Hello and welcome to Daily Commander!

Today we are going to be taking a look at Jarad, Golgari Lich Lord!

Jarad is a four mana 2/2 that gets stronger for each creature in your graveyard, and if you sacrifice another creature and pay some mana each opponent loses life equal to that creature’s sacrificed power and if you sacrifice a Swamp and a Forest you can return Jarad from the graveyard to the hand.

The synergy here is to dump a lot of creatures into the graveyard to pump up Jarad and then sacrifice him to deal a massive amount of damage.

Now we should obviously be playing a lot of creatures, the question is how many?

Well while a good 30-35 creatures would make things ideal for us, how about we take it to the biggest extreme?

Let’s play all creatures and lands and have our first Companion.

Umori has the Companion requirement that each nonland card in your deck must share a card type, and we are going to go all creatures all the way.

That means we need to get rid of mana rocks and ramping spells and focus on having mana dorks, of which there are plenty in green that we can make use of.

While they would be vulnerable in most other cases to removal, the fact that Jarad wants to have a ton of creatures in the graveyard will be benefit for us either way.

Either our opponents wipe the board and send our mana dorks to the graveyard to grow Jarad or we keep them on the field to make use of them to cast our spells.

And it’s not like we’ll be completely free from instants and sorceries, we just need to add a few Adventures to the list.

Adventure creatures count as creatures in all zones with the exception of on the stack, and that’s all that we care about.

Green has a few Adventure creatures that will help us ramp and black has a few removal spells tacked onto Adventure creatures, so we can make use of those to help fill in the missing removal gaps that this deck will have.

Now we do have to make sure that we get these creatures into the graveyard, meaning that we need to make use of some form of self mill, which is very prevalent in green and black.

In fact we’ll be using a popular, if controversial, Ravnica mechanic to facilitate our mill shenanigans.

Dredge allows us to mill a huge number of cards while also returning some key creatures into our hand.

The more mill effects we can get the better, and Dredge is one of the most reliable versions of that effect, and the more Dredge creatures we get into the graveyard, the better for us.

The fact that we can substitute any draw for a significant mill is huge. It also helps if we can make use of a creature like Aftermath Analyst to return any of our lands from the graveyard onto the battlefield, because that is also a concern.

If we have ways to return lands from the graveyard to the battlefield, like a Ramunap Excavator, are going to be extremely helpful in the long run.

Jarad has a fairly linear game plan, but if you decide to go the all creatures route, it becomes an interesting deck building puzzle that will prove to be quite fun to play in my opinion.

Now of course it is fragile to graveyard removal, but there is only so much you can do about it with the all creature restriction unfortunately.

Thank you for reading, see you tomorrow for the next Daily Commander!

Peace,

From J.M. Casual