River Landscape by Thomas Gainsborough (1768). Animar by Peter Mohrbacher.

Back in June I wrote a column about a deck I put together around Nethroi, Apex of Death. You can read about it here. Today I'm back to my Winning Ways series where I try to focus on ways to help players who are struggling with winning in Commander. The truth of the matter is that winning more games isn't as simple as just playing more powerful decks. The goal of most casual EDH groups is for everyone to have fun, so rolling into your casual EDH night with a top tier cEDH deck and just crushing games all night long isn't the solution. Still, you might have a deck that just isn't doing what you want it to do. I've been there, and sometimes it takes a few reworks to get it to actually win games and "work right".

I've been there. Today I'm going to talk about that Nethroi deck and how I've been evolving it over the past few months. Even though it had won a few games, it took several drafts to get it to where I was relatively happy with it.

It wasn't a bad deck and was capable of winning games at casual tables. The ability to build up a board, mutate onto Cultivator of Blades and give the team +7/+7 is a nice threat. Being able to mutate onto Novablast Wurm and wrath the board every time you swing is also fairly oppressive.

My problem with the deck wasn't that it didn't have any good moves. I don't generally enjoy playing decks that are that oppressive. Bringing a Fleshbag Marauder back multiple times is a very strong play but I find myself in a lot of casual games and casual players - and even many experienced players - don't enjoy forced-sacrifice decks. It's perfectly legal, but I just don't personally enjoy having my tablemates be miserable when my deck does its thing.

I also struggled to get any real value out of Nethroi's ability. It was fun to get some of the other mutate creatures into play and I do love Auspicious Starrix, but I never felt like Nethroi was living his best life.

The Infect Experiment

After playing that original Nethroi list for a while, I got the urge to rework it and turned my thoughts to infect. I've never managed to build an infect deck that I was happy with. Infect creatures are typically very low power and in Commander it's really hard to play with Infect creatures and not get hated off the table. Skithiryx, the Blight Dragon is a great example - you can often kill one person, but the rest of the table generally makes it a point to focus on you exclusively until you're dead.

My concept was to build the deck with little infect creatures and to play enough mutate creatures that I'd be able to turn those little 1 and 2 power threats into legitimate problems for the rest of the table.

These little guys might not seem like much, but my theory was that if I put an Auspicious Starrix, Chittering Harvester or some other bigger mutate creature onto them, it might amount to something.

The deck didn't really do that much. I mean, I still don't think it was the worst plan. My theory of being able to use Nethroi to bring back my creatures when they were dealt with made sense on paper. In actual games, I never really had much of a graveyard to pull from when I was ready to mutate Nethroi.

I also noticed that players would still overreact to seeing infect creatures as a threat. I'd play the deck, get an infect flyer onto the battlefield, and the assumption was that I was going to find a way to kill the table within a turn or two. That's how it felt, though I may have earned a reputation as someone who will sometimes play decks that fly under the radar and then blow up or combo off out of nowhere. It's a well-deserved reputation, but occasionally it backfires and I get focused on even if I'm not really playing that strong a deck.

Building Around Nethroi in EDH

I don't often rework a deck this often in just a few months. If a commander is underperforming and I'm just not feeling it, the deck will usually gather dust and then the sleeves will just get repurposed for the next shiny new Legendary creature that comes along. For some reason I kept coming back to Nethroi. I didn't want to give up on it just yet. It felt like a problem I needed to solve that I just hadn't quite figured out yet.

What I was missing was a way to load up the graveyard so that when I cast Nethroi I'd be able to get a nice assortment of creatures back onto the battlefield. My previous builds had done interesting things, but they were never that good at doing what Nethroi really wants to do - reanimate a small army.

I recently dabbled in playing a 5-color cycling deck and that got me to start thinking about using cycling as a way to try to load up my graveyard for Nethroi's mutate ability. Cycling seemed like a neat way to set Nethroi up to do what he wants to do most. There are even lots of interesting creatures in Nethroi's colors with cycling abilities.

I had reached the point where I wanted to just see how the deck would play with only one mutate card (Nethroi) and with a ridiculous number of ways to dump creatures into my graveyard. I also wanted to play way too many creatures and I really, really wanted to try to abuse Scourge of the Skyclaves.

That pesky demon is the cherry on top of my Nethroi sundae. It has a power and toughness equal to 20 minus the highest life total among all players so if someone is at 40, it's a -20/-20. Nethroi will return a total of 10 power worth of creatures from the graveyard to the battlefield. That total will include Scourge's negative power. That would mean I'd be getting 10 power and then another 20 power to make up for that -20 for Nethroi because including it means its power is included in the math.

My first rebuild of this list was one in which I decided to just go all in on the creatures, running every creature I could find that had cycling and not running any non-creature ramp. It was a deck with no interaction to speak of and it ran well over 50 creatures. I know full well that running no instant-speed removal is a poor plan, but I wanted to give it a whirl and see how good or bad it would be.

