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A lot of older players complain that new legendary creatures made withMagic: The Gathering’s Commander format in mind are all upsides, with none of the drawbacks they enjoyed building around. So why not pick a commander with a big drawback, like not being playable until you’re almost dead?
The Last Ride is exactly that commander: the higher your health, the weaker it gets, and it can’t even survive attacking until you’ve lost almost 75 percent of your life. But if you’ve got the drive to play a challenging deck, this one’s got the gas.
Magus of the Coffers
Magus of the Mirror
Peer into the Abyss
Swamp x27
Urbord, Tomb of Yawgmoth
War Room
This deck is designed to fit intoBracket 2: Core. While it can fit into Bracket 3: Upgraded with a handful of updates, one of the slots most in need of an upgrade is the commander itself.
The Commander
The Last Ride isa legendary 13/13 Vehicle with crew 2 and the ability to draw a card in exchange for two life and three mana(two generic, one black) for the paltry cost of one black mana to cast. But, of course, it has a major drawback: If you crew or attack with it when you have more than 12 life, it dies.
The Last Ride gets -X/-X, where X is your life total.If you have 13 or more life, it’s a 0/0, which means it dies as soon as it becomes a creature. Adding +1/+1 counters can help, but it can still die if you have too much life.
Making it indestructible doesn’t help either, since indestructible creatures still die if their toughness drops to zero.
Fortunately, Vehicles only count as creatures when they’re crewed (or under certain type-changing effects that are mostly in the blue color identity), which means thatyou can still use The Last Ride’s draw ability while early in the game, making it a consistent value engine which will slowly whittle you down until you can safely crew it.
Building The Deck
Despite being a modern Magic card, The Last Ride offers some classic black flavor and mechanics, allowing youto trade life for both card advantage and a huge creature, which makes it a good commander for a mono-black deck that almost feels like the legacy black stacks that many veteran players experienced in the late 90s.
Since it requires three mana and two life, The Last Ride doesn’t provide great value for hand advantage, but it is incredibly consistent:You can cast it from your command zone on turn onepractically every game and start drawing cards at instant speed by turn three.
There’s one important trap to pay attention to: while The Last Ride nominally has 13 power and can two-shot an opponent with commander damage,it has no evasion and getting it that big comes at the risk of dying to a Shock. Like other old-school black decks, risk comes with reward.
Usually, The Last Ride will do better as an early-game draw engine than as an attacker, but it’s nice to have that option available. In order to get your life low enough to be useful when needed,you should have a lot of ways to spend life, but also several ways to gain life back for when it gets too low.
Finally, you’ll need a panic button (plus backups!) to hit when an opponent wants to capitalize on your low life total.The deck features several ways to gain life or trade life totalswith opponents.
Ramp
Black has a surprisingly robust ramp package built around Swamps, with a couple ways to fetch them and several payoffs for controlling multiple Swamps.
The only Planeswalker in the deck, Liliana of the Dark Realms, has a +1 Loyalty ability that allows you to search your library for a Swamp and put it into your hand.As long as she’s in play, you won’t miss a land drop, but she also has a -6 ultimate ability to make all of your Swamps generate four black mana instead of one.
Crypt Ghast is a staple for mono-black decks, becauseit causes every Swamp to produce one more black mana. It also has the Extort ability, which allows you to gain life when you cast it, making it both a good early-game play for mana acceleration, and a decent late-game play to recover a bunch of life.
A similar, but less permanent effect comes from Bubbling Muck, whichmakes your Swamps produce one more mana for a turn and only costs one black mana itself. It can give you a slight advantage once you have two more Swamps than you need to cast it, and can still be used for big spells later in the game.
Cabal Coffers isone of the best payoffs for controlling multiple Swamps. Once you have three Swamps, or one more than you need to activate its ability, you can start getting way ahead in mana production, andMagus of the Coffers offers the same effect on a 4/4 body.
While 77 percent of the lands in the deck are already Swamps,Urborg, Tomb of Yawgmoth turn the rest into Swamps, allowing you to get black mana from lands that normally make colorless mana, like Reliquary Tower, while also empowering your Coffers and other Swamp-based effects.
Draw
The Last Ride provides consistent draw opportunities throughout the game, but it isn’t the most efficient method. If you draw into another draw effect, you can replace The Last Ride with it and save some mana or some life.
Continuing with the Swamp benefits, Dread Presence allows you todraw a card (and lose a life) each time you put a Swamp into play. If you need to gain life, deal with a pesky creature, or just have enough cards already, you can instead choose to deal two damage to any target and gain two life.
Erebos, God of the Dead has almost the same draw effect as The Last Ride, but one mana less expensive,making it a direct upgrade as long as you have more than eight life. It also prevents your opponents from gaining life, making it harder to recover from your attacks.
Greed might be the best version of this effect, since it reduces the cost down to one black mana and two life. It’s also the only version that’s never a creature or artifact, making it more difficult for opponents to remove.
While not technically draw effects, Dark Confidant and Darkstar Augur can both provide significant card advantage by giving youan extra card off the top of your deck each turnwhile making you lose life equal to the mana value. This can be as harmless as getting an extra land for nothing, or you could hit Shadow of Mortality and lose 15 life in one shot.
Keen Duelist has a similar effect, butyou and an opponent both reveal the top card and lose life equal to the mana value of the other’s card. While this deck includes some high-mana cards, it will often be a good idea to target an opponent who you know plays a deck with a low mana curve.
Life Swap
A lot of cards in this deck use your life as a resource, which means you’ll run out eventually. But these cards allow you touse someone else’s life as a resource! Or, rather, they allow you to pass your debt on to them.
Magus of the Mirroris the slowest version, requiring six mana, two turns, and limiting its effect to your upkeep. But it doesallow you to drop an opponent’s life low enough to swing for a killor hit them with an Exsanguinate during your main phase.
Profane Transfusion is more expensive at nine mana, but it switches the life total of any two players. Due to the nature of the deck,you’ll usually be the player with the lowest life, but you’re able to use this on two opponents, if needed. And since it also gives you a creature as big as the difference between the two players’ life totals, sometimes this will be the best play.
Soul Conduit is usually the most useful version, since it can be used at any time as long as it’s untapped, and you have six mana. You can use this to trade life with a player to make their next damage lethal, to protect yourself, or to interfere with the lifelink player’s strategy.
Soul Conduit can be used as a win conditionwith Platinum Angel, which keeps you in the game even if you have zero life remaining.
