When everything closed down back in 2020 I joined a small online Discord community to jam cEDH on Tabletop Simulator. It was there that I really started to dive in and understand cEDH and play the game as a main hobby. On that server I met and played vs some great pilots some of which I would become friends with in real life. One of which I have yet to meet is a player called Nazgir. I’ve played hundreds of games with Nazgir, including one of the longest games I’ve ever experienced clocking in at over 4 hours. I’ve played with various Krark aficionados at various skill levels. Many players pickup the deck and don’t understand exactly whats going on. Or they play against the deck and have no idea on how to interact with it or how the Krark changes interacting with the table. At this point in my cedh career I think I’ve played against every Krark variant and would like to offer perspective on the deck. Keep in mind I only directly play Krark paired with Tymna and Thrasios. Nazgir was the first Krark player I played against and he is a KrarkaShima purist. In my tournament career I have had the pleasure of playing into Shaka, Endera, Tyler, and many players much worse.
In my opinion, one of the Krark variants is a tier 0 deck and I’d like to explain why. There’s alot of background to understanding that as well as understanding the greater meta and I want to make sure this can be sent to where ever to explain my thought process on how Krark “escapes” the meta.
Clarification 1: Throughout this I will be referring to Krark flips as “Bounce” and “Copies” and shorthand for “Losing” and “Winning” coin flips from Krark triggers respectively. I will use these terms interchangeably.
Clarification 2: The medium I play on most regularly is Tabletop Simulator. On it there is helper tool that allows you to stack large number of Krark triggers all at once. I largely have not experienced Kark having a “time issue” simply because of the way that I experience Magic the Gathering. For a large number of players. Krark in tournaments has a very bad history and perception due to the time it takes to resolve triggers. Personally I feel this comes down to players not understanding when it’s time to concede as well as Krark pilots being forced to play out combos under pressure for time reasons. If you plan to play any Krark at an event after reading this, set yourself a timer and practice your combos within that time. Expect your opponents in a tournament to ask you the same.
Clarification 3: The most Krark flips lost in a row at the time of writing is 20 in a row achieved by player “Wanderer” on the 16th May 2025 (0.000095% chance). Their previous record was 15 (0.00076% chance). Nazgir’s record is 11 in a row (0.048% chance).
Krark for the uninformed
Krark, the Thumbless operates on a number of layers that other decks simply cannot have access to. Layer 1 to understanding the Krark puzzle is to understand your Krark based win. Your goal is assemble a board to stack triggers from Krark to gain busted effects. Each color combination offers a different way to break Krark and depending on the exact options you have there are a range of different combos you can pivot too depending on the pod and boardstate. With just red cards Roaming Throne, Harmonic Prodigy, Storm-Kiln Artist, Tavern Scoundrel, Ashling, Flame Dancer, and Birgi, God of Storytelling are your main cast and will appear in nearly every variant you find out there. These give you your main mana generation and provide advantage for you from using Krark. They allow the fail state of a Krark coin flip to be reduced and even reversed in some situations. For the rest of this piece, I need you understand this importance and the context for interacting with these decks. Krark needs support and that is the reason you play other colors. Red gives you the mana but it struggles with the cards. The first layer that most people think of with that is the partner Sakashima of a Thousand Faces
This is not the default list. I want to be clear that Krark is a highly customizable commander that can be tailored to whatever local scene with knife-like precision. If you understand your meta there’s quite literally hundreds of possible swaps and replacements for a given effect. Sakashima gives you a second Krark in the command zone. This then allows you to run the hyper efficient package of Phyrexian Metamorph, Phantasmal Image and https://scryfall.com/search?q=Veyhran+Voice+of+Duality\&unique=cards&as=grid&order=name. These 4 cards give you the possibility of stacking Krark triggers over top one another to layer your spells and rituals. Casting Rite of Flame and having 3 flips gives you great odds to copy once and bounce twice. This is theoretically infinite but in actuality likely is not.
