Commander Spotlight: Rendmaw, Creaking Nest
(Rendmaw, Creaking Nest || Art by Ryan Pancoast)
Scarecrows and Goaded Crows, Oh My!
Hello, my friends, and welcome to the kickoff to Commander Spotlight! This regular column will feature one legendary creature, usually from the most recent Commander precons, and provide you with a deep dive into ideas that should help get you started brewing your own Commander deck around it. I will be tapping into my vast deckbuilding experience in Magic and Commander, with an eye towards maximizing fun for the whole table. Did everyone have a good time playing against me and my deck, and will I be welcome back to play again? That's my definition of success!
If you don't know me, let me present a quick introduction. I started playing Magic in early 1994 when packs of Unlimited and Arabian Nights were still on the shelves at the local game shop, and I immediately started playing multiplayer games with my D&D buddies. I do enjoy competitive Magic, but multiplayer has always been my first love, so when Sheldon Menery shared Elder Dragon Highlander (EDH) with the Magic community back in 2007, I started building EDH decks and writing about them for Starcitygames.com. In 2014, I published The Complete Commander, an ebook designed to quickly bring people interested in Commander up to speed with the format. During the pandemic when there wasn't much else to do, my Commander deck collection swelled to 100 decks, but I'm now in the process of dismantling many of them and paring down to just my favorites. Building decks is my favorite part of Magic and Commander, and I'm excited to be sharing that love with you here on Commander's Herald!
Duskmourn: House of Horror Commander decks are on the shelves, and the first card that caught my eye is from the Death Toll precon: Rendmaw, Creaking Nest!
Rendmaw, Creaking Nest is a really cool design that encourages you to stuff your deck with cards that have two or more types. The Duskmourn release notes reminds us the card types in Magic include artifact, battle, creature, enchantment, instant, kindred, land, planeswalker, and sorcery. Legendary, basic, and snow are supertypes, not card types; Horror and Room are subtypes, not card types. The reward for playing one is to create a permanently goaded 2/2 flying Bird token for each player. In a particularly clever design choice, each of the tokens enter the battlefield tapped, which means that, when the turn passes, the next player gets to untap their goaded Bird and attack with it, and none of the other Bird tokens can block and trade off with each other.
Okay, let's shine a light on what we might want to run in a Rendmaw deck!
New Scarecrows
Thematically, since Rendmaw is a Scarecrow that makes "crows" as Bird tokens, we can fill out our creature base with other Scarecrow creatures, which all happen to be both artifacts and creatures, so they'll trigger Rendmaw. Duskmourn even brings us three brand new Scarecrows that easily slot right in here. The Swarmweaver makes flying Insect tokens, and if you achieve Delirium any Insects and Spiders you get +1/+1 and have deathtouch. The amusingly named Osseous Sticktwister is cheap and its lifelink will be handy, and it also wants you to achieve threshold so you can give your opponents a small, difficult choice during your end step to sacrifice a nonland card, discard a card, or take damage equal to its power. Then there's Wickerfolk Thresher, which has a really nice Delirium attack trigger that lets you either put the top card of your library onto the battlefield if it's a land or put it in your hand.
Other Scarecrows
There's a surprising number of Scarecrows available these days if you want to really push that theme. Scarecrone is the best of the bunch, providing a nice source of grindy card advantage by sacrificing a Scarecrow to draw a card, and then it's able to tap and spend four mana to put an artifact creature from your graveyard onto the battlefield. Roaming Throne goes into any deck that cares about a particular creature type, but since it's an artifact creature it's particularly good here, letting you make twice as many goaded crows for everybody. Scaretiller does cool things if your deck build can tap it outside of combat and you get lands into your graveyard reliably. Pili-Pala offers up a flying Scarecrow with a little bit of color-fixing if you need it.
There's an interesting subtheme among some of the Scarecrows that cares about you controlling a particular color creature. Fang Skulkin can give target black creature wither until the end of the turn, and that's not limited to just black creatures you control, so you can give those goaded black Birds wither if it would help shrink down blockers. Wingrattle Scarecrow has persist if you control a black creature (like a Bird or Rendmaw itself), and if you somehow control a blue creature, it has flying. Thornwatch Scarecrow has wither if you control a green creature, and if you somehow control a white creature it has vigilance.
How do you have a blue or white creature in your Golgari deck? Scuttlemutt and Scrapbasket to the rescue! Scuttlemutt also gives you extra mana if you don't need any color-changing shenanigans.
Heap Doll is a cheap Scarecrow that can provide you with a little bit of graveyard control. One-Eyed Scarecrow is a little awkward in that it shrinks the Birds you're giving your opponents, but if your playgroup includes a lot of small flying creatures, you might consider running it, and Scorn Effigy is really neat to foretell early so you can play it the same turn you cast Rendmaw to immediately get that Bird-making trigger.
