Biggest Butts in the Echoverse: Niv-Mizzet, Ghost Counsel Deck Tech

Welcome to another EDHLAB deck tech for the Reality Fracture set. The Multiverse Reforged precon included a lot of lore-twisting and color-pie-bending legendary creatures, several of which are great commander candidates. Today’s lucky commander is Niv-Mizzet, Ghost Counsel, the Echoverse counterpart to the famed Niv-Mizzet, the Living Guildpact and former parun of the Izzet League. 

This translucent Spirit Dragon has one singularly game-breaking triggered ability: whenever you gain life, you can pay the same amount back to draw that many cards. He also has flying and a tap ability to drain each opponent for one and gain one life. The single card you can draw each turn from that activated ability represents the absolute floor for this commander. The ceiling, on the other hand, is absurdly high.

Spells like Beacon of Immortality are straightforward ways to gain life, and they can draw you a fistful of cards on demand. Effects that set your life total to a particular amount — or exchange your total with an opponent’s — count as lifegain, so if you use them judiciously, cards like Axis of Mortality or Resolute Archangel can generate an absurd amount of card draw while knocking an opponent’s life total down hard.

There’s just one problem with this strategy. Black and white both have plenty of interactions with life, whether draining it or gaining it, and black has plenty of ways to draw tons of cards as well, but there isn’t much in the way of a straightforward win condition that stands out from other typical life-based win conditions like Exsanguinate or Torment of Hailfire. There are some payoff cards for second-draw-style triggers, but black and white generally don’t have access to many cards that care about mass draw, Sheoldred, the Apocalypse notwithstanding. So what’s an immortal ghost to do?

Discard cards, that’s what. The gameplan for the deck is relatively straightforward, at least on paper: gain lots of life, draw lots of cards, discard lots of cards, and get value from discarding lots of cards. It takes a few steps to assemble the pieces, and this deck can struggle without Niv-Mizzet on the board, so let’s go through all of the tools in the toolbox so you know how to pilot this cardboard tribute to Venus Callipyge.

I Like Big Hands

Your primary goal with this deck is to leverage the huge hand you’ve accumulated through a spell or ability that discards a ton of cards. Tireless Tribe and Sacred Rites are related payoffs — both of these cards pump toughness by discarding cards. Tribe buffs its own butt for four toughness per card, which means you only need to discard 10 cards to get its toughness up past 40, though you likely won’t need to go that high, whereas Sacred Rites gives your whole team a Brazilian butt lift for one toughness per card discarded. You might be wondering why increasing the toughness of these creatures matters — hold onto that thought for just one moment.

The other primary mass discard outlets are Sickening Dreams and Restless Dreams. Restless Dreams doesn’t directly deal damage or present a win condition, but it does allow you to sculpt your hand near-perfectly to set up a win, while Sickening Dreams deals a mass amount of damage to each player and each creature, which matters quite a lot when Stuffy Doll or Purity is on board. Each of those creatures can redirect damage, either from itself or from you, somewhere else, preferably your opponents. Lastly, old reliable Skirge Familiar is always an option to generate a massive amount of mana to cast all those spells in your grip.

...And I Cannot Lie

The card that really ties all of these discard outlets to the victory wagon is Confessor. My heart nearly stopped when I read this card, as it’s about as perfect a card for the deck as can be. You may gain a life whenever any player discards a card, and each single card discarded is a separate trigger for Confessor. With any of the mass discard outlets on board with Confessor and your commander, you can draw your entire deck to find your preferred win condition. To maintain your hand size, you'll need Rhox Faithmender or Cleric Class to gain two life per discarded card, and therefore draw two cards per card you discard, meaning you'll be netting cards for each draw. Just make sure to actually win the game once you draw your deck, because you don’t have much recourse for an empty library.

Confessor is the piece that makes this deck hum, so the list comes packed with a few ways to find it. Starfield Shepherd and Recruiter of the Guard can both find it, as well as Tireless Tribe, so the combo is never too far away.

Knew That Ass Was Real

Remember all that toughness-buffing? These are the cards that pay you off for it. Rasaad yn Bashir, The Kingpin of Crime, and Ghalta the Immovable all have that glorious Scryfall tag in common: buttstrike. Each of these creatures gives creatures with higher toughness than power the ability to deal combat damage according to that larger toughness stat. Rasaad yn Bashir also flat out doubles the toughness of your attacking creatures when you have the initiative, so make sure you block wisely to keep hold of that condition. Kingpin comes packed with Extort, so even if you can’t attack or are struggling to find your combo pieces, you can still eke out three cards per spell by paying a single extra mana for the drain. Ghalta is the most straightforward, just granting buttstrike and allowing defenders to attack, though there’s only a single defender in the whole deck.

Your fatties might have large glutes, but they need to be able to show that those butts are the real deal. MacCready, Lamplight Mayor and Behind the Scenes grant skulk, which should help your low-power creatures to sneak past a board of blockers. If that doesn’t work, The Wind Crystal can give your creatures flying and lifelink for a relatively affordable six mana, or you can slam Akroma’s Will to make your creatures nigh-unblockable and nigh-invincible for the alpha strike. 

