(Captain N'ghathrod | Art by Andrey Kuzinskiy)

Technically Playable - Captain N'ghathrod

Welcome to Technically Playable, where our mission statement is "Every commander is Technically playable" (the best kind of playable). The way this works is every article will have a commander generated using EDHREC's random button, I'll talk through the card and then write about how we can build around it!

This week's random commander is:

Horr(or)ifying Synergy & Milling Out The Table

Some might consider Captain N'ghathrod a Horror commander. While he does give all Horrors you control menace and mill based on the damage they deal, I'm not sure I agree.

However, with that in mind, I do think that there are a lot of Horrors that have amazing synergy with N'ghathrod. Uchuulon is a really good example as it gets bigger the more Horrors you control, allowing you to mill more cards when it hits your opponents which in turn, lets you to use its second ability more consistently to make more copies of Uchuulon.

You can then mill more cards and get exponentially more Crab Horrors. This increased power also works really well with the menace that N'ghathrod gives to your Horrors as it makes double blocking less appealing because no one wants to trade two creatures into a token.

But Uchuulon is not the only great Horror synergy we have; there are plenty of noncreatures that also work well with the Horror theme. Psionic Ritual is a really powerful spell that allows you to play an instant or sorcery from any graveyard (which you've been filling up all game) for free.

This is amazing because it allows you access to a lot of cards you may not be able to use in blue and black, like Farewell or Last March of the Ents, while also preventing your opponents from recasting those spells by exiling them.

On top of an already great card, if you have a single untapped Horror in play, you can copy the spell. If we use the example above, having one Horror would allow you to wipe the entire board with something and then use a card like Last March of the Ents to put all of your creatures into play.

Obviously, this is magical Christmasland in terms of what the card can do but even just grabbing two removal spells in a pinch is really powerful too, especially if you need to remove an artifact or enchantment which blue and black are infamously bad at.

The Horror synergy continues with Endless Evil, an aura that makes a 1/1 copy of a creature every turn and then returns to your hand if the enchantment creature dies, and is a Horror. A lot of Horrors have powerful static abilities that allow them to be useful even if they have low power and toughness.

The first that comes to mind is Consuming Aberration which will mill your opponents for potentially a huge amount every time they cast a spell. If we look at some higher-cost creatures, you can also make a bunch of copies of Hullbreaker Horror to keep your opponent's boards permanently empty or even Brainstealer Dragon to play all of your opponent's decks instead of yours.

The other side of the Captain N'ghathrod coin is, of course, mill. His second ability relies on you putting cards into your opponent's graveyard from their library so that you can steal them. There are a lot of amazing options here like Nemesis of Reason, Terisian Mindbreaker, and even Cut Your Losses/Traumatize, but these are all single-target.

I feel like N'ghathrod would benefit much more from spells that mill everyone equally because this will then give you more options of different creatures you can potentially grab in your end step. If you want to really have a ton of options of creatures to take Maddening Cacophony is particularly good, milling half of all of your opponent's decks giving you a smorgasbord of creatures to steal.

In fact, it works particularly well if you also have Strionic Resonator, Lithoform Engine, or Roaming Throne to give you multiple opportunities to steal from this huge selection.

Maddening Cacophony is probably the best option to see as many cards as possible but at a steep six mana, it's quite expensive for a non-green deck. This is fine as a finisher but we also need some more efficient ways of getting creatures into our opponents' graveyards.

As a one-off, Fractured Sanity is probably one of the most efficient ways to do this, milling fourteen cards for only three mana while also giving you an un-counterable instant speed option to cycle it and make everyone mill four instead. I love modal cards so this is already great in my book but I think the flexibility and efficiency of Fractured Sanity make it a must-include, even if you can only use it once.

People must agree with me since it's in a whopping 85% of N'ghathrod decks. There are of course other options though: Drown in Dreams is another great mana sink and modal spell that lets you use both modes if you control your commander milling your opponents and giving you access to more resources, but I think the best and most thematic option for N'ghathrod is Extract from Darkness.

This card does everything that this deck wants by milling your opponents and then taking a creature right away while also giving you five other options to choose from with N'ghathrod in your end step, an amazing card for this deck.

But again, I'm not a massive fan of only running cards that do things once. I think in 2024's Commander you really need some element of resilience in your effects and you need to get more than just one use out of them. I've already talked about Consuming Aberration above and I think it's a great example of a card that allows you to fuel graveyards consistently, and in huge amounts.

I've talked before about how much of a fan I am of mill in Commander and about Phenax, God of Deception in particular. In decks like Captain N'ghathrod where you are milling but also working with creatures (unlike something like Bruvac the Grandiloquent, which is tapping its creatures for other abilities) I think Phenax is an amazing fit and allows you to mill your opponent without ever having to risk your creatures in combat.

