Vhati il-Dal has one of the best tap abilities in the game. I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: From tapping to drop the power on something so you’re barely being hit (if you do it after blocking with the untapped Vhati, you’ll take no damage) to dropping the biggest and nastiest creatures to a very vulnerable 1 toughness for smashing and combat fragility, Vhati has a huge board presence at any multiplayer table.

Why does this matter?

Great Question!

I’ve been looking for a way to tease out a few new deck projects of my real-life deck stock. I thought a great way to do this would be to tap into some of my previous online-only versions I’ve published as initial thought brainstorms to jumpstart your own juice. Obviously, my real-life card stock, recently released cards, and more will all expect to make an impact on my project.

My first deck was to grab Fumiko the Lowblood and build an odd janky fun deck around her. What’s next?

Now budgets are one thing. The values of a card on the secondary market are constantly in flux. One card in that deck, Night of Souls' Betrayal, has spiked in value massively. But the deck’s point stands, especially as other cards have dropped in value.

So where can I dig for a real-life version of this Vhati engine?

Let’s take a look at the central cards.

First of all, Vhati has an awesome synergy with a variety of cards in the deck. Many cards in black and green deal 1 damage or give a creature -1/-1. When paired with a simple Vhati tapping, they will permanently pull a creature off the board. And note the large number of -1/-1 effects that will also kill creatures that could regenerate or have indestructible—so a card like Darkblast or Contagion Clasp is great at killing some serious stuff.

Dealing damage works, too. Both green and black are doling out damage to creatures. You can deal damage to flyers with something like Silklash Spider and Bow of Nylea or shoot things with Pestilence Demon and even Masticore and such. This can really help Vhati knock down stuff pretty quickly.

I expect the best engine for this deck to be Thornbite Staff. Every time an opposing creature pops it, as long as the Staff is on Vhati, he’ll untap. So you can tap and kill something and then untap and keep killing. We have a few effects that drop everything like Pestilence Demon and Golgari Charm.

That’s the basic concept of the deck: Kill stuff and keep on killing stuff.

So let’s take a look at my real-life version and see what it has to offer on that basic concept.

Virtual Vhati ? Commander | Abe Sargent

• Commander (0)

• Creatures (27)
• 1 Cloudthresher
• 1 Crypt Rats
• 1 Doomwake Giant
• 1 Drakestown Forgotten
• 1 Gloomdrifter
• 1 Harvester of Souls
• 1 Indrik Stomphowler
• 1 Massacre Wurm
• 1 Pestilence Demon
• 1 Phyrexian Plaguelord
• 1 Plaguemaw Beast
• 1 Reclamation Sage
• 1 Sepulchral Primordial
• 1 Silklash Spider
• 1 Skinrender
• 1 Skullwinder
• 1 Squallmonger
• 1 Tornado Elemental
• 1 Veteran Explorer
• 1 Vigor
• 1 Wall of Blossoms
• 1 Burnished Hart
• 1 Darksteel Sentinel
• 1 Masticore
• 1 Stuffy Doll
• 1 Ascendant Evincar
• 1 Drana, Kalastria Bloodchief

• Planeswalkers (1)
• 1 Liliana Vess

• Spells (32)
• 1 Beast Within
• 1 Darkblast
• 1 Golgari Charm
• 1 Grim Affliction
• 1 Putrefy
• 1 Suffer the Past
• 1 Black Sun's Zenith
• 1 Diabolic Tutor
• 1 Dread Return
• 1 Evincar's Justice
• 1 Explosive Vegetation
• 1 Harmonize
• 1 Kodama's Reach
• 1 Peregrination
• 1 Promise of Power
• 1 Curse of Death's Hold
• 1 Deathreap Ritual
• 1 Gaea's Anthem
• 1 Pernicious Deed
• 1 Phyrexian Arena
• 1 Rite of Passage
• 1 Night of Souls' Betrayal
• 1 Contagion Clasp
• 1 Lightning Greaves
• 1 Magewright's Stone
• 1 Sol Ring
• 1 Staff of Nin
• 1 Thousand-Year Elixir
• 1 Trigon of Corruption
• 1 Viridian Longbow
• 1 Thornbite Staff
• 1 Bow of Nylea

• Lands (39)
• 11 Swamp
• 12 Forest
• 1 Barren Moor
• 1 Command Tower
• 1 Evolving Wilds
• 1 Golgari Guildgate
• 1 Golgari Rot Farm
• 1 Grim Backwoods
• 1 Jungle Hollow
• 1 Llanowar Reborn
• 1 Llanowar Wastes
• 1 Oran-Rief, the Vastwood
• 1 Polluted Mire
• 1 Slippery Karst
• 1 Terramorphic Expanse
• 1 Thespian's Stage
• 1 Vivid Grove
• 1 Vivid Marsh

Buy This Deck

And there’s my deck!

