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Main » Articles » CasualNation #34 – Living Death Returns

CasualNation #34 – Living Death Returns

Abe Sargent
Posted on May 31, 2011
 Reddit

Hello, Nation! Today, I want to spend a whole article talking about one of my favoritest cards of all time. Frankly, I feel it may be a bit underplayed, which is crazy considering how ueberpowerful this card is at what it does. Why do I feel it may be underplayed? Let’s take a look:

Living Death has appeared in:

Tempest as a rare

Duel Deck Phyrexia vs. The Coalition

Battle Royale

Promo Judge Foil

There are several copies out there. If you want an original Tempest Living Death, how much is one in the cheapest condition on CoolStuffInc.com right now? It’s just $5 for a played one. It’s $4.50 for a near-mint one from the duel decks with the new border. It has been printed a few times, but the Battle Royale is a crappy white-bordered one no one wants, and was likely printed in small numbers. I would like to see the print numbers on the duel decks, but I doubt this one sold as much as the planeswalker-based duel decks like Jace vs. Chandra. The promo obviously has limited numbers, and Tempest was an earlier set and likely had a smaller print run than modern sets by a lot.

My point is that we don’t see a large number of these things around. This is a card that should clearly be a major staple and player in casual Magic, and that includes Commander.

Compare its price to other very useful casual staples from the same era (these are all “played” unless otherwise stated):

Academy Rector, $6.75

Sneak Attack, $31.50

Gamble, $6.25

Altar of Dementia, $6

Radiant, Archangel, $5.50

Defense of the Heart, $8.50

Eladamri, Lord of Leaves, $8.50

Treachery, $6.75

Mirri's Guile, $7.50

Gilded Drake, $6.75

Humility, $10

Lotus Vale, $6.25

Jet Medallion, $5.50

Mind Over Matter, $6

Undiscovered Paradise, $6

Yavimaya Hollow, $5.50

Imagine if I told you that Jet Medallion costs more than fellow-rare-from-the-same-set Living Death! Could you even imagine it? It’s incredible! Lots of these cards are great, but many are much, much worse than Living Death. This does not include cards that were printed relatively recently that are more valuable than Living Death due to casual demand. Do you know that if you were to trade, right now, a Balefire Liege for a Tempest Living Death, you would be losing roughly 50¢? That’s crazy. You’d lose a buck by trading a Creakwood Liege for it. I know which one I’d rather have in my black deck!

Since it has such a low value right now, it seems like a great time to dust it off and show it around. I’m sure many readers and players today did not play during the era of Tempest (at least not in real life, but perhaps online). Living Death may be a card considered more expensive than it is, or unobtainable. It’s not.

Why is Living Death so awesometastic? Let’s take a look under the hood.

Silly Card Tricks with Living Death

Clearly, it has two abilities. One is to clear out all creatures in play, and the second is to bring back all creatures from the graveyard to play. Since it does these simultaneously (essentially), you just swap them. This is a massive switch in game state. I would honestly say that Living Death is easily one of the top ten most powerful cards for multiplayer ever. Why?

As sweeping removal, is has no peer. The creatures in play are sacrificed. That gets past anything, from Regeneration to Indestructibility. They all bite it. You don’t hide from a Living Death. You can prepare for it, but you won’t hide from it.

Your deck will clearly be built around Living Death, so you should have a ton of great creatures stocked and ready for reanimation. What will your foes have? Likely not much. Let’s take a closer look.

In a duel, with four Living Deaths in your deck, the first one is essentially Damnation. Your opponent plays some creatures, you sweep the board with Living Death. Nice!

After you’ve set up, the Living Death will really favor you. If you’ve abused cards like Buried Alive, you could have a ton of creatures in your graveyard of significant size, all ready for Living Death to turn them into game-winners.

It interacts with power with a lot of cards. Discarding a card to something like Compulsion becomes deathly as you discard creatures to stock up your graveyard. Everything from Bazaar of Baghdad to Sonic Burst to Pyromancy can set you up for a big ol’ Living Death.

Another interaction is with creatures that will put themselves in the graveyard from play prior to you Living Death-ing and bringing them all back. Mogg Fanatic springs to mind as a cheap little creature you can sacrifice for no mana to deal a damage and then bring back from a Living Death. There are tons of Mogg Fanatics out there, so you can find cards for your deck.

Lots of cards have similar interactions, and you can build lots of different decks around Living Death.

There is one reason, at the end of the day, why you should give a severe consideration to Living Death. Wrath of God and similar effects will absolutely save you from dying when you are under the gun. They are cards that take the game state from losing to neutral. Living Death does more. Timed right, it takes the game state from you losing to you winning. There is a lot more potential power in this card than in any other sweeper (other than perhaps Martial Coup, but they are very similar cards).

