Crush Your Salty Opponents With This $50 Poison Deck! | Budget Commander
People have been asking me for more Budget Commander decks, so I'm back! With a Poison deck!
Killing Them With Kindness (and Poison)
Some folks get incredibly salty about Poison in Commander. I find the hate for it to be very silly and find the archetype incredibly fair, especially compared to what your average Artifact, Lands, Enchantress, Treasure / Food / Clue deck is doing these days. But still, the salt is something to keep in mind and anticipate, so you're left with two options: 1) avoid Poison if your playgroup gets salty about it or 2) embrace the salt, play Poison anyway! Become the villain! For me, option #2 is the easy choice, and I hope to convince you the toxic sweetness that is a fine-tuned Poison deck!
The goal of this deck is to kill all of our opponents with poison, ideally all at the same time. That's the "kindness" part: no 1-shotting some random schmuck with Tainted Strike and then continuing the game for hours, we're killing everyone all at once!
We do this by getting at least one poison counter on each of them, ideally with one of five cards: Ichor Rats, Infectious Inquiry, Prologue to Phyresis, Vraska's Fall, and Phyresis Outbreak. Alternatively we can poison each opponent one at a time with toxic / infect creature combat, like our commander, Venser, Corpse Puppet.
Once everyone is poisoned, we can start adding more counters with proliferate, and this is where the fun begins! We've got 14 cards that proliferate, letting us stack up the poison but also so much more in the deck! The second best proliferate card in the deck has to be Flux Channeler which can trigger like crazy in the deck and is a game-ender. The first best we'll talk about a bit later!
Proliferating poisons is actually the least interesting thing in the deck: it wins us the game, sure, but the REAL spice is that the deck is loaded with a diverse array of permanents that LOVE getting free counters on them! Our mana rocks like Astral Cornucopia, Everflowing Chalice, Empowered Autogenerator, Mindsplice Apparatus all generate more mana as we proliferate, our storage lands like Dreadship Reef also become huge rituals, Vat of Rebirth and Lux Cannon get way more effective, we can speedrun through sagas like Phyrexian Scriptures and so much more!
Last but certainly not least is our commander, Venser, Corpse Puppet. I honestly didn't think much of this card until I playtested older versions of this deck and realized it's actually the perfect designed commander for it. Venser provides a ton for the deck:
- It's a 2-drop so it can come down turn 2 consistently and can be recast a few times.
- Because it comes down early, you can usually swing in and poison someone before they get blockers.
- It repeatedly generates a blocker that can gain you life, which is HUGE since Poison often generates aggro.
- The creature token can be sacrificed for immense value, even enabling an infinite combo win!
Venser in the command zone means we can reliably use the most powerful proliferate engine available to us: Throne of Geth. We can sacrifice The Hollow Sentinel to the Throne, proliferating and immediately making a new Hollow Sentinel, which means we can proliferate each turn for 0 mana. But throw in Dross Scorpion to the mix and we can now untap the Throne each time we activate it, meaning infinite proliferate! This means our opponents are dead if they have a poison counter, or if we have Scheming Aspirant out.
Venser also makes random other cards way stronger, like Nasty End sacrifice The Hollow to draw 3 cards for 2 mana, Vat of Rebirth gets loaded with oil as The Hollow dies, or Ringsight to give Venser skulk so we can bypass blockers while tutoring up a card!
We also have lots of poison payoffs like Glistening Sphere, a 3-drop mana rock that proliferates and taps for 3, Distorted Curiosity, 1 mana draw 2, and Corrupted Resolve, a straight up Counterspell that is easier to cast!
The deck is reliant on specific cards so I'm running a much higher than average amount of tutors: Trinket Mage to find our busted mana rocks, Tribute Mage to find Throne of Geth simply the best card in the 99, Solve the Equation and Mystical Teachings to find our poison cards, and Ringsight to find any black/blue card with Venser out, plus gives him skulk to get around blockers!
I love this deck!
$50 Sample List
The $50 list has all the good poison cards already and basically all the best proliferate payoffs that I could find. It excels at ramp thanks to all the proliferate-scaling rocks like Astral Cornucopia, plus it's loaded with interaction and pillowfort cards to deal with the salt coming your way.
$100 Sample List
The $100 list adds most of the remaining good proliferate cards: Contagion Engine, Inexorable Tide, Radstorm, and Staff of Compleation. The first three are obviously absurdly good, the Staff can be painful but well worth it if you can offset the lifeloss with Venser's lifegain. The final big boost is Tekuthal, Inquiry Dominus, aka Panharmonicon for Proliferate! It also doubles as a fantastic blocker too thanks to its easy access to indestructible.
