(Gallowbraid | Carl Critchlow)

Technically Playable - Gallowbraid

Welcome to Technically Playable, where our mission statement is "Every commander is Technically playable" (the best kind of playable). The way this works is every article will have a commander generated using EDHREC's random button, I'll talk through the card and then write about how we can build around it!

This week's random commander is Gallowbraid, a card that is so quintessential of what creatures were like in 1997. Where a creature now would have to do a whole ton of different things as well as have built-in protection to warrant being played for five mana, back in 1997 Gallowbraid was probably a fairly decent finisher, with a keyword to boot. At first glance Gallowbraid is merely an on-rate stat line for its cost with one keyword and a fairly major drawback. While a lot of people might see Gallowbraid as complete garbage, we know better here than to judge a book by its cover.

Pay to Win

One of black's biggest and most iconic mechanics has been the idea of risk and reward. Infernal Contract is a really good example as it's a card that trades a huge amount of life for more cards than (almost) any other draw spell available. Gallowbraid is another really good example of this as when it was released a 5/5 for five that also had a keyword was a strong creature. This then had to be balanced by the cumulative upkeep. We don't live in 1997 anymore though so we need to find a way to weaponize this downside, luckily a lot of the mono-black toolbox is focused around paying life so Wizards of the Coast were kind enough to give us a whole host of payoffs. Repay in Kind and Profane Transfusion are the most straightforward of these, trading your low life total for an opponent's and getting a big creature, or setting everyone to the lowest life total (probably yours) opens you up to either pick up some kills with Gallowbraid in combat or even to "burn" your opponent using something like Gray Merchant of Asphodel or Torment of Hailfire. Gray Merchant is one that I particularly like here as it not only gives you the reach to beat opponents that have a developed board but also gives you some life to use as a buffer after taking out one or more of your opponents.

But swapping life with opponents isn't the only way to turn Gallowbraid's downside into our biggest advantage. There have also been a lot of cards printed over the last few years that let us get some utility from losing life. Font of Agonies is a really good example as it allows us to build up counters every turn through the Cumulative Upkeep that we can then wield as removal for our opponent's biggest threats. We can also use Vilis, Broker of Blood to turn Gallowbraid into an incrementally increasing Phyrexian Arena. So that is removal and cards dealt with, but how do we progress our gameplan and boardstate? Well, Universes Beyond has you covered there with Mortarion, Daemon Primarch which was included in the chaos deck of the Warhammer 40,000 precons. Mortarion allows you to pay mana up to the amount of life lost to create a ton of 2/2s with menace. Even just paying two or three mana into this will very quickly create a powerful and difficult-to-block board of creatures.

These are just a few of the options when it comes to paying life to win the game and even just slamming something like Bolas's Citadel in the deck gives you a way to easily pay a huge amount of life to enable these strategies.

Mono-Black, the Secret Ramp Color

Ramp has always been Green's "thing" and with cards like Elvish Mystic, Rampant Growth, and Cultivate being so heavily used in Commander (in 336,503, 640,795 and 866,956 decks respectively) it's clear to see why ramp is so commonly associated with green's core color identity. But what if I told you that black was actually as good as green at ramping? Okay, now that you're doing yelling at me in the comments, hear me out. I obviously don't mean that black decks are as good as green decks at the early ramp, nothing is, but the mid-late game ramp that black decks have access to is kind of huge. The most iconic of these is probably Cabal Coffers giving you access to a huge amount of mana for a very small amount of investment during deck building. I mean Cabal Coffers is so good that a lot of decks that care about casting X-costed spells will run it, even though with three or more colors in their commander's color identity. For those decks, they need to utilize it with Urborg, Tomb of Yawgmoth and while you can use it in a mono-black deck to make any utility lands into swamps you don't really need to. As well as their coffers, we also have access to the Cabal Stronghold giving us some redundancy and meaning we probably don't need to run Expedition Map (although it is really good).

On top of these lands, black decks also have access to something that is not fully unique but not that common in other colors. While Mirari's Wake is very good black has access to quite a few similar effects. Crypt Ghast and Nirkana Revenant both give black a lot of mana in the mid-late game and can facilitate some crazy Torment of Hailfire's or turns with cards like Greed enabling you to draw a ton of cards while still having the resources to play them. Pair these with Caged Sun or Gauntlet of Power and you can very quickly overwhelm a table with your resources. Crypt Ghast also has the benefit of having Extort which gives you another way to keep your life total at a reasonable level as you continue to play spells that you will need to pay life for. In extended games, I've even seen Extort be used as a win condition as the game has gone on and on and people have taken repeated chip damage from small creatures or maybe even their own Mana Crypts

These all give you ways to play the expensive payoffs that I mentioned above and allow you to consistently play Gallowbraid and keep it in play as many turns as you can to ensure the cumulative upkeep stays as high as possible to keep paying that life.

