Players everywhere love taking advantage of the graveyard. It's frequently referred to as the second hand for many, and that's especially true in Commander. Golgari - or Black-Green - decks are especially notable for this, with frequent sacrificing and reanimation fueling the strategy. This proved a major factor as to why the Sultai ended up being so popular in the original Tarkir block in the mid 2010s.

Players loved self-milling with cards like Sidisi, Brood Tyrant and Tasigur, the Golden Fang only to generate further value from doing so. Delve became a popular, if broken, mechanic and even the Blue-Black Silumgar version of the clan in Dragons of Tarkir still filled the graveyard thanks to the exploit mechanic. The combination of these abilities made the Sultai one of the most beloved clans on the plane and that continues now with Tarkir: Dragonstorm.

The Commander precons for this set have been red hot. Odds are good that you're probably having some amount of trouble trying to get your hands on them wherever you are. This remains especially true for the Sultai Arisen deck.

Players are absolutely hooked on the graveyard nonsense this deck is able to get up to. The commander, Teval, the Balanced Scale, is great at filling up the graveyard and swarming your board. This has made it one of the most hotly in-demand decks right now alongside Temur Roar, which is literally THE dragon deck. Unlike that deck, though, this one has a myriad of ways to adjust and upgrade it. Today, I'd like to cover some of those and look for some of the cooler options for the deck.

First, let's check out the list itself:

Sultai Arisen Precon | Commander

• Commander (1)
• 1 Teval, the Balanced Scale

• Creatures (36)
• 1 Amphin Mutineer
• 1 Avenger of Zendikar
• 1 Colossal Grave-Reaver
• 1 Consuming Aberration
• 1 Dauthi Voidwalker
• 1 Disciple of Bolas
• 1 Diviner of Mist
• 1 Floral Evoker
• 1 Gravecrawler
• 1 Hedron Crab
• 1 Jarad, Golgari Lich Lord
• 1 Junji, the Midnight Sky
• 1 Kishla Skimmer
• 1 Kotis, Sibsig Champion
• 1 Lord of Extinction
• 1 Lord of the Forsaken
• 1 Meren of Clan Nel Toth
• 1 Millikin
• 1 Multani, Yavimaya's Avatar
• 1 Necropolis Fiend
• 1 Noxious Gearhulk
• 1 Nyx Weaver
• 1 Ob Nixilis, the Fallen
• 1 Reassembling Skeleton
• 1 River Kelpie
• 1 Sakura-Tribe Elder
• 1 Satyr Wayfinder
• 1 Shigeki, Jukai Visionary
• 1 Skull Prophet
• 1 Springbloom Druid
• 1 Steward of the Harvest
• 1 Stitcher's Supplier
• 1 Tasigur, the Golden Fang
• 1 Timeless Witness
• 1 Woe Strider
• 1 Wonder

• Instants (7)
• 1 Forbidden Alchemy
• 1 Grapple with the Past
• 1 Grisly Salvage
• 1 Harrow
• 1 Lethal Scheme
• 1 Putrefy
• 1 Tear Asunder

• Sorceries (12)
• 1 Afterlife from the Loam
• 1 Casualties of War
• 1 Cultivate
• 1 Farseek
• 1 Life from the Loam
• 1 Living Death
• 1 Necromantic Selection
• 1 Rampant Growth
• 1 Treasure Cruise
• 1 Victimize
• 1 Welcome the Dead
• 1 Will of the Sultai

• Enchantments (3)
• 1 Crawling Sensation
• 1 Phyrexian Reclamation
• 1 Teval's Judgment

• Artifacts (4)
• 1 Arcane Signet
• 1 Conduit of Worlds
• 1 Essence Anchor
• 1 Sol Ring

