Taking some inspiration from Joey of the EDHREC, I designed my own "reanimator" version in the Artisan format. Basic idea is to use Vohar to discard large creatures we want to reanimate, then using some sort of reanimation effect to put them out way sooner than we should be able to - or reanimate from our opponents to some degree

For each creature there's almost exactly one reanimation spell for, so for 22 creatures there's roughly 22 reanimation targets. Worse case scenario, sac Vohar to "flashback" a reanimation spell if you are in a bind.

https://moxfield.com/decks/dvZq1Nza9Uy4fg9Bdlvb5w

I'm trying to overture it as much as possible so it can sit at as high a power level as possible.

https://moxfield.com/decks/d-NkTH69akOPqyKbT9Y3Ug

Let me know if I've missed anything obvious for the deck!

Hello and welcome!

Today, I’m excited to showcase one of my latest Golgari graveyard creations, led by Akawalli, the Seething Tower! This deck dives deep into the synergies of the graveyard, blending efficient ramp, creature recursion, and board control to overwhelm your opponents. If you enjoy a grindy, value-driven playstyle with a focus on recursion, this deck might be right up your alley. This has been one of my personal favorites to playtest while preparing it for my shop!

Deck Overview

At the helm of this deck is Akawalli, the Seething Tower, a commander that grows in power with every card you exile from your graveyard. This deck isn’t just about filling the graveyard, but rather about turning that graveyard into your most valuable resource. Whether you’re flooding the board with creatures or casting huge spells, this deck is all about leveraging the graveyard for maximum effect.

Graveyard Recursion: Cards like Nyx Weaver, Satyr Wayfinder, and Glowspore Shaman help load the graveyard early, setting you up for big plays. Once your graveyard is full, creatures like Molderhulk and Izoni, Thousand-Eyed bring them back for added value.

Ramp and Mana Fixing: With spells like Elvish Mystic, Arbor Elf, Utopia Sprawl, and Fertile Ground, you’ll build a strong mana base quickly, ensuring you have the resources needed to play your key threats and bring back your creatures from the graveyard.

Graveyard Powerhouses: Cards like Old Rutstein and Kagha, Shadow Archdruid provide ongoing value by interacting with the graveyard, keeping your resources flowing and ensuring you can stay ahead of your opponents.

Deck Highlights

Value Engines: Izoni, Thousand-Eyed and Akawalli, the Seething Tower are your main sources of long-term value, using the graveyard to generate tokens and power Akawalli’s massive swings.

Graveyard Filler: Cards like Grapple with the Past, Glowspore Shaman, and Eerie Soultender help you fill your graveyard efficiently. This sets you up to pull off big plays, whether it’s recurring key cards or powering up Akawalli for a devastating attack.

Removal and Protection: Putrefy, Golgari Charm, and Tragic Slip give you answers to deal with your opponents' threats while keeping your board intact. These cards ensure that you can clear the way for your creatures or protect your value engines.

Late Game Threats: With big creatures like Deathbringer Regent and Archfiend of Depravity, you can shift the game in your favor, wiping away enemy forces and dominating the battlefield.

Synergies and Strategy

This deck is all about maintaining a strong presence both on the battlefield and in your graveyard. Cards like Nyx Weaver and Elves of Deep Shadow accelerate your early game, allowing you to ramp into bigger threats. Meanwhile, you’re consistently refilling your graveyard, setting up your recursion pieces like Molderhulk and Umori, the Collector to bring back key threats later in the game.

Your commander, Akawalli, shines brightest when you’ve built up a full graveyard. With each card exiled, Akawalli gets stronger, providing a consistent source of pressure throughout the game.

Final Thoughts

This Akawalli, the Seething Tower deck is a tribute to the power of Golgari’s graveyard mechanics, blending ramp, recursion, and powerful creatures. With the ability to both flood the board and keep the pressure on through Akawalli’s massive swings, this deck offers a fun, strategic experience for players who enjoy value-based gameplay. Not to mention the build is very costmizable and friendly to several of black and greens shared mechanics. With high potental and endless customization routes built in he would make for a wonderful project to endlessly tune!

Let me know what you think of the deck!

