Ketramose, the New Dawn "Exiling For Fun and Profit" - Plot Twist #30

Welcome back to Plot Twist, the series where we build a Commander deck that looks like it'll tell one kind of story only to throw out a twist for our opponents mid-game. If you're joining us for the first time, welcome! I'd encourage you to check out the previous articles in the series to get a sense of the types of stories we're looking to tell.

On the last edition of Plot Twist, we built an enchanting aristocrats deck helmed by Ghen, Arcanum Weaver

This week, we're looking at our first commander from Aetherdrift: Ketramose, the New Dawn

How Does Ketramose, the New Dawn Work?

Ketramose, the New Dawn

Ketramos' last ability is what immediately caught my eye though: "Whenever one or more cards are put into exile from graveyards and/or the battlefield during your turn, you draw a card and lose 1 life." So whenever one or more cards get exiled to a Swords to Plowshares

Looking at Ketramose' EDHREC page, we can see that brewers are loading up on lots of instant speed exile effects with Swords to Plowshares

Doing the Twist

Instead, we'll be focusing on triggering a bunch of repeated exile effects on our turn this week on Plot Twist. Normally, I'm not a huge fan of decks that have a TON of triggers like we talked about on Plot Twist #12: "Aetherflux Reservoir at Home," but I'm willing to experiment with this particular brew since each of these triggers also draws us a card if we have our commander in play.

This week's brew uses creatures with abilities that exile something when they enter like Fiend Hunter

Then, to really twist things up, we're using life swap effects like Axis of Mortality

Repeatable Exile Effects

Since we're leaning heavily on our commander to refill our hand, we're running a lot of cards that can exile a card from graveyards or play one each turn. The more of these effects we can stack up at once, the more cards we draw off of Ketramose, the New Dawn!

We have a small package of cards that will allow us to exile a single card from a graveyard once a turn in Graveyard Trespasser; Lord Skitter, Sewer King; Unlicensed Hearse; and Urborg Scavengers. These effects all permanently exile cards from our graveyard, so we'll want to mostly exile our opponent's graveyards and save our own 'yard for other effects.

Instead, we'll save our graveyard for Dawn of the Dead, Dino DNA, Dollhouse of Horrors, and Séance since they'll allow us to 'reanimate' creatures from our graveyard AND draw a card off of Ketramose's ability. We can certainly get our opponent's creatures with Dino DNA, but since most of our creatures also have abilities that exile something and re-trigger Ketramose, we wanna lean on them first and foremost.

Creatures that Exile When they Enter

One strength of this deck is we get to run tons of creatures that will exile our opponent's stuff when it enters. Alabaster Host Intercessor, Luminate Primordial, Palace Jailer, and Solitude all allow us to exile a creature when they enter so we can manage the board and stay alive.

Fiend Hunter and Faceless Butcher can both target our own creatures with their own abilities if we need to. Notably, they also have the old templating for this style of effect, so if we exile Fiend Hunter with its first ability on the stack with Eldrazi Displacer or a similar effect, we can permanently exile an opponent's creature. By ordering it this way, Fiend Hunter's 'leaves' trigger happens first, so there's nothing to return and then its enters ability resolves, exiling something for good.

If we run into graveyard hate or other non-creature problems, we have answers for those too! Angel of Sanctions and Skyclave Apparition can remove an opponent's Rest in Peace or Leyline of the Void that otherwise mess up our plans.

Blinking: The Gateway Drug of Exile Effects

If you've every had the displeasure of playing against Yorion, Sky Nomad, then you know just how powerful being able to repeatedly blink all the creatures on your board can be. We're not going to that degenerate of a level with this deck, but we are running a handful of effects like Eerie Interlude and Semester's End that can blink out our whole board in responses to a Wrath of God, allowing us to re-use their exile effects when our creatures re-enter.

This deck instead runs a handful of effects that will blink, or exile and then bring back to the battlefield individual creatures. Mirror of Life Trapping is an amazing version of this effect since our creatures' enters abilities will still trigger, while Teleportation Circle and Conjurer's Closet each blink a single creature each turn. Eldrazi Displacer can blink one creature for every we have and is great at removing blockers too.

Once we've gotten two or so ways to reliably exile something on each of our turns, this deck should be running quite smoothly. We'll mostly want to use our exile effects to remove opponents' creatures and draw extra cards off of Ketramose, the New Dawn, but sometimes we may need to use Semester's End to prevent ourselves from being blown out.

Pulling Things Back Out of Exile

As I was building this week's deck, I also stumbled across a handful of effects that allow us to remove card from exile as well. Often, we'll get an extra effect for doing so, like Blight Herder allowing us to ramp, but we can also use these effects if we want to prevent Ketramose from being a creature for whatever reason too.

Oblivion Sower is probably the strongest of these cards, because we can put any number of lands and opponent has in exile into play under our control, no matter how they got to exile in the first place. Unfortunately, this effect only happens if we cast Oblivion Sower, so we can't blink it to reuse the effect. 

