Village Rites | Art by Matthew G. Lewis

It's Hard to Know Rite from Wrong

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, I'll be tackling the most common cheap card draw spell in black in Village Rites. This card and its ilk offer a deal that is fair as fair can be, until it isn't. For one or two mana, you can sacrifice a creature to draw two cards. This isn't card advantage in itself, since the sacrificed creature makes it a two-for-two, and the cheap mana cost is offset by the mana you presumably spent on the sacrificed creature. But any piece of synergy turns this exchange into a very favorable one. Sacrificing a token, for instance, or a creature that's already about to die. Sacrificing something like Bloodghast, which won't stay dead for long. Sacrificing an opponent's creature stolen with a Threaten effect. All of these turn Village Rites into a great deal.

Village Rites and friends have a long and storied history in Magic, but haven't really emerged into any competitive format until a few years ago. The first card of this kind was Skulltap, a sorcery that didn't offer many of the same shenanigans as its later cousins. Then came the era of Altar's Reap, which has been printed nine times since its first showing in Innistrad. A couple more versions of this effect altered mana cost and effect, and then the printing of Village Rites opened the floodgates on Skulltap variants. While these cards always found a small niche in their respective Limited environments, they just didn't have the oomph to make it in constructed formats. That is, until Deadly Dispute. Deadly Dispute made its mark on Standard, Pioneer, and especially Pauper, where it remains one of the most ubiquitous cards played across a variety of strategies. Refunding the piece of cardboard sacrificed to cast it goes a long way towards turning this spell into an advantage.

There are twenty cards that require a sacrifice to cast and draw cards in return. Most are in black, with a few in blue and a few in green. Here is the list:

The most played of these cards, unsurprisingly, is Deadly Dispute, in 232,316 decks. Its flexibility makes it a good deal at any point in the game, and it can range from a sacrifice outlet that gives you a rebate on its cost to even a temporary ramp spell. The next most played is Village Rites itself with 221,385 decks, easily beating out its twin Corrupted Conviction. The least played of these cards is the oldest, Skulltap in 1,399 decks, though I would argue that the second least played, Merciless Resolve, is worse. I was surprised to see Momentous Fall so far down on this list; when I started playing it was a bona fide staple as a rare way to draw cards in green. A momentous fall indeed, to its current position.

Making a Deck Tick

The first thing we need to do to enable all of these cheap draw spells is to play a bunch of cards that put multiple creatures onto the battlefield. There are a ton of options in this vein, from Bitterblossom effects that create tokens every turn to Awaken the Woods-style cards that put a pile of tokens on the board all at once. But one set of creature-producers especially tickled my fancy. This deck will be drawing a lot of cards, hopefully at least a couple extras every turn, so cards like Alandra, Sky Dreamer or the new Emrakul's Messenger are perfect fuel for our engine. Detective of the Month and Mindless Conscription join this exact same club, and form the core of our token-producers.

Along a similar vein, the new Sneaky Snacker slots into the deck perfectly as a creature that can be sacrificed to cast a Village Rites and return to play immediately upon that spell resolving. Chasm Skulker is a must as a way to go tall and then wide, as is Nadir Kraken. Murmuring Mystic and Sedgemoor Witch offer us ways to generate even more tokens off of casting our instants and sorceries. Saruman, the White Hand looks like an early contender for the general of this deck, as he also fuels tokens that can either be sacrificed to draw more cards or grow to enormous sizes.

The Twist - Zubera Surprise

This engine definitely looks like an efficient way to draw a good number of cards, but we need something to do with those cards, and as of yet we don't have any sort of win condition. But way back in original Kamigawa block, we got an explosive cycle of creatures that have puzzled brewers for almost two decades. I'm speaking, of course, about the Zubera, a cycle of five creatures (plus two others that work differently) that each care about dying alongside a lot of other Zubera. The goal of making them pop off barely even works in sixty-card formats, let alone in a singleton format such as Commander, but I believe this is finally the deck that can make it work. We're already in a strategy that loves sacrificing creatures, and a deck that draws a ton of cards. This is the perfect combination to make the impossible happen.

These cards care about how many Zubera have died this turn when they themselves die, so there are a couple ways to go about pumping up those numbers. The first is to loop these cards several times, sacrificing them and returning them to play and reaping larger and larger rewards every time. The second is to include several other Zubera (which can only be Changelings) in order to increase the number of distinct Zubera that can die to past the three we can play in these colors. This deck will be doing a bit of both of these strategies. But first off, we need a way to find our Zubera friends. Our draw engine helps, but is far from guaranteed. I will never stop recommending the Transmute package of Shred Memory, Muddle the Mixture, and Dimir Infiltrator as budget tutors, and this deck is a particularly good fit for those cards. The recently-printed Lively Dirge pulls double duty, allowing us to tutor up a Zubera and/or bring up to two of them back from the graveyard for re-sacrificing.