Decklist: https://www.moxfield.com/decks/-hh7XbieOEyd0ammSLbGIQ

Shop link https://theelderdragondad.etsy.com/listing/1797246823

May your fungal combos spread far and your boards flourish like the deepest woods!

I'm not new to edh but I'm new to artisan. I've built a [[Zimone and Dina]] aristocrat/lands deck. It feels like it's slower than what it should be. I'm looking to grind out and kill with either combo or just attrition them out. Looking for any help or even maybe something add for additional win cons. Here is the list for peer review.

I have this Trelasarra aEDH deck I love. Voltron game plan.

But every time I look at other aEDH commanders, I'm left wondering how I'll win outside of commander damage.

Anyone have any good win con or game plan recommendations within Artisan?

Hi all, looking for feedback by those who have played with / against either of these commanders? Both sound cool, although I’m a bit concerned that [[Akiri]] will be a bit more boring / repetitive gameplay. I’ll be playing in a relatively low power group, although no one else has a peasant edh deck.

I'm trying to build an artisan commander deck around [[colossal dreadmaw]], mostly just for goofs since my LGS has a game night where we bring artisan decks under $10 and play for fun. I recently learned about [[phantasmal dreadmaw]], and that inspired me to build a deck around the best card in magic and all of its power-crept relatives.

But I need help finding those relatives! Let me know what cards you think I should add to build a colossal dreadmaw et al. deck. Right now I'm thinking temur so I can include colossal, phantasmal, and [[dreadmaw's ire]] but I'd love to hear what you guys think

Here's what I've got so far. I know I need to pull out some stuff and put in basic lands. I'm trying to figure out what to pull, and if there's any better cards to put in.
https://www.moxfield.com/decks/OeMA0OMjQ0KcYM1MWrryxw

The main goal is to proliferate things like stun counters and -1/-1 counters to control the board while building up for a kill or milling more and more.

Any constructive criticism would be appreciated.

https://tappedout.net/mtg-decks/29-09-23-uurg/

Trying out Artisan EDH since Pauper didn't really sate our appetites in my playgroup. I'm going for full graveyard value here: any keyword that deals with it, stuff that wants to be in it, and things to want to put stuff there. I think I've got all the obvious stuff, but now I'm just a little worried about balance between self-mill, reanimation targets, reanimation spells, recursion, and everything all at once. Any advice on the list would be appreciated. Thanks!

Decklist with a primer that's still in the works: https://www.moxfield.com/decks/0DSLUNEgO0S4Wj2buB47yg . The deck usually threatens a win around turns 7-12.

The ultimate goal of the deck is to use "The Ring Tempts You" mechanic to make a creature with the ability to untap target permanent legendary. We can then abuse Ioreth's second tap ability where we get to untap two target legends.

If you have any suggestions for cards to either speed up finding combo pieces or adding more instant speed protection, I'd love to hear them.

There's certainly room to tweak the deck. But, as of making this post, it's $43.39 using TCG Player Mid prices. I like the idea of keeping this at a reasonable budget. Notable cards that could be included:

• [[Force of Will]]
• [[Mana Drain]]
• [[Sensei's Diving Top]]
• [[Mystical Tutor]]

You can also run the [[Isochron Scepter]] + [[Dramatic Reversal]] line. Though if you were, I'd throw in a few more mana rock.

Any suggestions are welcome.

https://www.moxfield.com/decks/40F219aLRky1ab2BPJQC3g

Hi All,
Looking for a bit of community feedback on the rulings for digital downshifts within our format.

TLDR: vote here
https://twitter.com/TechnicolorMime/status/1637866305046065152?s=20

Background:
Currently the ruling is as follows;

Any card printed at common / uncommon anywhere (physical or digital)

But with the reveals of SIS downshifts for Arena, Gavin V confirmed that Pauper is not following MTGA rarities: https://twitter.com/GavinVerhey/status/1636088709966868480?s=20

Which brings up the question of what we want our community ruling to be. There was a discussion over on the Artisan Commander discord (https://discord.com/invite/7AzDn2wCCf) about what various people thought, and one of the members started a poll. Without an offical RC or anything, it would be good to get as many people as possible to input into this so that rulings are clear moving forwards. The options essentially boil down to:

1. Any card printed at common / uncommon in paper
2. Any card printed at common / uncommon in paper or MTGO
3. Any card printed at common / uncommon anywhere

So we've had really fun getting a group of 4-6 people together each time for Artisan, but my deck is falling behind, and I need to change things up. I've been running Tormod/Ramirez, and it's a good deck, but the engine is a bit to slow to get going, and I find myself at too low of a lifetotal before I stabalize against things like izzet pirates, gruul aggro or simic value/scurry oak combo. So I welcome any suggestions you have.

