Tarkir Dragonstorm includes quite a few new interesting 3 color commanders, and even some playable Dragons. Among them are two Sultai legends and one promising uncommon for either pauper or EDH if your group is just cool like that that are promising commanders. The next 3 articles will cover each of those Sultai Dragons in turn: Kheru Goldkeeper; Teval, the Balanced Scale; and Teval, Arbiter of Virtue. Today’s build of Kheru Goldkeeper is aimed at Cool Folks groups that will let you play non-legendary creatures as your commander, along the lines of house ruling in things like Tamanoa or Dune-Brood Nephilim, but the same style of play will work in Pauper as well.
Similar methods of ramp, generating value, and control across the three are a reflection of similarly graveyard focused strategies, as well as the reality of what constitutes “good” interaction cards. All three decks are more or less variants of each other, so you could pretty easily assemble the kit for one and then have a few cards around to alter the play in the others. All of the three are comfortably in the high bracket 2 to bracket 3 area. None play Game Changers, but they are efficient, focused decks that will probably overwhelm “upgraded precons” and play pretty comfortably with “anything goes except cEDH” bracket. This little mini-series is an attempt to explore graveyard themed Sultai decks with new commanders but the themes, and the cards, should generally work well with existing Sultai decks as well as commanders that come out later. In a sense it’s more like an exploration of the archetype of Sultai graveyard commanders.
I think it’s pretty interesting when Wizards chooses to come out with several new legendary creatures with similar thematic abilities and the same color identity, as though they want to push a new archetype. It’s probably not true, Wizards’ short development cycle and endless pushing out of new cards most likely means they aren’t paying attention to their releases at that holistic of a level.
The iconic Sultai graveyard commander was probably Tasigur, the Golden Fang, though Sidisi, Brood Tyrant has also been around and quite useful for a while. Tasigur’s built in mill and delve abilities was sort of putting both sides of the trick on one card, but he’s fairly expensive at 6 mana – though 5 of it being colorless and only 1 colored mana makes it relatively easy to pump him out quickly.
Releasing all 3 of these in short order, with more affordable mana costs has definitely expanded the options, consistency, and speed of available commanders for the same archetype, and I really like the way they generally play well with each other and pretty easily all slot into each other’s decks, though the commander themselves tends to lead to a different sub-focus for how you are profiting off of your graveyard.
You could further upgrade any of them them with tutors, free interaction, and other generally better cards.
Kheru Goldkeeperhas a really strong basic ability, enough to make brewing around an Uncommon interesting. It’s a 3/3 flyer, a Dragon even to boot, at a very affordable 4 mana. With any luck on ramp you’re hitting that on turn 3, and there’s lots of ways to start generating mad value with this ability:
“Whenever one or more cards leave your graveyard during your turn, create a Treasure token.”
That can be devastating. Mass mill is pretty easy to assemble now to fill your yard, and delve is around, especially in Stomp the Yard III. There’s also reanimation, any bog standard reshuffles, or even just brute forcing it with a classic card like Tormod’s Crypt. A single (hopefully proxied) Timetwister can upend your yard (though only create one Treasure by itself). If you wanted to go infinite there’s the The Gitrog Monster combo with Dakmor Salvage, which you could pretty easily use to generate infinite Treasures.
It’s not in the deck, but you could run Bontu’s Monument with Gravecrawler or Oathsworn Vampire or Haakon, Stromgald Scourge as an alternative combo.
There’s also several variants in Dragonstorm, though most of them are whenever a card or a specific type of card leaves, like creature, and possibly have some limitation, like Kheru itself where it’s only on your turn.
The way I thought would be fun and consistent is with lands. Being able to play multiple lands and being able to play lands from your graveyard is pretty solid to begin with. If it’s netting you Treasures on top of it, that gets you a LOT of mana. To win the game you’ll use these Treasures to generate life loss triggers with Marionette Apprentice, Marionette Master, Agent of the Iron Throne, or Mirkwood Bats (on creation) and Syr Konrad, the Grim for creatures leaving. These and looping for value or attrition are basically your win cons.
There’s also a group of cards that can be looped to have artifacts endlessly leaving your yard:
Myr Retriever & Scrap Trawler &Â Workshop Assistant & Junk Diver.
In conjunction with Jhoira’s Familiar or Cloud Key reducing costs, and Krark-Clan Ironworks and Phyrexian Altar and Ashnod’s Altar as sacrifice outlets you can generally loop these. They are wonky loops and you have to read the cards carefully depending on which ones you get, but almost any two of those can lead to endlessly casting them.
The game plan for this deck is to ramp fairly quickly, as you need to assemble a lot of working triggers to either attrition your opponents out or get to one of your relatively complex and difficult to assemble combos. I feel like this deck is right where a bracket 3 deck ought to be, a coherent but complex and somewhat obtuse game plan, that involves a non-deterministic combo with some built in draw, ramp, and control to keep the game interesting. You’re not always going to tutor for the same thing, and the deck has virtually no tutors aside from land tutors, so you sort of get what you get.
You’re ideally looking for a starting hand that includes one of the 3 cost get two lands spells, and the lands to cast it, or one of the play additional land cards and a way to play lands from your yard. With either of these you should get sufficient ramp to get going, and then draw into the other pieces you need.
You can bring out Kheru relatively early since he’s pretty nonthreatening as a body, though you probably want to wait till you actually have some pieces out to work with him, but once he can start generating value for you, I’d say by all means get to it.
There’s some fairly random cards in here, which make sense given the game plan, but aren’t particularly necessary, like Mycosynth Wellspring and Ichor Wellspring. They are cheap and get you some cards or lands early, and can then be eaten up with costly plunder or one of your sac and draw spells to get their second effect, and can also be used as part of the loop with particularly Scrap Trawler. There’s also some big swingy spells which are fun, like Time Reversal, because of how aggressively you can self mill without worrying what’s going in the yard or about decking yourself, or if your yard has a bunch of stuff in it that you want again and want to refill your hand you can fire them off. You can probably run away with the game in the former scenario since you likely have your engine online, but they could easily be cut for more consistency in the deck.
So, here is our first Blue Green Black Sultai Stomp the Yard deck, with Kheru Goldkeeper at the helm.
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