Singleton Shmingleton - Build a Theft Deck with Mind Rot
May 20, 2024 by
Jesse Barker Plotkin 
Mind Rot | Art by Clint Cearley
All Those Card Games Will Rot Your Brain!
Hello, and 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. If you like picking apart your opponents' plans and then using their own strategy to beat them, this is the week for you! This week's card is a classic with two-for-one value that really tries to put a bottleneck on what your opponents can do. Of course, I'm talking about Mind Rot, a card which debuted in Portal and has been subsequently reprinted twenty-six times. Talk about a building block of the game! For over twenty years, Mind Rot has been providing the upper hand in grindier Limited formats. It's the balanced opposite of Divination, another card that feels like one of the classic templates of the game, and both cards have taught countless players the value of card advantage, as well as the dangers of not affecting the board.
Most Mind Rot variants have never seen play in constructed formats. The effect is often too slow, and it's usually a better bet for a control deck to make the opponent spend mana on their cards before answering them. In Commander, there is an added wrinkle, as almost every version of Mind Rot targets a single opponent. Getting a marginal two-for-one feels a lot worse when there are three opponents to deal with! But that won't stop us from doing our darndest to bring Mind Rot into EDH. There are twenty-nine cards that cost three mana or less and force an opponent to discard two cards. Here they are:
Mind Rots
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The most played of these cards by a country mile is Chain of Smog, with 26,959 decks. Funnily enough, until Strixhaven, this was a really bad card, and to this day no one is using it to make opponents discard cards. It only sees play as a combo with Witherbloom Apprentice. The next most played Mind Rot is Esper Charm, in 11,611 decks, a wonderfully flexible card that can also force an opponent to discard at instant speed. The least played card is, weirdly, strictly better than Mind Rot; Bog Down sees play in only 75 decks, despite having the ability to make an opponent discard three at the cost of... two lands. But the worst card on this list is undoubtedly Skullscorch. Your opponent can always choose the effect that hurts them the least, and especially in Commander, four damage doesn't really get you any leverage at all.
Which Card? Discard.
Now that we have a ton of ways to make our opponents discard, we need to figure out how to make them work. And we need to make them do quite a bit, as getting a marginal two-for-one on a single opponent is not very effective on its own. Only Arterial Flow (and technically Mind Rake) can effect all opponents, so we've got to find some serious payoff. The most obvious place to look would be towards EDHREC's discard theme page, which shows all of the fun and exciting commanders people are building around making opponents discard cards. You know, everyone's favorite decks, like Tergrid, God of Fright and Nath of the Gilt-Leaf. On second thought, maybe we should steer clear of this theme... we won't make any friends if we stop everyone else from playing the game entirely. Plus, let's try to get some points for originality. In Commander that counts almost as much as having a functional deck, and I believe we can do both.
But we still have all of these ways to slow our opponents down while at the same time putting cards in their graveyards, so I thought this would be a perfect time to try out a deck idea that I've always wondered about. What if we used the cards our opponents discard against them? I've had a blast playing with "theft" decks that try to use Control Magic and Thief of Sanity effects to win using only opponents' cards, and there are tons of funky effects that let us play things from our opponents' graveyards. These effects are often very undercosted because they rely on an opponent having something juicy in their bin. With our strategy however, we can pressure them to discard the expensive spells they might not be able to cast soon. And then the fun can begin.
First up are several cards that let us return a creature from any battlefield to our control. Reanimate, Animate Dead, and Necromancy are all-time staples of graveyard strategies, but in this deck we have very few good targets of our own. Even snagging a five- or six-drop from our opponents feels like a bargain. On the higher end, Sepulchral Primordial lets us take the best creature from everyone's graveyard, which should put us far ahead. Coffin Queen remains a supremely underrated reanimation piece, letting us change which creature we want in play.
There are also several weird effects that I remember from older Commander that let us cast instants and sorceries from our opponents' graveyards. Memory Plunder is a crazy card at instant speed, letting us surprise the table, and Spelltwine offers a sweet little two-for-one on top of the chaos. Arcane Heist brings the genre into the modern age with a tacked-on Cipher. Our second primordial, Diluvian Primordial, will always be a huge swing in our favor.
But the best versions of these cards give us the flexibility to cast any type of spell, and there are some powerful effects here! CEDH all-star Mnemonic Betrayal acts as a Yawgmoth's Will for an opponent's graveyard, letting us cast to our heart's content. Modern all-star Dauthi Voidwalker puts anything that would go to a graveyard into exile, where we can sacrifice it to cast a card for free. And combo theory-crafting all-star Reenact the Crime lets us pounce onto any card as it's put into a graveyard and cast it without paying its mana cost.
Rounding it Out
Graveyard theft makes this deck play out differently every game, but one thing we know will remain the same is discard. And a lot of the non-Commander focused discard payoffs are actually really fun to play with. Geth's Grimoire and Waste Not give us resources whenever we make our opponents discard, and Megrim and Liliana's Caress pressure their life totals directly. Aclazotz, Deepest Betrayal and The Raven Man both give us little fliers for our troubles, and can themselves force some discards. If this was a more focused theme, I might worry about locking other players out of playing the game, especially people playing synergy-driven decks that need a critical mass of connecting pieces. At this density though, a discard theme feels like it merely slows the game down to a pace where we can resolve Diluvian Primordial and Mnemonic Betrayal.
The Decklist
Mind Rot Graveyard Theft
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This deck is a blast in a chiller playgroup. It plays out differently every time, since it relies on other players' cards to win, so you never know what expect when you shuffle it up. The Mind Rots feel just good enough to put a bottleneck on what opponents can do, while also being so obviously fair that no one begrudges them. If opponents haven't played against this deck before, they will often jump to discard their most expensive cards since low-resource games favor cheaper action, but this will play right into our trap. Casting Memory Plunder on a Decree of Pain that someone binned without thinking feels so good.
Until Next Time
Cycling shenanigans, here we come! From Draft to Standard to Modern Living End and even to Pauper, anything that has Cycling for a single mana has proven itself to be ripe for combo potential. Since Ikoria: Lair of Behemoths, we now have so many versions of this effect that even in Commander we can put together a consistent engine. But what will that engine do, and will it be enough? 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.
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