Conditions Allow - Uchbenbak, the Great Mistake
(Uchbenbak, the Great Mistake | Art by Steven Belledin)
No Mistake About It
Hello, and welcome back to Conditions Allow, the series where I take a legendary creature with a drawback and build a deck to turn it into a strength. Today I'm venturing back to the Lost Caverns of Ixalan to build around one of my favorite cards from the set, Uchbenbak, the Great Mistake.
Uchbenbak, the Great Mistake is a 6/4 Skeleton Horror with vigilance and menace. Additionally, you can pay six mana to return it from your graveyard to play as long as there are eight or more permanent cards in your graveyard. When it returns this way, it enters play with a finality counter, which will exile Uchbenbak if it would die. This makes it difficult to repeatedly sacrifice Uchbenbak, the Great Mistake, like you would its smaller Reassembling Skeleton cohorts.
While there are ways to remove or circumvent the restrictions put in place by that finality counter, I don't think Uchbenbak, the Great Mistake really needs to. Thanks to a recent influx of Skeleton support cards, Uchbenbak, the Great Mistake is a viable Voltron commander for a shambling horde of the fleshless undead.
The Final Frontier
As your commander, Uchbenbak, the Great Mistake naturally avoids the ultimate consequence of gaining a finality counter when you use its ability. Six mana is already one less than the seven Uchbenbak costs after dying once. If it dies again, you can let it go to the command zone, and even though it's died twice, it only costs two more. If the game goes long, it will eventually cost too much to cast, but by then you should have found Power Conduit or Nesting Grounds to keep your commander from being exiled again.
Another wrinkle of Uchbenbak, the Great Mistake's ability is that it requires at least eight permanent cards to be in your graveyard. Since this will be a Voltron deck, you could include lots of Equipment. Blue does have some good options to re-use artifacts from the graveyard. In order to synergize with Uchbenbak, the Great Mistake specifically, however, I'm going to include the best Skeletons I can find. Most of these can pull themselves out of the graveyard, and they also benefit from the many anthems I'm going to include. This lets the deck pressure your opponents through commander damage while also playing defense; additionally, you can easily pivoting to a go wide strategy if the commander can't get through alone.
Graveyard's Full
Before we get to any of that, however, we need to actually get those cards into the graveyard, and for self-milling, there isn't much better than Stitcher's Supplier and Undead Butler. I'm also very fond of Mire Triton for some incidental life gain, as well as an early deathtouch blocker. Deathcap Marionette is a similar effect I'm also excited to try out. The Ancient One doesn't mill when it enters, but it can easily fill your graveyard with just a single activation, and once it does, a two-mana 8/8 is nothing to scoff at.
For some late game inevitability, I'm including Out of the Tombs and Cemetery Tampering. If a game goes really long, Out of the Tombs does a great job of keeping you ahead of your opponents on board, especially by returning the anthem creatures that can't return themselves. I'm also a fan of Jace's Erasure for steady self-mill that you can turn against your opponents to avoid over extending into yours. Ripples of Undeath is undoubtedly a more power card, but keeping some extra cards in your deck can help soften the blow of any Bojuka Bogs aimed your way.
Making Skeletons Dangerous
The card that really makes this possible is Corpses of the Lost. Giving all your Skeletons haste drastically changes the tempo of paying six mana to return your commander to play at sorcery speed. It also makes your Reassembling Skeletons and Persistent Specimens into an army that's incredibly hard to keep down. Criminal Past is your best buff to your commander, working incredibly well with a self mill strategy, but if you're going wide, Haunted One gives all your Skeletons a sizeable buff. Undying also makes your opponents much less likely to block, allowing you to drop life totals early.
Of course, what really matters for kindred decks is redundancy. More anthems is always better, and thanks to the last few years we finally have enough Skeleton anthems for this deck to work. Death-Priest of Myrkul is both an anthem and a token-creator. I'm not including many ways to sacrifice creatures (just Skullclamp), but Death-Priest of Myrkul provides a steady stream of tokens to gradually wear down your opponents' defenses in combat. On the other end of our graveyard recursion, Skeleton Crew makes a 2/2 Skeleton token every time Reassembling Skeleton comes back into play. Gisa, the Hellraiser doesn't create Skeleton tokens, but she does buff them, and she helps fill your graveyard to enable Uchbenbak, the Great Mistake's Descend ability.
Finally, we have a few old classics. Death Baron and Paragon of Open Graves make your small, recursive Skeletons much more annoying by giving them deathtouch. Then, to make sure not even Dragons are safe, Wonder gives all your creatures flying as long as you have an Island in play while its in the graveyard, and even though I've been emphasizing how all these lords make Tenacious Dead into a reasonable threat, they all make Uchbenbak, the Great Mistake into a must-answer threat. Depending on the situation you can focus on going wide with the smaller Skeletons, or big with your commander, while reserving counterspells to protect your anthems and other engine cards.
The Great Mistake
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Uchbenbak, the Great Mistake may seem underwhelming at first, but don't underestimate a big creature that can come back from the graveyard. Voltron decks often have to dedicate several cards to making their commander stick around, and this deck gets to focus on actually dealing damage instead. If you want to push the color pie a little bit, or are just a fan of Skeletons, definitely give this deck a try.
But what do you think? Are there any cards or synergies I overlooked? How would you build around Uchbenbak, the Great Mistake? Let me know in the comments, and thanks for reading.