I've also added Fabricate as another flexible tutor that usually finds Throne of Geth. Also Nuclear Fallout is super sweet wipe in the deck that can actually double as a (somewhat janky) finisher since they will (eventually) lose an extra life each time we proliferate their rad counters. It's especially cute with Vault 12: The Necropolis if you ever get the chance to cast Fallout and then follow up with Vault 12! SO MANY ZOMBIES!
Finally the lands start getting way better, with better fixing like Drowned Catacomb, but also neat tech like Peat Bog + Saprazzan Skerry which are consistent ramp if we can proliferate and Diamond City that can store up tons of shield counters and then activate it reliably thanks to Venser creating creatures so easily.
Further Upgrades
The first cards I'd pick up to further juice up the deck would be untapped mana-fixing lands: Watery Grave, Shipwreck Marsh, Underground River, Morphic Pool, Darkslick Shores, Polluted Delta, Sunken Ruins, Undercity Sewers, Urborg, Tomb of Yawgmoth and then maybe a couple more Island / Swamp fetches. This helps you more consistently cast Venser on turn 2.
For utility lands, I highly recommend Otawara, Soaring City + Takenuma, Abandoned Mire for always useful utility, Shizo, Death's Storehouse to give Venser evasion, and Phyrexian Tower which can turn The Hollow into ramp. However, the most spicy land to add is City of Shadows, which is terribly in most decks but an allstar here since we can sacrifice The Hollow One to it to get the first storage counter and then just proliferate for incredible ramp! The only downside is it's absurdly expensive thanks to the Reserved List.
There are four big remaining proliferate cards to consider: the best is Yawgmoth, Thran Physician, which turns The Hollow into draw + removal and then you can spam proliferates for easy wins. Ripples of Potential is another good one since we run a ton of powerful artifacts with counters on them. Vraska, Betrayal's Sting is a flexible proliferate option that also acts as removal or a finisher, but personally I feel she's a bit overcosted at 5 mana minimum. Sword of Truth and Justice is another one that is pretty good with Venser as the commander since it gives him (conditional) evasion, proliferates, and adds +1/+1 counters to grow your creatures which the deck has very few ways of doing, but I absolutely would not spend $30+ for the card, it's not that good!
The final big proliferate-friendly card I'd recommend is Tezzeret the Seeker, which can find your important artifacts more efficiently than the other tutors can, plus it also acts as huge ramp if you've got an Everflowing Chalice or Empowered Autogenerator on the battlefield.
Beyond that I'd focus on picking up powerful staples, like Vampiric Tutor, Demonic Tutor, and Diabolic Intent swapping in for weaker tutors, and Cyclonic Rift for that sweet one-sided wipe.
Bonus Deck: Dralnu Poison!
Ever since I started playing Commander back in 2011 -- gods, I'm old -- I've always had an odd fascination with Dralnu, Lich Lord. This commander comes with a huge drawback: a single Blasphemous Act will force you to bin all your permanents, ending the game for you. And his abilities aren't even that good! Kess, Dissident Mage is essentially a better version of him (you can't cast instants on opponents' turns), but cheaper and has access to Red!
So why do I like him so much? Because I just want to troll opponents by gifting Dralnu to someone right before he takes tons of damage and make my opponent sacrifice those creatures.
I've tried this a few times and folks, lemme tell you -- easier said than done! But there are a few cute ways to pull it off, like Sudden Substitution in response to an opponents' Blasphemous Act, or Domineering Will when an opponent is being attacked by a huge creature.
So I decided since I was making a salty Poison deck anyway, this was the perfect opportunity to further troll the table by running Dralnu at the helm! And bonus I can run nonsense like Relic Amulet and Sphinx-Bone Wand to damage Dralnu myself once I donate him.
Is the deck better than Venser, Corpse Puppet? No, absolutely not. Dralnu is quite bad: comes out slow, doesn't offer much value, and always runs the risk of blowing up in your face. If you want the best Dimir Poison deck then stick with Venser. But the tension of what will happen when he's on board, dear reader! It's delicious! Will I die to him? Will an opponent die to him? Will he do absolutely nothing of note (most likely)? Who knows!
So this is my current paper version of the deck with Dralnu. Again, not the optimized way of doing things, and it's a higher budget since I'm using cards I own, but just a fun thing to share nonetheless:
Thanks For Reading!
I don't do Budget Commanders that often these days because, simply put, they don't get the view count that my other stuff does. However this is a deck I alreay made for myself so it was super easy to write an article about it. Hope you enjoy! And hey, if there's a commander you have a burning desire to see done as a budget, list it in the comments section below and I might get around to it!
