Rat King, Verminister Commander Deck Guide

Rat King, Verminister | Illustration by Miklós Ligeti

We all know the Rat Colony/Relentless Rats decks. Usually led by Marrow-Gnawer or Karumonix, the Rat King, they break the singleton rules of the format, make players groan while they resolve Thrumming Stone trigger after Thrumming Stone trigger, and generally go aggro.

This established archetype has received a new commander from Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Rat King, Verminister! How does this potent activated ability change the formula? Does it offer any interesting interactions? Read on, and find out!

The Deck

Rat Colony | Illustration by Suzanne Helmigh

Verminister leads a Rat Colony deck with an emphasis on sacrifice effects to maximize the potential of Rat King, Verminister.

This is Bracket 3, if not at the peak of the Bracket’s potential. You have a strong win condition and can even backdoor into a sneaky noncombat win, but the horde of rats could be too much or too fast for Bracket 2 games, which tend to be lower on interaction.

The Commander: Rat King, Verminister

Rat King, Verminister was clearly built with either Rat Colony or Relentless Rats in mind; nothing else exploits the same name clause and synergizes with rats. As far as Oops, All Rats commanders go, it has two marks in its favor: protection and sacrifice synergy.

A great weakness of rats is black’s lack of protection for an archetype that depends on going wide. Between reanimation spells and Undying Evil effects, it’s decent at protecting one, maybe two threats, but it struggles to shelter a wide board from Damnation. Verminister fixes this by reanimating all your dead rats. Rebuilding takes time since you need to build up to three rats (importantly, Verminister can sacrifice itself as one of the three), and it doesn’t help against exile-based wraths like Farewell, but it’s better than shrugging.

The sacrifice synergy is more potent. It’s not that Rat Colony/Relentless Rats have never dipped into sacrifice synergies, but cards like Marrow-Gnawer and Karumonix, the Rat King don’t incentivize you to sacrifice your rats like Verminister. Not only does it reward you for sacrificing them by reanimating them, but it also provides a sacrifice outlet that triggers payoffs like Midnight Reaper and Blood Artist three times. These give it a unique spin in the archetype.

Rat Colony Versus Relentless Rats

This deck runs 32 copies of Rat Colony instead of Relentless Rats, and it’s worth considering the advantages of the Colony over the Relentless. Perhaps unsurprisingly, most of it comes down to cost.

There’s a monumental difference between 2 mana and 3. Rat Colony is easier to cast, they become very potent with cost reducers, and you just get more Rats for your buck. It leads to strong play patterns when you play a Colony turn 2, then play a mana rock and a second Colony on 3. It’s also worth noting that Verminister requires lots of rats; it’s easier to use when three Colonies cost 6 versus 9. The last advantage is that Rat Colony’s power boost counts all other rats in play, including Verminister and its tokens, Marrow-Gnawer’s brood, and so on.

This isn’t to say Relentless Rats has no merit. The toughness boost helps mitigate that weakness to board wipes; Damnation still sucks, but damage-based sweepers become less threatening, and Relentless Rats don’t trade with Llanowar Elves. Also, Cauldron of Souls becomes playable. There’s also the devotion angle; adds up fast for cards like Nykthos, Shrine to Nyx (excluded from this deck, like Thrumming Stone, for a little spice) and Gray Merchant of Asphodel. I considered Relentless Rats for these reasons but went with the cheaper creatures that showcased Verminister better.

Other Rats

As cool as Rat Colony is, it’s not the only rat in the sewer, er, deck. Other rat payoffs—mostly other legends that compete with Verminister for the command zone slot—provide extra juice.

Lord Skitter, Sewer King sneaks graveyard hate into the list, though it’s primarily here to produce sacrifice fodder.

Karumonix, the Rat King puts an even more aggressive spin on the deck by giving your rats toxic 1, but you’re interested in the enters ability. Refilling your hand keeps the pressure flowing or replenishes your resources after a sweeper, but before you have the fodder for Verminister.

Ogre Slumlord is an honorary rat and one of the best token producers in the deck. Since you often sacrifice your Rat Colonies to Verminister because they reanimate themselves, you reliably get 2-3 rat tokens off the Slumlord without going down on rats.

Marrow-Gnawer is the most popular rat commander and inarguably the most stylish. It fits in here perfectly, mostly as an emergency backup commander. After a sweeper comes down, Marrow-Gnawer can rebuild on its own, leeching power from cards like Magewright's Stone and Sting, the Glinting Dagger to make the board explode with rats.

Sacrifice Outlets

While Verminister is the primary sacrifice outlet in the deck, it isn’t the only one, nor arguably the strongest.

Phyrexian Altar works very well with all the card draw in the deck, letting you sacrifice rats and make mana and draw cards before Verminister brings the rats back to do it all over again. Altar of Dementia is also very strong; the Strategy section has more details about its role in the deck.

This deck can build an extremely wide board full of sacrifice fodder, which God-Eternal Bontu and Plumb the Forbidden convert into cards in hand. These can double as finishers with a Blood Artist in play since they sacrifice your entire board. Skullclamp gets an honorary mention here—I suppose Rat Colony having 1 toughness isn’t always a downside.

Ayara, First of Locthwain works obscenely well in this deck. Between Verminister’s tokens and the other rats, the deck has no shortage of cards to feed into the sacrifice ability—which, in turn, triggers Verminister’s disappear ability. But the drain on black creatures entering works extremely well with Verminister reanimating your rats en masse.

Sacrifice Payoffs

This deck’s sacrifice payoffs are extremely familiar to any aristocrats player: card draw and drain.

