Getting Heretical with Liliana in Commander
Have you ever had an idea for a deck and it didn’t really pan out? Did you give up? Keep playing the sort of wonky pile anyways? Or keep working on it? Today, I want to tell the a story about a deck I messed up and salvaged.
Liliana, Heretical Healer
Now, the reason I originally built this deck was actually because of Commander 2018. When I saw the three Bant Commanders (Estrid, Kestia, and Tuvasa), I was hugely impressed by their ability to be three different aspects of the same archetype. Even though they were all build around enchantments, one was an enchantment herself (Kestia), one was an enchantress effect (Tuvasa), and the third was simply an enabler to power up your enchantment synergies that already existed (Estrid). All three of these effects are something you would include in the 99 of your enchantment deck, but which one your Commander was made a huge impact on deck construction. When one of these three effects is in your command zone, so you have access to it all the time, you want to focus on the other two effects more in your 99. This concept of multiple Commanders being different pillars of the same archetype made me want more of that same thing.
On my search for other archetypes with similar features in their Commanders, I landed on mono-Black aristocrats. I had already seen multiple Yahenni decks, where your commander was your sac effect and multiple Endrek Sahr decks, where your commander was your token producer. I had even played a deck where I used Westvale Abbey as my (technically illegal) Commander so I could have both a sac effect and a token producer in the command zone simultaneously. However, in an aristocrats deck, the third pillar is the payoff. Why are you killing all your own creatures? I realized I had never seen a Liliana, Heretical Healer deck actually come to fruition before.
Mono Black’s biggest strength is its access to big mana. Not just a lot of mana, a LOT of mana. Cabal Coffers, Cabal Stronghold, Caged Sun, Gauntlet of Power, Extraplanar Lens, Crypt Ghast, and Nirkana Revenant are all cards that let this color go bigger than basically any other deck at your table. However, this is less important in an aristocrats strategy than in most. Many of the aristocrats are low-cost, low-sized creatures who’s power comes from synergy, not, well, raw power.
Another aspect on my mind was finding the right mix of payoffs, sac effects, and token makers. I decided that because I had my payoff in my command zone and she was a payoff for sacrificing a few times, not a ton of times, that one-shot sac effects would serve me well and my token makers could be bigger than usual. For example, cards like Voldaren Pariah, Fleshbag Marauder, and Burnished Hart are even better in this deck than they normally would be. The token producers I chose were ones that could really put the pressure on my opponent in addition to being multiple bodies, like Grave Titan, Precursor Golem, and Wurmcoil Engine. With both of these specialties in mind, cards like Victimize, Whisper, Blood Liturgist, and Rescue from the Underworld became very attractive to reanimate these fatties that also happened to be profitable to sacrifice. If you’ve ever sacrificed a Wurmcoil Engine to Victimize to bring back Rune-Scarred Demon and Precursor Golem, you understand why these cards are so good. Now add to that your Liliana flipping into a powerful planeswalker on top of that!
All of this sounds great, right? Lots of powerful synergies and big mana, but here’s the pitfall: Liliana strips you of resources when she flips (‘+2: Each player discards a card’) and synergy decks need a lot of resources basically all the time. This meant that my traditional building of her with the elements of an aristocrats deck ended with me having not enough resources to actually close in 90% of the games I played with her.
The solution to this ended up being relatively simple: replace normal aristocrats includes with more card draw. Examples of cards I was sad to cut are: Sengir Autocrat, Open the Graves, Pawn of Ulamog. All of these cards ended up being too synergy-focused and weak on their own to justify includes. They were replaced with cards like Ambition’s Cost, Ancient Craving, and Phyrexian Gargantua, just cards that add more velocity.
This simple change allowed the deck to play as a sort of hybrid of mono-black control and aristocrats. You still get to enjoy the thrill of putting a creature you paid mana for into the graveyard, but have enough card draw and longevity to actually hang in the late game after your commander has stripped everyone of their resources.
Categories:
Mana Ramp: Caged Sun, Extraplanar Lens, Crypt Ghast, Wayfairer’s Bauble, Gauntlet of Power, Sol Ring, Jet Medallion, Burnished Hart, Cabal Stronghold, Isolated Watchtower, Temple of the False God, Terrain Generator, Myriad Landscape, Crypt of Agadeem, Drownyard Temple, Nykthos, Shrine to Nyx, and Cabal Coffers.
Notable excludes are Solemn Simulacrum and Nirkana Revenant. All the cards included in this section are pretty obvious, with us leaning away from artifact ramp in favor of effects that put actual swamps into play so we can double them. The reason for both Solemn and Revenant being excluded is because they cost too much mana for their effect. Solemn at 4 is where we want to ideally be doubling our mana instead of simply adding one land, and Revenant is a doubler, but much more vulnerable than Caged Sun at its cmc. Additionally, because we’re leaning towards a lower curve with aristocrats, we don’t need to max out on mana ramp in this deck. The last card I feel I should mention is Drownyard Temple. This is a powerful card when you can basically guarantee you’re discarding it. The cost of including this colorless land isn’t particularly high, and the benefit of putting it into your ‘yard off Liliana and bringing it back is basically (3): Put a Wastes into play, draw a card.