The first few games the deck played in were pretty bad, but they were three player games with a very, very new player and an experienced and fairly competitive player. We got slaughtered, but in the third game I was able to move tables and play in a four-player pod. The deck was very slow to ramp, but I was able to wipe the board with a Massacre Girl and use a Tree of Perdition to drop a player's life total to 5. Most importantly, I was able to load up my graveyard effectively with those cycling creatures and flood the board to the point where I really looked like a threat.

My creatures were mostly little ineffectual things that would draw me a card, mill me or put a land onto the field, but it still looked impressive and that made me happy. I even got agonizingly close to winning with Mortal Combat but a buddy's Chaos Warp put an end to that dream real quick.

The List

This is one of those decks that I seem to always be tweaking, so it's worth noting that the Massacre Girl that had actually saved a table against an indestructible Platinum Angel and an Avacyn, Angel of Hope has already been replaced with a Duneblast. The former is a Human and can't be mutated onto with Nethroi. The latter will let me target a non-Human, wrath the board and hopefully still have a target on my next turn to mutate Nethroi onto.

I firmly believe that in low and mid-power Commander, there are lots of "right" decisions but not that many "wrong" ones. Massacre Girl was an important part of that game and she might eventually find her way back into this deck but I really hate not having a valid target for Nethroi to mutate onto. I am running a few humans, but her role as a boardwipe does set me up to have a turn where I sometimes won't be able to mutate Nethroi.

The list below is where the deck is at, but it's entirely possible that by the time this column goes up, I will have already made a few more little tweaks. I'm thinking I should be running Reveillark, though I have been leaning away from building this into a combo deck and I think of Reveillark as a combo piece. I didn't want this to be a combo deck.

Casual Nethroi Recursion | Commander | Stephen Johnson

• Commander (1)
• 1 Nethroi, Apex of Death

• Creatures (46)
• 1 Balustrade Spy
• 1 Beast Whisperer
• 1 Bloodspore Thrinax
• 1 Carven Caryatid
• 1 Corpse Connoisseur
• 1 Cultivator of Blades
• 1 Dawntreader Elk
• 1 Deathbringer Regent
• 1 Doom Whisperer
• 1 Elvish Aberration
• 1 Elvish Visionary
• 1 Excavation Mole
• 1 Farhaven Elf
• 1 Feaster of Fools
• 1 Fertilid
• 1 Greater Sandwurm
• 1 Imposing Vantasaur
• 1 Kami of False Hope
• 1 Krosan Tusker
• 1 Llanowar Visionary
• 1 Magus of the Mirror
• 1 Mycoloth
• 1 Mindless Automaton
• 1 Marwyn, the Nurturer
• 1 Pale Recluse
• 1 Sakura-Tribe Elder
• 1 Satyr Wayfinder
• 1 Spore Frog
• 1 Stitcher's Supplier
• 1 Sun Titan
• 1 Scourge of the Skyclaves
• 1 Shirei, Shizo's Caretaker
• 1 Sidisi, Undead Vizier
• 1 Skull Prophet
• 1 Solemn Simulacrum
• 1 Tree of Perdition
• 1 Twisted Abomination
• 1 Underrealm Lich
• 1 Verdant Eidolon
• 1 Viscera Seer
• 1 Voldaren Pariah
• 1 Vulturous Aven
• 1 Wall of Blossoms
• 1 Wasteland Scorpion
• 1 Winged Shepherd
• 1 Workhorse

• Instants (1)
• 1 Entomb

• Sorceries (12)
• 1 Altar of Bone
• 1 Buried Alive
• 1 Cultivate
• 1 Dread Return
• 1 Duneblast
• 1 Farseek
• 1 Final Parting
• 1 Kodama's Reach
• 1 Rampant Growth
• 1 Scout the Borders
• 1 Skyshroud Claim
• 1 Winding Way

• Enchantments (3)
• 1 Greater Good
• 1 Mortal Combat
• 1 Titan's Nest

• Artifacts (3)
• 1 Ashnod's Altar
• 1 Skullclamp
• 1 Sol Ring

• Lands (34)
• 7 Forest
• 7 Plains
• 7 Swamp
• 1 Bojuka Bog
• 1 Buried Ruin
• 1 Command Tower
• 1 Dakmor Salvage
• 1 Endless Sands
• 1 Exotic Orchard
• 1 High Market
• 1 Indatha Triome
• 1 Inkmoth Nexus
• 1 Khalni Garden
• 1 Opal Palace
• 1 Opulent Palace
• 1 Rogue's Passage

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If I were to build this for anything above a casual game, I would absolutely run the obligatory handful of boardwipes and targeted removal. I would also take a good look at Mikaeus, the Unhallowed and his many combo buddies. If you want to win games, that's where you can go with a build like this. You load up the graveyard with the combo pieces, hit your Nethroi mutate trigger, bring the combo pieces back onto the field and just win.

I don't actually want to win that way and I have other decks I enjoy playing that combo off in more interesting (to me) ways. I'm just not that into "Mike and Trike" (Mikaeus and Triskelion) any more and would prefer to build this as a slower deck for slower, more casual games. I very much value having a deck that can play in a casual game, do interesting things but not crush new players and this feels like that kind of deck.

