Hello and welcome to Daily Commander!

Today we are going to be talking about Grist, Voracious Larva!

Grist is a one mana 1/2 with deathtouch and whenever Grist or another creature enters the battlefield under our control from our graveyard or we cast it from our graveyard then we can pay a green mana to transform Grist into Grist, the Plague Swarm, a Planeswalker with three staring loyalty with a +1 to make a 1/1 Insect then mill two cards and putting a deathtouch counter on the Insect if a black card was milled, a -2 to destroy an artifact or enchantment, and a -6 to make a token copy of each creature card in our graveyard as a 1/1 Insect.

Grist is a graveyard strategy that wants you to pack your graveyard, have some reanimation, and to have a ton of normally strong creatures to make token copies of for the late game.

So we have a mill and reanimation strategy, and while we are at it we should also play around a bit with making some Insects to help us maintain a solid board presence.

First we need consistent ways to get cards into our graveyard while also having a reliable way to get creatures back to the battlefield cheaply.

Grisly Salvage is excellent in the getting cards into our graveyard because it let’s us take a look at the top five cards of our library and pick a land or creature and put it into our hand while putting the rest in the graveyard.

In a similar vein there is also Mulch which shows the top four cards of our library and puts the revealed lands into our hand and the rest into the graveyard, Malevolent Rumble reveals the top four and we can put a permanent into our hand and the rest to the graveyard and we make a 0/1 Eldrazi Spawn we can sacrifice for a colorless mana, and Grapple with the Past which mills us three cards and we can return a creature or land to our our hand.

We have decent number of ways to get cards into the graveyard, so we need to have creatures that can come back to the battlefield for cheap.

Bloodghast is perfect for this because getting it back to the battlefield is a Landfall trigger, and if an opponent has 10 or less life then it comes back with haste, which a nice bonus but we really want the cheap reanimation ability.

As far as cheap ways of reanimating creature there are creatures like Reassembling Skeleton which can return itself to the battlefield tapped for one and a black, Six which not only mills us and puts a milled land into our hand but gives nonland permanents in our graveyard retrace, and of course Unearth to return a creature with mana value 3 or less from the graveyard to the battlefield while also having Cycling 2.

The next thing we need to look at is playing into having a some Insect synergies, which tend to play well with graveyard decks.

Izoni, Thousand-Eyed is the sort of card I’m talking about because they make an Insect token for each creature card in our graveyard while also giving us a way to gain a bit of life and draw a card for two mana and sacrificing a creature, which ideally we can reanimate.

We also have the original Grist, the Hunger Tide, a unique Planeswalker that is a 1/1 Insect in places other than the battlefield which means we use Unearth to bring it back to the battlefield while also milling one which makes an Insect token as their +1, and if we happen to mill an Insect then we can repeat this process.

Then we have Aatchik, Emerald Radian which makes a 1/1 Insect for each creature and/or artifact in our graveyard and whenever another Insect we control dies we put a +1/+1 counter on Aatchik and each opponent loses a life.

The actual synergies with making Insects comes into play with cards like Swarmyard Massacre, which makes two Squirrel tokens and then gives each creature that isn’t an Insect, Rat, Spider, or Squirrel -1/-1 for each one of those creature types we control.

We also have access to Zask, Skittering Swarmlord which can let us play lands and Insects from our graveyards, and whenever another Insect we control dies, we put it to the bottom of our library and mill two cards, which adds cards our graveyard whenever one of our Insect tokens die.

As far as how we win, we should find ways to get creatures from the graveyard with Grist’s ultimate that have a massive swing in value.

Graaz, Unstoppable Juggernaut is a fun bit of tech for a deck like this because it turns all of our 1/1 tokens into 5/3 Juggernauts that must attack, which if we played our cards right then we should have a ton of creature tokens.

Terastadon to destroy three noncreature permanents and replacing them with Elephant creature tokens, Archfiend of Sorrows to give creatures our opponents control -2/-2 until end of turn, Avenger of Zendikar to get a bunch of Plant creature tokens as well, and Dawnglade Regent to make us the monarch and give our permanents hexproof as long as we are the monarch.

Demolisher Spawn is a fun way to get an aggressive finish in the deck because it gives other attacking creatures we control +4/+4 until end of turn if we hit Delirium, which if we have a decent number of tokens on board already can be a huge swing. Craterhoof Behemoth can do the same, and since its getting a reprint in Tarkir: Dragonstorm it should hopefully be a bit easier to get.

Grist is an interesting Commander that can get running in the early game, have a solid middle game, but can struggle in the late game if the correct cards aren’t in the graveyard. It’s been a while since I’ve had to rewrite the last bit of a Daily Commander because the original display cards weren’t working for the deck the more I thought about it.

Grist may be able to win through attrition, but will absolutely fold to an exiled graveyard, which is true of many graveyard Commanders, but the overall Grist strategy is so heavily tied to the graveyard that if a heavily invested graveyard is exiled, Grist just does nothing.

We can work through it, but Grist has a harder time than most to make it work.

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

Peace,

From, J.M. Casual