Sometimes playing group hug can get a little dull if all you do is play your helpful permanents on your turn and just watch the show. It is great fun to see what players do with the extra resources but once I learned my local meta I wanted to interact more with what was going on! That’s when I started taking a look at some of the most hated Commanders in the card pool and asking myself, “Could this power be used for group hug???”

Enter Muldrotha, the Gravetide! (Urza is still on my to do list!) Muldrotha gives me a secondary goal to achieve while helping the table. At first I had difficulty balancing the group hug cards with engine cards that are needed to fill the graveyard. But the fact is if you are doing the graveyard part correctly you will see most of your deck every game! Which is an incredible feeling for a group hug deck because it allows you to help in very specific ways and that makes for very interesting games! So what this deck turned out to be is a very high power, consistently performing graveyard hug deck that is always a blast to play!

Shout out to my friend Felix for the help in getting both my self mill strategy and the extra late game threats added to this deck!

Muldrotha is just a bonkers value card! Most group hug strategies that I enjoy involve keeping a variety of permanent types in play to provide constant perks for the table. Being able to play a land and cast (yes you get your cast triggers) one of each permanent type from your graveyard each turn is really impactful… If you have a full graveyard. So let’s take a look at the self-mill in this deck that I call Muldrotha Grave Hug!

Self-mill is the most important part of this deck! If done properly it gives you access to most of your cards in each and every game you play!

Hermit Druid is without a doubt the all-star of the strategy! This deck has six basic lands and every fetch land possible in these colors so a single activation of Hermit Druid can sometimes put half of your deck into the graveyard!

Altar of Dementia is so good and makes actually casting the dredge creatures a viable option! It works at instant speed so you can respond to removal and get value out of your creatures that way too!

All of the Dredge cards are great additions too! Interesting Magic history note. When Dredge was originally designed the self mill was supposed to be a downside so that’s why some of the ones with the highest dredge counts aren’t the rares. Mark Rosewater said this about dredge in his blog: “The novel idea” - “was to use self-milling as an additional cost.” And of course we all know that isn’t a cost at all in some decks!

Oath of Druids is a very exciting card and can end up milling a ton of cards! It’s free creatures for the table, it mills, it’s chaotic and I really couldn’t ask for a better card for this deck!

Anvil of Bogardan is kind of like a Howling Mine that also makes you discard a card. So kind of like a rummage mine I guess! It fits great in the deck but is in desperate need of a reprint.

Just be aware that decking yourself out with this deck is very possible very fast.

It’s also important to be able to be able to get things back from the graveyard in other ways in case Muldrotha isn’t on the field!

All of these cards can be used to help other players notice the wording on Noxious Revival! Exhume allows everyone to put a creature from their graveyard onto the battlefield and All Hallow’s Eve is just a bonkers mass reanimation spell but it’s on the reserve list and has gotten a bit pricey as of late. Incarnation Technique on the other hand is brand new and I love that Wizard’s is making cards like this! I wrote a whole weekly blog entitled Demonstrate and Other Fun Keywords! Check it out if you wanna know more about the history of this type of card in Magic!

Muldrotha is a very mana hungry Commander so let’s take a look at the ramp now!

Muldrotha’s ability to play lands out of the graveyard is great but it doesn’t actually give you an extra land drop per turn. That’s where Rites of Flourishing and Ghirapur Orrery come in! Helm of Awakening makes everything one generic mana cheaper and Heartbeat of Spring doubles mana produced by lands! Eladamri’s Vineyard gives everyone a couple free green mana each turn and is very cheap to cast. Which helps with the goal of this deck to cast one of each permanent type from the graveyard each turn!

Speaking of which if you have Mana Crypt, Lotus Petal and Mana Vault and Sol Ring they really make this deck hum! I guess that’s pretty true of any deck though.

This deck is one of my favorite decks to pilot! It really recovers well from board wipes and you get to see most of your cards during every game. It has a higher volume of non group hug cards than most of my decks but it really turbo charges the board effectively. Here is a link to the full deck list on Archidekt!

Thanks for taking the time out to read this deck tech! If you wanna talk Magic reach out anytime on Twitter!

-marksquare