In a boardstate of Krark, Saka, and Phimage casting Rite has the failstate of 3 copies. This will result in you being unable to continue the “loop” of casting, copying, and bouncing. The worst case scenario for this nets you 8 floating red. This is the “failstate” in this scenario since any bounce allows you to reuse the ritual spell in the future to potentially start the chain again. Flipping coins is a funny thing. Every Krark player reading this is likely laughing and pointing at me and saying “if only” while yes it is possible to fail this way, the more likely event is seeing Mental Misstep or watching Rite be bounced to hand 3 in a row. This can create very awkward Krark turns where you build a storm count in the 20s by just casting a ritual but you proceed to get unlucky with the timings of them and are forced to use it over and over again. This highlights the extreme importance of https://scryfall.com/search?q=Vivi+Orniter\&unique=cards&as=grid&order=name for the deck and really all mana generation throughout every build. When your spells produce the mana they cost then you don’t need to run as much mana generation which has the chance to backfire spectacularly. Card advantage spells like Ponder or Light Up the Stage have the opposite failstate of 3 bounces assuming the same board.
So whats the advantage of this deck over literally anything else in the command zone? Ral, Monsoon Mage is right there as an izzet storm option that has tournament results proving its success, why play this? Instead of having pure speed like Ral you gain a way to play and combo by ignoring key pieces other storm decks simply cannot. Without getting into the rules of priority and what “APNAP” means, if you have a flash enabling effect like Emergence Zone, Borne Upon a Wind or Valley Floodcaller or you are just casting Instants in general. The way triggers resolve allows you to potentially bury Rhysitc Study, Smothering Tithe or really anything your opponents might have to trigger off your spells underneath your win. This also applies to potential counterspells. Krark also offers the ability to turn free spells such as Mogg Salvage, Fierce Guardianship and Deflecting Swat into potential lock pieces. If you have the ability to bounce free spells back to hand you can just use them on multiple pieces again and again possibly in the same turn. In short, Krark offers uncapped combos, resiliency and resource advantage at the cost of speed, Sakashima as a partner allows you to further sacrifice speed to allow for more consistency.
This is the baseline I want to establish everything else off of. Krarkashima is all in on the Krark plan with the only backup being Underworld Breach. Let me say that again Breach is the backup. Every Grixis gamer reads that with confusion, “How can you win without Thoracle or Breach?” In this deck its really a board your looking for. The checklist goes:
- Krark on the board
- A mana producer (Birgi, Tavern Scoundrel, Storm-Kiln Artist, etc)
- A copy effect (Harmonic Prodigy, Roaming Throne, Sakashima, etc)
- An action spell
That last part might seem a bit vague but thats really the truth of it. Twinflame, Molten Duplication, and Cackling Counterpart can all act as that spell. If you copy the copier with Twinflame and flip bounce/copy then cast Twinflame again your chances of rolling bounce/copy increase. Once you have 4 Krark triggers you can begin copying the mana producer to go net positive. Then you can present infinite copies of everything you control. Twinflame grants haste so you just swing to win. Same goes for all of the other copy effects.
A different action spell in this context might just be End the Festivities. If you have Storm-Kiln Artist with a naked Harmonic Prodigy and Krark+Saka. TECHNICALLY you are presenting THEORETICAL infinite damage as each Krark triggers twice giving you 4 potential copies, each time you copy a spell Storm-Kiln triggers making 2 treasures. You only need 1 bounce to keep going while the chances of missing 4 in a row is 6.25%, you often don’t need to do this the full 40 times as players will be damaging each other in combat etc. Depending on your exact board this might change. Switch SKA for Vivi and Harmonic for Veyhran and you have yourself 3 damage every cast. If you can cast it 5 times Vivi will have 10 counters making 10 mana allowing you to cast it another 10 times. This is 15 casts or 45 damage. Again, this boardstate of Krark, Copy, Mana, Action is what you’re looking for. Outside of Krark, everything else is interchangeable depending on your deck.
The strategy has some glaring weaknesses. For one, this is the most commander dependent deck I will be talking about, if you kill krark enough, the deck has Dualcaster Mage and Breach to fallback on. Izzet is a notoriously bad color combination at tutoring those things. Secondly, the deck has some very expensive pieces. While you’d like to play every 4 drop under the sun, the “Three-cmc plus Four-cmc Creatures” are premium slots in the deck with tight competition. Many brewers go overboard including more than they should causing and extremely greedy build and and overly expensive deck. By excluding powerhouses like Ashling, Flame Dancer and Archmage Emeritus however you are leaving out entire potential win lines on the table. Lastly this deck is extremely explosive, but it is still not the fastest. This deck plays alot of responsible spells, but RogSi can still do RogSi things and mulligans are not always kind.
Adding a color with Silas
So we’ve gone over some of the advantages of blue, as well as some possible combos possible with clones and tools. Lets compare this to what i think is a premium color combination by using Silas Renn, Seeker Adept to add black cards to the mix.