When I Hit It, It Bounce Back

As with most functioning Orzhov decks, this list comes with some recursion or reanimator pieces as well. Since you’ll be discarding a ton of creatures anyway, having a few ways to pull cards out of your graveyard is good value. Ascend from Avernus is one of my personal favorites for mass reanimation — it’s a cheap card dollar-wise, and it’s an X-cost spell, reanimating all creature and planeswalker cards with mana value X or less. You can tailor the value of X to your needs to potentially save on mana costs, and if you decide to include some planeswalkers (there are plenty of good Ajani planeswalkers that deal with lifegain) you can hit those with this spell too. 

Tortured Existence is a real classic of discard-based recursion, and with Skirge Familiar and Confessor, you have infinite access to creatures in your graveyard as well. Cleric Class is flexible, making your lifegain more efficient first, then giving you the option to buff creatures with its second-level ability, and its last level is a one-time reanimation spell that also gains you a chunk of life according to the size of the creature’s derriere. An additional shoutout goes to Zero Point Ballad, another cool reanimator tech card: it’s a boardwipe that has the potential upside of recouping one of your creatures if you pay enough into the value of X. Alternatively, you can buff the toughness of all of your creatures, then pay into the X just underneath your minimum toughness to wipe away your opponents’ creatures while leaving yours unscathed. 

My Anaconda Don’t Want None

Continuing with the conventional beatstick-based win conditions, Loxodon Lifechanter can utilize the mana from Skirge Familiar to pump itself up many times over, allowing you to one-shot a player at nearly any life total, as long as you have a healthy amount of white mana available. Doctor Strange, Surgeon gives a more modest buff to your entire board as long as you have at least 10 more life than your starting total, and he also doubles your lifegain effects to boot. Rounding out the win conditions is Psychosis Crawler, which can burn your opponents out of the game when it sees you drawing a ton of cards.

If neither a combat damage route nor the Sickening Dreams damage-redirection plan can secure your victory, there’s always the old reliable of Vito, Thorn of the Dusk Rose or Sanguine Bond. Combined with the massive swing potential of Children of Korlis and Tainted Sigil, your opponents can find themselves in serious danger even if you don’t find the combo to draw your deck. Try to keep track of how much life you lose per turn, since you’ll need to have an accurate number to maximize the impact of these spells.

Speaking of Vito and Sanguine Bond, this iteration of the deck is lacking the other piece of the bog-standard life-based infinite combo involving abilities that burn opponents based on lifegain, but that doesn’t mean I forgot about them. Shortly, you’ll see an upgraded version of the deck with a little more junk in the trunk.

Unless You Got Buns, Hon

Since you’ve already seen the critical lifegain components of the deck, you know the most important pieces needed to assemble your win condition. That doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t know about the turn-to-turn lifegain pieces as well, though. Intervention Pact was once a pretty worthless spell compared to some of the other spells in the Pact cycle, but with Niv-Mizz-Orzhov, this spell functionally reads “draw cards equal to the power of a creature dealing damage to you and prevent that damage.” Union of the Third Path is a good burst-draw spell that effectively doubles your handsize with its lifegain being equivalent to the number of cards in your hand, and Angelic Chorus rounds out the payoffs for fat-assed creatures hitting your board.

A Brand New Butt

Not that I would know, but BBLs ain’t cheap. If you want a really good one, you need to be willing to shell out. This version of the deck comes packed with significantly more expensive — and powerful — cards to turbo-charge the gameplay.

About a week and a half ago, this card would have been perfectly acceptable to include in the base version of the deck. But of course, hype is hype, and Words of Worship ballooned from $2 to nearly $30 practically overnight. It’s for good reason, though, as with Niv-Mizzet, every single card you draw can be quintupled for the paltry cost of a single mana. Get a copy if you can afford one, because this is arguably the strongest card in the deck outside of the combo contexts.

Like I mentioned earlier, Bloodthirsty Conqueror and Exquisite Blood, which serve as the other half of the infamous Exquisite Blood/Sanguine Bond-style combo, were left out of the base version of the deck. Looking at the price tags, you can probably understand why — together, these cards are worth about 30% of the entire base decklist cost. It’s well worth it, though, as these cards are incredibly powerful even when they're not infinitely looping life loss and life gain triggers.

Tutors are self-explanatory, but it’s good to know what you should actually be tutoring for when you run them. Ranger-Captain of Eos fetches the creature components of the combo — Tireless Tribe or Confessor — and provides you with a buffer of protection against noncreature spells, assuming your opponents can’t interact with it. Enlightened Tutor gets Words of Worship if you just need to dig, or Exquisite Blood/Sanguine Bond depending on which half of the combo you need to complete the loop, and Vampiric Tutor is obviously a fixer, acting as a second copy of any card you need in the deck. Normally, you probably want Skirge Familiar or Psychosis Crawler, depending on what other pieces you have available to you.

Don’t Forget A-Butt Me

And there you have it, folks. One of my finest creations this year: a deck dedicated entirely to the fine art of appreciating bottoms, and one with a fair shot at being competitive to boot. I hope you enjoyed this deck tech and found some new tech for your own Niv-Mizzet brew. Join us on the EDHLAB Discord and tell us about your own spicy lifegain tech cards!

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