Kydele, Chosen of Kruphix | Art by Bastien L. Deharme
Tormod, the Desecrator | Art by Grzegorz Rutkowski
Keruga, the Macrosage | Art by Dan Scott
Support artists; say no to AI art 🙂

Sultai Power Trio

Time for the first Rally the Ancestors of 2024. We're kicking off the new year by playing a deck with a decidedly old school feel, even if the commanders aren't so old. While there are no shortage of decks going big out there, Commander was initially the place to play all those big seven-plus mana cards that were cool but didn't quite cut it in 60-card constructed formats. Linear strategies be damned! And it's still fun to just cast big things. So, that's what we're going to do, and do exclusively, with this deck. To lean into this go-big theme further, I wanted to play with partner commanders and a companion, too. Why settle for access to just one additional creature when we can have three? And there's no companion that screams Absolute Unit like Keruga, the Macrosage, so that's where we'll start.

Keruga puts us into blue and green, which fits a our plan just fine. Out of the two Simic partner commanders, Kydele, Chosen of Kruphix is well-played but much less so than Thrasios, Triton Hero (of course, we can't play Thrasios with Keruga either, so, easy choice). That said I wouldn't mind dipping into a third color to help us work around Keruga's significant restriction of no one or two mana spells. Kydele wants a deck that draws a bunch of cards, so this got me thinking of using my graveyard too (as we may need to discard some). Seems like black would be a reasonable third color. Looking at Kydele's partner options and ones that would work with Keruga's restriction, Tormod, the Desecrator seemed like a decent fit. And since there are only 68 decks with them together, it fits this column's theme. I realize I'm stretching "classic" a bit but in terms of partner commanders, Kydele was an original partner, so I'm going to use that rather thin justification to go ahead with this list 🙂

Both unfortunately cost four mana, but I think we can work around it. A deck like this with a fair bit of variance won't always need both commanders on the board, after all.

An unlikely team of heroes, ready to take on the world.

Beating The System

Not being able to play anything on our first two turns isn't backbreaking in Commander, but it isn't great. So, let's bend the rules a bit. There are a few types of cards we can play to give us some early-game action and cheap interaction:

1. Adventures: The mana value of an Adventure card is determined by its main mode, not the Adventure itself. So, we can play these in Keruga without issue.
2. Split cards: Split cards' mana value is determined by adding both halves together. So as long as that's more than three, we're golden.
3. Cards with Suspend: We can pay a Suspend cost for one or two mana as long as the spell itself costs three or more. Neat!

These are kinda fun, bend-not-break ways to work around restrictions (I threw a Foretell card in too). I don't want to play too many less-than-optimal cards just for the sake of it, but I can't say no to a few. Loading our deck with them might just be cute for cuteness' sake. Let's still try to make something that holds up!

Deck Goals

1. Draw lots of cards at once. Powering up Kydele to cast big threats is our main plan. If these threats are colorless, all the better.
2. Ramp! This is a mana hungry deck and we can't play very much on our first few turns, so that'll be tough. Doable, but tough.
3. Slow our opponents down early. It's not a terrible plan to blow up their mana rocks or use a removal spell on a small-but-valuable creature. This should help even the playing field until we can start dropping bombs.

Tips For Building and Playing This Deck

1. There are all kinds of threats to pick from here. I tried to stay on theme with my commanders as much as possible, regardless of price. Decks like this have a lot of flexibility, so if you want to build this and don't have every card for it, that's fine! There are plenty of cards to experiment with.
2. It's fine to mulligan until you have a decent amount of land or mana acceleration. This isn't a deck for keeping marginal hands, so don't be afraid to throw it away if you'd need some serious luck to get rolling.
3. Tormod benefits from all kinds of graveyard interaction and can generate some solid value, but you might not want him every game. Don't feel like you have to cast him or Keruga if your hand doesn't seem to be lending itself to it. As mentioned this deck is not particularly linear, so every game will probably feel a bit different. And we have no shortage of options.

The Deck

Key components of our deck include:

Recurring Card Draw

Still strong: Greater Good, The Great Henge, Jace, the Mind Sculptor, Damia, Sage of Stone, Kiora, Behemoth Beckoner, Tatyova, Benthic Druid
New hotness: Teferi's Ageless Insight, The One Ring

While I decided to run some burst and one-shot draw effects like Forgotten Creation, Windfall, Return of the Wildspeaker and of course Keruga, the Macrosage, I'm mostly concerned with getting an extra few cards each turn to keep Kydele producing several mana consistently. We're not going for a big combo finish or anything, just casting big stuff, and by the turn she can untap we're likely already at five mana. Realistically we only need two to five more colorless mana to cast most of our cards. The One Ring is perfect for this job, alongside some of the older ones in this group. Playing Sultai colors lets us play Damia, Sage of Stone, which is both an enabler and a payoff. She's great. I didn't go for big "Draw X Cards" spells as we really want to draw before we tap Kydele. Better if we can draw for cheap instead.

Rule Breakers

Still strong: Search for Tomorrow, Far // Away
New hotness: Tempest Hart, Stormkeld Vanguard, Venture Forth, Monster Manual, Virtue of Persistence

One of the reasons I wanted to build this deck was the amount of options that have come up recently to support this strategy. While Search for Tomorrow is still about as good of an early-game effect as this deck could hope for, we also get really synergistic cards like Tempest Hart and some early game interaction in the form of Stormkeld Vanguard and Virtue of Persistence. While we won't always want to play all of these early, we can still catch our opponents off-guard with them later if they're not expecting us to cast cheaper spells. Various cycling cards round this category out.