New Directions

I'm pretty sure that I'm going to try to keep playing this version until it wins a game before I seriously think about rebuilding it again. I want it to win a game, but what's more - I want it to win a game with Mortal Combat. I'm eventually going to be able to find a table where the power level isn't so high that I have no shot, there isn't a ton of graveyard hate, and I'm able to load up my bin and keep Mortal Combat out for a full turn cycle. I wouldn't say it's so close I can taste it, but I almost got there last Tuesday and I don't see any reason to think it won't ever happen. I might eventually stoop to running Vedalken Orrery into the deck so I can narrow my opponents' window of interaction, but I'll give it a few more games before I resort to that trick.

The funny thing about Nethroi is that I'm already thinking of new directions to take the deck in. I did this with Ramos, Dragon Engine a few years back. I had a Conflux combo build that worked really well, but I also tried out a Ramos Charms version and a Ramos Storm version. They were all fun and I'm glad I did those reworks. For Nethroi I'm considering an Elves build, but I'm even more intrigued by the possibility of building an artifacts version of the deck.

The Elves rebuild would likely end up as a rework of Marwyn, the Nurturer, complete with a combo wincon and with the added strength of Mono-Black tutors to go get my combo pieces. I think it would be a fun experiment and I might eventually pull my Marwyn build apart just to try it out. I don't think it would be fit to be played at casual tables, though I suspect it would end up as a high power or even a fringe cEDH deck. I'm not sure if it would be stronger or weaker than the current Marwyn cEDH lists, as Nethroi's mutate ability is still a hefty 7 mana and that's way too high to be viable in today's cEDH game.

An artifacts build would be centered around playing as many of the modular Arcbond artifact creatures as I could get my hands on. When a modular creature dies, you get to put its +1/+1 counters onto another target artifact creature. I could see Grakmaw, Skyclave Ravager and Reyhan, Last of the Abzan putting in real work in a deck like this. I've never killed an opponent with a Nethroi-mutated Darksteel Myr with a zillion +1/+1 counters on it, but it might be a fun thing to try.

I've somehow accumulated a small pile of Arcbound artifact creatures and I've always wanted an excuse to play them together. This might be just the right commander for it, though I suspect that any rework that moves away from cycling cards is going to leave me with the old problem of not having much of a graveyard to look at when I'm ready to mutate Nethroi. Even if my cycling version isn't exactly loading my graveyard with powerful creatures, it still feels good to have lots of options available to me when that mutate trigger goes off.

The big addition I suspect I'm going to make in the next overhaul of this deck is to add in Protean Hulk, whether I wind up going for elves or artifacts. Protean Hulk should interact with Scourge of the Skyclaves in the same way that it works with Nethroi. The possibly negative power of Scourge will offset additional power I'd be able to include in the pile of creatures I put onto the battlefield. It's a very synergistic choice and one I suspect might push this deck towards a more powerful build than I'm currently looking for. I want this version to be able to sit down, do a lot of powerful recursion but not just crush casual decks and I think I've managed to build a deck that can do just that.

Final Thoughts

Part of why I wanted to share this process with you today is that I think a huge part of being a winning deck-builder is being able to change your plan, adapt to new cards and new information, and evolve a deck over time. Your build might win a game or two, but if you refuse to ever rework it to try out new ideas or new strategies you might never unlock a much more powerful version of your deck.

This columns' title Rethink, Rework, Rebuild is a reference to how I've learned to approach deck-building. I like to occasionally try out something new. Sometimes I know that my first build is likely going to wind up being the best build for me, but I still learn a lot when I tear the deck apart, put it together again, and see how it would play.

It's a little embarrassing, but my first Narset, Enlightened Master build was full of monks and my first Mikaeus, the Unhallowed build was a deck full of all sorts of weird zombie animals. I had fun with both builds, but it took stepping back from those respective dumpster fires, looking at what I had and what other things I might do, and rebuilding to get to the point where I eventually had a deck that could win games. I still have Narset together, but I've developed a distaste for Mikaeus, the Unhallowed after having to play against a "Black Mike" combo deck for a few years. As they say, familiarity breeds contempt.

Winning in Commander is still all about matchups and power levels. No deck I build is guaranteed to be able to win games and I've had a lot of losses that were in part because my deck was just overmatched by a higher tier, more efficient, more powerful deck. In general, we are all trying to have fun, balanced games, but when you play a lot of commander you'll have the occasional blowout - both in your favor and at your expense.

I hadn't planned on writing this week's Winning Ways about Nethroi, but I realized that my best writing comes when I'm invested in what I'm writing about and I've been spending a lot of time looking at, thinking about, and goldfishing Nethroi lately.

I hope there was something in these Winning Ways columns that you can take away to help you with your own struggles in Commander. We all go through ruts and have times where it feels like we haven't won a game in a long time. Success will come, but don't be afraid to take apart a deck that just isn't working for you. If you love the commander but just can't get it to do what you want, try a new approach. Rethink, rework and rebuild the deck and even if you eventually return to the original list, you'll likely have learned a lot and you'll be able to make it a better deck in the end.

That's all I've got for today. Thanks for reading and I'll see you next week!