Rakdos, Lord of Riots Commander Deck Guide

Last updated on March 8, 2024

Rakdos, Lord of Riots | Illustration by Vincent Proce

Rakdos, Lord of Riots is the Demon-King of the Ravnican guild of the same name. He is a violent megalomaniac hellbent on the hedonistic existence of the never-ending party.

Rakdos has appeared in his dark majesty in every Ravnican set (or pseudo-block) to date. While Rakdos’s cards often deal with demon and devil creatures, Rakdos, Lord of Riots has a much broader theme, letting you design a deck around anything that makes your opponents lose life (read: most cards in Magic).

Here, I present to you a template for your own Rakdos, Lord of Riots Commander deck: a punishing life loss deck that promises to snowball out of control if left unanswered.

The Deck

Stormfist Crusader | Illustration by Chris Rallis

This Rakdos, Lord of Riots deck has two stages. In the first, we’ll be casting spells that act as repeatable sources of damage, favoring the ones that can hit each opponent and compound the total life lost each turn. Then, we’ll drop our commander and use its cost-reduction effect to drop bigger and bigger creatures, resulting in more damage on the following turn and even more generic mana to cast yet another creature. Before you know it, this deck can assemble a board of frightening demons and monsters and be home in time for cornflakes.

The Commander: Rakdos, Lord of Riots

It sounds reductive, but the best part about Rakdos, Lord of Riots is that it rewards you for playing the game. Dealing damage to your opponents is the easiest way to defeat them, and Rakdos’s effect makes it easier for you to keep dealing damage after you’ve dealt damage! What a concept!

The Return to Ravnica Rakdos, Lord of Riots stands apart from its other incarnations in part because it was the only version that doesn’t force you into a Demons/Devils-focused deck, before March of the Machine. Instead, all Rakdos asks of you in this deck is that you deal damage to your opponents, and that’s just what we’re going to do.

Get the Party Started

Some decks are mana-hungry. This deck is damage-hungry. Our pinging creatures and permanents effectively work as this deck’s mana dorks. A turn 1 Spear Spewer is the best opening we can hope for, and following it with either Creeping Bloodsucker or Stormfist Crusader is an excellent way to ensure your opponents lose life every turn for no additional mana on your part. Plague Spitter is another great free damage source, and won’t kill any of our creatures since we have no 1-toughness creatures.

One of our best and brightest is Neheb, the Eternal. Neheb basically doubles the free mana we get from dealing damage. Neheb makes red mana, too, so we can use it for the colored mana costs that remain after Rakdos, Lord of Riots cuts their generic mana.

Court of Ire can put down a lot of damage each turn, but even the 2 damage you get from the non-monarch mode is enough to significantly affect our casting costs. Sarkhan's Unsealing synergizes well with Rakdos, Lord of Riots, dealing 4 more damage down as soon as you cast your commander. Now we’re looking at a minimum of 5 life lost by your opponents that turn, perfect to roll right into a nearly free Scuttling Doom Engine.

Reckless Handling is one of my favorite tutors in recent years. You’ll almost exclusively use it to search up Swiftfoot Boots, but on the off chance you’ve drawn into it, it can fetch any of our big artifact creatures like Darksteel Colossus. Even if we lose the tutored card to the discard, the extra damage means we won’t be down any mana if Rakdos is on the field.

Finally, let’s do some Rakdos math. A handful of cards are 1-mana investments for what should normally be a small amount of damage. Rakdos, Lord of Riots turns that extra damage into generic mana for us, though, so our humble Lightning Bolt actually makes our next creature spell 3 mana cheaper for a 1 red mana investment. Pestilence turns 1 black mana into a 4 mana discount, so long as we still have all three of our opponents. Flame Rift has the potential to give us 12(!!!) generic mana to play with. Why not just run out that It That Betrays for free?

