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

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

Dragon Mage

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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!