Today’s deck tech is for the Oathbreaker format, officially recognized by Wizards of the Coast in March of 2023. Oathbreaker is an interesting take on the multiplayer MTG, allowing you both a Planeswalker* and a ‘signature spell**’ in the command zone. Both apply commander tax and you can only play your signature spell if your Planeswalker commander is on the battlefield. You also only have a 60 card deck and 20 life, giving you theoretically faster, more consistent games. Oh – and everyone’s playing red, because you have only 60 life to chew through instead of EDH’s 120. You can read the full rules for Oathbreaker here.

*Shorikai counts too. Thanks, rules lawyers. **only instants and sorceries are allowed

There is no EDHRec for Oathbreaker, giving you the feel of earlier EDH days where you are mostly up to your own devices when it comes to deck creation.

Today’s tech is a budget build with Tyvar, Jubilant Brawler as our commander and Life // Death as his signature spell. The deck revolves around playing, sacrificing, and reanimating Gray Merchant of Asphodel, colloquially known as Gary. Let’s go over Tyvar and his signature spell.

Tyvar Passive: You may activate abilities of creatures you control as though those creatures had haste.

This is a straightforward, strong ability that allows us to activate tap abilities on our creatures as soon as they come into play. You’re likely to see Tyvar show up on EDH rec for commanders who have tap abilities as it gives them pseudo haste.

Tyvar Ability +1: Untap up to one target creature

This in combination with his passive ability can really unlock powerful tap abilities, allowing you to not only use them instantly but also use it twice in a turn.

Tyvar Ability -2: Mill three cards, then you may return a creature card with mana value 2 or less from your graveyard to the battlefield

Tyvar comes with his own ability to reanimate creatures from the yard. We’ll lean heavily into self mill to better our odds of reanimating a creature. Beware though, activating this immediately leaves Tyvar with only 1 loyalty. With the amount of burn spells running around in Oathbreaker, you’re running a risk leaving his loyalty too low. Remember – if he’s not on the battlefield, you can’t cast your signature spell!

Signature Spell: Life // Death

Tyvar’s signature spell gives you two options, though the one we’ll be focusing on is Death. Death is Reanimate for extra but can only target creatures in your yard, damaging you for its mana value. Life can be an alternate win condition late game if needed, animating your lands as 1/1s for a hail Mary alpha strike.

The Graveyard as a Second Hand

I chose to build this deck in a way where almost card that gets milled has a chance to see play. The only card in the deck that doesn’t meet this requirement is Overwhelming Remorse. Every other card is either a creature (that can be reanimated), a spell with flashback or retrace, or a land that can be brought back with Worldshaper. This effectively makes our graveyard a second hand we can leverage.

Aside from Tyvar’s self mill ability, we have an endless supply of self-mill options in Golgari to chose from. Being a budget build, the selections for this deck are modest yet effective. Branchwood Prowler, Fa’adiyah Seer, Glowspore Shaman, Millikin, Nyx Weaver, Satyr Wayfinder, Skull Prophet, and Tapping at the Window all self-mill and provide some other value. Stinkweed Imp is also in the deck, providing us an option to Dredge 5 instead of drawing a card. This means roughly 15% of your deck allows you to self mill.

Shoutout to Fa’adiyah Seer – I just love this card but it’s quite narrow. This deck is the perfect home for this goofy card that just wants to see you make your land drops. “Is it a land? No? Get this garbage out of my face!”

We’re also running a couple discard outlets. This allows you the option of discarding more expensive creatures so you can reanimate them. Bog Witch turns any card in your hand into a Dark Ritual and Fauna Shaman allows you to search for the pieces you’re missing.

Looping Gary

Gray Merchant of Asphodel, aka Gary, has a potent enter the battlefield ability. Each opponent loses life equal to your devotion to black and you gain life equal to the total life lost this way. Playing him even once in a format where everyone’s life starts at 20 and there’s no commander damage swings life heavily in your favor. Playing him multiple times – you might outright just win.

Reanimation

Our signature spell, Death, allows us to reanimate Gary from the yard for a cost of 5 life. Each time you cast Death you’ll need to pay an additional 2 commander tax, eventually making this a costly endeavor. In addition, if Tyvar’s not on the battlefield, you can’t cast this spell to start with. So let’s run a few additional ways to reanimate as backup options.

Doomed Necromancer sacrifices himself to bring back another creature. Good flavor text too. Poor guy, just wanted to raise some zombos. Whisper, Blood Liturgist learned from doomed necromancer’s mistake and sacrifices two other creatures to reanimate. Dread Return allows you to reanimate twice – once for and once for its flashback cost of sacrificing 3 other creatures. Dread Return works quite nicely because even if you self mill it you can play it for its flashback cost.

Nyx Weaver and Eternal Witness don’t reanimate but can bring any card from your yard to your hand.

Getting Gary in the Yard

Playing or reanimating Gary once is only part of the puzzle. We need ways to get him back in the yard from the battlefield to continue trigger his ETB.

Viscera Seer is the most straightforward option, allowing you to sacrifice any creature to scry 1.

