Explode Your Opponents By Gifting Them Dralnu! | Magic: The Gathering

As Commander becomes more and more optimized and new designs are exponentially powercrept, my fondness for “pre-Commander” legendaries grows deeper. My favorite of these are oldschool commanders that have horrible weaknesses that you can turn into their greatest strengths: one of my very first decks, Karona, False God, is exactly this, where her downside of being passed around the table becomes a huge upside when I toss a Shiny Impetus on her and watch my opponents be forced to murder each other with her. I’ve also got a Selenia, Dark Angel deck that I’ve been playing for years where I use her ability to drop my life total as low as possible and then wreck my opponents with a Profane Transfusion or similar lifeswap shenanigan.

With my love of oldschool legendaries with downsides stronger than ever, it’s no wonder that I’ve got Dralnu, Lich Lord on my mind.

Dralnu provides decent card advantage / recursion for a Spellslinger deck. It’s a fine benefit, but honestly he’s been powercrept since at least 2017 back when Kess, Dissident Mage was introduced – similar ability (not quite as good since Dralnu can activate on opponent’s turns and potentially multiple times if you can untap him) but for a cheaper mana cost and gives you access to a third color – but most importantly Kess doesn’t threaten to sacrifice all your permanents if the Red player at the table hits you with some burn spell!

Yeah, that downside is BRUTAL: whenever Dralnu takes damage, you sacrifice that many permanents. And in a format where Blasphemous Act is one of the most played spells and shows up in nearly all Red decks, you’re taking a serious risk putting Dralnu on the battlefield.

AND I LOVE IT!

So just like Karona and Selenia, we can turn that huge downside that Dralnu has into a serious upside, by giving our opponents control of Dralnu and then exploding him with damage so THEY have to sacrifice their board instead!

So the first thing we need to do is give control of Dralnu to our unfortunate victim. Blue has a ton of control swap effects such as the classic Donate, but my favorite are the ones that are instant-speed and are flexible: Domineering Will is my absolute favorite because if our victim is being attacked by a big creautre we can gift them Dralnu and they are FORCED to block, hilarious! Sudden Substitution is another great one, we steal a spell and split second makes the swap all but guaranteed. Reins of Power is a super underrated card in general, it essentially is a mini-Insurrection in our deck but can also hand over Dralnu when we need it. And finally Wrong Turn is a donate at instant speed, but we can also mess up our opponents by simply gifting their best creature to a different opponent.

Once our opponent has control of Dralnu, we blow him up! Dimir doesn’t have a lot of high damage spells, but if we have lots of swamps then Consuming Corruption and Tendrils of Corruption do the job very well. Urborg, Tomb of Yawgmoth is by far the best way to turn all our lands into swamps, but if you don’t want to fork over $50+ then you can run Blanket of Night instead. There’s also colorless options Sphinx-Bone Wand and Relic Amulet, these are slower and more obvious threats for opponents but they are flexible. But if you’re lucky enough to have a Red player at the table, hit them with Praetor’s Grasp, chances are they have a Blasphemous Act for you to steal!

And that’s the main gimmick of the deck: we use Dralnu to blow up all our opponents’ stuff. Obviously this deck is quite “mean” and not always the vibe people are looking for at casual Commander night so double check with your group before running it, but if they’re game then it’s a super unique way to win for sure!

Now the rest of the deck is built around to support Dralnu, not just to utilize his sacrifice ability but also his recursion ability too! Sting, the Glinting Dagger is a powerhouse in this deck, giving Dralnu haste and untapping him on everyone’s turn for multiple activations. We also got the Dramatic Reversal + Isochron Scepter combo to not just produce infinite mana with mana rocks but also utilize that mana to cast all the instant/sorceries we want with Dralnu. And then the rest of the deck is UB Spellslinger stuff, we’ve got classic draw support from Archmage Emeritus or a Stinging Study, tutors with Dark Petition, removal and draw with Decree of Pain, and so on.

Here are two sample decks that show off what a complete Dralnu deck can look like. The first is a budget brew of around $150. All the core concepts are here, we’re a UB Spellslinger deck that tries to donate Dralnu and then blow him up, and we’ve got some finishers like Dramatic Scepter combo into Exsanguinate.

The second list is “no budget” although I kept it somewhat reasonable at around $400, no obscenely priced cards like Underground Sea. The main difference between this and the $150 list is we can afford running Urborg, Tomb of Yawgmoth which is a whopping $50 all by itself, and then since we have that and so many tutors we’re also running swamp mana doublers like Cabal Coffers as well. The rest of the budget goes to more minor upgrades like Solve the Equation becomes Demonic Tutor.

And that’s Dralnu! Again it’s a mean concept so double check that your playgroup is up for it, but if they are then you’ve got one of the most unique brews out there! Let me know what you think!