What's up Wizards, it's time for Rule Zero, the show that helps you prepare for the best game of Commander. I'm Sean, it is our hope that through our decades of experience playing EDH, cultivating a great playgroup, tons of great decks, and also trying a lot of outside the box variants and homebrew rules, that we can pass that golden knowledge on to you. This week we're covering one of the most infamous characters in all of Dungeons and Dragons, but one that was brought to life, or brought to unlife rather, in Magic the Gathering and the Adventures in the Forgotten Realm set. We are covering Aserarak, also known as the Devourer, the Lord of Unlife, Aserarak of the Scarlet Rogues. Yes, this is a deadly lich that resides in a horrific tomb that was created by the initial or original creator of D& D, Gary Gygax, in 1975 for a convention that happened called Origins 1. Gygax designed this adventure both to challenge everyone that was playing, particularly those who called themselves quote unquote expert players. and thought that they could best any challenge. He took that mantle up and decided to make one of the most long lasting, most beloved, but also terrifying adventures that would ever happen in Dungeons and Dragons. And so, Acererak was brought to Magic the Gathering as one of the most iconic characters of the realm and it has lived on in almost every edition of D& D since. So, we, ironically, will not be venturing into Acererak's tomb of horrors because it's If we were to do that, our adventure, just like every other player character's adventure who's ended, uh, or has ended up there, would die. In terms of Magic the Gathering, we would not be able to run any more dungeons with Acererak if we go there. And so without further ado, let's go ahead and introduce this Arch Lich himself, itself, and uh, talk about what the game plan is for this deck. Acererak, the Arch Lich. For two and a black, you get a 5 5 Legendary Creature Zombie. When Acererak the Archfletch enters, if you haven't completed Tomb of Annihilation, return Acererak the Archfletch to its owner's hand and venture into the dungeon. Whenever Acererak the Archfletch attacks, for each opponent, you create a 2 2 black zombie creature token unless that player sacrifices a creature. So, we are never going to complete the Tomb of Annihilation dungeon, which is one of three different dungeons that were created in the Adventures in the Forgotten Realms D& D set. However, we Don't need to. And instead we will be traveling mostly through two other dungeons, which I will share on the screen right now. The first one we go into is often the lost mind of fan delver. The first room is a scry one. The second gives us the option of creating a treasure or a goblin, depending on whether or not there's pressure on the board trying to attack us, or if we need to have more manna ramp from those two rooms. We have a couple different options, but I often choose the treasure room. So from that point on, you can either. Cause each opponent to lose one life and you gain one life, or you can give a target trouble creature, maybe even like a commander, a Voltron commander, negative four, negative zero. And then the final room of the Lost Mine of Phandelver is to draw a card. It's a pretty, a pretty quick dungeon that you can get through in the early game. And so it helps you get to the final place where Acererak will thrive. And ultimately this is where we will run, quote unquote, the dungeon, just constantly bouncing the lich. Up and down in his own little bounce castle until he gets through the dungeon of the mad mage. The first room in that is where you gain one life. We're not going to talk about the descriptors. If you play D and D, you know, the descriptors, they seem kind of cool. Like this is the yawning portal or whatever, but we're not going to talk about those because we're just going to save some time. We really just care about what the effect is. The second room scribe one. After that, we have a choice. We can either create a treasure token or we can have target creature not attack until our next turn. Um, Use as you wish. Often I'll get just the treasure though. Next we scry two, then we can either exile the top two cards. Now that we've seen both of them, perhaps if we've left them on top with that previous scry, or we can create two black skeletons if we just need some more blockers. Finally, we have scry three and leading into the ultimate, so to speak of this dungeon, the mad wizard's lair, draw three cards and reveal them to everybody. You may cast one of them without paying its mana cost. So, We're going to set up through six different scrys in this dungeon, hopefully a payoff card that allows a Sarirac to either keep going back through this dungeon. Cause once you complete one dungeon, you just reenter it and keep going or something that like reduces his mana cost or something that pays off in that every time a Sarirac will bounce from that point on, he will be able to drain the board of life. Just like a lich would like to do. It's very important to realize that this deck is a combo deck. So besides having tutors and all kinds of stuff like that in the deck, we have a lot of redundancy built in. And