“Wе’re like the wind and thе trees, you can’t stop what’s coming.”
Art:Coram, the Undertaker
by Kai Carpenter
Table of Contents
Today’s Featured Commander Is:
Coram, the Undertaker, is by far one of my favorite commanders to come out of MH3; this card just feels like a true Jund commander. Coram embraces his color identity very well and is just a very fun commander to pilot. We can hit very hard and are built to fill our graveyard quickly and make our commander huge. Some of the best examples of cards that help our commander out a ton are cards like Impervious Greatwurm
and Titanoth Rex
which are great ways to make our commander huge and can easily allow us to one-shot an opponent. We also have a heavy focus on mill since we can recur lands and cards from our graveyard quite often with the help of our commander. This is a graveyard-focused value deck that can be very strong against a myriad of strategies and is overall pretty resistant, we are quite weak to graveyard hate but are pretty strong overall. On top of our commander being a great source of damage we also have strong creatures like Fiend Artisan
and Golgari Grave-Troll
which can also help us maximize our damage and hit hard. Combine all of that with some sweet payoffs for a big graveyard like Deathbloom Ritualist
and Out of the Tombs
, and we have a pretty sweet gameplan and can put a lot of pressure on our opponents. Without further adieu, let’s get it!
The Deck:
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Coram, the Undertaker Graveyard Party!
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Why Coram, The Undertaker?
Coram is a large part of our deck and the main reason we are running huge power cards like Titanoth Rex and Rampaging War Mammoth
which are both very easy to get into the graveyard and make our commander pretty crazy, being able to hit for 10+ on the fifth turn is quite the rate and many decks will not have caught up to be able to contend with us in combat. Coram also provides a great amount of recursion for the deck, which allows us to get back some of the best of the best that we milled and, because of his ability, also allows us to get back lands, which can help us ramp out some of the bigger creatures in our deck if we need them for combat. Sadly, we don’t have a lot of protection for our commander, and they can be a bit of a removal magnet, but luckily, with our ramp, we can easily recur it.
Gameplan:
Our overall gameplan is pretty simple; in a perfect world, an opening hand for us has all three colors and some early game mill, but in reality, we can keep pretty much anything with a little bit of mill or mana ramp and a path to cast our commander. Beyond the starting hand, our game plan is to get our commander out as soon as possible and fill the graveyard up in the process, allowing us to make our commander big and allowing us to recur some valuable lands and creatures. We are naturally afraid of graveyard hate at pretty much every stage of the game and truthfully there is no way around this, we just have to hope our opponents don’t have it or if they do, that they drop it early. Being able to recover after graveyard hate is built into the gameplan as we just drop our creatures on the board and swing as much as we can, this is naturally considerably less powerful than the standard gameplan but if the need arises we can still have a board presence. If you’ve played other graveyard-based value decks, you will see familiar cards that allow us to hit hard like Lord of Extinction
and Mortivore
as well as some absolute graveyard classics like Golgari Grave-Troll we are quite good at both attacking and blocking within this deck.
Deck Matchups:
Since this is EDH, there are an absolute ton of things that can tip a game in your favor or out of it. While an archetype may seem favorable, there are absolutely good and bad commanders for our deck to go up against; I have included both these, which were all played among my testing groups using various decks, and I have included the sample size for clarity purposes. This is just meant to be a guide after testing a bunch of games with this deck!
The information below is notes about specific decks that were featured in our testing pods and how we fared against them. Naturally, EDH is a multiplayer game, so these are just a summary of my notes against different commanders and strategies. When we test these decks we try to test to its strengths and weaknesses to give a full spectrum of what the deck has to offer. Various commanders and archetypes/strategies are used to get the most accurate information.
Commanders, we have a good matchup against:
Miirym, Sentinel Wyrm
Record against Miirym, Sentinel Wyrm 4-0
I like this matchup a lot; this is a deck that rarely has any graveyard hate and takes a little bit longer than us to get going; by the time they amass a sweet army and start using their commander’s abilities, we are typically pretty well-established on board and in our graveyard.