In terms of upping our Zubera count, we can run a couple of the cheapest Changelings. Universal Automaton and Changeling Outcast come down for only a single mana, and Amoeboid Changeling can act as effectively two Changelings for only two mana.

But the real fun is recycling these little Spirits as many times as possible in a single turn. There are some good one-off ways to return cheap creatures to play, like Unearth, Reanimate, and the stellar Victimize, but there are also several creatures that will return a Zubera when they themselves kick the bucket. Gixian Puppeteer and Gurgling Anointer play into our drawing-extra-cards themes nicely, and when the turn comes when we want to sacrifice a lot of Zubera, we can throw them under the bus to get another shot. Body Launderer can even do quite a bit of digging before its time comes to serve the greater good.

Forming another angle of attack, cards like Nightmare Shepherd and Kinzu of the Bleak Coven give us another shot at every creature we sacrifice, at the cost of exiling the original. While this will negate our ability to continue to return these cards to the battlefield, they are also "may" abilities, so we can wait until we're done recycling our Zubera to use these cards for one last shot. These creatures are very helpful before we find our Zubera as well, letting us use sacrifice creatures twice and giving us more enter-the-battlefield triggers.

Extending the Turn

The Zubera only count the number of Zubera that have died on a single turn, which incentivizes this deck to build up to one explosive turn in which we recycle the little Spirits as many times as possible. Ember-Fist Zubera looks pretty pitiful if we sacrifice it once a turn for six turns, but if we can sacrifice it six times in a row, it'll deal over twenty damage to a bunch of targets. The remaining cards of the deck need to slant towards a combo-esque shell, with a lot of ways to produce mana immediately to continue our epic turn. The other resource we'll need to produce, card advantage, is pretty well covered by our Village Rites effects, as well as Floating-Dream Zubera itself. Rituals are the easiest way to gain mana immediately, and we get access to some exciting ones as a sacrifice deck. Culling the Weak, Infernal Plunge, Sacrifice, and Burnt Offering all turn the tokens we produce and the Zubera we reanimate into easy mana, letting us cast another Victimize or Graveshifter. And Ashnod's Altar and Phyrexian Altar simply cannot be beat in terms of either sacrifice outlets or mana production.

It would still take a miracle to pull off a win using only the Zubera (especially in our colors, where only Ember-Fist Zubera could possibly do it), but they can still put us into an insurmountable position. The discard off of Ashen-Skin Zubera can stop our opponents from dealing with us before we deploy all of the cards Floating-Dream Zubera will draw, and we can clear a path with Ember-Fist Zubera for an attack with a huge Chasm Skulker or Orc Army. Our deck is fully capable of playing the midrange plan, and the Zubera give us a surprise attack angle that lets us pull ahead enough to coast to victory.

The Decklist

This deck is a blast to play. After a few turns of playing out Emrakul's Messengers and Skulltaps, your opponents will start to think they know what you're up to. They'll let you play your Draft commons and turn them into discount Divinations. They might not even fret when they inevitably have to read Ashen-Skin Zubera. But after sculpting a perfect hand over the course of four turns of digging, that Zubera pops off. I was pleasantly surprised by how consistently this deck can find two or even all three of the Zubera, and how easy it was to use their death triggers to find more ways to bring them back. In a format where every deck needs a theme and coolness points might be worth more than damage points, this deck is exhilarating. The Village Rites angle makes the deck hum and run consistently, and the Zubera angle generates a ton of value with regularity while also inspiring my imagination to picture magical-Christmasland scenarios where I can deal 120 damage with Ember-Fist Zubera and draw my whole deck. And personally, as someone who has always wanted to make Zubera work, this deck is a fitting tribute to the silly Spirits that still catch the attention of Johnnies and Jennies every once in a while.

Until Next Time

The scourge of kitchen-table play tries its hand in the format where creature combat stinks! This card has turned innocuous boards of little tokens into lethal armies, and is almost always cast on the last turn of the game. Or else it is cast not at all, and rots in a hand after the third Wrath of God. Can we swing for the fences in one big attack while running eighteen copies of this effect? Find out next time on Singleton Shmingleton!

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