrifice something that is indestructible.

The Big Decision

If you're familiar with Rat decks, you must know we've got a decision to make. We want to run a ton of creatures so that we'll be in a good position to go after a Mortal Combat win if combo and a general aggro plan don't look like they're going to work out. We might even go after Mortal Combat just because it's a different thing to try to do with our deck and we're tired of always winning with Thornbite Staff. Trust me - if you're running enough tutors and you've got a meta that is light on removal and wraths you'll probably get bored after a while. I can only combo off the same way so many times before I want to do something different with a deck.

Relentless Rats cost three mana and get +1/+1 for every other creature on the battlefield named Relentless Rats. More importantly, a deck can have any number of cards named Relentless Rats. We could run Marrow-Gnawer, our wincons, a bunch of swamps and 50 Relentless Rats if we wanted to. We could choose to go with Rat Colony for two mana. These little guys get +1/+0 for each other Rat we control, and a deck can also have any number of cards named Rat Colony.

If we go this route, we would add in Thrumming Stone. This five mana artifact gives our spells ripple 4. That means that whenever we cast a spell, we reveal the top 4 cards of our library and may cast any revealed spells with the same name as the spell we cast without paying its mana cost. With Thrumming Stone out, it's entirely possible to cast one Relentless Rats and ripple through our deck to put out a dozen or more additional Relentless Rats because each one will ripple into another until the deck is so thinned out that we don't hit one in the top 4 cards of our library.

As of this writing, Rat Colony costs around $2.00 (U.S.) and Relentless Rats costs $2.00 for the Masters 25 printing and $2.50 for the older versions. Foil versions will cost about twice as much. That means you're looking at somewhere between $50 and $100 for your Rats if you're going to load up on either of these cards for your Marrow-Gnawer deck, depending upon how many you wind up running.

If you're like me and like a little variety in your Commander decks, there are a lot of other Rats you can play and they won't hit your wallet quite as hard. You won't be able to play the Thrumming Stone game, but that might be OK if you enjoy a little more variance.

Pack Rat has a power and toughness equal to the number of Rats you control and for 3 mana will let you discard a card and put a token onto the battlefield that's a copy of Pack Rat. Pestilence Rats has a power equal to the total number of other Rats in play, even if they are controlled by your opponents. Swarm of Rats has a power equal to the number of Rats you control. The basic idea here is that you don't have to run a Relentless Rats or Rat Colony deck to have some real threats in your Rat army. These little guys can pack a punch.

You can also run a lot of other Rats if you're going for variety. There are deathtouch Rats, there are infect Rats and there are Rats with evasion. There are Rats like Crypt Rats, which will let you turn Black mana into damage to each creature and each player. There are Rats like Rats of Rath, which will let you destroy an artifact, creature or land you control. That last one might not see very useful until someone tries to exile one of your Rats and you respond by killing it so it goes into your graveyard. You might even use it to kill enough of your non-token rats on the end step of the player to your right so you get 20 creatures in your graveyard when you go to your upkeep.

Remember that Mortal Combat wincon?

Rats of Rath and Crypt Rats can help make that happen!

Of course, if you blow up your army and someone exiles your new favorite enchantment, you'll be in a pretty bad position, but sometimes you've got to take those kinds of risks if you want to check something new off of your Commander bucket list.

Rat Adjacent Creatures

These next few creatures may not be Rats but they care about Rats more than most of us ever will.

Ratcatcher is an Ogre Rogue who costs six mana and, like Marrow-Gnawer, has the Fear keyword. At the beginning of our upkeep, we get to tutor for a Rat card. Ogre Slumlord is a five-mana Ogre Rogue who will let us put a 1/1 Black Rat creature token onto the battlefield whenever another non token creature dies. That isn't just our own creatures, so Ogre Slumlord has the potential to really help us build up our Rat army. If that isn't enough Ogre Slumlord gives our Rats deathtouch. Deathtouch is a pretty nice way to discourage our opponents from attacking us, so we'll also run Archetype of Finality in the list.

Piper of the Swarm is a Human Warlock who will give our Rats menace and will allow us to create Rats and sacrifice them to gain control of a creature. Chittering Witch from Throne of Eldraine will also join in the fun. When she enters the battlefield we create a number of 1/1 Black Rat creature tokens equal to the number of opponents we have. She also serves as a sacrifice outlet and removal option, allowing us to pay and sacrifice a creature to give target creature -2/-2 until end of turn. We're unlikely to use that ability on our own creatures before our turn to push our graveyard up over that 20 creature Mortal Combat threshold, but someday it might happen. It's always good to have an extra way to remove problem creatures if they're small enough.

Beyond Rats

You might think that running a giant pile of Rats would be enough, but there are a few additional cards that will fit into today's list pretty nicely. Our Rats are going to have a fairly low average CMC so these cards are likely to show up near the top of our mana curve.

Sidisi, Undead Vizier will fit in nicely with our tutor package and can either exploit a rat, or exploit himself when he enters the battlefield, allowing us to tutor up Thornbite Staff, Mortal Combat or any other card we decide we need. Sheoldred, Whispering One will allow us to bring a creature back out of our graveyard on our upkeep and will force our opponents to sacrifice a creature on their upkeep. Sepulchral Primordial has Intimidate (the rebranded Fear ability) and will allow us to grab a creature out of each of our opponents' graveyards.

These three creatures make up a powerful, if slow, combination. With all three of them out, Sheoldred will force our opponents to send a creature to the bin on their turn. We'll get those creatures back onto our battlefield with Sepulchral Primordial and we can get back Sidisi every turn and have him exploit himself so we get to tutor at the start of each of our turns. That's an oppressive scenario, but it will require an awful lot of mana and isn't exactly going to set any records for how fast you'll win the game.

