The Growth of a Kaervek Deck

Daniel Stockton
November 20, 2018
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Last time I wrote a bit on how we get straight-jacketed in our deck building habits by the way we write about decks. I don’t know that I have a good fix for that, but I wanted to try writing out how I built Kaervek the Merciless in a more narrative fashion, which might make it easier for us to think holistically about deck building. Plus it gives me a chance to sit back and ramble about my favoritist deck that I’ve been playing since way back when EDH cards were still chiseled on stone tablets! So indulge me as a bust out a rocking chair and tell you a story...

Kaervek was one of the first Commander decks I built when my friend Richard introduced me to the format back in 2009, and if I ever sell out of Magic, it’ll be one of the last decks to go. Part of the lure of Commander (still known as Elder Dragon Highlander), was getting that it was a Singleton format. My favorite format prior to EDH had been draft, so I had a huge number of dumb 1-ofs in my collection and nothing good to do with them. At the time, Limited archetypes tended to flip the 60 card formats on their head. Red-black was one of my favorite color combinations to draft, but it usually was a damage- and removal-based control deck (as opposed to the burn/aggro build it usually followed in Standard or Extended). The core cards tended to be.

Pyroclasm, Mind Rot, and Nekrataal, buttressed by spot removal and a couple big dumb beaters. So when Richard was explaining EDH to me, the first idea that popped into mind was scaling up a RB control draft deck. Pyroclasm became Earthquake, Mind Rot became Mind Slicer, and Nekrataal became assorted demons.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Looking back on the initial deck, it’s amazing how many cards haven’t changed. The main engine of the deck -- damage-based board wipes and big dumb creatures -- is still there. But the mass discard is long gone. It was good in the sense that I usually won the game if no one else had a hand, but they didn’t jive with Kaervek. If your opponents don’t have spells to play, how are you supposed to get Kaervek triggers? After I realized that the mass discard didn’t work, I tried a slightly different angle with mass land destruction, and big enchantments like Vicious Shadows and Baneful Omen to help get me the win. It was a misguided effort, for obvious reasons… again, if your opponents can’t cast spells, you can’t get Kaervek triggers. It also irritated my friends (mentioning “Boil” in the wrong crowd still gets people riled up).

 

When I pick a general, I want my general to be the best it can be. Sometimes, this will mean cutting powerful cards because they don’t work with my general’s agenda. Sometimes, when the powerful cards that work with my general push the limits of what I feel is fun or fair, I take that deck apart and rebuild with a new general. For example, I’ve built Niv-Mizzet, the Firemind before, and I’m pretty confident there’s no fun way to build an optimized deck with it. But I’ll never intentionally hobble a deck and leave it at 75% of its potential. For me, the most fun part of the format is taking a card and finding how to turn its dial up to 11. Doing so often leads me down fun rabbit holes that open up cool cards and synergies that I wouldn’t have found otherwise.

 

Wheel Effects

Molten Psyche, Reforge the Soul, Teferi’s Puzzle Box, Wheel of Fate, Wheel of Fortune

It’s an odd role for a control deck, isn’t it, where you want to give away card advantage to the other players? But that’s what Kaervek needs -- opponents to cast big spells.There’s an egalitarianism to these cards as well that makes for some interesting table politics. Weak decks tend to have trouble generating card advantage; strong decks tend to either draw or tutor to generate advantage. The Wheel-effects reset everyone’s hand and help maintain a level playing field. Molten Psyche and Teferi’s Puzzle Box help do the same by effectively generating extra mulligans. These core cards are potentially dangerous to me if one player has a substantial mana advantage, since they have more ability to dump their hand and let me refill it. So that table politic helps me contain those players (“Hey man, I just gave you a ton of cards. Can you cast some so we can take down that guy?”). And of course, I’m not giving cards away for free. Cards like Psychosis Crawler, Spiteful Visions, and Underworld Dreams make sure there will be blood. And the deck’s main control engine is going to help me claw back some of the advantage I give away.

 

 

Sweepers and Removal

Decree of Pain, Defiler of Souls, Demon of Dark Schemes, Earthquake, Fault Line, Harvester of Souls, Kagemaro, First to Suffer, Malfegor, Molten Disaster, Recoup, Reiver Demon, Rolling Earthquake

If the draw effects are this deck’s fuel, then the board wipes are the deck’s engine. This is the heart of most control decks; using single, large, spells to generate card advantage. I realize some of these picks are odd looking, but there’s a lot of interlocking synergy between them. Most of the damage-based sweepers don’t hit flyers, and most of the demons don’t kill each other. They also help advance the board state for Kaervek; I need to deal damage to players to start wearing them down, and direct damage and beefy attackers is the easiest way to do that. I occasionally get asked why I don’t run cards like Starstorm or Exsanguinate; the short answer is they don’t do enough. Finally, there isn’t a ton of sorcery recursion available, but Recoup almost always replays a Wheel or one of the sweepers here.

 

Interaction on the Stack

Red Elemental Blast, Reiterate, Reverberate, Wild Ricochet

If we’re running with the engine metaphor, these cards are the coolant. Sometimes the deck gives away too much, and needs to prevent or copy a big game breaking spell. The red blasts are clutch for this; I originally started playing them because I wanted an out to some of the nastier blue lockdown enchantments like Stasis or Arcane Laboratory, then realized they were great at fighting it out with other long-game decks.

 

Arch of Orazca, Dread Statuary, Foriysian Totem, Kher Keep, Kolaghan Monument, Lavaclaw Reaches, Leechridden Swamp, Liliana’s Contract, Promise of Power, Phyrexian Totem, Rakdos Keyrune, Sea Gate Wreckage, Shivan Gorge, Spinerock Knoll, Stensia Bloodhall, Toil // Trouble, Westvale Abbey

...and then this motley heap is where the engine metaphor breaks down. These cards don’t directly contribute to the main lines of play, but by playing as many cards as possible that help win, the deck claws back the advantage it gives away from table-draw effects. These are the cards I get asked about most often; many of these (Phyrexian Totem) look like bad cards. Others are just objectively bad (Leechridden Swamp). The way I see it, all of these are effects the deck needs anyway -- it needs to draw cards, play lands, ramp mana -- so why not play something that ekes out a little extra advantage? Even if the expected value is low, it’s still positive.

 

Basilisk Collar, Batterskull, Gratuitous Violence, Loxodon Warhammer, Wound Reflection

This is a little extra gravy to top off the nightmarish doom machine. To state the obvious, these cards are really, really good with Kaervek. Yes, I said in my previous article that I wouldn’t do this, and yes, they are good on their own or with other creatures in the deck. It’s still worth highlighting them though. Kaervek with lifelink rockets your life total into the 70s. Kaervek with a damage double rockets opponents’ life total to 0. And the equipment nudges Kaervek up over that magic 7 power threshold to get


At this point, I think this is where I’m supposed to write about the rest of the cards in the deck. Minor spoiler: most of them don’t matter. Yeah, I have Damnation in my list, but if you were going to build your own list, it could just as easily be Consume the Meek or Inferno. Commander deck lists are weird in that some become very tight for space, with every card filling a vital role. Others are loose, with plenty of options for an individual pilot to tailor their build.


Kaervek’s reasonably flexible; if you decide to try him yourself there’s more than a dozen slots (not including lands) that you could reasonably play with, and you could plausibly sneak in Runehorn Hellkite for the over-inflated Wheel of Fortune. As long as it cuts or burns, it’s probably fine!

 Thanks for checking out the stylings of Kaervek!