This list from my own digging, is widely considered to be the best primer for KrarkSi. For a more comprehensive guide, please read the primer above.
From a Krark perspective, what are we looking for and what do we gain? In 2 words; Demonic Tutor. Every single tutor spell we get access to from black functions as a way to get a two card combo. From Breach + LED, Thoracle + Consult to Dualcaster Mage and Twinflame every functional copy of DTutor like Diabolic Intent, Demonic Counsel and Praetor’s Grasp allow you to find any combo and win from just a won coinflip. Additionally since Krark is a big free spell lover, you gain access to Deadly Rollick one of the best universal creature removal spells as a potential target for your wins.
These are the most obvious, but digging deeper and you’ll find that Krark is able to transform cards like Plunge into Darkness into potent filtering tools. Pay 5 life and get 2 copies to look at 15% of your deck. It also lets you use powerful draw abilities like Bolas's Citadel to gain ways to win in hand as a fail state. A single Krark being out can encourage the other players to hold reactions until an extra copy has hit the stack to get maximum useage out of spells like Flusterstorm or Mindbreak Trap. In these situations, getting flips back to hand can sometimes be a positive as it lets you have more fuel for later. Since Krark is always so hungry for cards many pilots like Vilis, Broker of Blood for the sheer fact that the number of cards drawn can’t be beat. Rituals in Krark like Cabal Ritual and Dark Ritual can enable some of the most explosive turns in cEDH. Possibly the most explosive spell in Yawgmoth’s Will is also a staple for this color combination.
To summarize, Grixis Krark gains access to tons of instant and sorceries which can enable fast and powerful wins by combining efficient wincons and tutors with the mana cheating and advantage of krark. You’ll notice a heavy focus on the potential upside and me ignoring the other outcome. Without Saka and other non-legendary doublers being added you lose out on more consistent Krark only plans. This deck is not purely a Krark deck. In fact this deck can be the least “Krarky” deck as the wincons of Grixis are just that efficient. You trade consistency for a massive amount of resiliency, speed and explosiveness.
Talking about anything is Grixis is difficult because you always have to compare the options to RogSi and Inalla. Both of these decks are two of the heaviest hitters in cedh, one being a tier 0 deck and the other being one of the oldest true combo-turbo decks in the format. Grixis can sometimes just one on turn one without the commanders, the unique lines you get from Krark and the Krark package to me is similar to comparing to the Inalla Spellseeker lines. Other Grixis decks often have the feeling of “Win fast, lose fast.” Krark on the other hand gives you the unique ability to have resiliency from a stopped win. In RogSi if you sac Rog to Culling the Weak and someone presents a Mental Misstep you’ve been got hard. Its an uphill recovery to build the mana advantage again. Krark provides multiple resource advantages which can be leveraged like few other decks. Copying a Demonic Tutor provides some level of protection as well as many players having 1 counterspell in hand will be forced to allow the copies to go through outside of Mindbreak and Flusterstorm exactly. This can be especially helpful when looking at Necropotence or Ad Nauseam lines requiring cards like Final Fortune and Borne Upon a Wind to resolve in order to present a win. Pretty much it forces your opponents to have more and to use more to stop you compared to other Grixis variants which can be stopped by a single Fierce Guardianship.
Sans-blue flexibility in Tymna
Let’s leave behind the comfort of counterspells for a moment and trade them out for better protection.
Tymna is a powerful commander for the cost. You can build a strategy around the other commander and simply use Tymna for colors and a backup card draw engine to dig you out of bad spots. Pairing Tymna and Krark gives you the unique ability to tailor your deck to how “Krarky” you want it. Some builds and versions lean much more on the Tymna part of the plan such as Tyler’s version which took down Cloud City 7. Other builds like Shaka’s lean much more into the Krark plan as the main wincon. The flexibility is one of the main upsides to having a Mardu identity. In general the idea is to take the Human and combat package from most tymna builds through things like Professional Facebreaker to generate advantage. Pair this with the unique doublers in Krark alongside white protection from Silence or Grand Abolisher effects and you have yourself explosive post combat turns. Additionally if the Krark plan isn’t working out, Krark doublers like Roaming Throne or Delney, Streetwise Lookout can instead be used to double Tymna triggers and the triggers of humans to get yourself into a recoverable situation.