Zero-Mana Artifact Creatures
In addition to the Scarecrows, we might want to run a number of zero-mana artifact creatures that you can hold and cast once you've deployed your Rendmaw. Ornithopter is an excellent choice since it gives you a flying blocker, but there's also Memnite, Phyrexian Walker, and even Shield Sphere.
Lands with Two Card Types
Valgavoth's Lair gives us another enchantment land to go with Urza's Saga, so run 'em if you have 'em. Urza's Saga going to the graveyard is a great card to bring back with Scaretiller!
Then there are artifact lands, including indestructible ones, like Darksteel Citadel and Darkmoss Bridge. Treasure Vault and Scene of the Crime can be sacrificed to help with Delirium, then brought back with Scaretiller shenanigans. Also, if you've got a way to sacrifice lands, Power Depot has modular you can use to boost any of your artifact creatures... like Rendmaw!
Enchantments with Two Card Types
Enchantments that are also kindred cards check off the two card type box. Bitterblossom makes additional flying token creatures for offense or defense, while Lignify can neutralize an otherwise problematic creature, particularly one that could block and kill attacking Birds.
Whip of Erebos and Bow of Nylea are awesome enchantment artifacts to have in the deck, providing a nice static ability to your creatures while tapping for sweet utility. Bow of Nylea can even tap to add +1/+1 counters to goaded Birds your opponents control to increase the Hitchcock scariness.
Arasta of the Endless Web is an artifact Spider creature that can generate Spider tokens that will certainly appreciate a little boost from The Swarmweaver. Springheart Nantuko is another way to make token creatures, but keep in mind that, on the stack, a spell cast with bestow is either a creature spell or an Aura spell. It's never both, although it's an enchantment spell in either case, so you won't get the Rendmaw trigger. Still, it's quite powerful as an Aura if you've got enough extra mana and want to make copies of enchanted creature.
Other Cards with Two Types
If you're not completely dedicated to the Scarecrow theme, there are a ton of other artifact creatures that play awesome in Commander. Necron Deathmark and Noxious Gearhulk give you always welcome creature removal while providing Rendmaw a sweet Bird-making trigger. Skorpekh Lord gives a nice boost to all your other artifact creatures and gives them menace, which can help push through extra damage to supplement all the goaded Bird carnage in the skies.
There's even some instant kindred cards we can think about including. Eldritch Immunity is a cool way to protect one or more of your creatures from a targeted removal spell that's one or more colors, mass damage from red spells, like Blasphemous Act, or you can push past blockers for an alpha strike. Remember Scuttlemutt? You could tap it to give a colorless blocker one or more colors so your protected creatures can run on past to beat up on life totals.
Then there's another instant kindred card, Kozilek's Command! This gives you a ton of flexibility; you can make Eldrazi Spawn tokens, or you can scry and draw a card, or you can exile a creature, or exile cards from a graveyard.
Keep in mind for both of these cards you'll want to have plenty of colorless sources of mana since they require specifically colorless mana to cast. Llanowar Wastes, Tainted Wood, and Twilight Mire are great places to start for a Golgari deck, and you can also play one copy of Wastes and/or a Snow-Covered Wastes you can search up with basic land fetch like Blighted Woodland.
Tokens Matter
Since we're making tokens, there are cool cards to support that strategy. In this case, Primal Vigor is actually better than Doubling Season since you want to create more copies of the goaded Bird tokens for everyone, but I'd run both if you have them available. Then there's Insidious Roots, which will let you tap token creatures for mana, and if you have some number of graveyard recursion for your creatures, such as the aforementioned Scarecrone, you can even churn out Plant tokens.
Then there are some nifty creatures that like token creatures, like the awesome Grismold, the Dreadsower, which also hands out token creatures for everyone at the beginning of your end step, and since they're Plant tokens they can get boosted from Insidious Roots. Plus, whenever a creature token dies, Grismold gets swole.
Chatterfang, Squirrel General might be worth playing even if it's the only Squirrel in your deck, just as a way to create extra token creatures that can chump block while the goaded Birds attack your opponents. Gothmog, Morgul Lieutenant amasses Orcs when it enters, and gives all your token creatures deathtouch, and Mirkwood Bats will drain your opponents whenever you create a token or sacrifice a token. Again, every little bit of damage will help get you to the end game as your goaded Birds fly around and whittle down your opponents' life totals.
Lastly I wanted to touch on Coat of Arms. This is old staple from the early days of EDH, but I rarely play it these days because of the risk that an opponent's kindred deck ends up benefiting from this more than you and killing you with it. But in this case, you're making goaded tapped Bird tokens that all boost each other with Coat of Arms, and I think that makes it 100% worth the risk for the cool factor alone.
What's the matter? Is something wrong out here?
We're fighting a war, Sam.
A war, against who?
Against birds!
What sort of cards are you going to play in your Rendmaw, Creaking Nest deck? What new legends from Duskmourn: House of Horror Commander are you most excited to build decks around?