The card draw comes from Grim Haruspex and Midnight Reaper, which play extremely well with Verminister since you sacrifice multiple nontoken creatures at once.

Then we have Blood Artist, Vengeful Bloodwitch, Bastion of Remembrance, and Zulaport Cutthroat—familiar faces to black players. What this section lacks in depth, it makes up for in card quality.

The Mana Base

The mana base shows off value and utility lands alongside some 20+ Swamps.

Boggart Trawler, Fell the Profane, and Hagra Mauling sneak interaction into the mana base. Agadeem's Awakening adds another layer of protection, though it only saves one Rat Colony.

War Room and Castle Locthwain get card draw into the lands. Susur Secundi, Void Altar exploits the high power of Rat Colony to a similar purpose.

Some of your lands also tap for extra mana, among which Cabal Coffers is the most famous. You’re already sacrificing creatures, so Phyrexian Tower makes sense—a land that enables disappear works nicely. Crypt of Agadeem takes time to get going but taps for mana itself, so it’s less punishing than Cabal Coffers.

And then we have some general utility lands. Takenuma, Abandoned Mire is a shoo-in for black decks, Secret Tunnel making two big rats unblockable wins games, and Spymaster's Vault fits perfectly with a commander that asks you to sacrifice three creatures and fill the graveyard.

The Strategy

First and foremost, this is a Rat Colony aggro deck. You want to play out Rat Colony and smack your opponents around. That’s part of the reason this deck has so much card draw; you need to find those rats and keep playing them to keep up with your opponents that try to trade in combat.

The sacrifice package matters for the mid-to-late game, when attacking becomes less reliable. Rat Colony doesn’t have evasion unless you draw exactly Secret Tunnel, so attacks become sketchy. You can lean on Verminister, continuously sacrificing and reanimating rats so Blood Artist and Ayara and all those other cards push the last points of damage, or Midnight Reaper and friends draw enough cards to overwhelm your opponents.

Combos and Interactions

The deck has a few neat interactions that it can pull off, mostly surrounding Verminister. I’ll start by establishing a very important baseline: When activating Verminister to reanimate your Rat Colonies, there must be a Rat Colony already in the graveyard when you start to pay the cost. You can’t sacrifice a Rat Colony, then target it with the activated ability. Declaring targets is part of activating the ability. By this same rule, Verminister can’t sacrifice and reanimate itself. But any Rat Colonies sacrificed to the ability will be in the graveyard when it resolves, reanimating them. So if you sacrifice three Rat Colonies and target a fourth in the graveyard, you end with four Rat Colonies. Five if there are two in the graveyard, and so on.

Two other notes on Verminister: While you’ll reanimate Rat Colony 90% of the time, the ability is in no way restricted to rats or creatures you have duplicates of in the graveyard. Don’t be afraid to turn three rats into a Blood Artist or God-Eternal Bontu if that looks like the best path to victory. Also, it doesn’t have a timing restriction, so you can use Verminister in response to removal or to animate surprise blockers.

With that out of the way, let’s look at Altar of Dementia. This card’s mostly here as a self-mill enabler. Since your Rats have high power and come back anyway, you can sacrifice them, mill yourself for 5+ cards, and hopefully dump more Rats in the bin than you started with. With a little luck, and enough rats, this becomes a legitimate win condition with Verminister to reanimate swarms of rats to chuck at your opponents.

Holding priority is also important. Let’s say you control five copies of Rat Colony, and have one in your graveyard. You can activate Verminister, sacrificing three of them, then hold priority and activate Altar or cast Plumb the Forbidden to get the other two in the graveyard before the ability resolves, thus getting even more from the trigger.

Spymaster's Vault has a similar trick, where you can activate Verminister, then activate the Vault to connive away extra Rat Colonies.

Rule 0 Violations Check

As long as you don’t end up at a table where Rat Colony is too aggressive to keep up, this shouldn’t violate any Rule 0 conversations.

Budget Options

Rat Colony goes for about $5 a pop. You could go for the cheaper Relentless Rats ($2 a copy), but that would require messing with the curve and adding more mana rocks/lands.

Speaking of lands, there’s no reason this mana base can’t be 37 Swamps, which cuts into the price dramatically.

Phyrexian Altar plays nicely with the card draw, but not the wallet. You can exchange it for the far cheaper Ashnod's Altar or any free sacrifice outlet.

Sceptre of Eternal Glory and Throne of Eldraine reward playing a mono-color deck, but they can easily go away in favor of lesser rocks like Worn Powerstone and Charcoal Diamond.

Other Builds

Another potential build for Rat King, Verminister is Shadowborn Apostles, which also benefits from the same name bit of the ability, though it might struggle to find enough rats to sacrifice in the first place.

Beyond those three cards, your options are pretty narrow; it could be a general reanimator commander as this is an extremely cheap, repeatable reanimation spell and cards like Valgavoth, Terror Eater are worth three random rats, but it begs the question: Where are the rats coming from?

Commanding Conclusion

Relentless Rats | Illustration by Johann Bodin

Rat Colony and Relentless Rats might not have needed another commander, but they sure got one. And I don’t hate Rat King, Verminister. The sacrifice shenanigans distinguish it from Marrow-Gnawer and Karumonix, so it feels like a fresh option rather than a card that treads water.

Do you like Verminister and its sacrifice nonsense, or do you think rats have enough legendary support? Let me know in the comments below or on the Draftsim Discord!

Stay safe, and thanks for reading!