Trostani, Selesnya's Voice
Record against Trostani, Selesnya’s Voice 5-1
This is overall a pretty good matchup for us; we have a very high damage output, so the life is typically null and void, and many of their tokens, as well as their commander, are not that great in combat when they come out, so we can typically just go over the top and hit them hard. Now, many of these decks do have crazy powerful cards like Cathars' Crusade
, which is most certainly something to worry about, but until they start dropping bombs like that, just keep swinging against them and hit them as hard as you can as often as you can.
Arcades, the Strategist
Record against Arcades, the Strategist 7-2
This is a favorable matchup for us, we are often better than them in combat and while we can take som damage early if we can remove their commander and and have them be nothing more than walls we can hit them hard and decimate their board, keeping their commander off of the board is key and being able to start a little quicker than normal as well, overall a very good matchup for the deck.
Commanders, we have a tough matchup against:
Edgar Markov
Record against Edgar Markov 1-6
Edgar is just far too speedy for our deck; it is also not uncommon for a Bojuka Bog
to be hiding around in this deck. This is overall just a very tough matchup for us and we can’t do much to stop their commander, eminence is just a crazy ability and it only gets worse and worse as the game goes on. If we can be speedy and they have a slow start, we can catch them off guard, but for most edgar decks, that doesn’t really happen.
Purphoros, God of the Forge
Record against Purphoros, God of the Forge 1-3
I will not lie. This is a rough matchup; while we have a great damage output, theirs is even better, and they can typically out-damage us. The best way to get a win against a Purph player is to join forces with the others at the table and just swing them down and take them out as early as we can, our commander certainly helps with that! Overall, if they are left unchecked and allowed to get their commander out on curve or early, we are in trouble.
Eriette of the Charmed Apple
Record against Eriette of the Charmed Apple 0-6
Eriette is kind of built to shut us down. While they arent always packing graveyard hate the amount of auras and Pacifism effects they put on our creatures can be a huge problem for us, when all of our creatures and commanders are locked down the life loss / gain becomes a huge deal, this is another deck where us and another player need to join forces and hit them hard.
Deck Overview:
This section contains information about cards in the deck and how they function within the deck! I also highlighted some of my favorite cards in the deck!
Creatures:
We have so many cool creatures in this deck, but my favorite is the funny little lizard Kediss, Emberclaw Familiar
, which is a great way to make our damage insane and being able to hit all of our opponents allows us to choose the weakest opponent in combat and take advantage of that. Since our commander is often huge, one of the best pieces of mana ramp for the deck is Selvala, Heart of the Wilds
which can easily allow us to cast even huge creatures like Titanoth Rex and Impervious Greatwurm. Selvala is also a strong source of card draw, which can be a great way to further the overall game plan. Gravebreaker Lamia
is an amazing tutor and basically a second copy of Entomb
. This helps our commander greatly and allows us to get them huge as soon as we can. I also like the huge finishers we have in the deck, like Golgari Grave-Troll, Fiend Artisan and Lord of Extinction while these are dependent on us having a big graveyard there is rarely games where we don’t and these three can easily one or two shot an opponent.
Instants:
A good majority of our instant package is removal like Terminate
and Beast Within
; we do have a decent amount of removal, but I do typically like to save it for some of the bigger and worse threats that our opponents may have. I typically get questioned by my opponents on why we are running Demand Answers
and Bitter Triumph
because there is better versions of these effects out there; the free discard is the main reason we want a lot of stuff in our graveyard and if we draw one of our bigger creatures that we would prefer in the graveyard having a cheap discard outlet that provides utility is always good.
