(Lim-Dûl the Necromancer | Art by Matt Cavotta)

Technically Playable - Lim-Dûl the Necromancer

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:

It's no secret that I'm a massive fan of reanimation, and recently I've begun dipping my toes more and more into theft effects. That way, the power level of my deck is often on a similar (or sometimes lower) power level to the rest of the table therefore, theoretically, ensuring I am never playing a deck that is completely mismatched with the others.

With that in mind, let's jump into talking about Lim-Dûl the Necromancer, a commander that works on both of those facets.

Reanimating Your Opponents' Creatures

The way that makes the most sense to play this deck (at least in my mind) is the same way people used to play Kalitas, Traitor of Ghet in Standard.

By landing Lim-Dûl or Kalitas with the mana to remove creatures you give yourself the ability to not only keep yourself alive and your opponent's boards less dangerous but also give yourself the ability to build your own board over time.

Of course, Lim-Dûl is a little harder since you need the mana for the removal and Lim-Dûl's ability but you can get around that with some cheap removal like Defile or even free removal spells like Snuff Out.

The other way of getting around the high cost of Lim-Dûl is to run redundancy, the main version of this is Grave Betrayal as this gives you effectively a second version of your commander that doesn't require you to pay an additional two mana every time a creature dies.

This works particularly well with some of the more powerful boardwipes like Decree of Pain or Blood Money that give you a benefit as well as wiping the board meaning you will not only have a one-sided boardwipe thanks to Grave Betrayal[/el] but you will get a ton of resources from the spell itself as well.

Obviously, the boardwipes and removal that have a low cost or an extra benefit are ideal in this deck due to Lim-Dûl's extremely high cost but realistically any removal works well in this deck.

Boardwipes in particular are great because of the way that death triggers work. Even if Lim-Dûl is in play if he dies to the boardwipe at the same time as other creatures he still "sees" them die. This means you will get a trigger for each creature and it will allow you to pick and choose how to use your mana based on which creatures you want to save.

The ideal situation here is playing Lim-Dûl and then using a board wipe the next turn because if you have something like Damnation, you will almost definitely have enough mana to return two creatures. But you can also use Cabal Coffers and Urborg, Tomb of Yawgmoth together to have tons of mana to be able to play Lim-Dûl and hold up mana to reanimate creatures.

Of course, this also makes Lim-Dûl great against opposing board wipes as well as long as you have some mana lying around to use.

But we don't have to rely on Lim-Dûl and Grave Betrayal to take our opponent's creatures, we have plenty of ways to rip them straight out of our opponent's decks.

If you read my last article about Captain N'ghathrod you'll know I've been really hot on Brainstealer Dragon. It is a very expensive creature to play but I think it has a really high ceiling in terms of power level, if you can keep it alive for a turn cycle it can really quickly take over a game.

We also have access to some older ways to steal cards from decks. While we don't have Bribery we do have Praetor's Grasp. This card is particularly flexible because it can act as a silver bullet to remove a combo piece, find an answer to the current board, or even just grab someone else's Sol Ring to help pay for Lim-Dûl's commander tax.

Lastly is mono-black Etali, Primal Conqueror (yes I'm still dying on this hill), Breach the Multiverse. One of the best ways to take cards from our opponent's decks as it allows us to hit each player, including ourselves while also fuelling graveyards which we could use as a resource since we're playing black.

What is funny is playing Breach the Multiverse and then casting an opponent's Etali, or even an opponent's Breach to start a hilarious chain.

Reanimating Your Own Creatures ("Keep your hands off my graveyard!" -My opponents probably)

Lim-Dûl is great at using other people's decks against them, but we might want to have our own threats in case our seven-mana value commander doesn't last very long (spoiler: that will be often).

But we can still keep the deck on theme and go with a powerful reanimation package. These tend to be made up of two parts:

The first is getting stuff into your graveyard.

The second is making sure those cards are threatening enough to either act as a lightning rod for removal to keep something else alive or are threatening enough to simply end the game.

For filling our graveyard there are as many options as there are decks that want the effect. In black we have arguably the best options out there. Buried Alive and Entomb are probably the two best cards you can play.

Both allow you to search for the exact cards you want in your graveyard and being a low mana value means you can start to set up in the earlier turns of the game, with Entomb even allowing some really powerful plays as early as turn two.

The other benefit of Entomb is that it allows you to search for any card, not just creatures.

This means you can even search for something like Dakmor Salvage or a flashback card like Dread Return. But these two aren't the only ways to fill our graveyard.

I'm personally a huge fan of dredge and being able to Buried Alive for Golgari Thug and Stinkweed Imp lets you turbo-fill your graveyard with tons of threats that you can then bring back en-masse with Living Death or even do it at instant speed with Twilight's Call.

When it comes to the actual reanimation, again black gives us the best options in the game. I've already mentioned Dread Return which is amazing because you can Entomb it, but even if you draw it, being able to use this spell twice can swing some games in your favor very quickly.

We can also use the reanimation auras. The best of these are Animate Dead and Necromancy, since they are cheap, and Necromancy, has the ability to be cast at instant speed which definitely makes up for the cost of having to get rid of the creature at the end of the turn since you can just reanimate something with a powerful effect when it enters.

If don't want to risk running into enchantment removal you can also use Reanimate, probably the best reanimation spell in the game (I mean, the archetype is named after it) and if you're looking to return non-legendaries you can use Persist which also has an incredibly low mana value.

Now onto the fun part, the reanimation targets.

Personally, I've always been a fan of being able to reanimate huge legendary creatures like Sheoldred, Whispering One, Vilis, Broker of Blood, and of course Griselbrand (but obviously this one is banned sadly...).

Duskmourne also gives us Valgavoth, Terror Eater, a huge nine mana 9/9 that gives you another Lim-Dûl that allows you to pay life instead of mana to bring back dead creatures.

But recently we've seen more and more non-legendaries making Persist particularly good. If you look to the past of course you have Grave Titan and Sepulchral Primordial, old-timey beaters that really start to show my age.

But in recent years you've had cards like Bloodletter of Aclazotz[ and Archon of Cruelty who really put the threats we used to worry about to shame.

My favorite thing about adding a reanimation package to your deck is that you can completely tailor it to the power level of your playgroup, are they running high-powered decks?

Play something like Sheoldred, Whispering One or Archon of Cruelty. Is your playgroup lower-powered? Maybe go with a Zombie theme and run stuff like Undead Warchief and Headless Rider.

Being able to be so flexible means you could even run a sideboard of reanimation targets, shuffle them, and add a randomized selection to your deck every game.

The goal is just to make sure everyone has a good time!

As with all Technically Playable articles, this was a very quick look at Lim-Dûl the Necromancer as a commander, and a few of the cards that can really make a deck with Lim-Dûl as the commander tick.

Let me know in the comments below if you play Lim-Dûl the Necromancer, if you want to build a Lim-Dûl the Necromancer deck, or even if you just enjoyed this article!

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