Mercedes-Benzenlok (EDH / Commander)

This is my fun, fair, flample-filled foray into the world of battlecruiser magic. The deck plays something like a demon tribal deck where the goal is to ramp out a turn 4 or 5 Demonlord Belzenlok, draw 6 cards, discard all the creatures, reanimate them, and swing. We have a ton of rocks to get us to 6 mana and a decent amount of removal and draw, or at least enough to be relevant most of the time. I try to keep the number of cmc<4 cards low to make sure we draw a ton, but it’s a careful balance to strike between that and dying to damage from 15 life and I’m not certain I have the ratio just right. YMMV.

Single Card Discussion:

Rite of Belzenlok is a non-negotiable flavour win with this commander, even when I run out of creatures to sac to the demon. Abyssal Persecutor is the only creature we run purely as a beater with no additional utility. The fact that we can get it out for 4 and start slamming the blue player with little they can do to stop it helps to even out our lack of stack interaction.

Ramp:

We have a bunch of cheap ramp to jump us ahead in the early turns. At 6 mana, Belzenlok gives us a little bit of flexibility in what we run, but we prioritize land ramp heavily since that synergizes with our doublers in Crypt Ghast and Nirkana Revenant as well as our Cabal Coffers, Magus of the Coffers, and Cabal Stronghold. Since there isn’t much for us to do in the early turns but ramp, our rocks coming in tapped doesn’t hurt too much, which gives us nice budget options. Dark Ritual is a great way to land a turn 4 Belz and while it’s hard to proc threshold for Cabal Ritual early in the game, it can jump us ahead one turn at least and when we do get threshold it means we can play that extra demon turn 6 or 7.

Draw:

Just casting Belz usually generates a ton of card advantage, and attacking every turn often means having him removed so we can cast him again (which we don’t mind because of all our ramp). Nevertheless, it’s nice to have consistent sources of draw and our choices here are meant to give us that. I put Lord of the Void here because despite not literally drawing us cards, there’s often useful tech creatures in other colours and it’s hard to whiff if we pick our targets right. A Naya player will usually have something worth stealing in the top 7 and in the worst case we can hit the combo player to hopefully exile an important piece. Liliana’s Contract has never once won me the game, but drawing 4 cards is always good and it feels nice to have a do-nothing enchantment eat a Return to Nature or similar every once in a while because someone’s scared, especially when we have Vedalken Orrery out. NB: if an opponent has a smothering tithe out, do not play Kothophed, and if an opponent plays it while Kothophed is in play your number one priority is to remove it—you lose the game if ever a tithe tax is not paid and you don’t have the mana to stop the treasure train.

Recursion:

Our recursion slots are determined by their flexibility and utility. Blood for Bones is an obvious choice, as are Ever After and Victimize, since they get more than once creature back. Using Whip of Erebos casually doesn’t work out well in the long run, but using it after saccing Belz to, for example, Victimize let’s us double up on the ETB without increasing the commander tax. I want to point out two glaring omissions: Reanimate and Dread Return. Reanimate is a fantastic card but its CMC of 1 means it has to pass a pretty high relative bar to be included, lest it mess with out plan to draw many many cards off of Pleiades’ ETB trigger—we’re not here to exile 3 lands and stop the train on a 1 cmc spell unless that is going to make up for the cards not drawn on average. Instead we run Phyrexian Delver with a nearly identical effect. Next, Dread Return is another great spell I would slot into any other black deck, but here it only reanimated one creature and we often don’t have the three chaff creatures to sacrifice for its flashback cost. Each other reanimation spell we run has additional utility or hits more than creature, or both. It just doesn’t make the cut here.

Tutors:

Pretty self-explanatory for this one. If I owned a Demonic Tutor, I would certainly run it, but alas. Diabolic Tutor usually gets us coffers or some utility piece if we already have it, same for Rune-Scarred Demon. Blood Speaker is a nice reliable way to pump out demons at a steady pace and sometimes chump blocking if we’re in dire straits. Corpse Connoisseur synergizes well with our recursion suite and often gets us Vilis, Broker of Blood or one of our creature-based removal pieces.

Removal & Wipes:

Removal is one of the most important features of a good deck, so our priority is first and foremost to have ways to get rid of every permanent should we need to. Given what I said about Reanimate, it might be strange to see Bloodthirsty Blade, Go For the Throat, and Murder, but it is far more important that we be able to deal with a problematic creature than look for value in our graveyard and these spells are flexible and so relevant at all points of the game. For this reason, Price of Fame is an all star as most creatures worth removing are legendary, so we can cast this for 1B, it surveils so we get to filter big bois into the yard, and it gets a cmc 4 pass for inclusion. Bloodthirsty Blade is especially good for putting our opponents on a bit of a clock and removing a big threat without prompting retaliation by its controller. Demon of Dark Schemes, Kagemaro, First to Suffer, Reiver Demon, and Inner Demon work effectively as one-sided removal since our demons are all big enough not to care about relatively large -X/-X effects (and all our creatures are black or artifact creatures). Meteor Golem and Scour from Existence are the second and third most tutored cards (after Coffers of course) since they are just about the only things that can hit problematic enchantments, artifacts, planeswalkers, and lands—Golem is preferred for its recurrability, but Scour hits lands, which sometimes makes a difference. Finally, Archfiend of Depravity cuts down on problematic boardstates and provides fuel for Harvester of Souls and Kothophed.

Utility & Lifegain:

Since using Belz ETB willy-nilly results in a game loss, not to mention all the incidental life loss in Kothophed and Phyrexian Arena, it’s important to be able to make the life back. Whip of Erebos, Exquisite Blood, Gray Merchant of Asphodel, and Shadowspear, make the game a little easier, with Whip negating the damage from the ETB since Mushroom has lifelink at that point. Shadowspear does double duty as well by ensuring we have a way to get around hexproof in case it becomes an issue. The Immortal Sun does absolutely everything and is never a bad play, fitting in as a ramp, draw, pump, and removal (for planeswalkers) all in one! Pit Spawn is a solid blocker or attacker and is worth having around to prevent aggression. Vedalken Orrery is a nice-to-have and it lets us play a bit more on our terms.