Wasteland Strangler turns cards exiled under Palace Jailer and friends into an additional removal spell, while Bronzebeak Foragers exiles one card from each opponent and then lets us turn those creatures into extra life when we have the mana.

These effects are a great way for us to avoid getting blown out by a removal spell that hits our Fiend Hunter or Alabaster Host Intercessor at the wrong time.

Resetting Our Life Total

One major problem with relying on Ketramose, the New Dawn as way for us to draw a ton of extra cards is that we'll start losing life pretty quickly. Our opponents are going to pick up on that as well and start attacking us too, which is why we're running some spicy tech that black-white decks have in abundance: life swap effects.

Axis of Mortality and Soul Conduit are the best life swap effects in our deck since we can use them once a turn to exchange our life total with whichever player has the highest life total. They're also a great way to lower the life total of the biggest threat at the table so we can punch through with a lethal attack from time to time too. Plus, we can draw as many cards as we want with Ketramose knowing that we'll trade our low life total away next turn!

Magus of the Mirror offers a one time use of this effect, but we have enough ways to get creatures back from our graveyard that we should be able to rebuy Magus at least once. Resolute Archangel doesn't swap life totals per se, but it will reset our life total back to 40 if we need it. Eternity Vessel is crazy strong if we're at a high life total when we cast it since we can reset our life total just by playing our land for turn.

We'll need to be careful when deploying our life swap effects though because they'll be juicy targets for our opponent's removal spells once they see how easily we can blink and reanimate our creatures. Anytime we're able to draw a ton of cards, get into the single digits of life, and then exchange our life total with an opponent who's at 40+ life we'll be living the dream!

Winning the Game

Once we've blinked, life swapped, and durdled to our hearts content, it's time to win the game. We should be able to control which creatures stick on the board, and swapping our low life total for our opponents' will certainly help, but we need to get cheeky with our win conditions or this isn't a Plot Twist deck.

Syr Konrad, the Grim is an excellent way to get a few extra points of damage in every turn because he triggers when creatures go to the graveyard OR leave our graveyard. So every creature we reanimate from our graveyard with Dawn of the Dead or exile with Emperor of Bones will also trigger Syr Konrad.

The Capitoline Triad returns this week for the third time (check out Plot Twist #19 and #26 to see how we used them there) since it allows us to exile cards from our graveyard to gain an emblem that makes all of our creatures 9/9s. We have about 25 historic permanents in this week's decklist which should be enough? Let me know in the comments below if you think that's too few!

We're also running a pair of Eldrazi titans in Ulamog, the Ceaseless Hunger and Ulamog, the Defiler. Both Ulamogs can close a game out quickly and exile a ton of cards so Ketramose instantly becomes a creature. These can be rather salty cards to play against, so you could certainly power the deck down with something from the Maybeboard like Uchuulon or Hero of Bretagard if you want.

A Few Additional Twists for Good Measure

It's time for the best part of the deck: the weird cards that support this week's strategy!

Diabolic Servitude is a reanimation spell that will return itself to our hand when the creature we reanimate dies AND exile that creature, hopefully triggering Ketramose. This feels like a spell we'll be happy to loop in the late game to keep drawing cards and accruing extra value. It fills a similar role to Dawn of the Dead and From the Catacombs in this week's deck.

Tymaret Calls the Dead and Extractor Demon both help us quickly fill our graveyard and interact really well with our blink effects. Extractor Demon cares about creatures leaving the battlefield, so we'll be able to trigger it and mill ourselves (or an opponent) repeatedly, while Tymaret Calls the Dead makes blockers and helps us trigger Ketramose while we're at it.

Eye of Ojer Taq feels tailor made for this deck since we can use its craft ability to exile two creatures from our graveyard, draw a card off of Ketramose in the process, and then use the Apex Observatory side to cast a Luminate Primordial or Archfiend of Sorrows for free.

Last but not least, I want to give a special shoutout to Planar Guide which is a creature that acts as a mass blink spell. Sure, it's super telegraphed, but it'll be harder for our opponents to counter than, say, Ghostway. It also conveniently triggers Ketramose twice on our turn since Planar Guide exiles itself as part of the cost and then exiles every other creature!

Here's the full decklist for you to peruse:

Roll the Credits

I hope you enjoyed reading the latest edition of Plot Twist featuring Ketramose, the New Dawn. Next time you sit down for a game of Commander, see what sort of plot twists you can add to take the game's narrative in a new direction. I'd love to hear your thoughts on today's deck and what cards could find a home in it in the comments below or on Archidekt. The Maybeboards of my decklists are always filled with cards I thought could work but didn't make the final decklist.

You can check out my other articles here or see what decks I'm currently playing here. I've been tinkering around with my Signature Ikra/Bruse Secret Commander Wild Pair Deck lately, and really enjoying looking back at the deck now that I've gotten quite a few games under my belt with it. I'm constantly toying with new ideas like this Mono-Green 'Reanimator' Deck and Colorless Combo deck and would love to hear your thoughts on them there.

Stay tuned to see what other twists and turns are headed your way in the next edition of Plot Twist.