Demon’s Disciple and Plaguecrafter are great options to include as better versions of Fleshbag Marauder. They each enter the battlefield with an ability that requires every player to sacrifice a creature or Planeswalker. Plaguecrafter power creeps even further by saying any player who can’t discards a card. For you, this means sacrificing Gary (or Plaguecrafter/Disciple if you plan on reanimating for a soft board wipe). For your opponents, not even their Planeswalkers are safe if they have an otherwise empty board.

Whisper, Blood Liturgist we discussed as someone who can reanimate, but he also is a sac outlet, making him a two for one in this deck. Note that you can sacrifice Gary, use Tyvar to untap Whisper, and then reanimate Gary with Whisper. Spicy!

Similarly, Dread Return is a two-for-one as its flashback cost is a sacrifice outlet as well. You can sacrifice Gary to bring back someone like a Doomed Necromancer who in turn will sacrifice himself to bring back Gary. Poor guy just can’t get it right!

Fauna Shaman & Bog Witch won’t get Gary in the yard from the battlefield but they will do so from your hand. Bog Witch can turn Gary into a Dark Ritual and use the mana to cast Death, a nifty combo to bring out Gary at a discount. I considered running discard outlets when building my Glissa, the Traitor deck as an additional way to get artifacts in the graveyard, but ultimately decided playing cheap self-sacrificing artifacts made more sense.

Value Cards & Alternate Win Conditions

Quality Includes

Deathbloom Ritualist is often the card that wins you the game. With the quantity of creatures in your graveyard, she can tap for so much mana to allow you to play a ton of spells in one turn. You can play around trying to sacrifice and reanimate her, or untap her with Tyvar, to keep the mana flowing.

Fauna Shaman – “We have Survival of the Fittest at home” – allows you to dig through your deck for the specific creatures you want while also filling your yard with reanimation targets. With Tyvar, you can do this twice in a turn. You can discard a creature to go get Gary, discard Gary to go get Deathbloom Ritualist. Next get a Viscera Seer and bam, you’re on your way to victory.

Necrotic Ooze is an excellent addition to this deck. A known combo piece, he does work for us by having all activated abilities of all creatures in our graveyard. He can copy Viscera Seer‘s sac outlet, Deathbloom Ritualist‘s mana generation, Whisper or Doomed Necromancer‘s reanimation ability. You can use Devoted Druid‘s untap ability to keep tapping Nooze.

Vengeful Pharaoh is a fun include, providing a rattlesnake effect deterring your opponents from attacking you. Whenever you or a Planeswalker you control take combat damage, if he’s in your yard, destroy target attacking creature and put Pharaoh on top of your library. With instant self mill options like Millikin, Fa’adiyah Seer or Skull Prophet to get the Pharaoh back in the yard before you draw him into your hand.

Using Tyvar’s -2 to reanimate Blanchwood Prowler, Glowspore Shaman or Satyr Wayfinder can quickly put nearly 10% of your deck in your graveyard. As previously mentioned, be wary of Tyvar being targeted with low Loyalty!

Alternate Win conditions

It turns out people exile creatures and graveyards, kill your Planeswalker, and generally get the way of your well laid plans. Let’s discuss a few of the alternate win conditions for when things aren’t going quite to plan.

Dusk Mangler is our only alternative to Gary. Typically not as effective at draining life, he is more punishing to your opponents board states and hands. Note that you don’t need to pay his additional cost if you’re reanimating him. Be mindful you’ll lose 7 life yourself if you brought him in with Death and he doesn’t heal you so you may need to make use of your other reanimation abilities.

Token Generation

We run a few ways to make a large amount of tokens. This can be useful for Dread Return and Whisper who demand fodder for their reanimation. However, this is more here as an alternate win condition to go wide when your other plans have failed.

Worm Harvest creates you 1/1 tokens for each land in your graveyard and can be cast with Retrace. Retrace allows you to cast it from the graveyard by paying its cost and discarding a land, synergizing with itself.

Whenever Kessig Cagebreakers attacks, he will get you a 2/2 tapped and attacking wolf for each creature card in your graveyard. Over half of our deck is creatures, we love self milling, this guy can easily be an army in a can. We don’t have any real haste in the deck though so it will be a turn cycle before he can attack unless you reanimate him at instant speed on an opponent’s turn.

Similarly, Ghoulcaller’s Harvest will get you X 2/2 black Zombies with decayed equal to half the number of creature cards in your graveyard rounded up. You can cast this from your hand for and flash it back with .

Creakwood Liege buffs all of your creatures (except Millikin[/c]) and generates a 1/1 (secretly a 3/3) on your upkeep. Can help beef up your board to block against more aggressive attackers.

We’re running Worldshaper and Life is our signature spell. Worldshaper mills 3 whenever he attacks. When he dies, he returns all lands from our graveyard to our hand. This is generally useful as we run a number of ways to get him into our graveyard, so he can just end up being a rather large ramp spell a-la Splendid Reclamation. In combination with Life, you can turn all of your lands into 1/1s, attack with them, and then sacrifice World Shaper to bring all lands that died back to your battlefield tapped.

This is counter-synergy with Worm Harvest but hey, these are backup win cons after all!

Sample Deck List & Cost

At the time of writing, this deck clocks in at around $40, with the more expensive cards being World Shaper around $4 and Necrotic Ooze around $2. Shop around at your local LGS and you could bring the cost even lower!

Thinking of playing the deck? Got ideas for improvement? Comment below!