Sorceries:
You know you can’t have a graveyard-focused deck without including Living Death
which is my favorite board wipe and a great way for us to recover our board, just an amazing piece of support to have around and great against most creature decks, even if our opponents get a few creatures back we will almost always have the majority. Another great card to help us if we fall behind is Terror Tide
. I’ve gotten this up to -30/-30 before, and I don’t care what your opponents have. There isn’t much stopping this. Since we love both mill and ramp within the deck, we had to include Splendid Reclamation
, which is a wonderful mix of the two and allows us to ramp like crazy and is perfect for trying to hard cast some of the bigger creatures in our deck. Rise of the Witch-king
is a card I forgot about until I was building this deck; for only four mana, each opponent has to sacrifice, which is great against commanders with indestructible or just a whole lot of the format and the recursion we get can be absolutely crazy. The last card I want to highlight is Chandra's Ignition
, which can often be used as a board clear, but in a lot of my testing games, I was able to finish off multiple opponents with this awesome card.
Artifacts:
Our artifact package is very interesting, just additional mana rocks to help us speed out our commander and further the gameplan along quicker. We should shout out Chromatic Lantern
because it is the best piece of color-fixing we have for the deck.
Enchantments:
More mill is something we are always looking for, which is why Crawling Infestation
is a natural inclusion for the deck. It can be very strong, especially against other aggressive or smaller strategies, since we get a lot of creature production, which enables us to chump block. Greater Good
is just crazy. Honestly, I don’t think there is an EDH deck where Greater Good isn’t crazy; this card is an absolute powerhouse and can allow us to draw an absolutely ridiculous amount of cards. Out of the Tombs is a very cool backup plan for the deck, especially if we run out of cards, which doesn’t happen too often but absolutely can happen if the game goes on long, the extra mill is quite nice for filling up the graveyard and when our library is empty the recursion is pretty sweet as well, I like this card a lot and feel like more graveyard-focused decks should run it. Ripples of Undeath
is another example of a perfect card for the deck cheap mill that also allows us to get additional recursion is just great, its even better when we have our commander out and can get an additional card back from what we milled.
Land Base:
Although it may seem a little weird we are running a Bojuka Bog of our own! You never know when you are going to encounter other graveyard decks. Beyond that, we have quite a few cool non-basics in the deck that provide a lot of utility, like Dakmor Salvage
, which is a great way to fill up our graveyard and trigger our commander. Skarrg, the Rage Pits
is another card I love targeting our commander with especially when we have something huge like a Titanoth Rex in the graveyard. Skarrg allows us to output even more damage and the trample can enable us to get a commander damage kill with ease. Beyond that, we have a pretty straight forward land-base, we have the shocks and the fetches which are great ways to get our colors established as well and overall we have a pretty decent landbase that is great at getting our colors established and making sure we can cast our commander and follow the overall gameplan on-curve.
Strengths of the Deck:
- We can hit hard very quickly, and our damage output is one of the best parts of the deck.
- We have a ton of different ways to fill up our graveyard which is perfect for a Living Death
or just hitting hard with our commander. - We have quite a bit of recursion in the deck allowing us to amass quite a formidable board early, this isn’t a true reanimation-style deck, but having the option with cards like Oversold Cemetery.
Weaknesses of the Deck:
- Weak to graveyard hate, we are quite afraid of cards like Bojuka Bog! Luckily we don’t run into a ton of graveyard hate usually but if a deck is built to beat graveyards there isn’t a ton we can do.
- We rely on our commander a lot for high damage and recursion; without them, we can struggle to get back some of our best cards; there are multiple ways to do it but our commander is by far the simplest.
- Beyond killing them in combat or a few removal spells we do have, we are quite low on removal overall.
Deck Stats:
Sample Hands:
Conclusion:
Coram, The Undertaker overall is just a very fun and cool commander; while it has a lot of the same strengths and weaknesses of other graveyard-based decks, it is a little bit different in its playstyle and thusly offers a breath of fresh air to a very figured out archetype. I have been having a ton of fun with this one and I hope you all enjoyed it as well, if you have a Coram list send it our way we’d love to check it out! Thanks for reading to the end and for all of your support!