Wallet Warriors: Malfegor
Welcome back Wallet Warriors! Boy does it feel good to finally write this article. Malfegor has been my white whale since before I started this series and I am proud to show you this list that has been a long time coming.
The big demon dragon is incredibly difficult to build around because he asks so much of the deck builder. Not only does he require you to discard your entire hand when he enters the battlefield but he also wants you to have lots of cards in hand when he comes into play. These two aspects are very conflicting. This is the main reason why I kept putting Malfegor back on the shelf.
Once I realized that you actually have agency as a player and can make choices in the game, it opened up a lot of doors in the deck building process.
Before I get too deep into the process let’s see the deck list:
If you would like to see the deck separated into the categories I talk about click here.
Deck Overview
What I was alluding to earlier in terms of agency has to do with how we go about drawing cards. This was always the big roadblock with Malfegor. We obviously need some way to draw extra cards since our commander is incredibly good at getting rid of them.
The revelation that made this deck possible is that we can “save up” our card draw on the battlefield then start using it when we need to. These cards combined with our large suite of cards that we don’t mind sending to the graveyard make for an interesting value/reanimator/control deck.
The control sub-theme comes from our natural ability to wipe the board combined with a small package of card denial which I will get to in a little bit.
Card Draw
The first cards I want to talk about are at the core of our strategy. We want to spend the early turns setting up our mana as well as assembling some permanents that can get us some card advantage.
With only one or two of these card advantage engines on the battlefield we can much more easily cast our commander to wipe out most of the creatures that are not our own. After we pitch our hand we just refill with our tools we got prepared in an earlier turn.
One of the most powerful things we can do after getting rid of all our cards is drawing a fresh new seven! Well we have four ways of doing that in the deck, the most important being Magus of the Wheel and Runehorn Hellkite. The magus is a great play a turn or two before we bring out the demon dragon and the hellkite can simply be discarded with the rest of our hand since we want it in the grave anyway.
The rest of our card draw is less explosive but instead provides a steady stream of cards such as Greed, Phyrexian Reclamation, or Kothophed, Soul Hoarder. Okay Kothophed can also be very explosive since Malfegor’s board wipe ability will usually let us refill our hand right after discarding it.
Discard
The next aspect of our commander we want to take advantage of is that we can drop to zero cards in hand almost at will. With this ability in our back pocket we can use a suite of global discard effects that should be symmetrically bad for everyone but happen to not be so bad when we are empty handed.
Bottomless Pit, Cunning Lethemancer and Oppression all constantly choke the table on resources.
Dreamstealer and Rakdos Augermage give us options for targeting individual players who might be trying to sneak out of the noose and draw more cards than the rest of the table.
Finally Sire of Insanity is a great way to close out a game once our board has been developed since it strips most of our opponents options away. They will need the answer right away and if they don’t then they might go insane over this card.
Graveyard Synergies
So we have a plan for when we lose our hand after Malfegor hits the table but we may as well benefit from the cards we discard.
We’ve got cards that don’t mind being thrown in the bin like Anger, Soul of Innistrad, or Past in Flames. We also have one card with Madness in Call to the Netherworld. The idea with this one is we can cast it after playing Malfegor even with no extra mana. This means we can pick back up a creature we discarded or just grab another one that can refill our hand such as Kothophed or Bloodgift Demon.
Plus we have a reanimation sub-theme with a bunch of ways to cheat our big creatures back into play. Quick shoutout to Stitch Together which is a fantastic budget version of Reanimate and a card I feel is currently being underplayed.
Ramp
For our ramp package we’ve included four different mana rocks that can be sacrificed to draw cards. These are very important because they can be used to help refill our hand after we drop our commander.
Another notable card here is Revel in Riches. This enchantment is fantastic since we can drop it down before playing Malfegor then get a bunch of mana and a possible alternate win condition after we wipe our opponents boards.
Finally I want to mention Heartless Summoning since it is a very powerful card with a very small drawback. Keep in mind we do have some creatures in the deck that will die if the enchantment is in play but as I mentioned earlier, we have agency as a player and can choose to hold onto those creatures or to Heartless Summoning, whichever makes the most sense in the context of the game.
Interaction
Our control sub-theme comes from a handful of powerful cards. Demon of Dank Memes, Archfiend of Depravity, Chandra Flamecaller and Deathbringer Regent give us access to additional board control if our commander has gotten out of reach while Sever the Bloodline is a removal spell we can cast from our grave.
Then we have Rakdos Charm and Nihil Spellbomb give us some targeted graveyard hate which is important when we are forcing our opponents to discard cards they may want in the grave.
Wrap Up
And there you have it, Malfegor in all his demon dragony glory. I’m really happy with how this deck turned out and I feel as if I have leveled up after being able to conquer this obstacle that has been in my way for a long time.
I hope this inspires some of you to pick up this Rakdos gem and I know I will be playing and tuning this one for the foreseeable future.
See you all next time! Cheers!
