Commanding Respect: King Macar, the Gold-Cursed

Hello everyone and welcome back to Commanding respect, where we search for gold buried among magic’s underplayed commanders. When looking for gold where better to begin than the Greek-tragedy inspired King Macar, the Gold-Cursed! Once nearly unplayable thanks to being cursed with the keyword Inspired, Macar has recently become an incredibly fun and interesting choice of commander thanks to the introduction of vehicles and other recent cards. Today we’ll find ways to efficiently tap down Macar so that you can quickly profit from exiling your opponent’s largest threats and use the resulting advantages of board state and mana to find victory.

When building an EDH deck, it is important to first look at your commander’s abilities in detail. King Macar’s ability is complex, and can be broken down into 4 parts. First, as an Inspired ability, it triggers when Macar untaps, meaning the most effective decks will need to ensure that King Macar is untapping multiple times per turn. Second, his ability exiles our opponents’ creatures. It is important to realize the distinction between exile and destroy, as the former will put the creatures in a zone much harder to reach, can get around indestructible, and will not generate death triggers (both to our benefit and detriment). Thirdly, we get rewarded for this exiling with permanent one time use mana, giving us a chance to ramp into powerful late game spells once we’ve controlled the board effectively. Finally and perhaps most often overlooked, King Macar creates artifacts, a permanent type that has tons of support and whose generation is more than ready to be abused. Macar’s ability is interesting because it offers all three of its effects together, meaning that rather than just choose one to focus on we can use them to work towards each other. Below we’ll lay out ways to generate multiple Inspired triggers each turn, and then discuss cards and combos that take advantage of the results.

When King Macar was first printed in Born of the Gods, there were few reliable ways to tap or untap him in his color identity, and likewise Black had few ways to take advantage of artifacts like Red and Blue could. It seem that unless Macar somehow got one of those colors added to his color identity, he was destined to never see more than niche play in EDH. However, the arrival of Kaladesh and the introduction of vehicles radically changed things for Macar. Before, there were few ways to tap down a creature and benefit from it without attacking (a risky endeavor which often results in a dead of exiled Macar), making any non-combat tapping of Macar expensive and challenging. With vehicles, Macar can be safely tapped for free while still exerting a combat presence. With new vehicles in Ixalan, there are several choice to fill Macar’s garage; Notable ones include Moblie Garrison, which untaps Macar quickly, Untethered Express, which grows more troublesome with every attack, and Conqueror’s Galleon. The Galleon might seem an odd choice, as Macar can’t turn it on unassisted, but it still warrants inclusion because it flips into a very useful land that provides uses for excess mana late game.   

Vehicles won’t be the only way we tap down Macar, and with the exception of Mobile Garrison they won’t provide us ways to untap him to do it again. Holdout Settlement, Paradise Mantle, and Survivor’s Encampment each provide ways to tap Macar for mana, which was can use for spells or turn around and invest immediately into untapping him again. These cards make the high cost of cards like Sword of the Paruns and Umbral Mantle a little easier to swallow, but while we’ll take what we can get, cheaper twiddling is also necessary. Icy Manipulator and Puppet Strings allow us to tap Macar cheaper, and can additionally be used to control an opponent’s threat should Macar be off the board or somehow incapacitated. Puppet Strings is additionally an untap source like Thousand Year Elixer, which, while expensive monetarily, certainly deserves a spot in the deck due to its ability to cheaply untap Macar.

One final untap source worth looking at in detail comes from Clock of Omens and Silverskin Armor. Both are worth including one their own, the Clock because it can untap things like Thousand Year Elixer and the armor because it lets Macar take advantage of the artifact synergies listed below, but together they form a potent combo that let’s Macar wipe the entire board. When Macar is equipped with Silverskin Armor, he and the armor can be tapped to activate the Clock of Omens, which can then target Macar and untap him, letting him pick a target to exile. Doing this creates a gold token, which can then be tapped with Macar to activate the clock targeting Macar, untapping him and letting him pick a new target. By rinsing and repeating, Macar clears anything he wants to off the board and gets a gold token for everything exiled this way. From there, all you need to do is cash in that gold for victory.