Finally, we’ve got a few X-spells that serve mostly as an outlet for all that extra mana we’re saving, rather than true sources of generic mana. They’ll still contribute to the overall life lost that turn, but Exsanguinate, Rolling Earthquake, and Torment of Hailfire are late-game haymakers more than they are early-game value generators.

Rakdos’s Crew

We’ll cover how to stick Rakdos, Lord of Riots to the field next, but for now let’s take a look at what we’ll be casting on discount.

The obvious choice for threats in a Rakdos deck are colorless creatures. Lots of the best Eldrazi and artifact creatures have prohibitively expensive mana costs, but with enough damage on the board, we can cast most of these huge creatures for free. Any of our colorless creatures are within reach of a free cast if we drop Flame Rift first, and hopefully we’ll be able to drop two or three creatures per turn after we’ve dealt all our damage.

Each of these 8+ mana creatures is a threat in its own right, but mastering this deck will require a knowledge of which is best in which situation. Desolation Twin, Pathrazer of Ulamog, and Hand of Emrakul are classic beaters that make for a scary creature once they hit the field, but Cityscape Leveler should be saved for removing those pesky Propaganda effects that keep you from swinging in. It That Betrays is great on its own, but even better when it can follow other Eldrazi’s annihilator effects. Just remember to read the room! Is Pathrazer of Ulamog the right call, or will Scuttling Doom Engine be able to connect easier?

Other creatures will use Rakdos’s cost reduction to dump a ton of free mana into their X costs. There’s no reason Exocrine will be cast for less than X=5, or Maga, Traitor to Mortals doesn’t obliterate a player after taking a big hit in the combat step. Orcus, Prince of Undeath gives us options for removal (that beats indestructible!) and recursion.

The rest of the crew is about what you’d expect: generic beaters with good abilities. Ob Nixilis, Unshackled is suddenly playable in a deck where it doesn’t cost all 6 mana, Combustible Gearhulk either piles another load of damage on an opponent or draws three whole cards when it enters, and cards like Harvester of Souls and Butcher of Malakir help you keep pace with the table as the game evolves.

Lastly, let me touch on a funny one: Hurl Through Hell and The Ruinous Powers both allow you to cast your opponents’ exiled cards, and you can, in fact, use Rakdos’s cost-reduction on any creature spells cast from there. The Ruinous Powers will turn that spell into even more direct damage, further reducing the cost of any future creature spells that turn.

Rakdos’s Return (Not the Card)

If there’s one thing you should take away from the Modern format over the past year, it’s that the Rakdos Scam cards are very good. Malakir Rebirth, Feign Death, Undying Evil and Not Dead After All are some of the best ways to keep Rakdos, Lord of Riots and your field full of threats safe from the targeted removal they’re sure to draw. These cards are so important that I’d recommend using Vampiric Tutor or Rune-Scarred Demon to fetch them as soon as you’re able.

Saving either Rakdos, Lord of Riots or any of our other big creatures with one of these spells effectively fizzles whatever targeted removal your opponent has thrown at you, and if they chose poorly, we’ll get another ETB off of something like Combustible Gearhulk.

Let me reiterate, sticking Rakdos, Lord of Riots is paramount to making this deck work. Otherwise, we’re stuck waiting to hard cast all those big creatures while our opponents run circles around us. Even with a comparatively low mana value, we really don’t want to waste 4r colored mana replaying Rakdos every turn.

The Mana Base

With Rakdos, Lord of Riots’ ability to reduce the generic mana in the costs for our creature spells, our mana base really needs to focus on producing colored mana. We’re running zero utility lands that produce colorless mana out of our 36 total. In addition, we’ve got four mana rocks (note: no Sol Ring in this deck, it doesn’t help us cast our Commander any sooner), plus both Bontu's Monument and Hazoret's Monument to help with our creature spells. To round it out, we’re running Solemn Simulacrum – who we’ll often cast for free!

The Strategy

This Rakdos, Lord of Riots deck is fairly straightforward: You’ll set up some free damage effects in the early turns, cast Rakdos as soon as you’re able, and then keep turning your creatures sideways until there’s no one left!