so you may be able to draw into the combos that you're looking for. And the dungeon of the mad mage is really the best dungeon for that. So let's kind of briefly go over some numbers of what we're looking at here. This dungeon allows you to. Gain one life, scry a total of six times in three different rooms, create a treasure token and make two black skeletons before the payoff happens. So the payoff is that you get to draw three cards and then cast one of those cards. Now, if you're looking for maximum value and you're doing your utmost to try and dig into an answer or into a combo piece, say I'm trying to dig into a, a, uh, uh, blackboard wipe or something like that, a toxic deluge, for instance, then this is a really incredible dungeon. Think about how many cards you're getting to see. If you were to completely maximize this dungeon, not only do you get to scry six cards to the bottom, but you also get to. Instead of making two skeletons in that second to last room, you may be able to exile the top two cards and then cast them off the top. You still have to pay for them, but you could scry six to the bottom, exile two more cards. That's a total of eight. And in the final room, you're getting to draw three more and cast one of those for free. That's a total of 11 cards deep into your deck. That's a really incredible rate. And it's one of the reasons that this deck is pretty good at finding what it needs in the moment, even if you don't have like a vampiric or a demonic tutor, because you may be able to draw into one of those if nothing else. Without further ado, let's talk about one of the two types of cards that you want to run in this deck for sure. And we're going to use our Moxfield homepage just to kind of go through the cards very quickly and organically. Show you what we're talking about for the podcast version. I'll read the cards out loud that are important So you're not going to be left out in the cold First we want cost reducers for acererak Then we want payoffs for casting acererak the archlich over and over and over again in his little bounce castle of delights So the cost reducers in this case will be cards Like Defiler of Flesh, a card that helps us go infinite in some cases, for two colorless, two black, and creature of Phyrexian horror 4 4, has met us as an additional cast of the Is an additional cost to cast a black permanent spell you may pay two life Those spells cost one black less to cast if you paid life this way This effect reduces only the amount of black mana you pay Then there's this added piece where if you play a black permanent spell, then you can kind of give a plus one plus one Uh temporary buff to a creature and menace Um, that's not really going to come into play that often unless for some reason you can You know Swing with a skeleton or something like that to deal a lot of damage. I mean, I guess it could happen. Sure. Let's not rule it out. Um, but what this card is here for, if you haven't put it together yet, is that it turns the black pip in a Sarirac's mana cost into a Phyrexian mana. So that means that you could use two life instead of paying any mana at all. And if you have another cost reducer on the table, something that makes your creature spells cost one or two less, or you have multiples of the ones that make it cost one less, which is totally doable, then the Sarirac is technically free. only costs two life with the Aetherflux Reservoir, which is a card we'll show, which is one of your key win cons in the whole deck and something that you don't need to have, but it's good to have. It's an easy way to win. Um, that life loss will be totally negated. And then from that point, um, you will just be able to win. You'll just be able to go infinite and dome everyone for a jillion life. Aetherflux Reservoir, four mana artifact. Whenever you cast a spell, you gain one life for each spell you've cast this turn. That's why it's important to kind of keep track of the storm count in this deck. And, you pay 50 life, colon, Aetherflux Reservoir deals 50 damage. 50! To target creature or player. Why you would want to do that to a creature? I have no idea, but hopefully You don't have to for some reason because that would be really scary But yeah, you just don't people for 50 with this and so with the filer of flesh on the table Now let's go ahead and pull him up again that that Phyrexian mana for the one black mana will quickly be negated Um, but yeah As you'll be gaining 2, 3, 4, 5 life for every single time you've cast the Sarirac, so you'll start to gain more life actually, and then be able to go on your merry way. Um, another cost reducer that we use in the deck is Joyverse Familiar, 4 mana, artifact creature bird, 2, 2, historic spells cost 1 less to cast. That is a Sarirac, he is a historic creature. Then we have Undead Warchief, 2 colorless, 2 black, creature zombie, 1, 1, zombie spells cost 1 less to cast, a Sarirac. Guess what? He's a zombie. Then, further on, we have some other cost reducers. And in this, I might even add like, what are cards that make us a ton of mana? So let's not pass up this fun one. Bubbling Muck for one black sorcery until in a turn, whenever a player taps a swamp for mana, it produces an