Vraska, the Silencer Commander Deck Tech
Welcome to Thunder Junction, pardner! It's a frontier so wild that you can pretend you never had the bottom of half of your torso replaced with a metal centipede. Tarnation!
Having been cured of her Phyrexian affliction (according to my headcannon) by smoking copious amounts of Dr. Batty's Asthma Cigarettes, Vraska is back in the form of Vraska, the Silencer, and she's better than ever. She's Golgari, she has deathtouch, and given that my oldest and favorite deck is a Golgari deathtouch deck, this card is very much my jam, much like Dr. Batty's Asthma Cigarettes. They cured my canker sours, whatever a canker sour is.
Not recommend for children under 6. Children 7 and up, though? Very legal and very cool. I want my Dr. Batty secret lair, and I want it now.
Frontier Psychiatrist
Let's start with the Golgari Gorgon herself, Vraska Annabell Medusavich. She's a mere three mana, requiring just a single green and black pip to cast. Additionally, her ability only requires colorless mana to activate. That's means we can be a little sloppy with our mana base, especially given this is a two-color deck. For the list I'm building here, I'm not going to add too many pricey utility lands, but in two colors with a commander like this there's plenty of room for cards like Ancient Tomb and Strip Mine if your wallet can afford them.
A 3/3 with deathtouch for three mana is reasonable, but the real selling point here is her triggered ability. Basically, when a nontoken creature an opponent control dies, you can spend {1} to return it to play under your control as a tapped Treasure artifact with no other card types. In other words, when your opponents' stuff dies, you can bring it back as a Treasure that has whatever activated or triggered abilities that creature had before being petrified. As it's no longer a creature, it's harder for them to remove and get back, and it's also not vulnerable to Homeward Path.
There's a couple different ways you could build this list, but I'm going to go for a hybrid of a few of them. I feel like this is the kind of commander that needs to stretch her newly asthma-cigarette-reformed legs to get a feel for what works best for you and your meta. As such, we're going to be mixing up a token strategy combined with some forced sacrifice and one-sided fight effects to put opposing bodies in the 'yard. The tokens give us fodder to sacrifice for symmetrical sacc effects, and they also give us a wincon when combined with your creatures and Overrun effects. Maybe once you get a few games under your belt you'll find leaning further into one-sided fight effects works better to take advantage of her deathtouch ability, or you'll want to more efficiently hew down opposing lines with sacrifice effects that hit all players or at least all opponents. For now though we're going to mix and match those things.
That Boy Needs Therapy
All told we have about a dozen effects that force your opponent to sacrifice their creatures. Some are symmetrical and some asymmetrical, some are on bodies, like Chain Devil and Fleshbag Marauder, and some are on spells, like Extract a Confession and Vona's Hunger. The ones attached to a body probably work best since you can recur them with effects like Feign Death and Malakir Rebirth, but it's good to have a mix in the event you run into a Torpor Orb, plus the spell effects are a little cheaper to cast, and you don't want to be committed to spending 3+ mana every turn, especially since we want to have mana free to turn those creatures into Treasures via Vraska's ability.
The recursion effects mentioned, like Feign Death, also do double duty to protect Vraska along with instants like Heroic Intervention and Tamiyo's Safekeeping. All are cheap and efficient, and they can often serve as a tempo hit by baiting an opponent into trying to remove your problem commander and her freshly regrown legs.
You're Crazy in the Coconut
Not all these forced sacrifice effects are asymmetrical, however, and the spell-based ones, like Innocent Blood, force you to also sacrifice a body, and they don't provide one for that purpose like the creature-based spells, like Merciless Executioner. That's where token-generators and easily replayable bodies help, along with cards like Parallel Lives that double those tokens. You should have no shortage of sacrifice fodder that you won't mind offering up to the dark gods, and when you no longer need them to be sacrificed you can use them for a alpha strike enabled by Overrun-type spells.
There are another dozen or so ways in the deck to either generate tokens or to provide you with sacrifice fodder that can be reused repeatedly. The two Eldrazi token-generators, Awakening Zone and From Beyond, also generate tokens that can be sacrificed for mana to provide juice for Vraska's Treasure-making ability. Similarly, both Inspiring Statuary and Jaheira, Friend of the Forest will let you tap your existing Treasures for mana to make new ones without losing the older ones. There should be no shortage of ways to feed symmetrical sacrifice effects in a way that hurts you less than everyone else.
Szat's Will even does both, creating disposable pawns while also making each opponent sacrifice a creature, providing that you have Vraska in play to take advantage of both modes.
The Man with the Golden Eyeball
There are a handful of different ways to draw cards in this deck as well. Both God-Eternal Bontu and Reprocess let you mass sacrifice unneeded permanents, like your tokens and Treasures, to draw cards in bulk. Monumental Corruption can also draw you a fistful of dollars cards if you have the life to spare.
Deadly Dispute and Fanatical Offering let you trade a less valuable Treasure or creature for two cards at instant speed, and both leave behind tokens you can use later for other purposes.
Then we have a couple of examples of black's efficient small draw, cards that let you trade a few life for a few cards in the form of Sign in Blood and friends.
The ramp package in the deck is fairly boring. Cards like Glimpse the Core and Three Visits let you have options on turn two while also not monopolizing your mana if you draw them later in the game. There's really only five land ramp spells and two artifact ramp spells in the deck, as it's fairly low to the ground, and it produces Treasures to give you a boost in a pinch.
The removal package is also fairly straightforward. The sacrifice effects should work to keep most bodies off the field, and the rest of the spells are things like Beast Within and Tear Asunder that can hit multiple things. Currently there is no true board wipe in the deck, as I'm hoping the forced sacrifice effects will take care of most of the creatures you'd otherwise want to sweep away.
Let's Have a Tune
So how does this deck win? Gaining a significant resource advantage by casting a lot of three-for-one removal spells that put Treasures with added abilities into play isn't going to hurt. At the very least it should make it easier to find other win conditions. The first and perhaps least interesting way will be turning bodies sideways enhanced by various buffs like Overrun, Overwhelming Encounter, and Overwhelming Stampede. There're better versions of these effects in the form of creatures like Craterhoof Behemoth, but given I'm already running wallet-busting cards like Doubling Season in this list I opted for slightly less effective but radically cheaper sorcery-based options.
After that we also have a couple of standalone options. First, Agent of the Iron Throne can drop a hammer on the entire table if you sacrifice all your reanimated Treasures in one burst. It's a card that can also add a significant amount of chip damage over the course of a longer game. Similarly, the previously mentioned Monumental Corruption can blast someone for lethal, or it serve as a big draw for you if you have life to spare.
Revel in Riches is an alt-win card that can make you a significant amount of Treasures itself, and when combined with Vraska's Treasure-making ability and a dash of Dr. Batty's Asthma Cigarettes it can just end a game.
Last we have Rise of the Dark Realms. This might some counterintuitive at first glance since your opponents will hopefully be sending all their deceased friends to your battlefield as Treasure instead of to their own graveyard, but what's nice here is you can sacrifice all your petrified critters to pay Rise's considerable mana cost, then bring them back under your control, generating ETB triggers all over again while giving you an army to swing with next turn.
Sometimes a Parrot Talks
So that's Vraska, cured of cables for hair and maybe hay fever, if Dr. Batty is to be believed. I'm glad to see her on a creature cards as opposed to on yet another roughly interchangeable planeswalker, and I'm looking forward to seeing more of her as a creature down the road.
How about you? Do you like seeing creature versions of long-established 'walkers? Sound off about that, the deck, or anything at all in the comments below. Thanks, and thanks for reading!
Vraska, the Silencer
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