Baking Our Creatures Into Delicious Value With Baba Lysaga | $50
Hey friends and welcome back to Budget Commander! Today we'll be brewing a deck that draws silly amounts of cards while also killing our opponents at the same time: it's Baba Lysaga, Night Witch!
Golgari Sacrifice With a Twist
Baba Lysaga, Night Witch takes the tried and true Golgari Sacrifice archetype and gives it a little twist: our commander wants us to run a diverse array of card types as sacrifice! We have to fill our deck with all sorts of cards types -- ideally cards that are multiple types -- to sacrifice to Baba Lysaga, but the payoff here is a huge amount of card draw, lifegain, and lifedrain all rolled into one! We simply activate Baba over and over to keep our hand and life total nice and toasty while eventually our opponents just fall over dead!
Keep in mind that Baba Lysaga, Night Witch says that you sacrifice up to three permanents: you absolutely should look for cards that are multiple card types so you can sacrifice less things but still draw 3 cards and drain 3 life! The best of the best are cards that have all 3 card types, like an activated Mishra's Factory or Mishra's Foundry, so you only need to sacrifice a single permanent to Baba. Other notable cards include Blinkmoth Nexus, at higher budgets Inkmoth Nexus too, and the land animater Llanowar Loamspeaker.
Our ramp package is full of unique sacrifice fodder, like Primal Druid and Viridian Emissary being sac'd to Baba while drawing cards, or Ornithopter of Paradise being a mana dork that can be sac'd for two card types, or Accomplished Alchemist tapping for 3+ mana whenever you gain 3 life off Baba.
But my favorite Baba ramp tech is Ordeal of Nylea, whose wording allows us to sacrifice it to Baba to trigger its last ability and ramp out two basic lands!
Our removal package is equally unique: we can evoke cards like Foundation Breaker and Shriekmaw to destroy something and sacrifice them to Baba before the evoke trigger resolves, or sacrifice Binding the Old Gods before the third useless trigger resolves. But my favorite obscure tech has to be Chime of Night, which we can sac to Baba to kill any nonblack creature!
What's better than one Baba activation each turn? Multiple ones! We're running a bunch of ways to get more Baba value every turn, such as Tyvar, Jubilant Brawler, Instill Energy, Nature's Chosen, and Patriar's Seal. More draw and more drain is never bad!
Our deck is largely focused on activating Baba Lysaga all day every day, but how do we win? Well, Baba is going to do the heavy lifting here since those 3 lifedrain activations add up fast, but to close things out we're going to turn our lifegain into a bonafide overrun with Blossoming Bogbeast or ramp up the drain effects by layering a bunch more with Agent of the Iron Throne, Blood Artist, and similar effects. Maybe 3 lifedrain isn't enough, but 5+ certainly will do the trick!
And that's the deck: play Baba, activate Baba, draw cards and drain the opponents! Repeat until victory. It's a fun time!
$50 List
The $50 brew has all the essentials you need to go straight to value town. Baba draws us so many cards that discarding down to handsize is inevitable; the deck has a lower mana curve than average to help offset this. The finishers are a little jank but get the job done.
$100 List
Ashaya, Soul of the Wild turns all our creatures into lands which is wicked ramp and enables Baba. Mazirek, Kraul Death Priest is a fantastic finisher for the deck as well, turning our random dorks into lethal attackers. We also have a bunch of smaller upgrades too like Lightning Greaves and Illusionist's Bracers to enable more Baba goodness.
Further Upgrades
The single biggest upgrade to the deck in my opinion is Exquisite Blood, which doubles the pain from Baba's ability but also goes infinite with Dina, Soul Steeper, Vito, Thorn of the Dusk Rose, and similar cards. It's one of the best "I Win" finishers for the deck. Other upgrades include:
- 2+ card type lands Blinkmoth Nexus, Dryad Arbor, Inkmoth Nexus, Urza's Saga
- Utility lands Reliquary Tower, Bojuka Bog, Takenuma, Abandoned Mire, Boseiju, Who Endures, Malakir Rebirth, Bala Ged Recovery
- Mana-fixing landsOvergrown Tomb, Woodland Cemetery, Undergrowth Stadium, Llanowar Wastes, Deathcap Glade, Bayou if you're ballin'
- Argoth, Sanctum of Nature + Titania, Voice of Gaea might be too cute but gosh do I love meld stuff!
- More Baba activations Thornbite Staff, Magewright's Stone, Illusionist's Bracers, Thousand-Year Elixir
- Lifegain synergy is great Witch of the Moors, Veinwitch Coven
- Tutors Vampiric Tutor, Demonic Tutor, Diabolic Intent, Worldly Tutor, Survival of the Fittest
- Removal Toxic Deluge, Living Death, Culling Ritual, Deadly Rollick, Snuff Out, Druid of Purification
Next Week: MOM Precon Upgrades!
March of the Machines Commander preconstructed decks will be previewed next week and I'll be hard at work getting all of them analyzed and upgraded as quickly as possible. Check back next week for them! Thanks for reading!
