K’rrik
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[[K'rrik, Son of Yawgmoth]] is a unique and complex mono-black commander, allowing the player to pay [[symbol:bp]] costs with their life total, generating truly explosive mana advantage. The commander can be thought of as a four mana ritual that can pay for well over a dozen black pips as soon as it resolves, enabling explosive combo turns. K'rrik decks have access to a number of single cards that chain into game ending combos, as well as a dense suite of tutors to find those cards. Reanimation and storm are frequently but not always key elements in the deck’s game play.
Core Gameplan
Pre Game (Mulligans)
Find your line: When looking at opening hands, start by looking for a card ([[Final Parting]]) or cards ([[Entomb]]+[[Reanimate]]) that will win you the game. Then look at your mana acceleration package. Do the math to determine exactly when you can win with those resources, and evaluate if your opponents can stop you by then. No winning cards? Look for tutors that can find you the piece you need to win.
Assess Pod Composition and Turn Order: When evaluating opening hands, look first at your opponents. Is it reasonable to expect that you will be able to win before your opponents can stop you? If not, consider prioritizing hands with card advantage engines ([[Braids, Arisen Nightmare]]) to overwhelm control decks or resource denial engines ([[Pestilence]]) to deny stax decks access to hate bears ([[Drannith Magistrate]]) instead.
Tempo is everything: When starting a game with unfavorable turn order against interactive decks, the odds of winning go down dramatically with every passing turn. Keeping a mediocre hand into these pod dynamics makes it exceedingly difficult to recover. The overwhelming density of explosive mana, tutors, and one card hail Mary’s make it possible to mulligan aggressively and still turbo out a win attempt.
Early Game (Turns 1-2)
Accelerate into K’rrik: Utilize sac lands ([[Crystal Vein]],) rituals ([[Culling the Weak]],) and mana positive rocks ([[Mana Vault]]) to establish early.
Attempt a win: It is usually correct for your opponents to deny you access to K’rrik, your life total, and a presence in the game. Plan accordingly. Do not assume that your commander will survive a turn cycle - it’s best to attempt a win immediately after resolving K’rrik whenever possible.
Set Up Either an Engine or a Win Attempt: When a win attempt is not immediately possible, calculate the various costs for available lines based on your best estimation of your life total on your next turn. Look to tutor for either the most resilient or the most resource efficient line. Alternatively, tutor for and cast a durable advantage engine like [[Necropotence]] or [[The One Ring]]. Black may not have efficient countermagic, but responding to a counterspell with another win attempt is the next best thing. Card advantage ensures that you can do that.
Mid Game (Turns 2-3)
Combo Execution: When a favorable window presents itself, attempt a win, preferably with a backup attempt in hand. Be prepared to pay life aggressively. Games are often won from 1 life, so careful math is critical.
Pivots: Savvy opponents will deploy stax pieces (e.g., [[Deafening Silence]] or [[Grafdigger’s Cage]] ) that stop many of your lines. If removal is not immediately available, it’s often more resource efficient to pivot to a line that wins on a different axis (e.g., [[Fleshwrither]] or [[Vilis, Broker of Blood ]]+ [[Sheoldred, the Apocalypse]] + [[Pestilence]].)
Leverage Recursion: If multiple win attempts have been thwarted, cards like [[Yawgmoth's Will]] can provide a burst of advantage, helping regain access to critical pieces in a single turn.
Strengths and Weaknesses
Strengths
Speed: K'rrik’s life-to-mana conversion allows for fast combo turns, forcing slower decks to choose between deploying their early engines and holding resources to try to stop the win.
Tutor Density: The ability to pay for black pips with life dramatically increases the speed and efficiency of many high mana value tutors such as [[Beseech the Mirror]], providing incredibly consistent card selection.
Relentlessness: The deck also has a high density of game-winning single cards such as [[Peer into the Abyss]] as well as the tutors to find them. Even on low mulligans or after repeated disruption, the K’rrik player is never out of the game.
Weaknesses
Commander Reliance: While commander agnostic mana acceleration and wins are present in the deck, depriving the deck of its commander can severely hamper its efficacy.