Cards like Uchuulon, for example, work amazingly well with N'ghathrod as they get higher power but they also only have four toughness putting them at risk in combat. Phenax gets around this and allows you to activate them at instant speed giving you the ability to block and then mill in your opponent's turns if you really need to.

Pirating

So we've looked at how Captain N'ghathrod synergizes with Horrors and their innate milling potential, but he's not just a Horror, he's a Horror Pirate, which means only one thing. Pillaging. There are a lot of different ways we can steal from our opponents; from their hands, from their graveyard, even straight from their deck, and we're going to utilize all of them.

The first and probably the one with the least options is stealing cards from our opponent's hands. One of the best ways to do this is with Dauthi Voidwalker and any kind of discard. Thoughtseize is one that immediately comes to mind because of the way people have been using these cards in combination in Modern against Tron decks, stealing their Ulamog, the Ceaseless Hunger and playing it for free.

But that seems pretty low impact in Commander, so I'd probably be looking at cards like Windfall and Wheel and Deal to get a ton of potential options for theft.

This is really powerful but Dauthi Voidwalker seems a bit like cheating to put into this section since it can steal cards that go into graveyards from anywhere. On the other hand, Treacherous Urge feels a bit more like a Technically Playable card (only being in 1,880 decks since its first printing in 2007) which basically acts like a Puppeteer Clique from your opponent's hand. I recently added this to my The Beast, Deathless Prince deck, I've cast it once and it whiffed, my kind of Commander card.

If you want to stick with the Horror theme you can also use Elder Brain to repeatedly make people exile their hands, giving you access to any of the cards exiled giving you en-masse theft, but be warned, if you're not ready to protect it Elder Brain is a huge lightning rod for removal and will be killed on-sight if your opponents have ever had the misfortune of playing against it before.

I am a huge graveyard fan. I play the Goblin persist combo in Pauper, I played Grishoalbrand in Modern, and Reanimator in Legacy. When it comes to putting cards into graveyards and then putting them into play I have a deep-seated love for the strategy.

One of my favorite plays in Legacy was always using Animate Dead and Reanimate to turn my opponent's strategy on them, giving me time to set up a good combo turn to get Griselbrand into play safely.

While I do think Animate Dead and Reanimate are still amazing cards in Commander and that any deck with graveyard interactions should definitely run them, I also think that sometimes a single creature rarely gets you across the line.

In my playgroup we've seen a shift from board wipes to efficient, single-target removal, and if I were to Reanimate a single, powerful creature it would eat a Generous Gift or Swords to Plowshares within seconds. With that in mind, I think if your plan is to steal creatures from graveyards you should be looking more towards cards that get you multiple creatures.

Rise of the Dark Realms is a classic but I feel like Dredge the Mire often gets overlooked because your opponents make the choice however I think this works to your benefit in two ways: Firstly I think giving your opponent's choices always makes cards like these easier for people to see as less powerful (which is why it's been overlooked in the first place) and therefore make you less of a target.

Secondly, I feel like with the power level of Commander now the likelihood of getting some trash draft uncommon is fairly low, so for four mana getting two or three powerful creatures and a good utility creature is actually a very good rate.

Finally, we have the last of the different places we can steal from: the library. I personally feel that Etali, Primal Conqueror is the absolute king of stealing cards from your opponent, but what if I told you that Breach the Multiverse is just the mono-black sorcery version of Etali?

Well, it is and I won't be hearing anything to the contrary. But for N'ghathrod it does a ton of work, not only does it steal cards from your opponents when you play it but it also mills allowing you to steal more cards with Dredge the Mire or Reanimate while also giving you options for N'ghathrod's ability.

I've started to add Breach the Multiverse to all of my black Commander decks and I think it's probably the best card in N'ghathrod. While it's the best, Breach the Multiverse is far from the only way to steal directly from your opponent's deck. Another card I've recently put into The Beast, Deathless Prince, and one I briefly touched on above is Brainstealer Dragon.

This is another card that is quite expensive to play for a non-green deck, being a huge seven mana, but the payoff is amazing. If the dragon lives a whole turn cycle the potential damage that you can deal is massive and it gives you a quick way to close games out which is something I feel that theft decks often struggle with since you're reliant on both the card quality in your opponent's decks, the lack of synergy between the cards you're playing while also battling against cards like Homeward Path which you simply fold to.

As with all Technically Playable articles, this was a very quick look at Captain N'ghathrod as a commander, and a few of the cards that can really make a deck with N'ghathrod as the commander tick. Let me know in the comments below if you play Captain N'ghathrod, if you want to build a Captain N'ghathrod deck, or even if you just enjoyed this article!

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