The Krark win in this version also includes some layering possible with Red copy spells. Due to the abundance of treasure generators from the Tymna package, you are now much more comfortably able to run Reverberate style wins. What this looks like in practice is having something like Ashling Flame Dancer or any magecraft effect, casting your copy effect and winning a Krark flip to copy the original Reverberate. Since copies all trigger the magecraft effect with Ashling you can at instant speed loot through your deck. With Storm-Kiln Artist you immediately generate infinite treasures, oftentimes this is paired with a Mayhem Devil in order to translate that to infinite damage as well. Mardu Krark also gets access to Saw in Half which is paired with all of the non-legendary doublers and creatures in the deck to present infinite tokens at instant speed. ETB creatures like Orcish Bowmaster or Pinnacle Monk can than convert that to winning if you are already post combat or in instant speed. My personal favorite way to win with this deck is by combining Dualcaster Mage with Praetor’s Grasp and Saw in Half. Overtop the stack you can exile all of your opponents decks and present infinite copies of every instant in their decks.
Tymna provides a way to smooth out mulligans reducing variance as well as a very flexible pair of commanders which can present explosive wins. This deck is able to punish greedy players and punish midrange based metas as Krark provides the unique ability to win over gummed board states and multiple https://scryfall.com/search?q=Rhystic+Studies\&unique=cards&as=grid&order=name. While the meta right now isn’t super favored for this specific version of Krark, I think that as the meta slows down through either more players picking up Stax based decks or people wish to play more midrange variants of their favorite decks, Krark + Tymna will have a massive resurgence. I wanted to originally provide a wide range of Tymna/Krark variants discussing the pulls of each direction, but instead I’ll leave that to an exercise for the readers.
This deck struggles to interact meaningfully with your opponents trying to win outside of creature based or storm based combos. The deck no matter the variant also does not play the “yap game.” In other words, your political skill isn’t something you can really lean on in this deck due to the lack of powerful counterspells and due to your entire lineup of interaction being based around strictly Silence variants or Deadly Rollick style removal effects. This in my opinion is one of the largest drawbacks to playing Sans-blue krark. Krark paired with interaction spells like Mindbreak Trap or Fierce Guardianship can genuinely warp the entire game into a mini game of allowing certain things through. Krark can reward a sharp political pilot as well as capitalize on your opponents miscalculating the board position. The Tymna variants though sacrifice that political game and the ability to massively warp the game from one revealed spell for having a much easier time mulliganing and an easier time presenting wins from unqiue angles. You could argue that other versions could instead lean on single card choices like Fury Storm to generate infinite magecraft, but the fact is each other version is much more tuned to capitalize on either the blue spells present in the deck or the alternative wincons for a given color combination.
Cradlestorm and Thrasios.
All of the preamble and explanation of different variants was to buildup to what I think is the best Krark deck.
The original version of this deck was “Riverboat Casino” and would lean on Dockside loops to close the game with Thrasios. In a post-Dockside world though, whats the angle? Well it involves a few broad steps. But that starts with a different approach to Krark combos. For each other deck, the Krark part of the plan was the literal finisher to the deck, either getting us to Thassa's Oracle or directly winning from some other infinite. In Temur however, we can instead lean on Thrasios, Triton Hero activations to be able to draw the deck for some other win. Remember, Krark gives us the ability to copy spells over the stack so as long as we have access to a damage spell like Gut Shot you should be able to present infinite damage. Here, infinite mana will always have an outlet, compared to every other deck not having an outlet directly. This means we can now focus our Krark abilities to find an infinite mana win. The fashionable way to do that right now December 10th 2025 is via Eternal Witness and snap\ with enough creatures on board to generate mana through Gaea’s Cradle and any blue source. There are much more complex ways to do it in the deck such as the complex tutor chains you can find in the primer which are between 4-7 steps per card you need for the combo.
The goal is shifted now from a true Krark plan to now having a clear “shifting point”. The Thrasios gameplan is often compact enough and often involves few enough pieces to where we have lots of room in the deck for tutors and pieces to find exactly what we need when we need it. Unfortunately since this deck is so tutor heavy and since you are so flexible, this will require a very political pilot to understand the game and understand what not only the next step is, but understand what end state you’d like to present. Its entirely possible in this deck to assemble an infinite mana combo without Krark, likewise its possible to assemble a Krark only win without Thrasios or any other outlet by abusing Displacer Kitten and the suite of Green recursive creatures like Endurance, Timeless Witness and once again Eternal Witness.