Older Living Death Decks

Everyone has an iconic deck. I have a deck called Abe’s Deck of Happiness and Joy. Today, that deck is approximately 2,500 cards large, and it’s a Highlander deck (no more than one of each nonbasic). It ostensibly follows Five Color rules, so banned cards for it are banned in my deck. I have all five colors, and a minimum of 145 cards in each color (as monocolored cards, before consideration of gold and hybrid cards).

The deck began as a deck that basically stood at the intersection of the Spike Girls deck, plus the interaction between Sneak Attack and Living Death. I built it as a Type 2 deck for tournaments, and began playing it locally to a lot of fun and a lot of wins. Over time, the deck morphed again and again, until it found its current form. My deck owes a lot to Living Death!

At the time, Spike decks were a fairly common deck for a few months, maybe half a year. They used the good Spikes from Stronghold and often combined the interesting Spike core with another color. One of the colors used was Black, and created a different deck. This is the deck used by Team Rogue:

"Dark Spike Girls"

Clearly, this is an old-school deck, with twenty-one lands, and two of those didn’t even tap for a colored mana! This deck rocked Living Death to bring back the creature that were killed by moving all of the counters off them. You could sacrifice all of the Spike core, plus the Mindripper, and recur them. You could also sacrifice creatures to the Recurring Nightmare, or stock a graveyard with Survival of the Fittest.

It was turned into a Survival of the Fittest deck post-Exodus. I’m actually surprised not to see more Exodus tech (such as Mindless Automaton), but this may have been early in the deck’s age.

It clearly tries to be too much, with a Vineyard deck, a Living Death deck, a Spike Girls deck, and a RecSur deck all in it. It’s confused! Lots of decks then were confused.

Here is my original deck:

"Abe’s Deck of Happiness and Joy, Version 1.0"

This is clearly a Sneaky Death deck (my personal term for a deck built around the interaction of Sneak Attack and Living Death). Since it is three colors, it needed things like Birds of Paradise. Birds were essential! I’ve got the Spike core, because they are great off a Sneak Attack as well as preparation for a Living Death.

I at least have twenty-four lands plus Birds!

You have some seriously big beaters to cheat into play. I loved Child of Gaea, because at 6 mana, you could just drop it on turn five with a Birds and rock it normally. It was also awesome off a Sneak Attack or Living Death.

The deck has a ton of tricks as well. Lifeline is in there to bring back to play any creature that died with Sneak Attack. Portcullis is there to keep most of the creatures from Living Death from hitting play, so I could lock out my opponents’ creatures while bringing back my best two, thus winning quickly.

Want to get creatures into the graveyard? Look no further than Goblin Bombardment, which is probably the card I use the most in my decks. You can also sac a creature to the Altar of Dementia and deck not your opponent but yourself for more fuel. Stronghold Assassin is a sacrifice outlet for creatures as well, to get another use from a Sneak Attack creature or to prepare for a Living Death.

It looks, zany, doesn’t it? Winning tournament decks back then were not as consistent as today’s.

Before Exodus was released and brought with it a ton of very powerful cards that ripped the metagame in half, there was another tournament-caliber recursion deck that harnessed the power of Living Death. This is the rarely remembered Sliving Death. While a deck list was printed in 1998 Duelist #27, my Google-fu can’t find that deck list online. Coverage just wasn’t the same thing. I know some of the elements, and based on that, we’ll give you a deck list from that era like I would have built it, since I was playing heavily at the time.

"Sliving Death"

Certainly this deck would have a different set of cards today. The idea is to sacrifice your Slivers for drawing cards or forcing discards, then you bring them all back with a Living Death. It’s not even that great of an idea in retrospect, because you’re filling up their graveyard from discards. That’s not super-great. I suppose you just tried to fly over them with Winged Sliver–boosted forces.

I guess it played Corpse Dance, because it makes perfect sense in the deck (play Corpse Dance with buyback, pay 2 mana to sac it for an effect. It is still in the graveyard, Corpse Dance is still in your hand). All of the reanimation decks of the day played CD. Spike Girls played it, RecSur would play it, everybody would rock it.

Odyssey block may have been about the graveyard, but Tempest block—with Living Death, Corpse Dance, Volrath's Stronghold, Oath of Ghouls, and Recurring Nightmare right on the heels of Buried Alive in Weatherlight—was a much more powerful graveyard-oriented environment than people realize.

Updating the Decks

I’d like to update Sliving Death and Dark Spike Girls for today. Clearly, they both will have heavy numbers of cards from the Tempest block by default. (Sliving Death’s plan is to sacrifice Slivers, and that is best done with many Rath-era Slivers; Spike Girls uses a Rath-specific tribe.)

Let’s reverse the order, and get wacky with the decks.

"Dark Spike Girls, 2011"

Deciding which Spikes to use is relatively easy. The core three are clearly the class of the tribe. I tossed in a pair of Breeders next, because they are the next-best ones and slide right in.

