The Salamander King, and how to group hug him to death.

[TheWarfox]

This is not a serious deck. This is a jokey, roleplay-ish group hug kind of deck.

Gor Muldrak is a silly, ridiculous commander. There are optimal ways to use him. We will not be doing those here.
This deck is built around the idea of screwing with the board, ramping everyone, and getting them at each other's throats while you prepare to take advantage. Gor Muldrak puts lots of big, chonky 4/3s on the board, but more importantly as long as he's in play you and all your permanents are immune to those big Salamander boys. This leaves your opponents to be using them against each other. There's card draw, mana ramp, free permanent playing, and free mana aplenty in this deck for all players. The idea is to hit the gas harder than they can adapt to. Too many cards in hand makes them desperate to play them down to avoid discarding. This means it's a lot more likely their dangerous items hit the board, and that's when you steal their best stuff.

I roleplay when I play this deck. Gor Muldrak is a crazy conspiracy theorist character, convinced that the Amphin(Salamanders) have infiltrated society and are secretly undermining everything for their inevitable invasion. I will blabber on about the evil of Salamanders, and muse on one of the players being the Salamander King in disguise. I play mind games over whose side I am on, meddling with my interaction spells, but never fully punishing them. You'll note that none of my counterspells leave my opponents without at least a consolation prize. There's a lot of stuff like that. By the end of the game the most dangerous player gets declared the Salamander King, and I shift gears into trying to defeat them. I often fail, but I still have fun. I've had lots of silly shit happen with this deck, including one time stealing an opponent's commander with Modify Memory, and then using Hadana's Climb/Winged Temple of Orazca to one-shot them with their own now-flying commander for 22 damage.

It's a ton of fun. Lots of little interactions you can use to take advantage of the chaos, like getting extra upkeeps with Sphinx of the Second Sun and Paradox Haze, and then using things like Followed Footsteps and Progenitor Mimic with the only actual Salamander in the whole deck, Amphin Mutineer. The Mutineer can exile a ton of enemy creatures this way, turn them into more 4/3 Salamanders(that your commander makes you immune to!), and then you can do silly things like use Caller of the Hunt with Salamanders and Hadana's Climb to really whack people with a pumped up monster. Don't expect to win games, but do expect to have influence over who wins.

- The Warfox

https://deckstats.net/decks/209945/2634298-rise-of-the-salamander-king-gr