Opening hands for this deck can be tricky. You want at least one of Plague Spitter, Spear Spewer, Creeping Bloodsucker, Stormfist Crusader, or Thermo-Alchemist. These cheap creatures are your ticket to free damage on your opponents each turn, lowering the costs of future creature spells before you’ve even hit the main phase. My suggestion is to mulligan until you hit one of these and at least one ramp spell of some kind.

Early game should be entirely focused on sticking a pinger, and then casting Rakdos. At 4 mana, we can feasibly play our 6/6 flying trampler on turn 3, making a huge threat that’ll just turn into more threats. As we covered earlier, sticking Rakdos to the field is the hardest part of this strategy. Even if we hit 4 mana early, it might be worth it to hold off on casting Rakdos until we can protect it with a Malakir Rebirth.

Once Rakdos is on the field, our plan is to just pile on the value. If Rakdos can connect with an opponent, we’re looking at 6-mana minimum off of our next creature spell, which just compounds as more big creatures hit the field, further clearing the way for our even bigger creatures like It That Betrays.

Running out of gas is a real concern with this deck, as a pod full of removal can easily wipe the board of all those creatures we spent three turns playing. That’s why our primary tutor targets are either the survival spells like Feign Death, or draw engines like Harvester of Souls. Hazoret's Monument can help filter your hand early game, but we’re running low on full-on reanimation effects for our creatures in the graveyard.

Combos and Interactions

Since this is a fairly combat-damage focused deck, there aren’t really any infinite combos or odd interactions to speak of. I’d just like to point out that Bloodletter of Aclazotz, Solphim, Mayhem Dominus and Furnace of Rath’s replacement effects are ordered on the stack by the player they’re affecting, not the player who controls the permanents. Since these are all doubling effects, it won’t come into play as often, but on the off-chance you include a Fiery Emancipation in your deck, it’s important to know the order of the multiplication.

Rule 0

I don’t see any Rule 0 violations glaringly apparent in this deck, but I’d love to hear an invented reason for why this deck is unfair or against the spirit of the format.

Budget Options

This Rakdos, Lord of Riots Commander deck comes out to about $190 for its cheapest singles. That’s a little more than an average EDH deck, so let’s take a look at some quick cuts.

Vampiric Tutor is our best tutor available, but it’s also $32. Cut this and run any of the slower tutors like Diabolic Tutor or Profane Tutor.

Besides that, Torment of Hailfire is a big mana dump for after we’ve run out of creatures to cast on discount. It’s usually just resolved as a wincon when X is greater than 6, but there are tons of other mana dumps that’ll resolve just the same. Try the good ol’ fashioned Fireball or a Devil's Play if you’re feeling hot.

Other Builds

Rakdos, Lord of Riots, being a multicolored legendary demon, of course lends itself to helming a demon Commander deck. This runs about the same as any other creature type deck – you’ll run all the demon lords (notably, Herald of Slaanesh and Raphael, Fiendish Savior) and then slam the rest of the support package into it. We’re talking Coat of Arms, Roaming Throne, the whole deal.

Running Rakdos as your demon Commander gets you the added bonus of running the rest of the Rakdos legendaries in your deck. While you’re missing out on blue from the other most popular demon commander, Be'lakor, the Dark Master, you don’t really need it as most demons are mono-black anyways.

Commanding Conclusion

Plague Spitter | Illustration by Chippy

Rakdos, Lord of Riots is a unique and distinctly red/black themed commander with just enough value to have some staying power since its original Return to Ravnica release. It’s a commander for the Timmy player who's tired of seeing green all the time, and it’s also the group slug commander for the Timmy player.

Will you be building a Rakdos, Lord of Riots deck using the new retro-frame printing from Ravnia Remastered? How does this Rakdos stack up versus Rakdos, Patron of Chaos? Let me know in the comments, or over on Draftsim’s TwXtter!

Thanks for reading, keep the party goin’!