(Urza's Fun HouseUrza's Fun House | by Dmitry Burmak)

Here For a Good Time, Not a Sensical One

Greetings all you builders of strange and interesting decks, I come bearing gifts on this week's edition of The Monolith - the series in which I convince you to build more monocolored decks.

This week, I'm providing a new challenge for those of us who like to do things a little differently. For the deck builders that crave confusion from their opponents and savor the moments of baffled players staring at your board state with questions of, "what does this deck even do?".

In the first article I ever posted here on EDHREC, I lamented the modern design principle of hiding hybrid mana symbols in monocolored commanders to turn their identity from one to two or more colors.

Some commanders though are born with their hybrid mana symbols baked into their casting cost. This makes them a lot easier to cast from the command zone with less color fixing required to meet their costs.

You're Doing WHAT in Mono-Green?

I'm sure you can see where I'm going with this. No props to you honestly, the clue's in the title of the article. The question I'm here to answer is, what's stopping us from playing these commanders as though they were monocolored?

Why, nothing! Will it make the decks any better? No, almost certainly not. But we're not here to make the decks as powerful as physically possible. We're here to do something interesting and unexpected.

And nothing could be quite as unexpected as the decks that come about when you build this way. There's not a huge amount of commanders that fit the bill for this treatment.

The ones that do however, usually provide a strangely unique benefit to mono deck builders. As the card in your command zone is technically sitting outside of its usual color pie, all of a sudden mono decks get better access to some peculiar archetypes.

In this week's edition of The Monolith we're going to build a hybrid mana commander whilst only using one of its colors. And to make it extra strange, I'm specifically choosing to use the color that least fits the archetype of the deck we'll be building. An archetype and deck combo that only has around 115 decks registered on EDHREC.

A special shout out to one of my favorite Commander tech channels on YouTube for bringing this idea to my attention, EDH Deckbuilding. Demo has one of the most impressive abilities to just pull random old cards out of the aether that I've ever seen and uses that power for extreme good. i.e. building a million Commander decks in the most unique way possible.

Mono-Green Aristocrats

Their enemy positions on the color pie might convince you otherwise, but did you know that black and green aren't all that dissimilar from one another?

Both care about the graveyard, both are equally capable of returning cards from said graveyard and also making copious amounts of mana.

When you combine both colors into Golgari() there's a heck of a lot of self-mill, reanimating, life gain themes.

Notice however, that those themes are pretty heavy on the black part of the color pie. You can do pretty much any of those in mono-black, but in mono-green there isn't quite as much support.

So let's take a look at the legend that struck fear into the hearts of Modern players everywhere, HogaakHogaak.

Now the 'Gaak is a strange card, it basically can ONLY be cast by either convoking or delving (either tapping a creature you control or exile a card from your graveyard will pay for one of its seven mana). Most importantly however, it can also be cast from your graveyard.

Any commander that can basically reanimate itself can serve as a perfect figurehead for an Aristocrats deck. A deck that wants to continuously sacrifice their own creatures to trigger common black 'whenever a creature dies' effects like Blood ArtistBlood Artist or Morbid OpportunistMorbid Opportunist. But it turns out, green has access to a fair few good versions of these effects as well.

For the Greater Good

That's right, green mages love to sacrifice their own creatures just as much as the next guy. They just like to put a nice spin on it like calling it, "for the greater good" or chalking the death up to evolution or natural selection. But the effect is the same, I kill something I control and get something in return:

And those are not unattractive outcomes for your self sacrifice! Especially when you're sacrificing the big boy himself. How does drawing eight cards and discarding three, then putting eight +1/+1 counters on another creature you control sound?

Seems like a pretty good trade off to me. Alternatively, just use The Skullspore Nexus to double Gaak's power then create a 16/16 fungus token and shove 16 more +1/+1 counters on it from your Death's Presence. Good lord, that's a big mushroom.

Remember as well that most of the best sacrifice outlets in the game are colorless artifacts anyways:

If you find a way to cast creature spells at instant speed by putting out a card like Vivienne or Yeva then you can even reanimate Hogaak with your Death's Presence effect on stack and target him with his own +1/+1 counters.