Token Producers/Sacrifice Fodder: Reassembling Skeleton, Hangarback Walker, Gravecrawler, Precursor Golem, Grave Titan, and Wurmcoil Engine.
This is the category that got trimmed the most during tuning, as there are a lot of options that seem powerful. At the end of the day, you don’t need that much of this effect in this deck, because Liliana doesn’t ask you to sacrifice a lot, just every once in a while. Additionally, Hangarback Walker, Reassembling Skeletons, and Gravecrawler have added synergy with your deck creating just a ton of mana.
Sacrifice Payoffs: Dictate of Erebos, Pitiless Plunderer, Grave Pact, Dark Prophecy, Blood Artist, and Zulaport Cutthroat.
Once again, we just included the best of the best in payoffs. We want our payoffs to effectively win the game, which is why we opted to include the drain creatures and Grave Pact effects. Notable excludes are Butcher of Malakir and Falkenrath Noble, both of which were cut simply because we do not need that much of this effect and they cost the most mana.
Sacrifice Effects: High Market, Westvale Abbey, Viscera Seer, Voldaren Pariah, Sadistic Hypnotist, Yahenni, Undying Partisan, Ashnod’s Altar, Carrion Feeder, Blasting Station, and Vampiric Rites.
This category, we included the most. Being able to reliably flip Liliana is extremely important, and each of these cards offers its own unique benefits. Abbey and Market are lands, making them close to free to include, Seer and Feeder are one-mana, which has obvious draws, Blasting Station and Voldaren Pariah help you control the battlefield, Sadistic Hypnotist frequently just locks out the game, and Altar and Rites provide the lifeblood of EDH: mana and cards.
Creatures that Kill Themselves: Shriekmaw, Walking Ballista, Merciless Executioner, and Fleshbag Marauder.
These creatures all have a payoff-like effect and kill themselves immediately, making them clearly synergistic with Liliana (plus, with tons of mana, Ballista sometimes wins the game on its own).
Reanimation: Dread Return, Rescue from the Underworld, Victimize, Whisper, Blood Liturgist, Phyrexian Delver, Animate Dead, and Wake the Dead.
The ability to recycle creatures by moving them from graveyard to battlefield to graveyard is exactly what Liliana asks you to do on her face. Flip her by sacrificing a small thing to Victimize, then reanimate that thing with her –X ability and you’re just up value. Wake the Dead is an effective way to end the game with a stacked enough graveyard. If you reanimate a Blood Artist effect with it, this card can bail you out of completely losing scenarios no other card could.
Card Draw: Ancient Craving, Ambition’s Cost, Phyrexian Gargantuan, Skullclamp, Phyrexian Reclamation, Wretched Confluence, Waste Not, Necropotence, and Grave Scrabbler.
This category has the most interesting cards in it. We have staples Necropotence, Wretched Confluence, Skullclamp, and Phyrexian Reclamation as our generic card advantage cards. Ancient Craving and Ambition’s Cost were both selected over smaller card draw like Read the Bones, Phyrexian Arena, or Night’s Whisper, because we need the most bang for our buck. Waste Not and Grave Scrabbler are only synergistic with Liliana’s +2 ability, but are so powerful with it that they warranted includes. Finally, Phyrexian Gargantuan is a card I constantly end up adding to my decks in their later builds. I never want to include the apparently mediocre 6-drop in my decks, but near my third build each time, I always find myself looking for a creature to reanimate that just draws cards and this bad boy keeps making the cut.
Tutors: Rune-Scarred Demon, Demonic Tutor, and Expedition Map.
Not much to see here.
Board Wipes: Toxic Deluge, Damnation, In Garruk’s Wake, Pestilence Demon, Mutilate, and Necromantic Selection.
Pestilence Demon and Necromantic Selection are both cards I feel are criminally underplayed in commander. The Demon is a potent reanimation target that can just dominate any battlefield, and Selection puts yourself into a board-dominant position regardless of when you cast it because you always get the best creature possible while your opponents are left with nothing.
Removal: Tendrils of Corruption, Meteor Golem, Duplicant, Malicious Affliction, and Tragic Slip.
Malicious Affliction, Tragic Slip, and Tendrils are all sort of mediocre cards I elected to include mostly because they fit the theme so well. I like to play powerful magic, but sometimes when a card says ‘Morbid’, you just gotta include it.
This brings the final decklist to:
This build of the deck can wrench control of the most difficult boards, lock your opponents out of cards in hand and creatures on the battlefield, and win at instant speed with Wake the Dead and a stocked graveyard. But more importantly than that, it’s fun. All the things it’s doing are highly interactive and interactable, which means basically no opponent is truly out of the game against this deck until the literal death stroke.
I am extremely glad I did not give up on this deck after it performed poorly, because how this pile has grown has been truly satisfying.
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