Classic Commander: Ulasht, the Hate Seed

Posted on March 9, 2022

I talk a lot about my college days when it comes to Magic and Commander in particular. Those days were some of what I'd consider my creative peak when it came to the game. I wouldn't end up being more of a competitive grinder for a couple more years and I was more involved with just having a chill good time with friends. It let me try lots of different things that I could construct, deconstruct, and build again as something new. I'd have eight decks one week, take them apart to build a cube, and then eventually take apart that cube to make a whole set of completely new decks separate from those initial eight.

What made this so fun was the inventiveness. I had more time and energy to go out of my way to look for things that might be interesting and fun. Things that could prove to be a different take on things than what you might normally find. Even cards that might not always look the most appealing on first read can end up being extremely exciting once you give them a chance and get around to playing with them. That's how I felt with Ulasht, the Hate Seed when I first saw it to when I first played with it.

Ulasht was a card that, if I recall correctly, I got with a bunch of random bulk nonsense I picked up from some random eBay repacks as I was getting back into the game. I bought a couple rare repacks just to fill out my collection and later found someone making actual boosters out of bulk they had lying around (11 commons, 3 uncommons, and a rare) for $1 a pack. That made for great cheap draft material with friends and ended up being a great time, but it meant getting cards like this that I wouldn't otherwise pick up.

When I first read the card, it felt like word soup. Trying to read it and understand it kind of made my eyes glaze over a little and I wrote it off for a while. Then I thought about it more when I was looking for something new to work with and realized just how great it actually was. Oftentimes, Ulasht comes down really large for a meager 4 mana investment. It's even better when you realize that it counts creatures being Red and being Green separately, so for every creature you have with both colors, Ulasht gets two counters as opposed to one. So Ulasht gets huge, beats face, or else makes more creatures and pings down problem stuff.

All of this made Ulasht a perfect candidate to revisit for a Classic Commander list. Let's check out a list!

Ulasht | Classic Commander | Paige Smith

Commander (1)
1 Ulasht, the Hate Seed

Planeswalkers (1)
1 Garruk Wildspeaker

What I loved about Ulasht was how you could just toss together a pile of sweet Red and Green cards that you have lying around and make it work. As long as you've got creatures of both colors coming onto the battlefield, Ulasht gets bigger. Even if you're not able to get Ulasht itself to be really all that big, you can use its ability to spit out some saprolings, let it die, and have it come back even bigger than it was the first time.

This was how I ultimately ended up building my Ulasht deck when I was in college: going through my collection and taking some of the coolest cards I could find and smashing them together. There was very little synergy, just a bunch of good rampy creatures that could let me fill up a board quickly and beat my opponents into a pulp. When it worked, it was great, but it also had a lot of issues as well. I played cards like Birthing Pod and Hibernation's End in my original list, and it just made me go through my deck extremely quickly. There also wasn't much graveyard recursion, so when my stuff died, that was it. It was fun, but ultimately kind of dull and non-synergistic - something I sought to fix in this list.

The first point was to make saprolings work a bit more here. If I remember right, Verdeloth found his way into my original list as a good budget top end that also happened to work very nicely with saprolings and made a ton of tokens to fuel Ulasht. Somehow, though, I skipped a couple of the other really obvious cards, as my original list was more "binder rare pile" than a cohesively constructed list. As such, cards like Mycoloth, Thelonite Shaman, and Nemata, Grove Guardian all seemed like natural fits here - not to mention Sprout Swarm as a way to continually generate an army of critters.

I also looked to figure out the problem of the deck going through too much of itself too quickly and always finding what it needed. Yes, it certainly made the deck strong, but it was just the same thing every game and was dull. What's more, as mentioned previously, when stuff went to the grave, it stayed in the grave. So, I added a little graveyard recursion in the form of Genesis, Elixir of Immortality, and Kozilek - which also works as a game ender too. And instead of repeated tutors like Birthing Pod and Hibernation's End, there's one-time abilities like Tooth and Nail or Green Sun's Zenith. You also have more random abilities like Lurking Predators or general card draw like Primordial Sage and Harmonize. This increases the variance a little and makes for a more fun experience when playing with friends.

What's more, I also like to think that this is a bit more of an optimized list, featuring a lot of the more ideal options. That said, there's a ton of great budget options if you want to just get a bunch of creatures going. Jade Mage, Ant Queen, and Centaur Glade will cost you maybe a combined dollar altogether, but each make tons of critters to fuel Ulasht. Wort, the Raidmother too was in my original list, as she basically provides six counters for Ulasht by herself and can double a handful of major spells, but I thought other cards would provide better synergy. Basically, there's tons of cheap options to work with and you should play around to see what works with your budget.

And speaking of fueling your creatures, one last thing I considered were creature buffs and anthem effects. Originally, I had a bunch here, as Ulasht makes a lot of tokens and you want to pump up those tokens. The problem was that, weirdly, you want Ulasht to die so that it can come back and be even bigger to make more tokens. So, if you use your anthem effects, it actually is a bit of a nonbo with Ulasht itself. This was why I took out Boartusk Liege despite having a lot of overall great synergy otherwise. Instead, I focused on tribal buffs (buffing saprolings), temporary until-end-of-turn buffs, and extra +1/+1 counters in a few cases.

All told, I think this leads to a really cool and really fun build. In fact, I daresay it'd probably matchup pretty well against a number of modern Commander lists as well. I might make a few buffs here and there (Vithian Renegades might be better replaced as Reclamation Sage, for example) but you don't have to do very much to have a potent deck. It's a really cool list and the type of build around that surprised me just how much fun it ended up being when I first played it back in college. Who knows, maybe you will too. Give it a try at your next Commander night and find out for yourself.

Paige Smith

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TAGS articles, casual, edh, commander, decklist, gruul, red/green, classic commander, paige smith, 03092022, ulasht the hate seed, predh