Graveyard Interaction

Still strong: Hell's Caretaker, Sheoldred, Whispering One, Genesis, Nissa, Vital Force Crucible of Worlds
New hotness: Ancient Brass Dragon, Virtue of Persistence, Sail into the West

As mentioned, I'm not going too hard on the graveyard theme as Tormod, the Desecrator is a secondary component of this deck, but there are a few neat cards to trigger it. Hell's Caretaker in particular isn't something I'd always play due to its fragility, but with our big threats and how it combines with Tormod, it's quite good here. Genesis also gives us some recurring value, and Ancient Brass Dragon and Virtue of Persistence (yes, again) give us some tools for the late game. Sail into the West gets a special shout-out here as it's a great burst of card draw in addition to returning cards from our graveyard. It's too on-theme to cut! Last, Crucible of Worlds (and its buddy Ramunap Excavator) give us another way to dig lands out of our 'yard (we'll be running fetchlands in addition to the ones we might discard with our wheel effects) gives us yet another way to trigger Tormod and ensure we hit our land drops.

Ramp, Etc.

Still strong: Harrow, Selvala, Heart of the Wilds, Kruphix, God of Horizons, Chromatic Lantern
New hotness: Tireless Provisioner, Gwenna, Eyes of Gaea, Entish Restoration, Monster Manual

At the end of the day, we want to go big and supporting Kydele with additional ramp and cost reduction is still important. Monster Manual is a nice adventure card that is a little more resilient than Elvish Piper and the like, not being a creature. It's not ramp of course, but it fills the same role. In the actual ramp category, Entish Restoration is a perfect way to go big, and Harrow is still excellent too. Not to mention they both play nicely with Crucible of Worlds. Gwenna, Eyes of Gaea is one of the more exciting ramp cards printed lately. There are ton of classics too, but we're well-supported with these new entries. Give them a try if you haven't.

Payoffs

Still strong: Colossus of Akros, Ulamog, the Infinite Gyre, Geth, Lord of the Vault, Waker of the Wilds, Genesis Wave, Entreat the Dead
New hotness: Ghalta, Stampede Tyrant, Zopandrel, Hunger Dominus, Portal to Phyrexia, The Tarrasque, Vorinclex

This deck is chock full of big, dumb fat and mana sinks. I'll highlight a few of the new ones. It's tough to get bigger and badder than The Tarrasque so in it goes. Also, I said it's tough, not impossible. That's where Ghalta, Stampede Tyrant comes in. Or Zopandrel, Hunger Dominus, who makes all our stuff big and bad. Vorinclex is also a lot of value packed into just one card. It'll be a green staple for some time, I think. Last, Portal to Phyrexia is expensive but can be utterly backbreaking. I've been looking for a home for it and this fits the bill. I've also included some big X spells and mana sinks just in case we actually do generate an insane amount of mana in one turn. It certainly does happen!

One last note, I'm going heavier on lands (40) this time, but that's including our modal double-faced cards. In this case I think we want to actually cast Agadeem's Awakening, Bala Ged Recovery and Glasspool Mimic more often than not, whereas in other cases they get played as a land the vast majority of the time. I also don't want to be missing any land drops. 36-38 lands is usually my rule, but this deck is already breaking a few of those, so 40 it is.

Alright, on to our list.

I should talk about a few lands. I try not to play too many colorless lands in three-color decks, but Reliquary Tower and Ancient Tomb fit too well to pass up. Reliquary Tower was a late addition; I wasn't sure how often I'd end up with a bunch of cards in-hand but since we aren't playing much early, it's not too hard to push our hand beyond seven. It has been solid since.

This is a high variance deck with a lot of individually powerful cards. It really does feel more like an old-school Commander deck to play. Each time I've played it it has felt quite different! One game I used Monster Manual to power out an early Ulamog. Another time I was able to grind a win out with Tormod, Virtue of Persistence and Genesis. I also lost to my own One Ring, but we'll forget that happened. In any case, each game was quite fun. If sometimes you just wanna draw cards and cast big dumb stuff, this is a deck for you.

How I Used EDHREC To Build This Deck

This was a challenging deck to put together. Missing out on cheaper cards isn't easy, and while there are plenty of ways to work around things, not all of them are created equal. Let alone how many big, awesome creatures I wanted to play. It was definitely a deck I had to tweak and playtest a few times before I felt good about sharing it with all of you.

Process-wise, we're working with two commanders and a companion, so there are plenty of pages to check out. Tormod and Kydele don't see much play together, so while their page had some ideas, I found myself looking at them individually. And while a different playstyle, I also checked out Yarok, The Desecrated with Keruga as a companion. The colors fit, anyway. It was tough to get a ton from the individual theme pages this time, but when all else fails there's Scryfall (I'd start with criteria that matched our commanders and companion and refine from there) It really is a phenomenal search engine.

Read More:

Rally the Ancestors - Legends of the Honored One

Eat Your Heart Out, Keruga

Dallas Meidinger

Dallas is a communications professional, writer and nearly life-long Magic player from Canada. Commander is his format of choice. When not playing or writing about Magic, you can find him skiing or biking in the mountains he calls home.