Hello and welcome to Daily Commander!

Today we are going to be talking about Grismold, the Dreadsower!

Grismold is a three mana 3/3 with trample and at the beginning of your end step each player creates a 1/1 Plant creature token, and whenever a creature token dies, you put a +1/+1 counter on Grismold.

It’s not often that we want our opponents to get creature tokens, but this presents the off kilter deck archetype of group slug, which means that we give our opponents things and we use those given resources to our advantage.

The goal of this deck is to give our opponents as many creature tokens as we can and then kill them all so we can swing out to win the game, playing the politics in who we give tokens to to keep us alive.

The first step of the plan is to give our opponents creature tokens, and there are quite a number of things that do just that.

Seed the Land essentially reads everyone has Landfall make a 1/1 Snake creature token. This means that if our opponents are a Landfall deck, it benefits them a little more, which incentivizes them to want us alive for a while.

Sylvan Offering is also a political tool, one that makes a huge token for us and an opponent and a bunch of little tokens for us and an opponent, allowing us to play the politics game a little more.

If a player is pulling too far ahead, then we have a pair of Curses, Curse of Shallow Graves and Curse of Disturbance which incentivizes our opponents to attack the cursed player to make a Zombie token.

Of course this doesn’t mean that we will sit back and take a beating, we need to make sure that we can make some credible threats.

Clackbridge Troll makes three tokens for an opponent and at the beginning of our combat, an opponent can sacrifice a creature to tap Clackbridge Troll to give us 3 life and draw a card.

Desecration Demon does this at the beginning of each combat, and whenever a player sacrifices a creature this way, it taps Desecration Demon and puts a +1/+1 counter on it.

There is also Curse of the Cabal that is ten mana to cast, but only four to Suspend for 2 turn and it has a player sacrifice half of their permanents. If a player sacrifices a permanent at the beginning of their upkeep then it adds two time counters.

This could mean that the spell never resolves and our opponents keep sacrificing their tokens making Grismold bigger, or a they don’t risk it in the early game and an opponent sacrifices a bunch of tokens to make Grismold huge.

The best way to make Grismold win is to do a massive sweep of our opponents creatures, and Massacre is one of my favorite ways to get this done.

Not only does it kill all the small 1/1 tokens that we should be giving our opponents, but also snowballs and kills the bigger things our opponents control while making sure our Grismold stays alive.

Stacking simultaneous triggers is always fun.

In order to get the absolute most of this we also should have ways to deal damage to our opponents whenever their creatures or any creatures die. Massacre Wurm can do a similar effect to Massacre Girl without the snowball, but an opponent loses 2 life whenever a creature they control dies.

This makes it easier for Grismold to swing in against an opponent who is at the lowest, or even take out the last player to win the game.

Having Archfiend of the Dross is a risky endeavor, but also has an opponent lose two life whenever a creature they controls die, attached to a 6/6 flier which can swing in for damage.

Grismold is a neat build around because incentivizing your opponents by giving them tokens can definitely blow up in your face if they decide to not play the politics game.

The name of the game is to make sure you don’t reveal your intentions too early and alleviate your more wary opponents by giving them more things.

This is a more tricky play style, but one worth checking out in my opinion.

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

Peace,

From, J.M. Casual