Negan, the Cold-Blooded: Sac of Treasures

Short version: Sac of Treasures is a Mardu Commander deck that pairs Negan, the Cold-Blooded — the Universes Within printing of Malik, Grim Manipulator — with a mountain of Treasure tokens, then converts every one of those little coins into life loss for the whole table. It is a Magic: The Gathering deck that wins by inches — a point of drain here, a forced sacrifice there — until three opponents quietly bleed out at once.

This is my kind of deck. It rewards a spicy line, an underdog card doing the heavy lifting, and the slow build of a machine that finally clicks into gear. Let me walk you through how the Sac of Treasures build actually plays.

Negan costs . His enter-the-battlefield trigger makes you and a chosen opponent each secretly pick a creature that player controls, and then that player sacrifices it. Because the pick is secret rather than targeted, hexproof and shroud do nothing to stop him. On top of that, every time an opponent sacrifices a creature, you make a Treasure.

So the plan is two-headed: point Negan at the board to strip creatures and generate coins, then re-use that enter trigger over and over. Everything else in the deck is built to turn that stream of Treasures into a win.

The heart of Sac of Treasures is Academy Manufactor. It rewrites every "create a Treasure" into "create a Treasure, a Clue, and a Food," which means one trigger suddenly feeds three different needs — ramp, card draw, and a little emergency lifegain. It is the piece I most want to see, and I run tutors like Enlightened Tutor and Goblin Engineer largely to go find it.

Stack token doublers on top and the numbers get silly. Mondrak, Glory Dominus and Anointed Procession each double what you make, and Xorn pumps the Treasures specifically. Drop Negan with Manufactor and a doubler already down and you are cracking open a genuinely obscene number of artifacts in one trigger.

Making Treasures is only fun if you cash them in for damage. This is where the deck earns its name. Disciple of the Vault pings a target opponent every time one of your artifacts hits the graveyard — and a sacrificed Treasure does exactly that. With Manufactor turning every coin into three artifacts, each Treasure you spend is three separate points of loss.

Mayhem Devil fires whenever any player sacrifices a permanent, so it punishes both your Treasure-cracking and everyone else's board sacs. Mirkwood Bats might be my favorite — it drains all opponents both when your tokens are created and when they leave, so it hits on the way in and the way out. And Marionette Master is the closer: with counters on it, each artifact heading to the graveyard drains for its power, which ends games in a hurry.

The Mardu color pie gives this deck a deep bench of forced-sacrifice cards, and I lean on them hard. Merciless Executioner, Fleshbag Marauder, and Plaguecrafter make everyone sac a creature, then stick around as chump blockers or future sac fodder themselves. Sheoldred, Whispering One turns that into a repeatable, every-upkeep grind, and instant-speed options like Sheoldred's Edict and Vona's Hunger let you strip a key blocker at the worst possible moment for the table.

The beauty is the overlap: every forced sacrifice also feeds Negan's Treasure trigger and pings your Mayhem Devil. The control package and the drain package are the same cards.

Under the hood this is a 100-card list running 35 lands with an average mana value of 3.49 — a fair, midrange curve that tops out with a few heavy hitters like Torment of Hailfire. The color demands lean hard on black (about 47 black pips across the deck) with red and white as strong supports, so the fixing is built for a black-primary Mardu base of Triomes, painlands, and Pathways. Command Tower, Arcane Signet, and Sol Ring smooth the early turns, and once the Treasure engine is online your coins double as any-color fixing for the splashes.

Piloting is all about firing Negan's enter trigger as many times as you can. Blink effects like Ephemerate, Conjurer's Closet, and Teleportation Circle flicker him for another secret sacrifice and another Treasure. But I don't play precious with him — I'm not spending cards to keep Negan alive. If somebody removes him, that's fine by me; I'm happy to recast him from the command zone and eat the commander tax, because a fresh cast means a fresh ETB and another forced sacrifice. Dying and coming back is just one more way to press the button.

In one recorded game, Nahiri's Resolve flickered Negan every turn and quietly ground the board down until the table had nothing left to swing with. The rhythm is the same however you get there: resolve Negan into some token support, then keep re-triggering that enter ability while the drain pieces turn all that fodder into damage. If you want to see how those games get scored, the results above run on Nerd Leagues' deck-vs-player ELO, and you can browse other lists in the public deck explorer.

The strengths are resilience and reach. You do not need combat, so a stalled-out board actually helps you, and your drain hits all three opponents at once instead of picking on one. The forced sacrifices double as removal, so you rarely feel dead in the water.

The weaknesses are real, though, and worth naming. It is slow — you need a turn or two to assemble the engine, and a fast combo deck can end things before your coins pile up. Graveyard hate on Academy Manufactor or artifact hate on your Treasures can gut the plan, and losing Negan repeatedly still runs your commander tax up over time. This is a build that thrives in a grindier, more casual Commander pod and struggles against a table that is racing to turn five.

If you love a deck that turns a fistful of shiny coins into a slow, satisfying squeeze on the whole table, Sac of Treasures is a joy to pilot. Build your own version, track it in a league, and go make some Treasures.