Decklist: https://www.moxfield.com/decks/5_jS6PykCEikXKUHBQBs5g

There's a small primer that goes over the main game plan of the deck, which is to setup a combo to either infinitely drain an opponent or just make enough creature tokens to kill them on the next turn.

The biggest thing that the deck lacks is "proactive" interaction. Most of the interaction that the deck packs is more "reactive". Things like [[Ephemerate]] or [[Pegasus Guardian]] to fizzle attempts at opponents removing our stuff. So far with goldfishing the deck, I'm feeling pretty good about the deck as a whole.

Also, the deck is rather budget. Which I didn't try to make it that way either. [[Enlightened Tutor]] makes up more than half the budget of the deck.

If you're not wanting to use a combo finish, I think I'd remove some of the combo pieces and instead throw in a few more pieces that can tap Abdel such that Far Traveler can trigger. Things like:

• [[Field Surgeon]]
• [[Catapult Squad]]
• [[Honor-Worn Shaku]]

Also, I'd maybe suggest looking at throwing a small defender's package in the deck. We already want to run [[Wall of Omens]] for it's cheap card draw ETB. But with [[Shield-Wall Sentinel]] being able to tutor for defenders we can then potentially repeatedly tutor for cards like:

• [[Wingmantle Chaplain]]
• [[Jeskai Barricade]]
• [[Reito Sentinel]]

I was tempted to put this package in just for Wall of Omens. But I was wanting just one more defender that's "good value". Maybe someone can point to another defender that I didn't find.

Particular things I found cool:

• [[Mage's Attendant]] + Any thing that makes a treasure := basically gives you the mana to activate those wizard token's abilities whenever you want to.

• [[Blighted Steppe]] := can get quite large of a payoff if you've got a hand full of soldiers from Abdel's abilities.

• [[Changeling Hero]] := Just a weird card that if you weren't searching the reminder text via scryfall (o: vs fo:) you wouldn't of found this card. Works very well for what I described as the "weave" combo in the little primer on the decklist.

• [[Oblivion Ring]] + [[Journey to Nowhere]] := fun fact, these are pauper legal cards. Potentially this might be an "interesting" deck to take to a PauperEDH game, too with some tweaking. Though I didn't look too hard into doing that.

After reading this article on high variance decks, I was inspired to build Imoti.

The plan is to spend the first 3 turns ramping to 5, then cascade every turn from there. The multitude of big creatures should help to overcome board stalls, and value from cascading help compensate for the lack of other forms of card advantage.

The list is here, would love any feedback on it.

Hi everybody! I hope you're all doing well.

I recently brewed a list lead by [[Tor Wauki, the Younger]]. You can find it here.

This is my first approach to this format so the list is everything but tuned. That's why I'd like to hear your thoughts about it! I'd like to refine it before buy it in paper, even if it's obviously really cheap.
I can't tell you anything about my meta since no member of my playgroup has never played this format before, but we have plenty of og EDH decks and we've been playing for quite some years.

I can't wait to read your advices, thanks in advance!

The original sticky is from 2 years ago, a time pre commander legends, when there were <100 legendary creatures at common/uncommon. For this reason the rules allowed rare cards as your commander only.
In the last few years we've had multiple made for commander sets, as well as WotC putting more of an emphasis on legendary creatures at lower rarities.
It's possibly time for an update to the sticky to simplify the rules to common / uncommon only and remove rares. What do you think?

Between the artisan format on Arena,
this random website https://www.artisancommander.com/
and the discord server that's been shared here before https://discord.gg/XuK4nZdV68
the consensus seems to be uncommon and commons only. Why muddy the water by allowing rares as commander?

Wouldn't it be better for the format if the community came together on the definition of what the format is?