Hello and welcome to Commander Bites!

Today we are going to take a look at Umbris, Fear Manifest!

Umbris is a five mana 1/1 that gets +1/+1 for each card your opponents own in exile and whenever Umbris or another Nightmare or Horror enters the battlefield under your control, target opponent exiles cards from the top of their library until they exile a land card.

Game Plan

Umbris is a variant of a mill deck, however they take it to the extreme in that we want to have our opponents exile the cards that they mill rather than have those cards in the graveyard.

These are pretty strong effects that we can use to make a massive Umbris that can swing to win us the game, though it would also be helpful to have some control elements in the deck in order to make sure that our opponents don’t have a lot of options in getting rid of Umbris.

Game Plan

In a deck like this, it is good to have some redundancy, so any ways we can have our opponents exile cards from their library, or at the very least put those cards in the graveyard while we exile them later.

Mind Grind is the card that put nondetermined mill effects onto the map and it is pretty good to include since we can pay X and then have each opponent reveal cards from the top of their library until they reveal X land cards and then puts all of them into the graveyard.

Mind Funeral is a cheaper way to get this sort of effect, however it targets only one opponent and they have to reveal cards until they reveal four land cards and puts them into the graveyard, which can be useful when dealing with low to the ground aggressive decks in order to deny them of their creatures and lands if they happen to run a lower land count.

Tasha’s Hideous Laughter is more of what we want because it has each opponent exile cards from the top of their library until that player has exiled cards with a total mana value of 20 or more, which against decks that use cheaper mana value cards is great because we get rid of more while decks that use higher mana value cards its great because we get rid of more potent threats.

Ashiok, Dream Render is an amazing Planeswalker for us to use because we blank our opponent’s ability to search for cards from their library and we can -1 to have target player mill four cards and then exile each opponent’s graveyard.

While Leyline of the Void is one of the hallmark ways for us to exile our opponents graveyards while keeping our own graveyard in tact, we also have access to Planar Void, a one mana enchantment that exiles any cards that would be put into the graveyard. Having two of these effects is ideal because if an opponent manages to get rid of Leyline of the Void, we do have a backup and vice versa.

There is also a way that we can protect ourselves from our opponents attacking us with Web of Inertia, which makes it so that at the beginning of the opponent’s combat phase they can exile a card from their graveyard and if they don’t then creatures they control can’t attack us, which if we have their graveyard exiled makes us untouchable.

Then we have various Horrors and Nightmares that help facilitate our plan as well, with The Mindskinner being one of the better options for us because it can’t be blocked and if a source we control would deal damage to an opponent, we prevent that damage and each opponent mills that many cards, with The Mindskinner being a 10/1.

Elder Brain also works really well for us because whenever it attacks a player we exile all cards from that player’s hand and then they draw that many cards, and we can play the exiled cards and we can spend mana as though it were mana of any color to cast the spells from the exiled cards.

Setbacks

Mill is a contentious strategy in the best of times, where the people that dislike mill, really dislike mill decks which can mean that we draw our opponents removal.

What’s more, since our deck is such an aggressive form of removal in that our goal is to exile our opponents cards, they are more likely going to retaliate in kind by being more aggressive to us.

Our deck also takes a bit of time to get going. While we can get the mill started fairly early, if we cannot exile cards from our opponents graveyard or library fast enough, then any of our opponents that are playing a reanimator deck can hold their reanimation effects until they have an opening while we do the graveyard fueling for them.

It also means that aggro decks will be able to attack us for some amount of damage before we can get Umbris onto the battlefield since they are five mana, and while there are some cheap to cast Nightmares and Horrors, these two creature types tend to err on the higher mana value side of things.

It also doesn’t help that in order for us to make the most out of Umbris, they need to stay on the battlefield, and that can be a bit tough after casting them if we didn’t set up some ramp pieces, which in our colors is difficult outside of mana rocks.

Bracket Rating: High 3, Low 4

I think Umbris has the potential of being a very powerful deck that needs to be dealt with fairly quickly.

If an an opponent is outpacing you aggressively the deck will struggle as will combo decks that happen to get the ideal draw, but what the deck does well is that it can start milling our opponents early, have ways to get those cards into exile, while also being a late game threat if you manage to keep Umbris on the field.

Thank you for reading, see you all tomorrow!

Peace,

From, J.M. Casual