Flavor of the Month: Last Meal

Last Chance by Joshua Raphael

Dumb ways to die

The only guarantees in life are death, taxes, and prematurely knocking oneself out of a Commander game because of a boneheaded play at least once. Welcome to Flavor of the Month, where we use cards' flavor as a recipe for building spicy decks!

This time, we're storing our bottle of rat poison with our bottles of cooking oil and sauces like we're in a Hanna-Barbera cartoon. We're flying too close to the sun, tempting fate, playing with fire, washing the lich's car--we're gonna see how much fun we can have almost losing the game.

One of the longest-running jokes in Magic is the flavor text of a character's "last words"--doing something ill-advised that will inevitably and obviously get them killed.

What makes this joke extra funny to me is that the characters whose last words are featured on these cards almost never have their own legendary creature card or are referenced again on another card (with the notable exception of Saffi Eriksdotter of Lhurgoyf fame). Who's ever heard of Radavi, Herreth, or King Igalus? In most of these cases, a character was created and named in this vast universe just so they could eat it in a funny way. It's truly beautiful.

As per protocol on this series, we did a lil' Scryfall search for flavor text with some amusing last words, and that will be the starting point for this deck.

Ingredients

Unsurprisingly, we see a lot of red cards with flavor text hinting at some of the dumbest ways to die, and one theme we see revisited in these cards quite often is people messing around with Dragons when honestly why the %#^$ would you do that? They're practically sentient Apache helicopters with a mean streak.

If we're gonna get stupid with this deck, we might as well get greedy too. Let's have some big Dragons and the hoarded treasure we're foolish enough to cross them for (hello, Rapacious Dragon). There are a number more "last words" cards we can pull from in the colors we'll end up in, and to my genuine surprise and pleasure, they're halfway playable, if not particularly inspiring. Even the latest version of Stonecoil Serpent, the Secret Lair version--yes, that one--has some last words on it, and Stonecoil is an underplayed card in this format (it fits anywhere in your curve! It can blank lots of creatures accidentally, and block 90% of commanders with impunity! It can be played in any color!) so I'm happy to have a reason to slot it in.

Dragon Mage, Drakuseth, Maw of Flames, and Stonecoil Serpent are perfectly fine Magic cards we're not upset to be playing anyway, but a light Dragon theme doesn't seem flavorful enough for this build. No, we're going to have to go beyond the cards in this small pool--but we're going to stay as true to the theme as possible.

Yep, we're going to lose the game almost lose the game! A lot. And there's only one commander we can trust to get us that close to oblivion without dying with any consistency, and that's Becky with the Good Hair herself: Obeka, Brute Chronologist.

Now, Obeka decks are quite popular already, utilizing extra turn spells to lock the game out. And yes, we're going to use a few of those extra turn cards in here, but they're more incidental than anything. What are you going to do, take three extra turns and hit folks with Dragons a few more times? Nah. We're going to use that time to make sure we're setting up to land one of our "you lose the game" cards--under an opponent's control, preferably.

We'll be using nearly every card that can cause the caster/controller to lose the game available in Grixis--fourteen, to be specific. Archfiend of the Dross, Phage the Untouchable, Immortal Coil, Out of the Tombs, Demonic Pact, Nefarious Lich, Forbidden Crypt, Lich's Mastery, Pact of Negation...*deep breath*...Slaughter Pact, Final Fortune, Last Chance, Warrior's Oath, and Alchemist's Gambit.

We also have some cards that don't outright say "you lose the game" on them, but might still get us killed, like Descent into Avernus and Form of the Dragon. The latter is also an excellent flavor fit for our deck and its Dragon subtheme.

Of course, there's always the chance that we get got by one of these things, but that's half the fun.

Preparation

So you've got a deck full of poisoned barbs; time to start sharing the love! Creatures like Archfiend of the Dross, Abyssal Persecutor, and Bronze Bombshell make for pretty good donations, as do the various "lich" enchantments, like Lich's Mastery and Nefarious Lich and a nearly-complete Demonic Pact. They put your opponents in positions they're not prepared for and will send them scrambling to not lose the game very, very quickly.

How do we move these permanents around? A number of nifty gadgets can be found in the Grixis toolbox to exchange permanents (or gift them, in the case of Harmless Offering). Role Reversal, Fateful Handoff, Daring Thief, The Trickster-God's Heist--a lot of these cards are finicky in what they want to exchange or gift. Often we need to exchange the same type of permanent, so we need to maximize our permanent types and cram as many of these swap spells in here as possible to try and make magic happen. Confusion in the Ranks is a fun, almost harmless kind of chaos until you cast Out of the Tombs and swap it for a control player's Rhystic Study--then Bojuka Bog them. Hope one of your four hate-bears are in the top two, friend.

You'll probably want to use plenty of these cards yourself, at least until the losing the game part. That's where Obeka, Brute Chronologist comes in. She'll end your turn if you get a little too close to the danger, since most of our ways to accidentally off ourselves would happen on our own turn. That means that she's literally the only thing keeping us from losing to our own stupidity (or greed, sure)--so we keep her protected at all costs. Nothing but the finest in finery here: Lightning Greaves, Swiftfoot Boots, and Darksteel Plate are my top choices, though there are other options.

We also have a little extra insurance in case someone does get Obeka's neck after we've set up an end-of-turn death trigger like the sword of Damocles dangling above our heads. Platinum Angel, The Golden Throne, and Stunning Reversal all can save us if O-beka gets O-bliterated.

Finally, while there are a lot of neat little interactions between these cards that you can discover for yourself, I would be remiss if I didn't point out that Sudden Substitution is the deck's undisputed MVP. Casting it on your own extra-turn-or-die spell, like Last Chance, gives whatever sucker you deem worthy one more turn to win--without their best creature, to boot. Or less than one turn, if you give someone a Pact of Negation who isn't in blue. It's also a flexible spell that can get you out of a lot of jams or just cause general mayhem, which is always welcome at my tables.

Yield

Here's what we end up with for the decklist; careful, there are sharp edges here.

Early in our first "old-school" Dungeons & Dragons campaign, my wife decided their character should scope out a troll's cave to see if he was in there by crawling in and looking herself. Thinking of the party's greater good, I suggested their character give mine all gold and valuables on hand so if things went sideways, we'd at least not also be out hard-to-come-by valuables. The inevitable happened, and despite my forward-thinking (and in my opinion, noble) actions on behalf of the party, for some reason I'm the bad guy when that story gets told?

I digress. Don't crawl your level-1 self into a troll's cave unless you want to have your last words immortalized on one of these cards.

Have fun not dying with this deck; tell me in the comments below what else could fit in the deck, and if you'd like, the stupidest way you've lost a game of Magic in the past!