additional black mana. You know what that sounds like? Sounds like high tide for swamps. And in this deck, we run almost I don't know, like 85 percent basic swamps. So all of our swamps are going to make two now. Great times. Another is the card that does this occasionally. Liliana of the Dark Realms, two colorless, two black, three loyalty planeswalker. Liliana searches for a swamp, puts it into your hand as the plus one. However, if you get to the negative six emblem, then you are living the dream, friends, because the emblem says swamps you control have tapped to add four black mana to your mana pool. There's another old alliances land that does this same trick. Leave it to the trivia buffs out there. Tell me what it is. I used to own one and then I traded off because it's selling for like 50, 60 bucks at that time and probably more now as it's on the reserve list. So let's go to further down cost reducers in the artifact section of the deck. As we're flipping around, here we go. We have none other than Jet Medallion, two colorless, artifact, black spells cost one less to cast, boom, that's great. Bantu's Monument, three colorless, legendary artifact, black creature spells cost one less to cast, and whenever you cast a creature spell, you drain all opponents for one, you gain one life. That's a win con in itself, and a cost reducer all in one beautiful package. Next, Cloud Key, three colorless, as Cloud Key comes into play, it's a win. Choose artifact, creature, enchantment, instant, or sorcery. You choose creature. Spells of the chosen type cost one less to cast. Harald's Horn. Again, redundancy is one of the key things to this deck. Harald's Horn. Choose a creature type, creatures of the chosen type. You choose zombie, cost one less to cast at the beginning of your upkeep. Then you can look at the top of your library. You might find a zombie there with this ability. And if you do, you can put that card in your hand and then you draw for turn. So you draw two cards effectively, even though you have to reveal the zombie to everyone else. Another card that does cost reduction, Semblance Anvil. For three colorless artifact imprint wins Semblance Anvil. You may exile a non land card from your hand. So, what you want to exile usually would be a creature, but if you can get artifact creature, if you can exile, say, that Joyrus Familiar from earlier, what you can do is you can reduce the cost of all artifacts by two, and Reduce all creatures by two because whatever is imprinted on symbol example, um, whatever types could be multiple types, right? Those types get negative two to their mana cost basically. Um, so this is a pretty powerful card, but it's incumbent that you have something else in your hand. So every once in a while it will sit and rot. The power level of it is so high though that I think you'll be safe playing it. Um, another card that increases all your mana By a bajillion, cage son, six mana, artifact, as it enters the battlefield, choose a color, we choose black, guess what? Creatures of the chosen type get plus one, plus one, and whenever it lands, ability. causes you to add one or more mana of the chosen color, add one additional mana of that color. What an insane way to say, when you tap your land, add one extra mana. Um, so everything makes double. Another card that we have from the newer Wilds of Eldraine commander set, I think is Throne of Eldraine for five colorless. Um, Legendary Artifact. Enters the battlefield, choose a color, you choose black, then you can tap to add four mana of the chosen color. Spend this mana only to cast mono colored spells, not a problem. And then you can pay three, tap it, draw two cards, spend only mana of the chosen color to activate this ability. Again, mono colored decks can profit highly off of Throne of Eldraine, and this deck is no different than that. Another card that buffs up your mana production, Carnival of souls for one and a black you get to run this hilarious looking art Um an enchantment whenever a creature comes into play you lose one life But you gain a black mana and so this will help you in the mid game I think mostly in making a cererak technically cost two Although he casts it costs three to put him out. Initially. You'll get one black mana back for it again You're losing life while you're doing this but life is a resource for a lich Um, or Unlife, I guess. And then another card that reduces cost. Heartless Summoning. 