Gev, Scaled Scorch | art by Taro Yamazaki

Welcome to our new(ish) deck tech series, The Sunday Stream! Well, by "new" I mean we've been doing this for a year now.

Jason Alt and I started out streaming on Whatnot in August 2023, giving away booster packs while we built a $50ish commander deck from scratch over the course of a roughly two-hour stream, ending in us actually giving away the deck we built on stream to a lucky viewer. We use the power of this very website (and Scryfall on occasion), as well as suggestions from the chat, to create unique and interesting decks that specifically avoid simply adding every good card from a commander's EDHREC page and going from there.

After we're done compiling a first draft of our deck on EDHREC, we export it over to Archidekt to begin tweaking the list and making some final cuts, swaps, and additions. You can find all of the decks we've ever built for this series right here on our Archidekt page.

If you're interested in checking out our streams, we go live every Sunday evening at 6 PM CT/7 PM ET on the EDHRECast Twitch channel.

Let's move on to this week's deck...

Gev, the Vus Bus

Commander: Gev, Scaled Scorch

Twitch VOD Link

Archidekt Link

As tradition goes on the Sunday Stream, we usually choose the commander for the next stream right at the very end of each show. Typically we choose a commander from the most recent set or we dig a little and find a lesser-used commander if we want to shake things up a bit. We stumbled up on Gev from Bloomburrow and decided really lean into his first ability, which makes our creatures larger based on the number of opponents that have taken damage on a given turn. The second Lizard-centric ability is interesting, but Lizard kindred is the number one most common archetype on Gev's page, so we're trying to steer away from that and do something unique with him.

So how can we most effectively make sure that we're maximizing the number of +1/+1 counters our creatures enter with? Well, red is obviously very good at mass ping effects, and black is good at mass life loss. Gev's ability only specifies "lost life," so either method will work for this deck.

There are a few very obvious inclusions like Torbran, Thane of Red Fell and Mechanized Warfare that will simply add more damage to any red damage effects that we have in our deck. Nothing revolutionary there. The other obvious inclusions are cards like Impact Tremors and Warstorm Surge. Gev's payoff being creature-based make these obvious inclusions to add more ping damage, thus allowing us to hit the three-counter threshold more consistently. Warstorm Surge adds even more mid- and late-game value by paying off the added counters in the form of extra damage.

Jason and I also came up with the idea to utilize black's access to the Extort mechanic, which gives us an automatic life loss on all three opponent for the low cost of one black mana. Seems straightforward enough, so let's get building.

Set it and Forget it

Jason and I are both big proponents of using enchantments as a way to generate passive value over time. Enchantments are far more difficult to remove than creatures and aren't a one-off benefit like an instant or sorcery. This deck runs 15 enchantments, all of which are designed to either make sure we hit each opponent with damage on each of our turns or to generate value from the added counters.

Court of Ire and Sanctum of Stone Fangs are excellent inclusions in this deck. Court introduces monarch to the game, which is always good, and automatically lets us damage an opponent every turn, even if we're not the monarch. While Sanctum of Stone Fangs is obviously a Shrine and is more effective when played with other Shrines, we don't actually care about that much in this deck. Every turn, Sanctum will cause three opponents to lose life (and gain us one life), maximizing our extra +1/+1 counters for the low cost of two mana and an enchantment that will never sap enough life for any opponent to care to remove it.

Painful Quandary and Sulfuric Vortex are ways to speed up the game by generating lots of extra damage through your opponents simply playing the game. Both will chip away at life totals fairly quickly and could generate some attention for removal, but the payoff for either is too great to ignore, especially in our budget build. As a bonus, Vortex prevents life gain, which prevents those pesky life gain decks from taking off beyond your reach.

Rakdos Value Engines

Before we get too far into selecting the meat of the deck, we need to make sure we have ways to access as much of our deck as possible and the mana to cast spells, as Magic players do. In Rakdos, that almost always means treasure tokens and impulse draw or looting effects.

Mahadi and Neheb both serve as mana production for the deck. Mahadi will generate treasure when our creatures die (we'll revisit this later) and Neheb can generate a pile of mana each turn simply by our deck doing what it wants to do. If we only have Sanctum of Stone Fangs and Neheb on the field, that's three free red mana at the beginning of your second main phase.

Neheb pairs very nicely with Florian, which will trigger at the same time, and will give us a bunch of cards that we can spend Neheb's red mana on. They're a perfect match for this deck.

Rakdos is another fantastic payoff for all of the ping damage we're dealing, making our creatures much cheaper to cast.

THE VUS BUS

Somewhere along our deckbuilding journey, we rediscovered what we've coined as the "Vus Bus," namely a cycle of artifact creatures that have various payoffs for +1/+1 counters.

Pentavus uses its +1/+1 counters to creature flying Pentavite tokens which, assuming we've dealt damage to all of our opponents this turn, will enter as 4/4 flying creatures. Want to give flying to some of our big creatures that don't already have it? Hexavus has you covered. Hexavus also has the ability to "recharge" itself by pulling counters off of other creatures, which we are generating in droves.

Tetravus has a similar ability to Pentavus, except that it triggers at upkeep and you can choose to remove every counter from Tetravus and generate that many artifact creature tokens with flying, all of which will enter as - you guessed it - 4/4 creatures. Triskelavus also has a similar ability, except those tokens can be sacrificed to deal damage to your opponents, which is a very convenient triggered ability, indeed.