After that, I chose some other creatures with counters that are on-theme. The graft ability of Simic Basilisk, Cytoplast Root-Kin, and Sporeback Troll works very well in this deck. You can move counters for free to later creatures played. They also all have an activated ability that can give extra power to your Spikes and another card of interest.

After consideration, I went with Triskelion, but not Mindless Automaton. I thought about Automaton, but I ultimately felt I had more important things to do with my deck, and Living Death is my card advantage. Trisky will kill stuff and players with speed. With the counter-hopping and helping, it can be a great tool of death. It also likes the additional cards like Living Death and especially Corpse Dance.

Living Death was an auto-include, since this deck is built around it. I tossed in a single copy of Corpse Dance as a surprise. It can bring back the top creature from your graveyard, and many have abilities to be used, and then kill the creature to keep it around, instead of exiling it. Spike Feeder will give you 4 life, and Trisk is broken off a Corpse Dance. With some mana, you can hop counters or make 1/1 Spikes.

A single Grave Pact is another nasty surprise. If played at the right time, you can devastate your opponent’s board position. As you hop counters from Spikes to kill them off and make bigger creatures, you can wipe an opposing board clean of resistance. Spread the Sickness is ideal as the obligatory kill spell that also has Proliferate. Add counters to all of your creatures! Finally, we wrapped up with a pair of Cultivates to help smooth that mana base that needs bbb for Grave Pact and ggfor many things.

Talking about the mana base, I went with the dual lands that I could, including the ETB-tapped Gilt-Leaf Palace. It’s just a Coastal Tower–type card for g/b if you ignore the Elf ability. Llanowar Reborn is a great extra bit of gas for this deck. If you wait until you play Spread the Sickness before taking off the counter, you can get some extra graft from it.

This is a pretty solid version of Spike Girls for today. I wanted Spike Rogue to reorganize your counters, but I didn’t have the space. Other good options may have included a flying choice (perhaps Pentavus) to have aerial defense and the numerous other cards that help or make +1/+1 counters for creatures. (I considered a single copy of Decree of Savagery, Vigor, or perhaps even Strength of the Tajuru; some of Energy Chamber or Incremental Growth). I considered pulling Cultivate for Fertilid, but I liked the speed of Cultivate; you might prefer the other).

Anyway, don’t forget in this Infect day and age that +1/+1 counters will remove -1/-1 counters, and vice versa.

"Sliving Death, 2011"

Okay, let’s talk about this one. I have made a few changes here and there to the original. The core is still there—Mindwhip Sliver and Mnemonic Sliver. After that, I have kept some, and made some changes.

Since Blue/Black typically doesn’t have the power/toughness-boosting Slivers, I also included Spectral Sliver as a four-of. Both Shifting Sliver and Winged Sliver help to get your team past others. Winged Sliver can also help your team play defense.

After that, the rest of the Slivers are more for cool abilities than attacking and blocking. Crypt Sliver is better than the early Clot Sliver, because it doesn’t take mana, when you are rocking a lot of mana requirements among other Slivers. Basal Sliver is another sacrifice outlet, and it can help you to make a lot of mana for the abilities of your dudes. Synapse Sliver can help you draw even more cards, and the single Mesmeric Sliver is a nice trick to amp up the power of your dudes, and help lock down the game post–Living Death.

I brought back Grave Pact again as a single copy of surprise, Living Death is again a four-of, and this time Corpse Dance is a two-of. I’d love to Corpse Dance any Sliver when I have Mesmeric in play along with Mnemonic and/or Mindwhip (or just sac it with the Basal ability if all you want to do is trigger Grave Pact and/or Mesmeric). It can also get sacrificed to Attrition, another singleton removal card in your deck. Feel free to sac Slivers to take out big guys your opponent has. It also loves the fodder from a Corpse Dance. Heck, you can even sacrifice a Danced creature to a Recurring Nightmare to bring back something permanently.

This deck is quite the synergetic little monster. I tossed in a pair of Time Warps to give you an extra turn to swing with a Winged Sliver–led or Shifting Sliver–led assault.

Other possibilities I considered included counter magic, Heartstone, instant removal, and more traditional card-drawing, such as Fact or Fiction or Tidings. You could still rock Capsize. Frenzy Sliver was close to making the cut, and Homing Sliver almost made it as well. (As a Red card, you couldn’t play it, but you could Slivercycle it to get it into your ’yard, and then bring it up with Recurring Nightmare or Living Death.)

For the Sliver deck, you might wonder why Living Death is better than Patriarch's Bidding, but remember, Living Death is mass removal. Don’t forget that it is the perfect way to sweep clear the board and start again, because only your deck is built around the Living Death of Awesomeness. There’s nothing wrong with the Bidding in a tribal-based deck like the second one, but I’d much prefer the LD to a PB even in it.

I hope that you enjoyed today’s article all about one of the coolest kids in the classroom.

See you next week,

Abe Sargent

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