1 and a black enchantment. Creature spells you cast cost 2 less to cast. Creatures you control get negative 1, negative 1. That doesn't matter much. The only time this will matter is when you have skeletons on the board. They would die automatically. Um, and the dungeon that we talked about that you go through has skeletons. So that may impact you a little bit. Um, but either way, it makes it right. One man at a cost to cast. And that is what the deck is trying to do. Now, how do we pay off? We talked about aetherflux reservoir already. That is the ultimate payoff, I think, in the deck. However, there are other ways to drain people. We also talked about Bantu's Monument. It drains all opponents for one. You gain a life. In addition to that, because we've got to have redundancy in this effect as well, we also want to, um, we can use, if there's creatures on the board, Noxious Ghoul for three. Two black, a zombie, three, three. Whenever Noxious Ghoul, or another zombie enters the play, all non zombie creatures get negative 1, negative 1 until end of turn. So, not a bad payoff as far as like, when a cereric bounces in and out, you will give all non zombies negative 1, negative 1 equal to the number of times that he does that. So that's a way to win, or at least to clear the whole board so you can keep doing your shenanigans. Now a way to drain everybody would be Cabal Paladin, three and a black, creature human knight, four two. Whenever you cast a historic spell, Cabal Paladin deals two damage to each opponent. That's a really quick way to knock people out of the game. Similar to that spell, we have Ayara, first of Lothwain, three black, two three elf noble legendary creature. Whenever Ayara or another black creature enters the battlefield under your control, each opponent loses one life and you gain one life. Um, then. secondary ability of like tap, sac another black creature to draw a card. Turns out skeletons are black, so the dungeon of the mad mage that you'll be constantly going through, um, Iyara will be able to sac one of those to draw you an extra card. Diagraph Colossus is another payoff. Two colorless, one black, zombie giant, 2 2. Um, enters the battlefield with a plus one plus one counter for each zombie in your graveyard. Doesn't matter too much. What matters is when you cast the Sararac, because yeah, when you cast the zombie spell is what it reads, but in our world here, we're talking about only casting one zombie. When you cast a zombie, put a 2 2 black zombie token onto the battlefield tapped. It amasses a massive army very quickly, and you might be able to swing out for victory the following turn. So, how do we search for these things? One, we do a lot of card draw. So, we're going to go ahead and use this really sweet oldie but goodie Demir Houseguard, a three and a black creature skeleton 2 3 with fear. Sacrifice a creature, regenerate it. That's not what's important. This card has is called transmute transmute for one and two Black and what that allows you to do is allows you to search for a card equal to its casting cost Which is four so there's a lot of cards in here So many redundant format of cards that are key to this deck working so you can transmute Which allows you to tutor for any one of them. So cabal paladin defiler of flesh You Undead Warchief, um, Panharmonicon, Aetherflux Reservoir, The One Ring, Shieldred the Apocalypse. There's so many four mana targets in this deck. This is a funny, great tutor, um, that you can use just for some redundancy or if you don't want to like use a skeleton tutor for something, go ahead and use the oldie but goodie Demonic Tutor, um, or also Vampiric Tutor is a card I run in here as well. Now, how do you protect yourself? Well, you have tons of board wipes. What if you don't have a board wipe? Well, you can run this classic card, Darkness. This is a black fog. That's what this is. It's instant, one mana, one black mana. Creatures attack and block as normal, but none deal any damage. All attacking creatures are still tapped. Play any time before attack damage is assigned. That's the old legends wording. It's hilarious. I just thought I would read it out. But for listeners, I apologize. It is just One black mana for a black fog. Um, it's expensive card. It's up to like twelve dollars now But I think if I think you should get a copy, you know, I think it's worth it I think they reprinted one in the um in the most recent warhammer decks. So it should be a little cheaper there That'll be nice another surprise card, which has been reprinted thankfully because it used to be very expensive Imp's mischief one and a black instant speed change the target of target spell You lose life equal to that spell's converted mana cost. Um, this is a way to prevent, say, somebody from exiling a Sarirac, or exiling one of your key artifacts, um, or maybe even hitting you with something like a Torment of Hailfire, which you don't want. Uh, so just to like, O ish handle on the car that you're driving to make sure that you don't die last second. And speaking of, let's go on down to Stunning Reversal for three and a black instant. The next time you would lose the game this turn, instead draw seven cards and your life total becomes one. Exile Stunning Reversal. This deck is the perfect deck for this card. I don't know if you've ever played this card or seen it played, but it often rots in hands, doesn't really do what you think it would do, but Asura Rack is special in that way, because I think in this deck, what you're really trying to do is just get to the next turn, and all you need sometimes is just like one payoff card, so this does two things for you. It gets you to the next turn, and it draws you seven brand new cards. Um, fantastic. It will save you and hopefully you will win on the very next turn in a creature deck or something This card is not very good because you're trying to just you know, attack people do normal stuff But in a combo deck one turn is sometimes all you