• Lands (37)
• 4 Island
• 5 Swamp
• 6 Forest
• 1 Cephalid Coliseum
• 1 Command Beacon
• 1 Command Tower
• 1 Contaminated Aquifer
• 1 Crypt of Agadeem
• 1 Darkwater Catacombs
• 1 Dreamroot Cascade
• 1 Drownyard Temple
• 1 Exotic Orchard
• 1 Fetid Pools
• 1 Foreboding Landscape
• 1 Golgari Rot Farm
• 1 Haunted Mire
• 1 Hinterland Harbor
• 1 Llanowar Wastes
• 1 Memorial to Folly
• 1 Myriad Landscape
• 1 Opulent Palace
• 1 Sunken Hollow
• 1 Temple of Malady
• 1 Terramorphic Expanse
• 1 Woodland Cemetery

Buy This Deck Export text

I love what this deck is getting up to. Most decks that seek to utilize the graveyard do so in a way that tries to go all-in on reanimator strategies or else utilizes sacrifice outlets. This is a little more like a deck that puts stuff in the graveyard and cares more about you pulling stuff out of it in a broad sense. You're not aiming to get the biggest creature you can fast, nor are you trying to accrue sacrifice value, but rather gain value by dredging a card to your hand or buying back a Reassembling Skeleton. That's a really cool approach!

What I find surprising, though, is how few cards take advantage of this in the deck itself. Aside from Teval, only two cards care about other cards leaving the graveyard: Kishla Skimmer and Teval's Judgment. Now, admittedly, there aren't many cards which utilize this strategy. In fact, there's around 23 total according to Scryfall. Still, though, I personally feel like there are a couple cards that are well worth playing.

When it comes to touching on all cards leaving the graveyard - thus having the best synergy with Teval - four cards stood out to me. The first one is the most surprising: Kheru Goldkeeper. This one is right in Tarkir: Dragonstorm proper and is quite obtainable for many players. It's a little shocking it didn't show up in this deck, if I'm being honest. Both Tormod, the Desecrator and Defiled Crypt // Cadaver Lab are great ways to generate lots of additional zombie tokens and come on cards that can be had for mere pennies. The last one is the most expensive by a lot, but if you can swing a copy of Amzu, Swarm's Hunger then it's well worth it. Not only does this card also make a lot of tokens, but it makes them huge as well.

There's also a few cards that benefit you if creatures leave the graveyard. Now, unless you're making heavy use of Dryad Arbor, this won't happen with Teval, but you can still build your deck with the right kinds of creatures that come back regularly. Heck, Skeleton Crew will do both aspects for you! Insidious Roots is perhaps the most popular means of generating value for having your creatures leave the graveyard, but the lesser known side of Syr Konrad, the Grim's ability makes him a very real threat. Chalk Outline is another way to generate more creatures, while Soul Enervation provides another way to whittle opponents' life totals, even if they're arguably lesser options.

So now that we know what kind of payoffs we're looking for, what about creatures that come back easily? Thankfully, the precon does a fairly solid job of this already! It comes with both Gravecrawler and Reassembling Skeleton, which are great at being brought back from your graveyard with ease. Whenever I'd write about Aristocrats strategies in the past, these would be two of the first ones I'd jump to for recommendations, along with Bloodghast. Which, oh yeah, even though it's not in this precon, Bloodghast also just got a very recent reprint in Aetherdrift, making it cheaper than ever before.

When it comes to pulling other creatures, there's almost no shortage of options to pull from. As I was going through creatures that self-reanimated repeatedly, I found close to two dozen very playable cards - most of with are cheap. A few classics I always love are Bloodsoaked Champion and Nether Traitor, as well as the more recent Razorlash Transmogrant. Forsaken Miner also comes back nonstop, provided you have the means to repeatedly commit crimes of course. For the extra budget minded, cards like Cult Conscript, Persistent Specimen, and Sanitarium Skeleton are classics that are both readily available and cost actual pennies.

Once you get through the creatures side of things, the non-creatures ends up being minimal. There aren't a ton of spells that repeatedly return to your hand from your graveyard or the battlefield, after all. I will say, though, that I'm quite a fan of the Dragon enchantments from Scourge that pair quite well with large creatures, giving you a means of bringing back multiple cards at once for serious value. They're especially powerful with Multani, Yavimaya's Avatar since you can easily recur him and the auras only check if Multani enters, not if you cast him.

