#ishkanah

You voted. You ignored Avacyn. Your $90 prayers have been answered.

So, we have a $90 deck. Our colors are Black and Green. Let us see what we can do with our Spider Queen. Before we go into the deck analysis. Well you can see the whole thing here. We’ll talk about the deck below.

Ishkanah, Grafwidow 

Finally a legendary Spider for a potential commander and a two color legendary spider no less. Ishkanah, as well as being a potential tribal commander, has Delirium and is probably in the best colors for it. She is a 3/5 for five mana with reach and the ability to put three 1/2 spiders tokens into play if you have four or more card types in your graveyard. Her black identity comes from her other ability which causes your opponents to lose life equal to the number of spiders you control.  

Spiders 

Spiders as a tribal are not great as there aren’t that many of them. They’re generally quite expensive and have high toughness and all of the ones I have in here have Reach. The best spiders in my opinion are Silklash Spider and Penumbra Spider as they are quite cheap and have quite powerful abilities. Other spiders could include Watcher in the Web, Arachnus Spider, Graverobber Spider and Netcaster Spider. Besides these there aren’t many other good spiders. There is a great fog spell called Arachnogenesis which prevents damage and can potentially produce a lot of spider tokens. 

Delirium and Self-Mill 

I lied, there is one other good spider, Nyx Weaver, which really has its place in this deck because of its ability to put cards from the top of your deck into your graveyard. This will allow more card types to be in the graveyard and trigger Delirium. Other cards that do this include Mesmeric Orb, Splinterfright and Codex Shredder. Delirium makes certain creatures better when there are four or more card types in your graveyard. Besides Ishkanah, there is Grim Flayer, Autumnal Gloom and Mindwrack Demon among others. Lord of Extinction is another potential advantage of having a large graveyard, especially if you can find a way to fling it at someone. *Cough* Jarad *Cough*.

Don’t get carried away 

You will need some of your library so don’t go dumping all of it into your graveyard. You will need some ways to utilize certain parts of your graveyard or at least to stop you from milling yourself out. Ulamog, the Infinite Gyre and/or Kozilek, Butcher of Truth both shuffle your graveyard back into your library when they enter it. Elixir of Immortality allows you to do this too. Perpetual Timepiece allows you to shuffle any number of cards back into your library which is even better because you can filter what you don’t need. Crucible or Worlds and Titania, Protector of Argoth both allow you to gain bonuses from land in your graveyard giving you the ability to play them from your graveyard or get tokens when they enter the graveyard. Splendid Reclamation allows then puts all lands from your graveyard into play which could be devastating if combined with Landfall.  

A Bit of Reanimation

Another potential advantage of delirium is having ways to cheat some of the larger creatures into play, fortunately there is an abundance of such abilities in these colors. Meren of Clan Nel Toth is one such example, easily gaining experience counters and returning larger creatures on your turn. There is other abilities such as Victimize, Animate Dead, Grimoire of the Dead and Rise of the Dark Realms.  

And Finally... 

Ishkanah is a fun and unique Golgari commander who focuses around the Shadows Over Innistrad mechanic delirium, and is the first and currently only Legendary Creature- Spider.

This deck will be a mixture of combo-centric gameplay and spider spamming (not to be confused with Spider Spawning, which sadly will not be appearing in this deck). The first few turns should be focused on enabling Delirium, so that by the time you cast Ishkanah, she is bringing along her little baby brood. Then, through blinking, the Nim Deathmantle +Altar combo, or simply casting her multiple times throughout the game, an army of spiders shall wrap up the game in a nice, neat little web! In case you missed this week’s tech card, Nim Deathmantle, you can find the link to that article here, explaining the combo: https://theposterchildofgrixis.wordpress.com/2017/08/01/an-equipment-by-any-other-nim-would-play-as-sweet/

Win conditions for the deck include the staple green finisher Craterhoof Behemoth, but also the two tribal anthems: Door of Destinies and Coat of Arms (or in this case, Coat of Legs), both of which were missing from the Radha Elfball deck.

        Besides the combo mass-production of spiders, there are also wonderful niche EDH cards within the tribe. There are silver bullets in the form of Acid Web Spider and Stingerfling Spider, and Nyx Weaver both enables delirium while also providing a means to reclaim anything necessary later in the game.

    The rest of the deck plays cards like Panharmonicon and Doubling Season to increase the number of spiders produced when Ishkanah enters the battlefield.

Myr Battlesphere is here for combo purpopses with Nim Deathmantle, added benefits with token doublers, two instances of card types for delirium, and because I just love myr!

http://tappedout.net/mtg-decks/spider-butt/

Thank you for reading! Feel free to comment and share and also request any other EDH decks you’d like to see me brew!

~The Poster Child of Grixis