The Decklist

This list is as all-in on creatures as I'd care to go with a deck and I'm pretty sure that as I played this deck I would drop creatures out and add stuff like Black Market and instant speed removal. Yet again, you're looking at a work in progress, but a WIP that should make for a fun deck that has the capacity to run away with a game. The current utility spells are all tacked onto creatures, so your ramp will put a body in the yard, your removal is in the form of forced sacrifice which again will put a body in the yard. Because of our Mortal Combat backup plan, we're putting a lot of value in burying bodies.

Marrow-Gnawer Combo | COMMANDER | Stephen Johnson

• Commander (1)
• 1 Marrow-Gnawer

• Creatures (47)
• 1 Archetype of Finality
• 1 Ayara, First of Locthwain
• 1 Bog Rats
• 1 Burglar Rat
• 1 Burnished Hart
• 1 Butcher of Malakir
• 1 Chittering Rats
• 1 Chittering Witch
• 1 Crypt Ghast
• 1 Crypt Rats
• 1 Doom Whisperer
• 1 Fleshbag Marauder
• 1 Gnat Miser
• 1 Gray Merchant of Asphodel
• 1 Grim Haruspex
• 1 Ink-Eyes, Servant of Oni
• 1 Locust Miser
• 1 Magus of the Coffers
• 1 Nezumi Bone-Reader
• 1 Nezumi Cutthroat
• 1 Nezumi Graverobber
• 1 Nezumi Ronin
• 1 Nirkana Revenant
• 1 Ogre Slumlord
• 1 Okiba-Gang Shinobi
• 1 Pack Rat
• 1 Pestilence Rats
• 1 Piper of the Swarm
• 1 Plaguecrafter
• 1 Rabid Rats
• 1 Rancid Rats
• 1 Ratcatcher
• 1 Rats of Rath
• 1 Ravenous Rats
• 1 Razortooth Rats
• 1 Royal Assassin
• 1 Scrib Nibblers
• 1 Sepulchral Primordial
• 1 Sewer Rats
• 1 Sheoldred, Whispering One
• 1 Sidisi, Undead Vizier
• 1 Skullsnatcher
• 1 Slum Reaper
• 1 Solemn Simulacrum
• 1 Swarm of Rats
• 1 Throat Slitter
• 1 Typhoid Rats

• Sorceries (2)
• 1 Demonic Tutor
• 1 Diabolic Tutor

• Enchantments (3)
• 1 Grave Pact
• 1 Mortal Combat
• 1 Phyrexian Arena

• Artifacts (14)
• 1 Akroma's Memorial
• 1 Ashnod's Altar
• 1 Coat of Arms
• 1 Eldrazi Monument
• 1 Jet Medallion
• 1 Mirage Mirror
• 1 Mirror of the Forebears
• 1 Skullclamp
• 1 Sol Ring
• 1 Staff of Domination
• 1 Sword of the Paruns
• 1 Thornbite Staff
• 1 Vanquisher's Banner
• 1 Vedalken Orrery

• Lands (33)
• 26 Swamp
• 1 Cabal Coffers
• 1 Cabal Stronghold
• 1 Emergence Zone
• 1 Maze of Ith
• 1 Myriad Landscape
• 1 Nykthos, Shrine to Nyx
• 1 Urborg, Tomb of Yawgmoth

Buy This Deck Export text format

This list weighs in at an average CMC of around 3.5, putting it firmly in the casual range of Commander decks. We've got 25 Rats and a handful of Rat generators so we should be able to get our critical threshold of Rats to be able to combo off. If that plan fails we've got cards like

Gray Merchant of Asphodel and Ayara, First of Locthwain that can help with our life total. We've also got a few tricks up our sleeve like Doom Whisperer, which can let us pay life to load up the graveyard before our upkeep if we're close to the magic number of 20 creatures we need to win the game.

Final Thoughts

I've found the Mortal Combat wincon to be somewhat elusive, but I suspect it's because I haven't truly build a deck with it as the primary goal. Today's build is a deck that can win games, but that's primarily because of the infinite Rat combos. The backup plan of Mortal Combat is definitely something you'll want to go after every now and then, but I don't expect it to win that many games. It's just too easy to destroy or exile Mortal Combat, exile a few creatures from your graveyard, exile your whole graveyard, or even block creatures from going into the graveyard. Any robust meta will likely have answers flying around in every Commander game and you're unlikely to see a table just let you win if they can stop you.

I wanted to write about Marrow-Gnawer because he was recently reprinted and is a fun and powerful tribal commander, but the best possible shot at a Mortal Combat win probably isn't in Mono-Black. I would probably build a Dimir deck with a plan of using cards like Tunnel Vision or Traumatize to quickly load up our yard. The irony of using Blue self-mill to land a Mortal Combat win without any real reliance on going to combat is real, but if you don't care about such things you might try Phenax Wall tribal with a plan to generally only target yourself.

My monthly plan of pointing my readers towards ways to try to win more games feels like it went a little off track with this week's entry. Instead of taking a losing deck and giving it ways to win, I've taken a winning deck and given it a more interesting way to win so that it doesn't get stale and predictable.

That's all I've got for you today. In the coming weeks I'm hoping to bring you another look at a player from the weekly Commander league I run. Every year I've tried to shine a spotlight on some of our top players, as there's always something to learn from them.

Thanks for reading and I'll see you next week!