Now, the deck has changed quite a bit since the budget version debuted as the seventh entry in my Commander Budget series back in 2014, but the core is still here. There are a handful of cards that I just don’t own (like Caustic Crawler) or have any extra copies of (Carnifex Demon), but for the most part, the changes I made were due to the key removals of the budgetary restrictions. And yet, this is still a cheap deck when you look over it.

What are some of the cards that are new additions to the Vhati machine?

One of the great things about Night of Souls' Betrayal was that it constantly shrank all creatures, and thus, moving a creature to 1 toughness via Vhati would kill it. But the main problem with effects like this is they affect our own stuff as well. That’s not good! So I tossed in Gaea's Anthem as a minor anti-shrinkage or anti-mass-damage effect. It makes our stuff bigger to out-smash others, and it has a solid effect moving forward. Another way to protect our stuff, at least from the damage-based stuff, is Vigor, a powerful addition to this deck. In addition to using damaged-based attacks to hit opposing creatures to kill them off, you can churn mana into a Silklash Spider to pump your own flyers (there aren’t many) or to tap a Viridian Longbow–wielding creature of your own to grow them. Effects like Pestilence Demon when you have a Vigor out are downright intoxicatingly awesome. We have a few ways to save your stuff (Golgari Charm can also be used to regenerate your whole team to save your creatures from a load of damage from a sweeping damage-based effect such as Crypt Rats). Rite of Passage is here, too, for a similar-to-Vigor ability—although it doesn’t prevent the damage, you can build up a nicely sized beater or three with it.

I tried to layer in a lot of this synergy. From the -1/-1 counters of Skinrender to the recursive shrinkage of Drana, Kalastria Bloodchief, there are a bunch of options here kicking it around. We want to get some mad beats.

Don’t forget effects like the buyback-enabled Evincar's Justice and Tornado Elemental.

I tried to keep my support cards viable in terms of toughness. This deck doesn’t want too many 1-toughness dorks rocking the table and dying. Veteran Explorer is an exception; this Scout wants to jump into the deep dark for you. But I chose to go with beefier options when I could—I swapped out Eternal Witness for Skullwinder and Acidic Slime for Indrik Stomphowler. Beef, baby!

There are multiple tricks in here for you to discover. Stuffy Doll? Staff of Nin? Ascendant Evincar?

And there are a ton of new additions to this deck that didn’t make the cut in my budget build—this is a surprisingly deep concept. This includes Doomwake Giant, Curse of Death's Hold, Trigon of Corruption, Cloudthresher, Drakestown Forgotten, Squallmonger, and aforementioned cards like Tornado Elemental, Evincar's Justice, Drana, Massacre Wurm, and Crypt Rats.

It’s one big, spicy meatball serving some serious creature control at the kitchen table. I’m looking forward to unveiling it in reality, not just as a fun decklist for you to use as inspiration for your own decks.

Other cards I pulled for this project and sitting next to my deck are Acidic Slime, Eternal Witness, Sakura-Tribe Elder, Wasteland Viper, Nissa's Expedition, Phytotitan, Triskelavus, Acorn Catapult, Pariah's Shield, Armillary Sphere, Phyrexian Arena, Vampire Nighthawk, Phyrexian Gargantua, Gaze of Granite, Basilisk Collar, Underworld Connections, Spread the Sickness, Exsanguinate, Ruthless Ripper, Keening Banshee, Ruinous Path, and Zendikar Resurgent.

While Shadows over Innistrad clearly has just hit the streets, I think we’d all agree that Tooth Collector is on my radar for inclusion as well. I want to see how the deck runs first before trying it out.

Don’t forget you can add various removal effects on top of each other to handle bigger problems, even without Vhati. You can tap Staff of Nin, pull a counter off Trigon of Corruption, and then pull a counter off Drakestown Forgotten to kill off a 3-toughness creature. With the sheer density of damage and -1/-1 abilities in the deck, you can build them up to kill something more threatening easily enough.

And there we go!

What did you think of the real-life Vhati project? Is there anything in here you would like to include? Anything that sparks your own creations? What real-life project should be tackled next?

Vhati really is that good.