need. So I hope that you've enjoyed Watching, you know some of the videos so far, but what we're gonna do now is we're gonna go ahead and show you some of the arena highlights and Yeah, see you on the flip flop. Well, hello. Hello. Hello We are here playing Arena Brawl with the Sararac, trying to get you a good game. Um, I had to re record because I'm trying to learn the audio in OBS. In a previous video, the sound was way too loud as far as the master volume on Arena. And so all I could hear was the music from Arena and my voice was just muttering underneath it. Let's look at this hand. We have a two mana Mana Rock. We have a Paradox Engine. Let's And we have Urza's Incubator, which allows us to reduce cost for spells by two. And we have a Cosmos Elixir. It has no interaction, but we are going first. I think I'm gonna try it. And what I may do, is I may Since I have the incubator I may hit the cosmos elixir on the semblance anvil to reduce artifact cost So that I can play the incubator Always with the combi of the bamboo groves a alchemy only card which gives green extra ramp Which is exactly what they don't need The only way we can get really screwed up here. I think is is One, we don't draw a land. That would be bad. Two, if they start destroying our artifacts. Um, that would be also terrible. Okay, sure. Okay, we did not draw a land. The question is, the Kami doesn't really matter. I think we need to Semblance Anvil on the Cosmos Elixir. And we really want to draw land next turn because if we do we will get to pan or monocon Ursus incubator and Also Okay, so we'll get to pan or monocon here Yep Ursus incubator I'm gonna go ahead and make our Acererak cost Two less now, I'll play this and we'll go ahead and draw This back to hand All right. We are set to party as soon as we draw an extra swamp hopefully They are gonna get to go off with their omnath locus of the royal though. It only cost them three Mana, they're gonna use Fetch land there Draw some cards another fetch this deck runs a thousand million fetches. They're gonna get more lands So they're gonna pump up their omnath to insane proportions Luckily, they can't draw cards off of it yet because they haven't hit eight lands however We have struck the gold mine. The gold mine being Gilded Lotus. Panharmonicon. If they have no way to interact with this stuff, and I don't think they do, um, they lose. So, unfortunately they didn't really get to show you what the deck does, um, Um, but Because Paradox Engine is an infinite combo, I'll go ahead and show you how that looks. In the build If you're unfamiliar with it Whenever you cast a spell untap all non land permanents you control. So I Cast that for three mana Or a cast gilded Lotus for three mana, which is right above it It taps to add three of any color that's black I then had five mana available I was going to be able to cast paradox engine for three of that Then I have two black floating Acererak only cost me one at that point because the ursa's incubator had reduced its cost by two And that allows me to Untap using paradox engines ability to untap all non land permanents the gilded lotus So I make three And then every time I cast sarirac I can untap gilded lotus make three more And even without any kind of cost reducers that in itself is an infinite combo. You just don't net any mana so to speak but Um, with the cost reduction, I'm starting to net black mana every time I do that. He only costs one, I gain two every time I untap the Gilded Lotus, and it just floats. And then what I can do, is as you see, the path, the dungeon, the Mad Mage, is I gain one life, I scry one, I look for things to kill with at that point. Um, I will scry to the bottom anything that is not like a Bontu's Monument. Or Um, I, Iyara I think is the Yeah, Iyara first of Lothwain. So anytime a creature enters they get drained for one or perhaps a Kabal paladin anytime I cast a historic spell it deals two damage to each opponent All the cards that I showed you earlier and that's honestly one reason I really like playing in brawl Um Especially nowadays like there's more and more cards available on here and so you get to pretty much make a Acererak or Cererak deck that's like close You know to what you would play in paper and so it lets you get those rotations in So you can keep like or those repetitions in so that you can keep learning how to play the deck very fast efficiently quickly Anywho, that's the long and short of it. Thanks for watching and uh, Hopefully you enjoyed this video. If you have any thoughts, comments, Go ahead and leave those below. Would love to hear from you. We are now on Blue Sky, by the way. So if you're interested in talking with me, um, That's probably a better place to do it. I do enjoy it a bit more than X, considering that X was just so full of advertisements and also porn bots. Like, half of my followers, if not more, were all just random bots with very randomly generated names that would pop up and be like, click on profile for pics or whatever. And it was just annoying. I've had such a better time at Blue Sky for the purposes of Magic the Gathering and just sharing thoughts and joy with others. So find me there. Alright, see you on the flip flop.