I’ll go over him once over just for recollection’s sake.
For this deck, our Commander is a 5 drop – 3UU for a 3/4 Legendary Human Wizard. Not fantastic stats, but not bad either. His ability reads as follows:
2U, tap: Each play puts the top three cards of his or her library into his or her graveyard.Exile up to two creature cards put into graveyards this way. Put an X/X blue zombie creature token onto the battlefield, where X is the total power of the cards exiled this way.
As I said before, having the effect of hitting all players gives him a lot more versatility than Ambassador Laquatus, though one thing I forgot to mention is that Laquatus has more range than Geralf does due to the fact that Ambassador Laquatus doesn’t have to tap for his ability.
As far as his ability is concerned, he fits flavorfully with the rest of his Skaabs from Innistrad – putting your deck in the graveyard to feed your other Skaabs, Essentially the same as his mono-blue creations, which all either mill you to make it easier to cast some of your other Skaabs, or they require creatures to be exiled from your graveyard as additional casting costs.
The main problem with creating a Geralf deck is that it’s very difficult to build it as zombie tribal – there’s very few in just blue.
These are more are what I recommend for the list, and I’ll post the rest of my recommendations in the Skeleton List below.
Skeleton List:
Commander:
Stitcher Geralf
Creatures:
Armored Skaab
Deadeye Navigator
Deranged Assistant
Fatestitcher
Havengul Skaab
Laboratory Maniac
Palinchron
Peregrine Drake
Rotcrown Ghoul
Screeching Skaab
Skaab Ruinator
Snapcaster Mage
Stitched Drake
Teferi, Mage of Zhalfir
Trinket Mage
Undead Alchemist
Wonder
Instants:
Blue Sun’s Zenith
Cyclonic Rift
Evacuation
Long-Term Plans
Mystic Tutor
Pongify
Spin into Myth
Rapid Hybridization
Enchantments:
Intruder Alarm
Rooftop Storm
Artifacts:
Caged Sun
Elixir of Immortality
Extraplanar Lens
Gauntlet of Power
Sensei’s Divining Top
Planeswalkers:
Jace Beleren
Jace, Memory Adept
Jace, the Living Guildpact
Jace, the Mind Sculptor
Tamiyo, the Moon Sage
Lands:
Cavern of Souls
Nythos, Shrine to Nyx
Rogue’s Passage
Snow-Covered Islands
Terrain Generator
The majority of this list is flavorful, but focuses on a few combos. As a Johnny, I have no choice but to play mono-blue with a few combos that I just can’t help but love. The main problem I had in building this deck was trying to find a niche for him that I liked – he doesn’t do a whole lot as a commander, and he is a terrible Zombie commander due to the fact that there are very few mono-blue zombies. Most of the good blue Zombies are black and blue. We’ll get to a list for that soon, though.
This combo enables us to use Deadeye Navigator with any of our zombies that make us mill cards from the top of our library to completely empty our decks.
The next article will be much easier to write, seeing as black has much, much better Zombie support, and Gisa will be a lot of fun to mess around with.
Until next time.
-SolemnParty (David Rowell)