Having access to Thrasios in the command zone also allows your ritual based turns discussed earlier to always have an endpoint. Now when you’re casting Rite of Flame over an over you have a new decision point; Activate Thrasios or not? Additionally cards that are able to untap a permanent are now all ritual spells. Emerald Charm combined with Krark and Gaea’s Cradle is now a hyper efficient ritual that you can use to present wins with on its own. Manamorphose is one of the main pulls to the deck for the sole reason of with Krark copy effects to be able to generate eye-watering amounts of cards and mana from one spell. If the hybrid mana rule is ever changed, every Krark deck gets it too! Green also presents very interesting ways of generating storm through cards like Land Grant. This card specifically has the option of having the ability to infinitely shuffle your deck via failing to find. Infinite Storm means that with a mana generator like Birgi or Storm Kiln Artist, you now simply win with Thrasios.
The Temur build is the most interesting to me since it is the most political version. You have to have a good understanding of your goals and what your opponents are doing all at once. Every X tutor like Chord of Calling presents a difficult choice for your opponents. It’ll be an uphill battle to get counterspells pointed at anything else even with X equal to 2. Neoform and Eldritch Evolution can function as one card wincons allowing you to assemble any kind of line easily. Because of how high value certain creature ETB effects can be like Spellseeker, blink spells like Ghostly Flicker and Essence Flux are run in the deck as ways to assemble new lines. Submerge is a card I will mention now since if I don’t somewhere. Someone will be mad.
So whats the drawback? Well truthfully Temur Krark is the hardest deck to play; its not really that close to me. The player actually piloting the deck needs to be sharp in multiple areas and keyed into what potential options and backup plans you might want to shift into are. Especially since having a tutor bounce back to your hand from a failed Krark flip can result in a wasted turn. This deck requires you to have a good sense as to when you want Krark and when you need Krark to hang back. The fail state of many of the green cards is purely nothing. Cards like Rite of Flame have low opportunity cost and low risk to try flipping with since it just costs 1 red to try. The same cannot be said for Eldritch Evolution or every tutor in the deck due to the resource cost. Some lists run Transmute Artifact which allows you to assemble Candelabra of Tawnos and Expedition Map letting you establish massive mana advantage. The point with Krark sometimes is being able to exchange your resources around to assemble the board you need. Understanding how your pieces are interchangeable and how you can navigate a win without being stopped.
Was any of this coherent?
You’ll notice a distinct lack of stats and percentages in this discussion of Krark. In my own experience and opinion when discussing Krark the actual percentages of a given boardstate are not relevant. Each deck no matter how you slice it is built around a given outcome. Whether thats winning one 50/50 or assembling 4 Krark triggers ending in copy/bounce combinations. Decks like Etali, RogThras, or YoshiThras are often touted as being nondeterministic, however no one talks about the stats when it comes to the other flips outside of the pilots figuring out micro decisions within a specific game. I think the same should apply here and when talking about Krark. I hope that I’ve managed to provide some perspective on each deck above.
This post took about 20 days to get to a point where I am satisfied. This is going to be in conjunction with a larger discussion on the meta that’s still in the works. Krark provides enough unique advantages as a commander I felt that I would be doing a disservice to the different deck options and the different color options available by not giving the thumbless his own place. I mainly focused on the positives and the differences between the decks as the full meta discussion I’m still working on will go more into the drawbacks of commander centric strategies and where several holes can be found no matter the variant.
Tabletop Simulator introduced me to many cool concepts and decks. If you’ve never tried it I think it’s more than worth the $15 purchase, over on the discord server we are looking to host more events as well. If you want to practice for your tournaments in person, you can find me there practicing as well. Before Tabletop Simulator I never thought about how Krark could be utilized to assemble a messy win. My own local meta just didn’t have any players who liked Krark. It provided a nice place to try new decks, tweak decks and see what is really possible within the world of cedh. Nazgir and I haven’t been able to play a game against each other in almost a year now at this point. He and I both have had life take us beyond the online world. Every time I hear someone talk about Covid and the effects of the pandemic, I am always taken back to being stuck in my room. Staring at a board trying to work out what the next step is. I can’t help but think about how many times I’ve seen the coin flipped and how many games really would have been different on a won or lost flip.
To Nazgir, if you even find this: Thank you for every game, I look forward to the next, whenever that may be.
