Thanks to how long an average Commander game lasts, long-term forms of card advantage become extremely important. With multiple board wipes hitting the table every game, establishing your engine once and winning from there is surprisingly ineffective. This makes MTG cards that offer extra draws every turn significantly more powerful in Commander, which has, in turn, made repeatable card draw effects extremely expensive.
Fortunately, not all card advantage comes in the form of card draw, offering some budget opportunities for Commander players. In the right deck, MTG Master of Death offers tons of card advantage through recursion.
MTG Master of Death
Master of Death is a rather straightforward card that can easily become quite powerful. Surveilling 2, while valuable for graveyard decks, isn’t an effect worth writing home about, but Master of Death rarely just enters once. On top of being an effective blocker, your Surveils will pile up, helping you find the key cards in your deck. Whether you need to hit specific combo pieces, or just get your Gravecrawler effects into the graveyard, Master of Death will provide tons of value over a longer period of time.
If you don’t want to spend mana playing Master of Death every turn, the card can still be used as a card advantage tool with discard effects. This lets Master of Death partner with Rummaging effects like Artist’s Talent or Bazaar of Baghdad, and turn them directly into card advantage. Many Zombie Commanders, in particular, like Varina, Lich Queen, care about this, easily allowing Master of Death to essentially function as an extra card.
Beyond rummaging and looting, Master of Death can pair well with milling strategies. Commanders like Sidisi, Brood Tyrant and Teval, the Balanced Scale can easily mill Master of Death over, giving you an extra card to use for no cost. The card does double duty with Teval, in particular, triggering its leaves the graveyard effect to create additional Zombie tokens.
The perfect decks for Master of Death, however, are the ones that can both synergize with its recursion and with its body. Raffine, Scheming Seer and Temmet, Naktamun’s Will do exactly this, offering looting effects for card advantage, while scaling their buffs with Master of Death in play. Wizard and Zombie typal decks can do this to a lesser extent, making Master of Death more threatening than a recurrable 3/1 body.
Surprisingly Popular and Cheap
While Master of Death can provide lots of card advantage and selection throughout the game, the card does suffer from being a bit straightforward. That said, despite the Zombie only working well in a few archetypes, Master of Death is extremely popular, appearing in over 19,000 different Commander decks according to EDHREC. If anything, this suggests how strong Master of Death is in a deck that synergizes with it.
With this in mind, Master of Death’s price tag is surprisingly affordable. Thanks, in part, to a semi-recent reprint in Murders at Karlov Manor Commander, Master of Death can be yours for just $0.50. If, like many players, you have a discard, mill, or Surveil deck that can afford to run the card, you’ll be easily impressed with what Master of Death is capable of.
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