Why I Keep Coming Back to My Myrkul, Lord of Bones EDH Deck

Short answer: I keep coming back to my Myrkul, Lord of Bones EDH deck because no other Commander deck I own turns dying into the best part of my game plan. Every creature in the 99 gets a second life as an enchantment token, and watching that engine come online never, ever gets old.

I've been playing Magic: The Gathering since 2013, when a couple of friends taught me the game in my living room, and Commander swallowed us whole shortly after. In all those years of brewing, this is the deck that stuck. Not my best deck. Not my winningest deck, we'll get to the record, and I promise I'm not hiding from it. Just the one that makes me happiest to shuffle up.

For you get a 7/5 God with a wild promise: whenever another nontoken creature you control dies, you can exile it and create a token copy of it that's an enchantment instead of a creature. Oh, and Myrkul gains indestructible once you're at half your starting life or less — the deck literally gets harder to kill as the game gets scarier.

That one line of text warps the whole build. My mana dorks aren't just ramp; they're future enchantments. My sacrifice outlets: Viscera Seer, Yawgmoth, Thran Physician, Fiend Artisan aren't just value pieces; they're the conveyor belt feeding the machine. The gameplan is simple to say and delicious to execute: get Myrkul out early off cheap dorks, sacrifice creatures into enchantment copies, and let token doublers like Anointed Procession turn one death into an army of ghosts.

Here's the thing about a Myrkul deck that a decklist can't show you: it plays like a puzzle box. The same 100 cards produce a completely different machine every night depending on which pieces hit the table in which order.

Some games it's a pillow fort. I once stacked up ten-plus enchantments behind a Sphere of Safety and watched two friends do the math on attacking me and quietly put their creatures back down. Some games it's an aristocrats deck, looping tokens through free sac outlets while Mirkwood Bats pings the table to death. And some games Scute Swarm or Tendershoot Dryad just decides the game on its own. I wrote up the full construction in my earlier Myrkul deck tech analysis if you want the nuts and bolts — this post is about the feeling.

The deck's greatest hits reel is why it survives every round of deckbox cuts.

There was the night the doublers went nuclear: Myrkul spun completely out of control, the engine ended up producing 256 spirit tokens, and I tutored out Mirkwood Bats to drain the whole table at once. That's the ceiling this deck is always whispering about.

Then there was my favorite kind of win — the solitaire game where I drew through most of my deck and a humble Grim Guardian finished everyone off, one point at a time, because I was making enchantment tokens by the fistful. A two-mana common closing out a Commander game is peak Johnny joy.

And one summer night, I turned Tendershoot Dryad into an enchantment token, then cast For the Common Good for five to stamp out five more copies of it, and my saproling swarm grew up very, very fast.

Every deck has a soul, and these are the cards I'd sooner sleeve in a second copy of than remove. Fiend Artisan is the most important card in the 99 for me, it sacrifices a creature and tutors out exactly what the moment needs, which in a toolbox deck like this is everything. Tendershoot Dryad and Grim Guardian are my proof that underdog cards win real games. Anointed Procession once carried a win so completely that my entire game note was two words: "That's all." And Devoted Druid is my spice slot. As an enchantment token copy it can churn out absurd amounts of green mana with the commander out.

Now the honest part. Across 26 recorded games since early 2025, this deck is 6–20. That's a 23% win rate and a deck ELO sitting under 1000. We track every game in our pod, and the numbers don't flatter me.

But here's what the record taught me: I'd rather lose spectacularly with a deck that feels like mine than grind out wins with a netdeck. The losses are stories too, I once built an unbelievable board and got Farewell'd back to the stone age, and honestly? I laughed. If your playgroup isn't tracking games yet, here's how deck and player ratings work, the data made me love this deck more, not less, because now its legend is written down.

Myrkul, Lord of Bones isn't the best commander in Magic: The Gathering. He's just the one who made a deck I'll never take apart. Every pod needs one of those.