More Colorless Fun!

Hangarback Walker is a potential big-time death payoff, creating a bunch of flying Thopter tokens based on the number of +1/+1 counters on it.

Glaring Fleshraker creates Eldrazi Spawns that can be sacrificed for colorless mana whenever we cast a colorless spell, and those Spawn tokens deal a damage to each opponent whenever they die. More fabulous synergy for our commander.

Steel Overseer is a do-it-all counter generation engine for all of our artifact creatures, which we hope will be numerous.

Omarthis may be the single most interesting card in this entire deck. Each line of text makes this card more and more fun in our engine and payoff system. First, it has X in its mana cost, which means all of the free mana we're generating makes him significantly stronger, and the +1/+1 counters our commander generates essentially count for six free mana when casting Omarthis.

Omarthis also gets larger every time we put a +1/+1 counter on a colorless creature. Remember all of those artifact creatures we're creating that will enter with three +1/+1 counters? I'll give you a second to process that outrageous synergy.

Finally, when Omarthis dies, we're going to manifest cards off the top of our library equal to the number of counters on it. All of those manifested cards will enter the battlefield as 5/5 creatures after the three +1/+1 counters from our commander are added.

Just for fun, let's say Warstorm Surge is on the battlefield and Omarthis is a 10/10 when it dies. That's ten 5/5 creatures entering the battlefield, resulting in a total of 50 damage that can be distributed as you see fit, and you can always flip those cards face up later on if you manifested some creatures you'd like to have at your disposal.

A Small Sacrifice

While a classic Rakdos sacrifice theme isn't necessarily central to the deck's primary game plan, all of those death triggers I just mentioned will be much more effective if we can trigger those whenever we want.

Akul is a very interesting sacrifice outlet in this deck, allowing us to sacrifice three creatures to put a creature directly from our hand onto the battlefield. If you're reading this article, I'm going to assume that you know why putting creatures on the battlefield for free is good for business.

Viscera Seer is a classic sac outlet in black. It's a staple of any sacrifice strategy in black for a reason.

Throne of Geth is particularly useful to us, as it allows us to sacrifice one of our many artifact creature tokens to make the rest a little bit bigger. This ability could make Omarthis a very big problem very quickly.

Murderous Redcap is one of our "we're playing budget, not playing fair" inclusions, as this immediately goes for infinite damage with our commander and a repeatable sac outlet, which is Viscera Seer in this deck. If you were going to upgrade this deck beyond a $50 budget, Ashnod's Altar is probably one of the first things to swap in.

A Few Other Neat Artifacts

Animation Module gives us more ways to create artifact creature tokens and lets us move counters around as needed.

On our upkeep, Energy Chamber lets us either add +1/+1 counters to an artifact creature or a charge counter to a noncreature artifact, which allows us to pump up something like Everflowing Chalice.

Liquimetal Torque is a tidy little mana rock that also lets us make another creature an artifact creature until end of turn, which can be useful in a variety of different ways.

If you're at all familiar with Sunday Stream lore, you'll know Mimic Vat is a card that finds its way into a lot of our decks, and for good reason. Its utility knows virtually no bounds, and can be especially useful in a deck like this that doesn't have much of any recursion.

A Few More Fun Cards

Krenko is a no-brainer in this deck, as it will immediately enter the field with those three counters, and then will get a fourth counter and create five 4/4 Goblins on its first attack.

Obsidian Fireheart is more "Set it and Forget It" value, allowing us generate extra damage that's tied directly to your opponents' lands, and will continue to do so even if Obsidian Fireheart leaves the battlefield.

Warlock Class is a fun class enchantment that becomes a Wound Reflection-esque win condition once fully upgraded.

Havoc Festival is honestly just a very funny card that could be another win condition for this deck that generates so much passive damage. Does it hit us too? Yes. Do we care? Probably not.

WAIT. Where is the Extort?

If I'm being honest with you, Jason and I were so enthralled by the colorless synergy in the deck that we completely forgot about Extort until the very end of our deck build. Not to worry though! Pontiff of Blight is the one-stop-Extort-shop we need for this deck. It gives all of our other creatures Extort, which is exactly what we want.

Closing Summary

This deck took a lot of twists and turns during the deck building process, but we ended up with a significant amount of artifact synergy from The Vus Bus & Friends, resulting in some very fun and rewarding payoffs. Gev's fifth-most popular archetype is a generic "tokens" strategy, but our artifact/colorless synergies appear to be mostly unique to all of the Gev decks in EDHREC's database. It's worth noting that of the cards I didn't specifically mention, many are different versions of "deal 1 damage to each opponent" effects that are generally useful in this deck.

As I mentioned earlier, if you like this deck and want to help us build other unique and fun decks on a budget, be sure to check out our Twitch streams every Sunday evening!

Levi Stevenson

Since first dipping his toes into Commander a a few years ago, Levi has consistently made a point to avoid making a whole bunch of the same kind of deck by brewing lots of different color combinations, only to discover that he just has token decks in almost every color combination. When not playing or talking about Magic, you can find him playing drums in a cover band, writing and talking about Iowa State athletics, or embarrassing his wife in public with outrageously dumb jokes.