Vampire is one of the most consistently popular creature types in Magic: The Gathering, with Commander players in particular being drawn to their allure. While this generally means that most Vampires worth playing are quite well-known, a few gems have managed to slip into the shadows. Carmen, Cruel Skymarcher is one such MTG card, offering a unique and powerful take on an Aristocrats Commander with serious combo potential.
Carmen, Cruel Skymarcher MTG
Carmen’s first ability makes it incredibly easy to scale it up into a massive threat in an Aristocrats list. With creatures that create more bodies on death like Doomed Traveler, and sacrifice outlets like Carrion Feeder, you can basically trigger this growth on demand. This triggers on noncreature permanents, too, so Fetchlands and Treasure generators like Ruthless Technomancer help a lot here.
This ability also triggers when your opponents sacrifice, which makes it ideal alongside Edict effects like Accursed Marauder and Plaguecrafter. If you really want to live up to the ‘Cruel’ in Carmen’s title, Grave Pact and Dictate of Erebos will up your growth a ton. This duo is particularly good alongside cards that make tokens for everyone, like Tombstone Stairwell and The War Games.
Once you’ve powered Carmen up, you’ll be able to resurrect heavy hitters like Archon of Cruelty with every swing. While this will happen naturally a lot of the time due to Carmen’s scaling, Equipment like Hammer of Nazahn and Commander’s Plate can expand your reanimation pool rapidly.
Of course, in order to make use of this reanimation consistently, you’ll want to include cards like Stitcher’s Supplier and Buried Alive to set up your graveyard. Due to the deck’s Aristocrat leanings, the likes of Altar of Dementia and Mesmeric Orb are particularly good options here. You may also want to pursue multiple reanimations per turn by including trigger doublers like Roaming Throne.
Doubling your triggers will also double up Carmen’s lifegain ability, which lets you pursue that as a legitimate sub-theme. Scaling creatures like Elenda’s Hierophant work wonderfully here as additional threats, while cards like Enduring Tenacity turn Carmen’s lifegain into a very real clock for your opponents.
Cruel, Cruel Combos
While Carmen is more than capable of winning a fair game, it also has access to some wild infinite combos if you want to get more ruthless. It pairs particularly well with combo classic Warren Soultrader, since Carmen’s lifegain balances out Soultrader’s life loss for easy infinites. With this pair, you can loop Gravecrawler for infinite enters and dies triggers, for instance, netting a quick Blood Artist win.
Warren Soultrader is also the key to another of Carmen’s major combos, this time with Stridehangar Automaton. Provided you have one spare creature to sacrifice to kick things off, you can make a Treasure and a Thopter this way, then sacrifice the Thopter to repeat. This will net you infinite Treasures, which you can funnel into something like Walking Ballista for an instant win.
If you’d rather win by drawing your entire deck, Carmen can arrange that too with the help of Yawgmoth, Thran Physician and Nest of Scarabs. Start by sacrificing a creature to Yawgmoth, letting Carmen’s ability resolve and putting a +1/+1 counter on it before adding a -1/-1 counter to cancel it out. This will draw you a card and make an Insect token, which you can sacrifice to keep the loop going.
A Vampire Worth Unearthing
With all of this fair value and combo potential, you’d expect Carmen, Cruel Skymarcher to be a widely-played MTG Commander. This is actually far from true, it turns out, with EDHREC data revealing that only 4,417 players run this banger in the command zone. The card is reasonably popular in the 99, appearing in around 52,900 decks there, but for some reason this hasn’t translated into more build-around love.
Whatever the reason for this, it’s good news for anyone wishing to pick up Carmen for their own use. Near-mint copies can be had on TCGplayer for as little as $0.59, and the fancy extended art printing is hardly bank-breaking either at $4.89. At these prices, Carmen is a fantastic buy, and a great foundation for a fresh Aristocrats brew, budget or not.
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