(Balthor the Defiled | Carl Critchlow)

Technically Playable - Balthor the Defiled

Welcome to Technically Playable, where our mission statement is "Every commander is technically playable" (the best kind of playable). Here's how it works. Every article will have a commander generated using EDHREC's random button, I'll talk through the card and then write about how we can build around it!

This week's random commander is Balthor the Defiled. Let's have a look at the card and break down the different elements so we can go into deck building knowing what we want to do.

I love these old super-specific legends. Balthor was actually the win condition (with Gray Merchant of Asphodel) in my old Iname, Death Aspect deck, so I'm intimately aware of how out of hand this card can get. We're looking at two specific abilities here. Firstly a Lord-effect for the Minion creature type; we're going to ignore this. There are 36 Minions in Magic. Of these, around six are good outside of very niche settings and one of those six is Braids, Cabal Minion, who is banned in Commander. And you can tell I'm not even being biased when I say Minions are not good because Phage the Untouchable is one of my all-time favorite cards.

The second part of Balthor is what we're here for. I know this is only my second article, but as you read more of my stuff you'll notice a very strong theme resonating between them. I love reanimator. Whether it's Reanimate itself or Ever After, I love moving cards from my graveyard into my hand or onto the battlefield, and Balthor does this in spades. With Iname, I used something like Conspiracy or if I still had the deck, you could use the much better Maskwood Nexus to turn everything in your deck into a Spirit, fill your graveyard with Iname, Death Aspect's ability and then active Balthor to flood your battlefield with monsters. While you can't put literally every creature into your graveyard with Balthor in the command zone, I'll showcase some other awesome reanimator options for Balthor's 99.

Get In The Bin!

A really important element of reanimator decks is actually getting the cards you want into your graveyard. If you're still quite new to Commander, you might think that putting your best cards into your graveyard is at odds with winning the game, but I can't stress enough just how powerful treating your graveyard as an extension to your hand actually is. The best way to fill up your graveyard is undoubtedly cards with Dredge. Stinkweed Imp is great because you can play it as a creature, use it to block and trade upwards (because of its old-style deathtouch), and then return it with Dredge to fill your graveyard.

Equally, Golgari Thug is a great way to get cards into your graveyard while still being able to return any utility creatures that you want to actually play to the top of your deck to draw later. If you want to have some Dredge cards you don't need to toss and just want to turbo self-mill, sadly, you don't get access to Golgari Grave-Troll but you can use Dakmor Salvage or Darkblast.

Dredge isn't the only way to fill up your graveyard though. Other self-mill cards also allow you to fill it up without the need to miss out on a draw. Atrocious Experiment and Funeral Rites are amazing ways to generate card advantage. I always treat self-mill in these decks as effectively drawing cards, since you use your graveyard so much, meaning that these "draw two and mill two" cards are effectively drawing you 3-4 cards based on what you mill. three mana for four cards is an amazing rate and these are great examples of how draft commons and uncommons can be surprisingly great in Commander decks.

But these are just one-offs, how do you fill up your graveyard a bit more consistently? Well, with permanents of course. Palantír of Orthanc, Out of the Tombs, and Cemetery Tampering are great value engines that will slowly build up your graveyard over time. The main issue with these cards is that you can't control when they happen. To do that you'll need something like Altar of Dementia that you can use whenever you want. Altar is also a great way to abuse creatures with great enter-the-battlefield effects, since you can sacrifice them and bring them back over and over.

Be Sure To Recycle!

Remember the three R's: Reuse, Recycle, Reanimate! I've talked a lot about how important getting cards into your graveyard is already, but equally as important is making sure you can actually use them once they're in there. As always, I'm going to break this down into a few different steps:

• Make sure your creatures are worth reanimating (no one wants to bring back Forsaken Drifters...).
• Be sure to actually have ways to Reanimate them.
• What do we do with the leftovers?