Inconsistent Card Advantage: While the commanders of many meta decks provide card advantage or selection, K’rrik provides mana. Mono-black decks lack access to some of the best card advantage engines in the format like [[Rhystic Study]] and [[Mystic Remora]].
Vulnerable Wins: Without access to high quality countermagic or silence effects, the deck is forced to rely primarily on speed and redundancy to protect its wins, with some pilots employing hand attack like [[Thoughtseize]] or tax effects line [[Defense Grid]] or [[Wandering Archaic]] to protect their wins.
Stax Vulnerability: Cards like [[Deafening Silence]] and [[Grafdigger’s Cage]] slow the deck considerably.
Core Combos
[[Necrotic Ooze]] combos are commonly assembled through [[Fleshwrither]] or by casting [[Buried Alive]] and a reanimation spell targeting [[Necrotic Ooze]].
[[Necrotic Ooze]] on the battlefield and [[Asmodeus the Archfiend]] + [[Skirge Familiar]] in the graveyard
Use the activated ability of [[Asmodeus the Archfiend]] with [[Necrotic Ooze]] to draw seven cards, paying the [[symbol:bp]][[symbol:bp]][[symbol:bp]] cost with black mana, with life through K’rrik, or by discarding cards to pay the activation cost of [[Skirge Familiar]] with [[Necrotic Ooze]].
Discard three cards to generate [[symbol:bp]][[symbol:bp]][[symbol:bp]] to pay to draw seven again, looping to draw as many cards and produce as much mana is needed.
When [[Gray Merchant of Asphodel]] is drawn, discard it to generate [[symbol:bp]] then proceed to the Gray Merchant Loop.
Gray Merchant Loop: After drawing your library, you can manually discard, reanimate, and sacrifice [[Gray Merchant of Asphodel]] to drain the table with sufficient devotion after reanimating your graveyard with [[Balthor the Defiled]]. Alternatively, you may discard a sac outlet like [[Razaketh, the Foulblooded]] and a reanimation outlet like [[Chainer, Dementia Master]] and present a loop. Here [[Gray Merchant of Asphodel]] can always be removed or reanimated in response to exile effects on the stack.
Use [[Chainer, Dementia Master]]’s ability via [[Necrotic Ooze]] to reanimate [[Gray Merchant of Asphodel]].
Drain opponents and gain life when [[Gray Merchant of Asphodel]] enters.
Sacrifice [[Gray Merchant of Asphodel]] with [[Necrotic Ooze]] using the activated ability of the sacrifice outlet.
Repeat for infinite life drain and gain.
[[Hoarding Broodlord]] combos can be assembled with or without K’rrik, often by reanimating [[Hoarding Broodlord]]. Here are the two most common.
[[Buried Alive]], with K’rrik:
When [[Hoarding Broodlord]] enters the battlefield, search for [[Saw in Half]].
Convoke [[Saw in Half]] targeting [[Hoarding Broodlord]] by tapping it, K’rrik, and paying [[symbol:bp]] with life or mana.
Resolve [[Saw in Half]], searching for [[Buried Alive]] and a suitable reanimation spell like [[Reanimate]].
Convoke [[Buried Alive]] by tapping both token copies of [[Hoarding Broodlord]] and paying [[symbol:bp]] with life or mana.
Search for [[Necrotic Ooze]]+[[Asmodeus the Archfiend]]+[[Skirge Familiar]].
Pay the cost of the reanimation spell, targeting [[Necrotic Ooze]], then proceed to the Necrotic Ooze combo.
[[Peer into the Abyss]], with K’rrik:
When [[Hoarding Broodlord]] enters the battlefield, search for [[Saw in Half]].
Convoke [[Saw in Half]] targeting [[Hoarding Broodlord]] by tapping it, K’rrik, and paying [[symbol:bp]] with life or mana.
Resolve [[Saw in Half]], searching for [[Sacrifice]] and [[Peer into the Abyss].
