- Nirvana, In Bloom
It's a spicy one today, folks. I was scrolling through commanders, looking for a casual, durdley deck with complex interactions I could pull out at a low power table and still have a good time with when I came across Baba Lysaga, Night Witch. I saw her when she was spoiled in CLB, like everyone else, and had a good laff, like everyone else, calling her "Baby Lasagna," and, like everyone else, promptly forgot she existed. Currently sitting at just under 700 decks on EDHREC, I think it's safe to say that she has had middling impact at best. So, how broken could she be?
The biggest problem I had with the deck was a win condition. I first went to an aristocrat theme, but found it too slow and clunky to be able to close games out reliably. Torment of Hailfire was next, but I fell asleep before being able to test it out. Well, what is the deck actually doing? Sacrificing lots of stuff, sure, but it also draws a lot of cards. You know what card likes drawing lots of cards?
Cadaverous Bloom does.
Being able to turn the dead cards in hand into mana to cast the hot spells in my hand is real good. When you combine it with ways to untap Baba Lysaga like Instill Energy, Thousand-Year Elixir, and Thornbite Staff, things can get a little nutty. They get especially nutty with Reassembling Skeleton and/or Genesis Chamber. You'll often burn through your entire deck, killing everyone else in the process. Even if you don't combo out, with the amount of random permanents this deck vomits out it's quite easy to just overwhelm the table with value until they slowly bleed out from ol' Baba's ability.
This is a very rough draft that's still working out the kinks. Generally, the game plan is to slowly advance your resources with permanents and Baba without overcommitting to the board until you're ready to overwhelm your opponents. I think it needs more protection, fewer token producers, and a stronger emphasis on lands, since I often found myself sacrificing lands in a pinch to draw cards.
Anyway, here she is.