One of my personal joys in Magic, much as in life, is trolling the living hell out of my friends and making them regret ever knowing me, at least briefly, and you can too. This deck leans heavily into the Rakdos Punisher archetype, turning your opponents taking game actions into damage before doubling up that damage and bringing the game to a swift conclusion.
The Commander: The Lord of Pain
Right away we’re off to a good start, turning the first spell EACH player casts EACH turn into damage you can throw at a player of your choice. This means not only do you benefit from it a la Vial Smasher the Fierce, your opponents are going to help you out here as well. This is accelerated even further if you have a table of filthy blue players who want to be rudely casting a bunch of instants on other peoples’ turns. Next, the Lord turns of that annoying life gain that threatens to undo all your hard work, though he does nicely allow you to gain some back of your own if you were to lose it from your own effects or being targeted for hurting the entire table in rapid succession. Finally he has menace which is a nice little bit of evasion – you’re probably not swinging a ton but there will be spots you can get in and he has a solid body.
The Ramp
Since our deck is heavily built around getting our commander out and letting him do his thing, the faster we can get him out the better. To that end we are packing some of the best fast mana still in the format with not just Sol Ring but lesser seen options like Dark Ritual and Mana Vault plus slightly less fast Worn Powerstone. We also have a few of the traditional 2 mana rocks in Arcane Signet and Rakdos Signet as well as Crypt Ghast and the Cabal Coffers + Urborg, Tomb of Yawgmoth combo.
The Card Draw
I’m planning on building this deck in paper as the first new deck I’ve done in quite a while, and as is my wont for a first draft I have gone light on the card draw until I get a feel for which of the punisher cards I like and which don’t hit quite right. That said we have some classics like the Demon above, Phyrexian Arena, and Decree of Pain, along with the joint draw and punisher effects of Scrawling Crawler and Spiteful Visions. In the long run I could see adding in instant speed draw like Blood Pact to allow us to also trigger our commander on other peoples turns but time will tell.
The Utility
A lot of our utility is pulling double duty to begin with, immediately obvious with dual faced cards like Fell the Profane which can also be land drops as needed. I won’t be surprised if this number goes up after some testing since most of the black and red versions would fit fine in this deck. Massacre Wurm is both a mini wrath and a damage effect, our board wipes Blasphemous Act and In Garruk’s Wake have high CMV’s so they can throw big damage around from the Lord, and Chandra’s Ignition both leaves him around after the wipe and combines extremely well with Basilisk Collar to both ensure it’s a full wipe and gain a massive amount of life. Vandalblast serves to wipe our opponents artifacts out.
We have a small amount of targeted removal with Bedevil and Withering Torment, and then a bunch of ways to protect our Lord from targeted removal like Swiftfoot Boots and Deflecting Swat as well as ways to save him from a wrath in Malakir Rebirth and Not Dead After All or bring him back with Sheoldred, Whispering One. Depending on your local meta it may make sense to phase some of the single target protection out for spells like Reanimate to deal with a higher number of board wipes.
No Mercy and Crawlspace serve to punish or dissuade attacks as we draw aggro, Pain Magnification can strip their hands of things to attack us with, and Bojuka Bog gives us at least token graveyard hate. Demonic Tutor and Vampiric Tutor give us ways to find these toolbox cards.
The Win Conditions
There are numerous avenues of punishment you can lean into with this archetype, and for this particular build I have chosen to go with damage doubling to maximize the Lord’s effect with a draw punishing subtheme and a few one off effects thrown in. We have a whole host of doublers and damage boosters like Angrath’s Marauders, Torture Pit, and Fiery Emancipation. We can punish people for casting spells with Painful Quandry, for drawing cards with Underworld Dreams and its heirs, and for even tapping mana with Manabarbs. Creatures entering or dying trigger Blood Artist and Blood Seeker, Harsh Mentor hits abilities, and several variations of Wound Reflection pile on even further to close the game out. We don’t have any infinite combos but the Exquisite Blood + Sanguine Bond one would be right at home here if you so chose.
Thanks for joining us for our latest kitchen table Commander deck! Make sure to keep an eye out for the other decks in the series!
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