Random Commander Challenge: Arvad the Cursed Reanimator (EDH / Commander)

Each week(?) on the Random Commander Challenge, I click the Random Commander button on EDHREC and build a unique and new design for an existing commander. While decks do not have to be built entirely around the commander, they have to be built such that their commander is essential to the identity of the deck; they must be worse if you swapped their commander for another, better one in the same color identity. Finally, each deck must be different at their core than the 'normal' or 'standard' deck that that commander uses; while any commander that isn't in the top 30 is allowed, I am not allowed to build them the way they are normally built.

This time, we're going to be building around Arvad the Cursed, a 3/3 Vampire Knight for 3WB from Dominaria that has deathtouch and lifelink and anthems your other legendaries by +2/+2. Arvad clocks in at 174 decks on EDHREC, which are full of legendaries and Dominaria historic payoffs, most of which are the standard WB legendaries you see in the 99 or legendaries he was in Standard with. The general plan of the average Arvad deck seems to be tapping out, playing legendary cards, and then profiting, although some cards that do have specific synergy with Arvad - like Odric, Lunarch Marshal applying Arvad's keywords to your whole team - do peek through on occasion. The generally held strategy with Arvad seems to be jamming legendaries and making dudes.

When analyzing Arvad himself, two things jump out at you about his design. The biggest thing Arvad brings to the table - the reason you would pay 5 mana for a 3/3 in a format where Goblin Welder is legal - is a replayable +2/+2 anthem for your entire board. While this is definitely the bad half of Elesh Norn's effect, turning a board of 1/1s and 3/3s into 3/3s and 5/5s has some incredible swing potential. The second thing that jumps out at you about his design, though, is the cost of the effect: it only pumps legendaries. Normally, anthem effects see play in EDH in token decks, in decks where you can spend one card to create more than one body to buff with your anthem. Gaea's Anthem is a great card when it pumps your board of ten Saprolings from a 10-power board to a 20-power one; playing a Gaea's Anthem feels a lot worse when you're buffing a board of two 7/7s. Arvad's legendary restriction means that every card we will be buffing is a full card, one that started in our deck at the beginning of the game, and this makes getting considerable value out of him a lot harder.

In order to build intelligently around Arvad, we need to understand how playing him is going to work out in any real game of Magic. At baseline, we can imagine that if Arvad is generating us a large amount of stats on our board, he is very likely to be removed, meaning that we should treat him less like a 3/3 that will stick around and trade with something and more like a scuffed Overrun. With this in mind, in order for playing him to be really worth it, we need to get at least +6/+6 out of him on each cast, meaning we should try and have at least 3 other bodies on the board before we cast him. While this is entirely doable on curve - we can actually have a 1, 2, 3, and 4 when we cast him - the second and third cast are going to be harder and harder to make work if we can only generate 1 or 2 bodies each turn.

With that in mind, there is only one strategy in WB that can generate 3+ legendary bodies in a single turn: reanimator. We will be utilizing a go-wide build of reanimator, one that recurs our cheap legendary creatures, so we can swing in and close out games with Arvad. Rather than filling our deck with legendary creatures, we will be picking creatures that either help widen our board (Teshar, Ancestor's Apostle), hamper our opponents' ability to kill us or our board (Thalia, Heretic Cathar, Kambal, Consul of Allocation), or refill our resources as we start to run out of cards (Ravos, Soultender, Gonti, Lord of Luxury, Rankle, Master of Pranks).

Mass reanimation in WB is actually fairly limited; besides X-spells and a few cards that can activate multiple times, it seems that white's reanimation suite is mostly just a few very popularized cards. While in a 60-card deck, 4-ofs of Rally the Ancestors, Return to the Ranks, Immortal Servitude, or Gruesome Menagerie present a versatile suite of mass reanimation effects, we have very limited options both for what we can use and what we can reanimate. There are only three legendary 1-drops in WB, and we're running them all, and most legendary 2-drops in WB are very bad outside of their dedicated shells (Sram, Senior Edificer, Sensei Golden-Tail, and Kentaro especially). The fact that there aren't enough WB legendary 1- and 2-drops to make Arvad on curve worth it was what made us move to reanimator in the first place, and the same problem is apparent here. Thankfully, since these cards are very cheap and there are plenty of ways to return large numbers of creature cards from our graveyard to our hand, we can still have functionally similar Rally the Ancestors-es, albeit ones that require multiple turns and which make it difficult to cast Arvad.

The final result of this deck is a lean, aggressive WB reanimator deck that gets in early and refills the hand late and uses Arvad to close out games. By naturally avoiding large single targets for removal, we take full advantage of our opponents' likely choice to save removal for Arvad, and by not presenting any worthwhile targets, instead just spitting out hordes and hordes of dudes ad infinitum, we maximize the value of each draw.

Arvad is a lot unlike most of the commanders we have looked at on RCC, because unlike most other commanders, his effect is actually very narrow. Arvad wants to engage in combat with a large number of legendary creatures, and regardless of how we aim to accomplish this, there aren't a lot of ways we can actually build him that make him the ideal commander for the list. Most of the archetypes BW has real support for - lifegain, aristocrats, Vampires, and enchantments - either operate on a completely different axis than Arvad does, or actively restrict the already limited pool of creatures he works with to an even smaller number. Unfortunately, WB - unlike color identities with more variety - doesn't have any real cards that interact in a real way with Arvad's pump ability besides your one combat step a turn; there are no extra turns, no "power X or greater"s, no fighting, no anything in a color identity with little deviation from the formula of "gain life, sacrifice dude, play Vindicate" its commanders all seem to boil down to. Until WB gets some more interesting cards, ones that interact with something other than exactly graveyards and life totals, it's unlikely most of its commanders will ever have more than a rudimentary build and a pile of cards that say "value".