Pauper Commander

Gary, God of the Deal

Oakley Reid

29 Jul 2021 - 7 min read

Gray Merchant of Asphodel has long been one of my favorite pauper legal cards. It represents the perfect intersection between power, balance, accessibility and, of course, meme-ability. So when spoilers for Theros: Beyond Death started to roll in last year, you can imagine how unbelievably hype to see that my man Gary (yes I will be referring to the card as “Gary” for the entirety of this article) had finally returned from his business venture sporting a bag of cash and a new uncommon rarity.

While I’m normally the first person to speak out against upshifting rarities between reprints, I was willing to let it slide JUST THIS ONCE because printing Gary at uncommon means one important thing…he can now be played as your commander in Pauper EDH! So let’s get brewing.

All Black, Everything

One glance at Gary’s ETB should tell you everything you need to know about how we’re going to try and build this deck: We’re going to try and have him hit the battlefield as hard and as frequently as possible. To do this, we’re going to want to maximize the number of black mana pips on our permanents as well as maximize the number of permanents we have on the battlefield at all times:

When it comes to single-target removal you can’t do much better than the recently reprinted Oubliette . On top of giving us two mana pips, this card phases a creature out for as long as it sticks around, and yes that works exactly how you’d want it to with an opponent’s commander overstaying its welcome. Pestilence is worth its weight in gold, allowing us to do what very few cards in pauper can accomplish and that’s keeping the board completely clear turn after turn. Finally, that brings us to Wall of Shadows . Wall of Shadows is one of the unsung heroes of mono black, able to buy the deck a lot of time by blocking your opponents’ largest creatures each combat and still pulling its weight for an eventual merchant ETB with two pips. (You’ll notice that’s a theme with a lot of cards in this deck, creatures with two black mana pips such as Liliana’s Specter and Faceless Butcher ensuring Gary is always bringing the pain when he comes around.)

Quality AND Quantity

No matter how strong we make Gary’s ETB, it won’t be enough to handle three 30-life opponents unless we can trigger the ability a bunch of times over the course of the game. This means most opponents might not be so keen to cast a removal spell on Gary just to have you play him again and drain them for even more life one turn later. Luckily, we’ve come prepared for this:

Soldevi Adnate is one of a number of sac outlets we’re running in this deck to speed up Gary’s turnover rate. If our opponents aren’t going to kill our commander for us then we’ll just have to take matters into our own hands. In case they DO actually want to kill Gary (maybe we’ve already cast him four times this game and we’re starting to look a little scarce on mana) we’re packing a number of insta-reanimation cards like Shade’s Form and Undying Evil to ensure he won’t be missing for long. These two types of cards can also be used in tandem for a quick, on-demand source of lifegain if the need arises. Lastly, should our opponents ever catch us off guard and manage to kill Gary while he’s unprotected, we have Cadaver Imp and a few other cards like Tortured Existence to exhume him from the graveyard and allow us to cast him for his base mana cost. It goes against common sense to allow your commander to hit the graveyard in the first place, but being able to cast Gary for only five mana in the late game can be a really efficient move.

One can only hope that Gary someday reaches the level of fame as Fblthp, the Lost did in Totally Lost and gets his own legendary iteration. My personal theory is that deep down WotC realizes that unleashing Gary’s true godly form into the world would be too powerful and result in more format disruption than Companions did when they first came out. Until that day, we’ll just have to stick to taking names in Pauper EDH with Gary’s mortal form. Thanks for reading!

Oh, and of course if you want to take Gary into your OWN hands - here’s the list that won me the game this week. Let me know if you think I’m missing something! Gary, God of the Deal

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