Convoke [[Sacrifice]] by tapping a token copy of [[Hoarding Broodlord]] and sacrificing it to generate [[symbol:bp]][[symbol:bp]][[symbol:bp]][[symbol:bp]][[symbol:bp]][[symbol:bp]][[symbol:bp]][[symbol:bp]].
Convoke [[Peer into the Abyss]] by tapping [[Hoarding Broodlord]] and paying [[symbol:bp]][[symbol:bp]][[symbol:bp]][[symbol:bp]][[symbol:bp]][[symbol:bp]].
[[Vilis, Broker of Blood]] + [[Sheoldred, the Apocalypse]] Combo:
With both [[Vilis, Broker of Blood]] and [[Sheoldred, the Apocalypse]] in play, pay life for activated abilities (e.g., [[Phyrexian Altar]], drawing cards through [[Necropotence]], or K'rrik discounts).
[[Sheoldred, the Apocalypse]] offsets life payments by gaining life whenever you draw cards.
[[Vilis, Broker of Blood]] triggers on life payments, drawing cards.
Continue the loop until you draw your deck.
Win Conditions
Gray Merchant of Asphodel can be looped with [[Chainer, Dementia Master]] and a sac outlet or manually killed, sacrificed, and reanimated through cards like [[Saw in Half]], [[Culling the Weak]], and [[Balthor the Defiled]] or [[Corpse Dance]].
Pestilence activations can kill the table after drawing your library if your life total is high enough due to [[Sheoldred the Apocalypse]] triggers or if you have protection from everything from the enters the battlefield trigger of [[The One Ring]].
With sufficiently high storm count generated through [[Bolas’s Citadel]] either through [[Necropotence]] activations or looping [[Sensei’s Divining Top]], a storm outlet like [[Aetherflux Reservoir]] can eliminate your opponents.
In sufficiently staxxed out board states, incremental drain from [[Pestilence]] and [[Braids, Arisen Nightmare]] and combat damage from your large, evasive creatures can close out grindy games.
[[Professor Onyx]] and [[Chain of Smog]] can drain your opponents.
Things to Keep in Mind
Know your pivots: [[Fleshwrither]] remains one of the best game-winning tutor targets into action restriction stax like [[Deafening Silence]] or [[Rule of Law]] - if you expect it in the meta, [[Chainer, Dementia Master]] can be quite valuable. Winning with [[Pestilence]] activations after drawing your deck with [[Sheoldred, the Apocalypse]] and [[Vilis, Broker of Blood]] will let you circumvent [[Grafdigger’s Cage]].
Use your words: While the deck may not run countermagic, you can still be an active and active participant in the game at instant speed. Sometimes it can be valuable to reveal that you have removal in hand to dissuade opponents from attacking to lower life total. The best interaction can be the interaction you never have to use.
Chain Tutoring: Many of the tutors in the deck are highly restrictive. Explore lines that use a restrictive tutor like [[Beseech the Mirror]] to find a less restrictive tutor [[Demonic Tutor]] that will find you your win.
Winning Without K’rrik: Your opponents likely know that your commander presents an extreme threat. Familiarize yourself with the ways the deck can function without him. [[Lake of the Dead]] is an incredible source mana advantage, and can accelerate you into a full-cost [[Peer into the Abyss]]. [[Buried Alive]] + a reanimation spell with three additional cards in hand will win you the game while your opponents think you’re locked out by [[Drannith Magistrate]].
[[Blood Celebrant]]: This card can not only convert life into colorless mana, it can do it while triggering [[Vilis, Broker of Blood]]. It can often be a priority tutor target.
[[Necropotence]] is best used judiciously to maintain card parity with other decks. Life is doubly important to us as a resource. While we can win at instant speed in response to a big activation, it is extremely risky.
Conclusion
[[K'rrik, Son of Yawgmoth]] is a high-risk, high-reward mono-black turbo deck that generates explosive, unparalleled mana advantage in the early game. This combined by a high density of both tutors and game-winning single cards makes it a threat from turn one. The complexity of the lines and complex multi-resource management makes wins easy to disrupt and difficult to pilot. Mastering sequencing, resource management, pivots, and tutor chains are the key to making the most of K'rrik’s potential.
