Max Power - Glarb, Calamity's Augur
(Glarb, Calamity's Augur | Bram Sels)
All Your Win-Cons Are Belong To Us
How good is Glarb, Calamity's Augur? Nobody knows until somebody brews it Max Power, so let's get to it.
Sitting with Bloomburrow for a minute here, I couldn't help but notice a surprising lack of interest in Glarb. This was surprising to me, because on the name alone, Glarb is already epic. When you read his text box, though, it just keeps getting better!
"Card Advantage, Ramp, or Combo"
There is an adage when it comes to Competitive EDH commanders: to be considered, a cEDH commander needs to either provide card advantage, ramp, or be part of (preferably) a two-card combo. Well, what if I was to tell you that Glarb, in addition to currently winning the nomination for best-named Magic card of 2024, also almost did all three of those things?
Card Advantage: This one is the most obvious of the options, but also admittedly comes with a huge caveat. Glarb lets you play cards off the top of your deck, essentially "drawing" them, but only if they are lands or spells that cost four or more.
Ramp: All right, this one's a stretch, but... if you play a land off the top of your deck that you wouldn't have had access to otherwise, isn't that kind of like ramp? No? Yeah, fine, you got me on this one.
Combo: Don't break your keyboard desperately looking at Glarb's page on Commander Spellbook: he doesn't have a two-card combo. What he does have is insane synergies with Doomsday. More on that later.
Okay, so so far I haven't sold you very well on Glarb. He almost provides useful card advantage, he doesn't quite ramp, and he doesn't combo so much as exile your entire deck in what's known to be an extremely risky strategy. Why should we be considering him as the leader of a high-powered deck?
Put simply, because four-mana cards don't always cost four mana.
Fast Mana, Disruption, and Tutors
Fast mana, disruption, and tutors are what make high-powered EDH what it is. Fast mana getting your threats and value engines down with just enough resources left over that you can defend them with interaction is the lifeblood of fast play. So how can you do any of that with four-mana spells?
Outside of the most well-known "free" spell of all time, Force of Will, there are also entire other genres of spells that either cost nothing, or cost a lot less than they say on the tin. Perhaps the second-most popular at this point in Commander is the cycle of spells from Commander 2020 that allow you to cast them for free if your commander is in play. Unfortunately, there's only one of them that Glarb can cast off the top: Deadly Rollick. With that said, we'd be foolish not to be playing Fierce Guardianship under any (high-powered) circumstances, so we'll throw that in, too.
More importantly, however, you can find a ton of other free spells by searching the specific phrase they use on Scryfall: fo:"without paying". This actually barely scratches the surface, however, so I'd include the more common phrase "rather than pay" as well. This brings up a cavalcade of stuff, but I'd like to start by focusing on where the majority of these spells comes from: Mercadian Masques block.
Masques block was obsessed with free spells. Just in the original block, we have a common cycle of spells, including Snuff Out and Gush, uncommons that feature the free (but bad) counterspell Thwart, and a rare cycle that features 60-card powerhouses Misdirection and Unmask. Looking at the rest of the block, there's also a cycle of "if an opponent has a basic of the opposing color of your basic" free spells that can also be very good at high-powered tables that will tend to be playing more colors, usually with fetches to go grab duals and shocks. The best of these is easily Submerge, although I tend toward Massacre as well, myself.
Even outside of the free block, however, there are still tons of options that technically cost four mana, but won't in practice. Using that same search, we can also find several cards that see cEDH play in Mindbreak Trap, Force of Vigor, and Baleful Mastery. Going back to the Alliances cycle that brought us Force of Will, we can also grab utility-creature-killer Contagion. Looking at the evoke creatures from Modern Horizons 2, the powerhouse that is Endurance doesn't fit the bill, but commander-countering Subtlety does. Further down the list, we also see some reduced cost things outside of Baleful Mastery in Price of Fame and Murderous Cut.
In short, while we'll be stuck with the same fast mana and tutors that every high-powered deck is using, most of which can't be utilized off the top with Glarb, there is an entire package of interaction that can be, potentially back-to-back-to-back with some top of library manipulation. It's not the whole kit and caboodle, but it is a good start to make our "card advantage" commander lose the quotation marks.
So, what's next? Oh yeah, didn't I mention something about insane Doomsday synergies?
Winning!