The best option for non-creature spells - and certain creature spells as well - is honestly taking advantage of the dredge mechanic. It's honestly shocking there's only one card using the mechanic in this deck: the powerful Life from the Loam. I can understand not including something like Darkblast which comes across as rather weak in a setting like this, but it feels like a head scratcher to not include simple options like Dakmor Salvage, Moldervine Cloak, or Grave-Shell Scarab that don't go too hard on the dredging. Each of these are fine additions as they both fill your graveyard and remove cards from your graveyard.

The big worry with something like dredge - and even cards like the commander Teval itself - is that they'll fill your graveyard too quickly. To that end, it might be good to add in some cards that put cards back into your deck from the graveyard. Something small like Reito Lantern goes a long way, or you can go all-in and take advantage of a card like Gaea's Blessing or Elixir of Immortality to put your whole graveyard into your deck. Eldrazi titans like Ulamog, the Infinite Gyre will also do the trick there, but those might be a bit too rich for many players' blood.

So, now that I've covered filling your graveyard and returning cards from it, I also want to address one other area I haven't talked about yet: exiling cards with the delve mechanic. Thanks to a number of powerful spells such as Dig Through Time and Treasure Cruise having rather profound impacts on Constructed Magic, delve has earned a reputation for being quite powerful. In one-on-one Magic, this is a fairly accurate summary. Even simple cards like Hooting Mandrills and Gurmag Angler proved to be serious threats in the right setting when they could be cast for just one mana.

In a multiplayer setting, however, these cards play a lot differently. Casting a one mana 5/5 vanilla creature isn't exactly going to be the most backbreaking thing to happen when there's multiple players to contend with. You have to really have an effect that's powerful enough to warrant you to want to play them in Commander. After all, you're exiling your cards, which means you can't get them back. Sure it makes them leave the graveyard, thus triggering Teval's ability, but the cost there is real so you need to make it count.

The precon features four cards that have delve on them: Necropolis Fiend, Treasure Cruise, Tasigur, the Golden Fang; and the all-new Afterlife from the Loam. Of these four, Tasigur and Afterlife from the Loam are easily the most potent of the bunch. Tasigur gives you a solid body with a way to both fill your graveyard and recover cards from it. Afterlife from the Loam gives you the ability to pull stuff from opponents' graveyards, thereby letting you generate a powerful army in one fell swoop.

The others, though, feel quite a bit more questionable to me personally. This is especially true with Necropolis Fiend. Delving away cards is already a problem for this deck in practice, but to make the most use out of the card itself you need to exile even more cards. That's a tall ask, and one that you'll likely find yourself only exiling small numbers of cards when you'll need to take out bigger creatures. As for Treasure Cruise, sure an Ancestral Recall is always going to be reasonable in any format. However, in a format like Commander, you can get away with many other comparable options without exiling cards from your graveyard.

Personally, there's two cards I'm a big fan of. The first is Ethereal Forager. This card allows you to delve away spells and then get to recast them for more value later on, softening the blow of you having to exile cards. Alternatively, if you're going to go in on the delve plan, maybe you should REALLY go in. Casting an Empty the Pits is a great way to send a message and show that you mean it. You can also run Sorcerous Squall if you expect another player to have a really powerful spell like, say, Insurrection, but I wouldn't lean on it because of how easily it can whiff - especially given that it hits only one spell.

By now I've covered a lot of ground and admittedly I still probably haven't tackled all the ways you can approach this sort of deck. You can go harder on an Aristocrats strategy if you want, or even turn it into a more straightforward Reanimator deck. As you can tell, there's a ton of moving parts with this deck, which makes it a great one to mess around with. Find what makes the deck appeal best to you personally and really lean into it. Make it your own and have one hell of a great time at your next Commander night!

Paige Smith

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