(Rockslide Elemental | Art by Joshua Hagler)

Is The Presence Of Death Making Anyone Else Feel Extremely Strong?

Welcome back to Singleton Shmingleton, where I bend the singleton rules of Commander by building decks with as many functional reprints of a certain card as possible. This week we're looking at, Unruly Mob, a little creature that grows, which is one of my absolute favorite archetypes. Commander games can be long, and there can be a whole lot of time in between my turns, so I love having a lot of little fiddly triggered abilities to keep track of. If they involve dice, say no more. I could get Craterhoof Behemothed or Thassa's Oracled five games in a row, and I think I wouldn't notice. All I want to do is move my dice.

Outside of my daydreams, Unruly Mob and its friends have seen very little play in pretty much any format. Some versions have been good in Limited formats, but the baseline is often to low to be worth it even there. That hasn't stopped Wizards from printing approximately one bajillion versions of this effect, so many that I had to restrict my search criteria. There are two main strains of Unruly Mob: one type costs between two and four mana, and only triggers when your own creatures die, and the other type costs between four and six mana and triggers when anyone's creatures die, like Lumberknot. If I'm building a deck around a kind of threat whose only strength is its size, I want to do so fast. So I've chosen to only include Unruly Mob variants that cost three or less. That reduced the list from thirty-two down to eleven. Here they are:

The most played of these cards is Cordial Vampire, in 37,235 decks. It's a rare case among these cheap creatures that triggers off of our opponents' creatures dying, and in a Vampires deck it goes absolutely nuts. Coming in second is Taborax, Hope's Demise, in 12,203 decks. Again, Cleric decks boost this number, but even without that aspect, the potential to be a Flying Lifelink beater is huge. The least played of these creatures is Gimli, Mournful Avenger, which may have been lost among the other THREE Gimli cards, and which seems to be in a weird color pair for this effect. People seem to be sleeping on Rockslide Elemental, which both has a relevant keyword and triggers off everyone's creatures dying. It's one of the best of the bunch, but falls second-to-last in inclusions. Show that Elemental the light of day!

Unrulying the Mob

These creatures push us in a pretty clear direction. We want as many of our creatures as possible to die, and we want that to happen soon enough that a big vanilla creature is a scary threat. Luckily, Commander players have done a lot of work developing a strategy that operates on very similar principles: Aristocrats. Sacrifice outlets, dorky creatures, and Blood Artist effects turn into a whole lot of value very early. Aristocrats strategies have proven fun and powerful for a long time, and have always presented a dilemma to opponents: do you kill the sacrifice outlet or the payoff? This deck seeks to turn that choice into a trilemma by adding another kind of threat: the fatty.

Aristocrats has always been good at making opposing removal look silly: Lightning Bolt doesn't line up well against the player with a bunch of 1/1s and a Spawning Pit. By replacing some of the cheap Blisterpod-type bodies with Unruly Mobs, this deck tries to force our opponents to fire off those removal spells, even if they're not getting much value from them. By stretching removal even further, some aspect of the plan should be able to pop off unhindered, and it only takes one leg to win the race. Or something like that.

If we're replacing one part of our engine, the cheap bodies that replace themselves, with cheap bodies that grow, we might want to add cards that will replace their bodies and help keep our wheels turning. Golgari Germination is the classic version of this effect, but in recent years we have been spoiled with variants. Anax, Hardened in the Forge, Blight Mound, and Totentanz, Swarm Piper are all incredibly powerful. And why stop there? There are more variations. This series is about consistency: let's run them all. Here's every one that costs three or less mana:

There isn't a stinker on this list. Curse of Clinging Webs could get a little awkward if we want to return our creatures to the battlefield, but it comes with the upside of being able to attach to an opponent instead, and its tokens are beefy. Abzan Ascendancy comes with free +1/+1 counters, and makes our army of little creatures threaten some real damage while also giving us value if and when we decide to recycle them. Same with Blight Mound: our beatdown strategy gets a lot more real when our dorky tokens have two power.

Filling The Gaps

The rest of the deck builds itself. Aristocrats staples like Mayhem Devil and Ashnod's Altar get a spot on the team, and cheap recursive creatures like Reassembling Skeleton and Cult Conscript supercharge our engine. For the rest of the deck, we want as many creatures as possible, so if there's a utility dork that can fulfill any given function, we want to play that over a comparable spell. Sakura-Tribe Elder and Birds of Paradise are simply the best in ramp, and need no justification. No one is trashing on Eternal Witness, so this doesn't entail too many compromises. Haywire Mite slots in like a hand in a glove.

A couple new cards stand out. If you've been paying attention to Legacy, you'll have heard about Broadside Bombardiers from The Lost Caverns of Ixalan Commander decks. This card is fast, scary, and brutal; watch out. Tarrian's Soulcleaver can turn any of our creatures into a super-Unruly Mob, letting us rebuild fast from disruption or spread out eggs in multiple baskets.

A Cheeky Sneaky Combo

Animation Module opens up a three-card infinite combo with multiple redundant pieces that we'd be happy to play anyways. Alongside any Unruly Mob and either Phyrexian Altar or Ashnod's Altar, we can get infinite power, infinite death triggers, and, in the case of Ashnod's Altar, infinite mana. Here's how: sacrifice any creature to an Altar; trigger the Unruly Mob to put on a +1/+1 counter; use the mana to pay for Animation Module's trigger and get a 1/1; sacrifice that 1/1 to the Altar, and so on. Animation Module also pulls its weight outside of the combo, letting us dump mana into making extra bodies whenever our Unruly Mobs grow. It really is free to include in the deck, and can enable some free wins.

The Decklist

This deck has so many angles of attack. Opponents will treat it like a classic Aristocrats deck, until you attack them with a 15/15 Feral Ghoul, and then they'll have to stretch to respond. Like all creature decks, Wraths are tough to beat, but all of our effects that replace our creatures when they die make our rebuilding stage a lot faster. It's often safer to hold the second or third Zulaport Cutthroat effect in case everything gets wiped, and then deploy it on top of all the consolation tokens. But then again, if we have three of those effects going, we might just have won; it's an explosive engine. Four colors is tricky, and it's hard to make a mana base that costs less than a refrigerator, but the core concept would work with fewer colors. It's not as if Aristocrats actually needed help as a strategy, but if you love sacrificing creatures but have a hankering to go tall as well, this is the deck for you.

Until Next Time

How much do I love casting cheap creatures? So much that I want to cast them again and again. This type of card is full of potential, whether as combo piece, value recycler, Blink imposter, or even to as protection from removal. How can we make this cat purr? Find out next time on Singleton Shmingleton.

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Jesse Barker Plotkin

Jesse Barker Plotkin started playing Magic with Innistrad. He was disqualified from his first Commander game after he played his second copy of Goblins of the Flarg, and it's all been uphill from there. Outside of Magic, he enjoys writing and running.