For those not well versed in the art of Doomsday piles, they are usually a convoluted mess of memorization and deep thought. Above all, however, what restricts the five-card "you win the game, eventually" pile you can make of your deck with Doomsday is that you need to be able to draw a card to get to the part where you play things and loop stuff to win the game.
Well, with Glarb, no longer. With his ability to play spells that cost four or more off the top of your library, there are any number of easy piles to create that will just win you the game. No muss or fuss required, unless you want there to be some (more on this later). Let's run them down, one at a time, and talk about how many extra "slots" they allow.
1. Jace, Wielder of Mysteries [End of Pile]
First off, if you have four mana to spare after casting Doomsday, you can just put Jace, Wielder of Mysteries and four of the "free" spells we discussed earlier in a pile, and immediately win the game. You can even do it with three mana if you haven't played a land for the turn yet, as Glarb will let you play the land off of the top. The go-to spells here will change depending on your circumstances, but I would advise that you stay away from your initial instinct to go grab Force of Will or Mindbreak Trap. They might be powerhouses, but they also need targets to be able to be cast, and chances are good that if you got to cast Doomsday, your opponents don't have interaction anyhow. My usual piles here are some combination of Jace, Deadly Rollick, Snuff Out, Submerge, Massacre, Contagion, and Force of Vigor, depending on what I have in my hand and what I'm worried about on the board. Just keep in mind that all of your free spells also need a valid target (preferably not Glarb, if you can help it) to be able to cast. I can tell you from experience that it is really awkward to be sitting with a Snuff Out on top after a Doomsday, only to look across the board and see that all the creatures in play are black.
2. Gush, Lion's Eye Diamond, Gitaxian Probe, Thassa's Oracle [End of Pile]
Having three blue pips for Jace after having three black pips for Doomsday seems like a tall order. With that in mind, most games the pile you'll be looking for is this one. It does require you to either have two Islands in play, or to have not played your land for the turn, but both of those are easily achievable in this list. As for how to pull it off, this is where it gets complicated.
You'll want to start with Gush on top, provided you don't need a second island there to get Gush online. From there, it depends on if you have mana or not. If you have two blue pips available, you may want to skip on the Gitaxian Probe and Lion's Eye Diamond completely and just load up on more interaction. If you don't have mana available, then you'll want to have Lion's Eye Diamond and Gitaxian Probe as the two cards underneath Gush. You'll then want to play the Lion's Eye Diamond, then play Gitaxian Probe, then activate Lion's Eye Diamond with Probe on the stack. This allows you to discard your hand with three blue mana in your mana pool, then resolve Gitaxian Probe to draw your next card, Thassa's Oracle. As for the last card, it's dealer's choice. There is some argument for it being a counterspell, as your opponent could be sitting on a Stifle effect, only now you don't have a hand, so the only free counterspell you have that works is Mindbreak Trap, which... probably doesn't work. For me personally? I like Snuff Out. It sends a message.
- Gush
- Lion's Eye Diamond
- Gitaxian Probe
- Thassa's Oracle
- Dealer's Choice
There are other possible lists that are some combination of those listed above. The astute among you will probably have noticed that you can play Jace, Wielder of Mysteries off the top of the library with Lion's Eye Diamond in hand, for instance. Doomsday is well-known for being a difficult effort in memorization, but Glarb adds another layer entirely by letting it be so versatile. Glarb's abilities allow you to play lands off the top before playing your free interaction, in case you need more mana. His surveil 2 can be utilized in a pinch if circumstances change or you mess up the pile to change up what you have on top. Above all, don't panic, and look at your available options if you run into a wrinkle. And even more than that: don't be afraid to pull the trigger on Doomsday. Where most decks, that would be a game loss on the spot if you don't have exactly what you need, with Glarb's options, chances are if you stare at your entire deck long enough, there is absolutely a way that you can win the game, even if it means waiting a turn with interaction available.
The List
The Year Was 2808
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If you had a Turbo deck in mind, get that out of your head right now. With the pip-intensive mana cost of our commander, it made way more sense to lean on massive amounts of interaction to keep us alive until we can get Glarb down, then lean on his innate card draw to keep us in more interaction and land. You'll want to keep the turbo decks under control early with cheap interaction, then play the long game to grab value with your commander, which will then grab you a Doomsday to either cast with counter backup or after the other decks at the table have exhausted their interaction. The deck feels well-suited for this game-plan, and is extremely resilient.
But what I think hardly matters, so instead of ending on what I think, why don't we instead end on what you think about today's list?
