The Commander
Flying, haste
Whenever Excava attacks, return up to one target artifact, creature, or non-Aura enchantment card with mana value 3 or less from your graveyard to the battlefield with a finality counter on it. It's a 1/1 Spirit creature with flying in addition to its other types. (If a creature with a finality counter on it would die, exile it instead.)
Guide
Gameplan
Excava is an aggressive RW reanimator engine: attack each turn to bring back a cheap artifact, creature, or enchantment from your graveyard as a 1/1 flier, generating value and recurring powerful enter-the-battlefield effects. You fill the yard early, then loop disposable bodies for ETB triggers, sacrifice fodder, and incremental advantage while beating in with a 4-mana evasive haste creature.
Strengths
- Free recursion every combat with no mana cost, fueling ETB/death loops
- Has built-in evasion and haste, so it pressures life totals immediately
- Turns dead cards in the graveyard into a renewable resource
- RW has excellent cheap value creatures and artifacts to reanimate
Weaknesses
- Reanimation is capped at mana value 3 or less, so no big bombs
- Finality counters exile reanimated permanents, limiting how often you can reuse the same card
- Relies on connecting in combat, vulnerable to fogs and blockers
- Removal-heavy tables can keep Excava off the battlefield and stall the engine
- Needs graveyard setup, so it can be slow without enablers
Key Cards
- Solemn Simulacrum — A 3-MV artifact creature you can recur for ramp and a card on death, and the finality exile is fine since you draw and ramp.
- Wall of Omens — Cheap reanimation target that replaces itself with a card every time you blink it back.
- Goblin Bombardment — Free sacrifice outlet to convert reanimated 1/1 tokens into damage before they exile from finality.
- Skullclamp — Draws two cards off each 1/1 Excava reanimates, turning recursion into a card-draw engine.
- Faithless Looting — Cheap way to dump high-impact ETB creatures into the graveyard for Excava to reanimate.
- Sun Titan — Pairs with Excava to double up on recurring your cheap permanents and protects the engine.
Upgrade Path
Add efficient self-mill and looting (Stitcher's Supplier, Faithless Looting, Cathartic Reunion) to stock the yard fast, and pack free sacrifice outlets so finality counters never waste a body. Tighten the curve around impactful MV 3-or-less ETB creatures and artifacts, then add protection like Swiftfoot Boots and recursion redundancy (Sun Titan, Reveillark) to keep the engine resilient against removal.
Core Cards
The most-played cards for this commander, built from aggregated deck data (the Mythic Graph). Build public decks to seed it.
Win Conditions
- ▸Aristocrat drain via Blood Artist/Zulaport Cutthroat plus repeated sacrifice of reanimated tokens
- ▸Combat damage from Excava and an army of recurred fliers
- ▸Grinding incremental card and value advantage until you out-resource the table
- ▸Skullclamp/Goblin Bombardment value loops generating overwhelming card and damage output
Archetypes
- Aristocrats — Recurring 1/1 bodies feed sacrifice outlets like Blood Artist and Goblin Bombardment for repeatable value and damage.
- Reanimator (small) — Excava reanimates cheap value creatures and artifacts from the yard every attack for free.
- Blink/Value — Bringing back permanents replays powerful ETB effects each combat to grind out advantage.
- Aggro — Flying haste plus a growing board of reanimated fliers pressures opponents quickly.
Combos
No combos found for this commander on Commander Spellbook.
Related Commanders
Same color identity (RW), by popularity.