Once Macar has generated enough mana through gold and lands, all that remains is finding a big enough spell to spend it on. Fortunately, black has several options for spending excess mana in the form of spells like Drain Life and Exsanguinate. Obviously, spells that hit each opponent are better than those which only target one, but single target spells are still worth including as they can help stabilize your own life or remove a troublesome creature/opponent from the game before getting around to everyone else. For when you absolutely positively got to kill every player at the table however Torment of Hailfire offers additional redundancy to the Exsanguinate game plan and ensures that players who aren’t dead from it resolving are at least severely crippled. Death Cloud is also a viable alternative, however it hits you as well, so if you don’t consider ending the game for everyone with one spell a personal victory you might consider cutting it for something tamer. A final life loss spell with some versatility is Damnable Pact, which can be used to refill your own hand, kill a player through life loss, or mill out a player that’s gone to infinite life or gotten greedy with their draws.

Ending the game with big life loss spells is facilitated by Macar and his Gold tokens, but additional sources of mana are often desirable. Black has great mana increasing spells like Magus of the Coffers, Crypt Ghast, and Cabal Coffers (the latter of which will not be included in this list, as it presently costs nearly as much as every card in this deck combined). Aside from the standard black ramp, Macar’s association with artifacts lets us take advantage of additional cards to double our mana. Inspiring Statuary is another card from Kaladesh block that radically improved King Macar EDH decks. Essentially a mana rock on its own, Inspiring Statuary also doubles the mana that each Gold token can produce, meaning you can have the mana to cast your game ending spells twice as quickly, or be able to cast them later in the game twice as powerfully. The statuary additionally synergizes with several other cards in the deck, but most notably Blinkmoth Urn. Like the statuary, Blinkmoth Urn generates mana for every artifact we control, but comes at the cost of giving our opponents mana for each of theirs. Typically including Blinkmoth Urn in a deck hinges on the belief that you will have more artifacts than your opponents, and that you will be able to use the mana created better than they will—both of which are true in our case—but we can go a step further and deny our opponent’s that mana by tapping the urn with Inspiring Statuary or cards initially intended to tap Macar like Icy Manipulator.

Aside from giving us mana, the artifacts in our deck can also provide additional effects. While artifact interactions aren’t plentiful in black, artifacts matter sets have given us useful tools to exploit. One of the most powerful is Marionette Master (again, it is hard to understate how much King Macar loves Kaladesh). Marionette Master’s ability makes it such that every time we sacrifice a treasure an opponent loses life—typically at least 4, as the servos should only really be created in an emergency. Disciple of the Vault also gives us a similar effect, which while smaller also comes on a much cheaper creature. It’s important to remember that while tokens cease to exist when they enter the graveyard, they still enter it first, making these abilities function properly when you sacrifice Gold tokens. Additional artifact loving creatures include Moriok Rigger and Syndicate Trafficker, which can use your Gold tokens to grow into bigger threats as the game continues.

By focusing on the above themes it is easy to create a solid core for a deck. After adding some ways to protect Macar, throwing in a few beefy creatures as backups, tutors to find our win cons, and some necessary tech like board wipes, Artificer’s Hex (black’s super-secret answer to Swiftfoot Boots and a favorite pet card of mine), and targeted removal—important to have for the times when Macar is not on the table—we’re left with the deck below.  

End of Turn Brainstorm

There is no single correct way to build an EDH deck for a given commander; so long as you—and hopefully your playgroup—have fun with it, any avenue you take a deck is worthwhile. You might add in Treasure of Clue token producers to accompany your Gold. While Treasure tokens are weaker than gold (notably they can’t be tapped and then sacrificed), there are still ways to produce enough of them that both or either type of artifact can have a noticeable effect. Alternatively, while this deck does focus some on traditional mono black control elements, you might want to go deeper and add targeted discard effects, ensuring that you keep spells from being cast while also keeping the board clear of undesirable creatures. A mill subtheme is also possible, while perhaps not as silly as the proposed R/G mill at the end of (our last commanding respect article), splurging for Geth, Lord of the Vault and adding cards like Suffer the Past to take advantage of full graveyards could be an excellent way to expand Macar’s portfolio of denying his opponents resources while adding to his own.

And that’s it for today’s article, hopefully you’ll have fun using this deck to get rich off your opponent’s misfortunes. As always, I’d love to hear any thoughts, disagreements, stories of successes or otherwise with the deck, or suggestions for future commanders in the comments below, until next time!