Hello and welcome to Daily Commander!

Today we are going to be talking about Grimgrin, Corpse-Born!

Grimgrin is a five mana 5/5 that enters tapped and doesn’t untap during your untap step, and you can sacrifice a creature to untap Grimgrin and put a +1/+1 counter on it and whenever Grimgrin attacks they destroy a creature the defending player controls and puts a +1/+1 counter in itself.

Grimgrin is a made for big beats and sacrifice, which is easy enough to work with, so that is what we are going to do.

Getting a number of creatures out onto the battlefield shouldn’t be difficult, and there are plenty of ways to get them back as well.

Black has a number of ways to get creatures onto the battlefield from the graveyard, and there are many one mana creatures that can do it by themselves.

Forsaken Miner is great because you can sacrifice it, and whenever you attack with Grimgrin and target another creature an opponent controls, then we can pay a black mana to bring it back to untap Grimgrin.

Bloodsoaked Champion, Gravecrawler, and Tenacious Dead can also come back to the battlefield at a cost, but they all work in making sure we have some recursive fodder to sacrifice to Grimgrin.

We can also consider anything that has Persist or Undying so at the very least we have two times we can use a creature, or if a creature has Disturb then we can sacrifice the creature and then Disturb onto the battlefield as additional resources.

There is also Unearth, which means that we can attack with the creature when it is Unearthed and before it is exiled we can sacrifice it to Grimgrin to untap for defense.

Since there are going to be things dying, anything with Morbid or cares about something dying is up for grabs as well.

Tragic Slip can easily take out a problematic creature that has indestructible, Spoils of Blood can make another body to either attack or defend as we need it, and Gruesome Discovery also allows us to have our opponents discard cards.

There are also other creatures that we want to die in order to gain more and more advantage. Chasm Skulker turns cards we draw from the plethora of creatures that draw a card when they die into Squid tokens with islandwalk, Endless Cockroaches can recur themselves when they die, or if just want big bodies then Phyrexian Triniform can do that in spades.

To address the elephant in the room, I am doing what I can to avoid the obvious Zombie typal synergies that this deck has, but there are cards we can use to make sure we can cast Grimgrin fairly efficiently.

Rooftop Storm, Undead Warchief, and Zombie Apocalypse are solid choices to do so, but for the sake of this build I don’t want to lean into it too heavily.

The goal of the deck is to win via Commander Damage, and that means that we need to protect Grimgrin in order to make sure this is the case.

Aboshan’s Desire is ideal because not only does it give Grimgrin flying to make it easier to get damage through, our goal in having a lot cards in the graveyard makes getting Threshold easier so that Grimgrin can get shroud.

There is also Lazotep Plating which gives us and our permanents hexproof while making another body that we can use and Ripples of Potential to proliferate and phase out anything that we proliferated.

If we really need to protect our things then there is Smoke Bomb, a flash artifact that gives all creatures shroud, and when we sacrifice it at the beginning of our upkeep it makes a creature we control unable to be blocked.

Grimgrin is straightforward and simple, and while it would be easy to go through the Zombie typal strategy, I wanted to avoid it as much as possible to show that there are broader options to Grimgrin, at least in terms of card variety.

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

Peace,

From, J.M. Casual