#chainer

The new hotness however gives a far more potent and consistent Chainer Loop. K’rrik will replace the black mana requirement of Chainer’s ability with a 6 life payment which totals up to 9 life for instant speed reanimation. Kokusho will drain each opponent for 5 life gaining back 15 in a 4 player game and with the mana costs of Gary Chainer and K’rrik your Gray Merchant will drain for at least 7 gaining 21 life. So with any sacrifice outlet the loop is completed. When you get down to the last opponent you should have enough life to kill them, or with two more black symbols on your board Gary is still infinite. What makes this combo so powerful though is that it can be entirely assembled off of a Buried Alive. With Chainer in play Buried Alive and 3 black mana instantly activates the whole combo. You first activate Chainer to get K’rrik, then pay 9 to get Gary, then with the life you regained pay another 9 to get any creature based sac outlet. If that creature costs at least BB such as a Nantuko Shade then you have the full infinite even against a single opponent. The full combo can go off from 6 mana and at least 13 life with your commander in play. Since you do not use your hand after the Buried Alive you can go all in with Rituals and Lion’s Eye Diamond to set this up very early. Since Black has the best Tutors and you only need to resolve Buried Alive its very easy to set up this combo, and each 3 black mana (or 9 life if K’rrick got onto the field) is virtually a counter to interaction as the whole process is instant speed and can kill people in response. These combos seem a bit janky due to having many pieces, but most of the cards involved are powerful on their own and you can play a controlling game where you utilize Chainer for value and disruption until you can simply assemble any of these cards. These combos also have a lot of redundant parts. Even though there are a lot of cards that need to fall in place you will see them often and of course powerful draw and Tutors in black can simply fill in the gaps making the deck pretty consistent and resilient. Compare this to the new Chainer that is basically just an awkward Karador that staples haste onto creatures. You have to pay full cost and the discard outlet isn’t really advantageous as you could have cast the creature from your hand since there is no discount, and you are not gaining card advantage through reanimation since you still have to spend a card on it. (You also cannot play Hellbent Control because of the discard requirement but thats a article for another time). Chainer was once a powerful commander that was a low tier competitive deck. Cobblepott of the Lab Maniacs even tried to bring him to cEDH for a while (though he did not have overwhelming success). Chainer is simply too slow for cEDH and the lack of other colors does hurt. Back when Chainer was a more relevant face he competed with Karador who was prefered because of color identity, especially since the prefered combo of the time was Boonweaver Giant. K’rrik has definately added power to the deck, but he is still not cEDH. He is a really strong casual commander with a much better way to close the game with C19′s release, so he is worth giving a try.