So, the cards we want to reanimate need to fit into our deck's theme. Since we're putting a lot of cards into the graveyard and are probably mass reanimating them with Balthor, cards like Gray Merchant of Asphodel become a great out-of-nowhere, one-shot kill option. Equally, if we can't guarantee it'll be a one-shot, Dreadhound and Syr Konrad, the Grim are also fantastic ways to grind out a win.

We also want the other creatures in our deck to be impactful so that if we can't mass reanimate for whatever reason, just bringing back one or two creatures will still be enough to help us close out the game. Razaketh, the Foulblooded is a fantastic finisher by itself and allows you to find any of the pieces you need to win through other ways. Additionally, Archon of Cruelty is wildly powerful both as a reanimation target and as a creature you can just jam and build up value with. Our enter-the-battlefield effects can also provide some utility with cards like Ravenous Chupacabra, Noxious Gearhulk, and Meteor Golem being some personal favorites for creature-based removal.

But we do need to return them from the graveyard, otherwise the idea of it being a second hand doesn't really work. Luckily, we have a plethora of choices when it comes to reanimation spells. Obviously, we have the original Reanimate as well as Animate Dead and Necromancy which are also amazingly cheap options for bringing back a creature. I personally love the reanimation spells that are a little bigger, splashier, and have bonus effects.

Incarnation Technique has one of my favorite keywords, Demonstrate, allowing you to reanimate two creatures in exchange for allowing an opponent to reanimate one. This is always beneficial since you can choose the opponent, allowing you to pick someone with worse options than you to reanimate. Alternatively, even if everyone has haymakers in their graveyard, at least you get two! I've also seen a lot of games with Breach the Multiverse recently. I love big splashy spells in Commander and this is absolutely up my street. I've yet to get my hands on a copy to play in paper, but I'm really excited to jam it in every black deck that I have.

As well as Balthor, we can run a bunch of other mass reanimation spells. Rise of the Dark Realms has always been a Craterhoof-level threat in Commander games, with it often winning the game or at least giving you such a massive advantage that no one can come back from it. But everyone knows about Rise of the Dark Realms, but what about Twilight's Call? It lets everyone mass reanimate their graveyard, but just like with Incarnation Technique, there is a very good chance you'll have the best graveyard in your pod so you benefit from it the most (every. single. time.).

You also need something to do with all of those leftover cards that you have from all that self-milling. There are a couple of routes we can go with these. You'll probably have a smattering of lands and spells in your graveyard, so Delve is a great mechanic to use these up with. Cards like Dead Drop and Murderous Cut give you some really efficient options for removal and Empty the Pits gives you a great instant-speed win condition for when someone drops a Rest in Peace and you need to make sure you get something out of that graveyard that you just stacked.

Skeletal Scrying is another great option, and while it doesn't have Delve, it does have a Delve-adjacent ability that lets you turn cards in your graveyard into cards in your hand. And of course, you can run Crucible of Worlds to make sure you don't miss too many land drops from all the self-milling.

As with all Technically Playable articles, this was a very quick look at Balthor the Defiled as a commander and a few of the cards that can really make a deck with Balthor as the commander tick. I've missed out some key cards that would obviously be amazing (like Entomb and Buried Alive) but I don't want to make the deck for you! Make sure to check out Balthor's EDHREC page for other hidden gems.

Let me know in the comments below if you play Balthor, if you want to build a Balthor deck, or even if you just enjoyed this article!

Read more:

Preview Review - The Reanimation Station

The Trinket Mage - A Guide to Reanimator in EDH | How to Build a Reanimator Commander Deck #mtg

Paul Palmer

Hey there, I'm Paul. I've been writing about magic for a really long time. I love to write about obscure commanders (one of my really early articles back in 2015 was about Skeleton Ship) and how you can make decks around them work, no matter how unplayable they are. I love Gruul, I love Mountains and I love casting Lightning Bolt.