Casting Hogaak

Speaking of casting your commander with Flash. You'll likely want to be able to cast Hogaak on other people's turns. Because you can't easily use regular reanimation effects that are normally reserved for black decks, the 'Gaak will serve as your only repeatable sacrifice target.

For that reason, we want to be able to cast him over and over again and with his mana cost only available to cast via delving and convoke, there's only so many times we'll be able to do that in a single turn.

But don't worry, we're playing Commander! There's a whole three other players whose turn cycles we can interrupt and perform annoying sequences on. With our flash enabling effects on board we can recast our commander on every other players turn and repeat our engine of sacrifice effects.

This way we can maximize the efficiency of our board and also remain reactive to other players turn by doing things like flashing in Hogaak as a surprise blocker.

Mill or Tap?

Now this is all a great plan but we don't exactly have access to unlimited mana. Being able to delve for Gaak's mana cost is nice but we will run out of cards in our graveyard eventually. That's why we want to use the powers of convoke to reliably cast Hogaak on every turn.

And whilst green isn't the go to color for sacrifice outlets, it's incredibly good at convoking with easy access to token generation and, most importantly for this build, the ability to untap its creatures on every player's turn.

By having seven creatures on board, predominantly ones with aristocrat style effects on them, we can effectively cast Hogaak every single turn for free and then sac him again for a huge amount of value. Getting a free effect on every one of your turns is pretty great.

Getting it four times per turn cycle is incredible. And because we'll be convoking each time we cast Hogaak, we won't actually be spending any mana, allowing us to hold up our lands for protections spells and interaction.

One hurdle we will need to jump however is getting around Gaak's high cost on early turns of the game. For that reason you'll likely want to have some token generators in the deck or at least a little self mill to eat up some of the early cost.

Waiting until you've cast seven different creature spells and hoping they don't die until the seventh hits the board is asking for a bad time.

Having some creatures in your deck that also come with a token themselves is a good way to get bodies on board too. The same is true for any repeatable activated or triggered abilities that generate those tokens.

These cards will help us to generate bodies for convoking but also provide us with alternative sacrifice fodder for our triggered death effects, which is especially useful when we start running into anti-'Gaak graveyard hate.

Free Real Estate

One of the truly funniest things we could do in a build like this is employ yet another banned Modern card to get up to some very specific shenanigans. It's probably one of the coolest sacrifice outlets in the game and it can do some absolutely heinous things. You know it, you love it. It's the Birthing PodBirthing Pod.

With Gaak's big cost of seven mana which we'll largely be spending absolutely nothing to cast, we can tutor some insanely gross creatures directly onto the battlefield by putting Gaak into the pod. The only catch is they have to cost exactly eight mana to meet the pod's effects.

Do you know how many horrendous things in Magic: The Gathering cost exactly eight mana? Did you know that Craterhoof BehemothCraterhoof Behemoth costs exactly eight mana?

Using this effect we can even tutor out our Patron of the OrochiPatron of the Orochi to untap our green creatures on every subsequent turn cycle as mentioned above, ensuring our plan hits the ground the running once we untap on our next turn.

And there's plenty more horrid eight mana creatures you can pop in this deck if you have the budget or inclination:

Go Forth and Reanimate in Green

In truth there's a lot of funny ways you can build this deck, and I think it provides a very fun deck building challenge for those of us who love a restriction. I'm sure there's plenty other hybrid commanders that could do the same.

Let me know in the comments if you're tempted to build this monstrosity. And let me know what cards you would add or alternate commanders you want to build out of color identity.

For now though, thanks for reading and I'll see you on the next edition of The Monolith. The home of the weird and wonderful in just one color. Keep sleeving those basic lands and I'll see you next week!

Michael 'Wheels' Whelan

Wheels is a lover of all things cardboard from Brighton & Hove in the UK. As well as playing card games of all flavours multiple times a week he's also deeply invested in board games, wargames, and RPGs. In fact, he even designs his own tabletop games from self published TTRPGs like, The House Doesn't Always Win to published wargames like, FREAKZ! Mutant Murder Machines. Wheels is a big advocate for wacky deckbuilding and is an evangelist for more commander players building mono-coloured decks. He talks about all this and more on his YouTube and TikTok channel, Just For Fun!