(Heartless Summoning | Art by Anthony Palumbo)

How Could You Be So Heartless?

If there's one thing that's broken in Magic, it would be fast mana. From Tolarian Academy to Black Lotus, it's extremely hard to make a card that significantly speeds up your game plan without it being broken in half.

But when Wizards of the Coast released Innistrad in 2011, they managed to walk that fine line - releasing a card with an obscenely powerful cost-reduction effect, but slapping on a significant-enough downside to ensure it never saw that much play.

A card like Heartless Summoning reads almost like a challenge from Wizards to all aspiring brewers - the obvious cards you'd pair with a creature cost reduction of two generic mana, like Arcbound Ravager and Steel Overseer, don't work here. But with a little bit of creativity, I assure you we can break Heartless Summoning, creating a monster of a deck much too competitive for any casual table - and all we need is a few dozen pieces of unplayable draft chaff to fuel our deck's engine.

Command The Storm

Heartless Summoning most commonly sees play as simply a value piece - often in decks where you'll be playing lots of big creatures, but without caring much about their P/T. Among the commanders most often paired with it are:

We're not interested in using Heartless Summoning simply as a value piece, however - we want it to be the centerpiece of an elaborate combo deck. Getting a two mana discount off your Etali, Primal Conqueror may be powerful; but what's really busted about Heartless Summoning is the ability it gives us to dump our hand into play for free. But even then, playing an Omega Myr as a zero mana 0/1 is hardly going to set the world alight.

Unless that Omega Myr draws us into a Diamond Mare, which draws us into a Automated Artificer, and so forth - once you've moved enough cardboard around in a single turn, it's trivially easy to win, especially with Storm payoffs like Tendrils of Agony.

And how can we turn worthless, zero mana creatures into cards? With our general and friends.

Along with Yawgmoth, Thran Physician in our command zone, our deck runs eight Grim Haruspex effects. If we've only got Yawgmoth out, no matter how many two mana creatures we pack our deck with, we'll eventually run out of steam; but once we've added a Grim Haruspex, it's almost impossible for our engine not to go full steam ahead, every single Omega Myr giving us another two bites of the cherry to ensure we never run out of gas.

The vast bulk of our deck, 39 cards, consists of artifact creatures, with more than 1 toughness and mana costs of 0-2 generic mana.

Virtually all of these are interchangeable, although it does give us a fun opportunity to play some of the most obscure cards in the entire format, like Lore Seeker, which sees play in an utterly enormous total of 16 decks across the entire EDHREC database. The only ones worth mentioning are the few that can let us see more cards, like Runed Servitor and Eager Construct, and the ones which net us mana - notably, Cathodion, Gleaming Barrier, and Su-Chi.

Usually, it's easy enough to chain together so many of these effects that we draw through essentially our entire deck - often by as early as turn four.

Knockout Blow

So we've drawn through almost our entire deck, and have cast and promptly sacrificed over 30 creatures. What next? Well first, we'll need to make some mana. Cathodion style cards aren't the only ways of doing this.

We run a few Dark Ritual effects - not only the original, but Overeager Apprentice and Priest of Gix, which function as Dark Rituals once we've got Heartless Summoning in play. Easily the best sources of mana, however, are Pitiless Plunderer and Carnival of Souls, turning every Omega Myr from a mana-neutral card draw spell to a mana positive one. Having these two on the field at once even obfuscates the need for Heartless Summoning completely.

By this point, we'll have dug deep enough into our deck to find any of our numerous wincons.

Easily the best of these is Aetherflux Reservoir, when getting to 30 spells cast in a single turn is not only possible but also likely, it's not at all hard to reach enough life to sniper your opponents down all at once. Tendrils of Agony is similar, but does require a little more work - if your opponents are at 40 life each, casting the 60+ spells needed to finish them off is a doable task, but less simple. But it's also easy enough to win by getting a Vindictive Vampire or Falkenrath Noble down in the early turns, than grinding your opponent's life totals down that way. Who says Aristocrats isn't a CEDH-level strategy?

Complete the Circuit

From here, it's a simple matter of adding some redundancy.

We run a lot of tutors to find Heartless Summoning - or whatever the piece of the puzzle we're missing is. While these effects are plentiful in black, pieces to protect our combo unfortunately aren't.

Imp's Mischief is a fairly self-explanatory way to dodge counterspells. The inclusion of Xiahou Dun, the One-Eyed is a lot more baffling. Without Eternal Witness or Regrowth available, this is the cheapest way to get our Heartless Summoning back from the graveyard - in terms of mana, that is, with Xiahou costing an eye-watering $100 - thanks, reserved list.

Ultimately, the deck comes together like this:

Final Parting

CEDH is a part of the commander format I've barely explored - indeed, this deck was initially intended as merely a fun casual list; but once I realised it could pretty consistently get a turn four kill, at least without interaction, I realised it was probably better suited for the dark side of EDH.

That said, I still probably wouldn't recommend bringing this to the next big CEDH tournament - while the deck can win extremely quickly, it often folds to interaction; while the element of surprise, of bringing an unseen brew, might help your winrate, you'd probably still get curb stomped by the average Thoracle list floating around. Still, if you want to mix up your usual CEDH lists, or just surprise a few of your more competitively-minded friends by beating them with a deck almost half of which consists of unplayable draft chaff, it's definitely worth checking out. The list almost floats in an awkward middleground, too competitive for casual commander, too janky for CEDH - but none of that takes away from how insanely sweet it is.

That's all for this week - I'll be back next article with a decklist much more suited to filthy casuals like me.

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