Keeping Yourself Healthy (Or At Least Not Dead)

We've talked a lot about using cards in this deck to pay life and using that to help you win the game. But if you're paying so much life, surely your opponents will be able to pick you off without much trouble. Well, yes, but also no. A large chunk of this deck should be dedicated to making sure you aren't losing the game too early. Selenia, Dark Angel is another deck that works in a similar way, pay a bunch of life and leverage some niche cards to your advantage. Unfortunately Gallowbraid doesn't get access to Phyrexian Unlife or Swords to Plowshares or any of the huge list of white cards that help with regaining lost life, so you will need to be a little more inventive to make sure stay alive.

The first card I'm going to talk about is actually the opposite of inventive or niche, Sheoldred, the Apocalypse If you're happy to draw some ire in your Commander games and be a little bit of an archenemy Sheoldred is a great card at keeping your life total healthy while also chipping down your opponents. She also works really well with any of your card draw spells like Greed, Night's Whisper, and Sign in Blood by making them life-neutral or even life positive since Night's Whisper for example will gain you four life from Sheoldred while only paying 2 life for the spell itself. If you're looking for something a little more inventive (which of course you are, look at the article you're reading, it's about Gallowbraid) then using something like Tree of Perdition can work in multiple ways for this deck. Being able to quickly drop your life total low to swap with an opponent's while also keeping it alive with around 40 toughness allows you a one-off pseudo-reset of your life total later down the line. And if you're interested in resetting your life total, and using some of that mana from Crypt Ghast you can use Eternity Vessel to repeatedly reset your life total based on what it was when you first played the Vessel. This is one of the best ways you have to consistently keep your life high while still being able to play all of your life-costing effects.

But, lifegain isn't the only way to prevent yourself from dying. Over the years there have been a lot of interesting cards printed that help to prevent you from losing the game while having a hefty cost. Lich's Mastery is one that has been on the sidelines for a long time due to the previous popularity of Cyclonic Rift as it circumvented the enchantment's main way of protecting itself. Personally, I have seen a massive drop in the usage of Cyclonic Rift in the last few years and I do think that it may finally be time to dust off your Lich's Masterys and try them out. I've mentioned this one first as it is probably the weakest with Gallowbraid since whenever you lose life you exile cards or permanents but I do think it's hilarious with Sheoldred, the Apocalypse so I wanted to make sure I mentioned it. Pact Weapon on the other hand is amazing with Gallowbraid as it does double duty of preventing you from dying when your life drops below 0 and turning your commander into a threat with commander damage. Pact Weapon may not seem great since the buff is based on the cost of the card but while a lot of black decks will run cheap tutors we've also looked at a lot of expensive payoffs in this short article alone. Not only are these fun to play since they are quite niche, and also mechanically work well in the deck, but they also fit well with the theme of Gallowbraid and other older black cards and the idea of the risk and reward strategy that mono-black decks have had for around 30 years.

Of course, you could always try a commander damage strategy, and I think it would be incredibly funny to play Gallowbraid while sandbagging a Blackblade Reforged in your hand for surprise commander damage kills by leveraging the built-in trample on your commander. Alternatively, you could even use Vorpal Sword's deathtouch in combination with Gallowbraid's trample for a surprise kill. Although expect these to only work once.

As with all Technically Playable articles, this was a very quick look at Gallowbraid as a commander and a few of the cards that can really make a deck with Gallowbraid as the commander tick.

Let me know in the comments below if you play Gallowbraid, if you want to build a Gallowbraid deck, or even if you just enjoyed this article!

Read more:

Brew For Your Buck - Build a Budget Mono-Black Deck

Back to Basics - The 10 Most Played Mono-Black Cards in Commander

Paul Palmer

Hey there, I'm Paul. I've been writing about magic for a really long time. I love to write about obscure commanders (one of my really early articles back in 2015 was about Skeleton Ship) and how you can make decks around them work, no matter how unplayable they are. I love Gruul, I love Mountains and I love casting Lightning Bolt.