The Commander
Flying
Whenever a permanent owned by another player is put into a graveyard from the battlefield, you draw a card and you lose 1 life.
Guide
Gameplan
Cast Kothophed and turn every opponent's dying permanent into a card for you while you actively blow up the board to fuel the engine. You churn through your deck, refill your hand, and convert that card advantage into a grindy mono-black win. Manage your life total carefully—you can deck-draw yourself out or bleed dry if you're not paying attention.
Strengths
- Massive card advantage, especially against token, sacrifice, and creature-heavy tables
- Pairs perfectly with your own boardwipes and edict effects to draw fistfuls of cards
- Evasive 7-power flyer that closes games on its own
- Mono-black gives access to elite tutors, ramp, and recursion
Weaknesses
- The life loss is symmetric and uncontrolled—mass removal can drain you fast
- Removal magnet; opponents prioritize killing it, and recasting at 6 mana hurts
- Can deck or kill yourself if the trigger snowballs out of control
- Mono-black struggles with enchantments and non-creature permanents without specific answers
Key Cards
- Whip of Erebos — Lifelink keeps you alive while the draw triggers and attacks drain your life total.
- Black Market Connections — Stacks even more card and mana advantage onto an already engine-heavy deck.
- Bontu's Last Reckoning — A cheap one-sided-feeling wrath that triggers Kothophed for a huge pile of cards.
- Pestilence — Repeatable damage that kills opposing creatures one at a time, drawing you a card each ping.
- Reliquary Tower — Removes the max hand size limit so your massive draws never go to waste.
- Sheoldred, the Apocalypse — Punishes opponents for drawing and offsets your own life loss from triggers.
Upgrade Path
Add fast mana (Dark Ritual, Mana Crypt, Sol Ring) and reanimation (Reanimate, Animate Dead) to deploy Kothophed ahead of curve. Tighten the lifegain suite—Whip of Erebos, Vito, Gray Merchant—so the symmetric life loss never kills you, and include tutors (Demonic Tutor, Vampiric Tutor) to find your engine pieces. Top it off with a deterministic drain finisher like Exsanguinate or Torment of Hailfire to close before the table stabilizes.
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
- ▸Beating down with the evasive 7/7 flyer, often with lifelink attached
- ▸Overwhelming card advantage converting into removal-backed inevitability
- ▸Drain and life-loss effects like Pestilence, Sheoldred, and Exsanguinate
- ▸Big mana payoff finishers like Torment of Hailfire fueled by your card flow
Archetypes
- Control — Kothophed rewards repeated boardwipes by refilling your hand every time you reset the table.
- Aristocrats — Your own sacrifice outlets and edicts turn opponents' deaths into a relentless draw engine.
- Group Slug — Symmetric punishers like Pestilence and Sheoldred grind every opponent down while you draw.
- Reanimator — At 6 mana, cheating Kothophed into play early via reanimation maximizes its draw window.
Combos
No combos found for this commander on Commander Spellbook.
Related Commanders
Same color identity (B), by popularity.
