Reanimator

Reanimator is a deck archetype known for putting powerful creature cards into their graveyard, then using spells or abilities to return those creatures to the battlefield for a cheaper cost.

Reanimator strategies almost always include the color black.

## **Popular Cards & Commanders**

**Popular Reanimator spells include:**

* Animate Dead
* Victimize
* Rise of the Dark Realms
* Reanimate

**Popular Reanimator commanders include:**

* Meren of Clan Nel Toth
* The Mimeoplasm
* Chainer, Dementia Master
* Karador, Ghost Chieftain

## **Key Components**

There are three main components to any reanimator strategy: creatures to reanimate, the spells that reanimate them, and a reliable way of putting creatures into a graveyard.

### **Reanimation Targets**

Reanimator players are frequently able to put creatures into play without paying their mana costs. As a result, their reanimation targets are frequently high-cost creatures with powerful effects that take place as soon as they enter the battlefield.
Popular targets for Reanimator decks include:
* Jin-Gitaxias, Core Augur
* Sheoldred, Whispering One
* Void Winnower
* Rune-Scarred Demon
* Terastodon
* Razaketh, the Foulblooded
* Avacyn, Angel of Hope

Reanimator decks may elect to revive a handful of creatures, keeping them and their powerful effects on the battlefield to overpower their opponents. At other times, they may choose to repeatedly reanimate and sacrifice creatures in and out of play, triggering their powerful enter-the-battlefield abilities multiple times. Because this strategy allows players to avoid paying high mana costs, some players may also choose to reanimate creatures that form infinite combos with each other.
### **Reanimation Spells**

Reanimation spells may refer to spells that return a single creature from the graveyard to the battlefield, or spells that return multiple creatures from the graveyard to the battlefield. Some popular methods of putting creatures into play from the graveyard include:
* Reanimate
* Animate Dead
* Necromancy
* Victimize
* Living Death
* Rise of the Dark Realms
* Karmic Guide
* Journey to Eternity
* Sepulchral Primordial
* Body Double
* Dance of the Dead
* Dread Return
* Beacon of Unrest

### **Filling the Graveyard**

Reanimator decks do not necessarily wait for their creatures to die of natural causes before they begin reanimating them. Rather, they employ a variety of tactics to fill their graveyards with potential targets.
* **Tutors:** Reanimator players often put creature cards from their libraries directly into their graveyards. Cards like Entomb, Jarad’s Orders, Intuition, Corpse Connoisseur, and Buried Alive all help load the graveyard with specific cards, which the Reanimator player can then revive more easily.

* **Discard:** A Reanimator player may occasionally wind up with powerful, expensive creature cards in their hand, which they do not intend to cast. In these instances, it is more efficient to discard the creature card, then reanimate it with a cheaper spell. Popular discard outlets include Frantic Search, Careful Study or Ancient Excavation. Mass discard effects like Windfall can also be effective. Survival of the Fittest and Fauna Shaman are popular for their ability to both discard and tutor new targets.

* **Self-Mill:** Putting cards en masse from one's own deck into the graveyard is one of the fastest ways to amass a variety of potential reanimation targets. Stitcher’s Supplier, Sultai Ascendancy, Hermit Druid, and Dredge effects like Life from the Loam can all assist with this. Some card advantage spells like Fact or Fiction, Notion Rain, and Grisly Salvage will also incrementally add to the graveyard.

* **Mill:** Because a Reanimator player can never be certain whether their opponents will be Spellslingers with few creatures, they tend to revive their own creature cards. However, they do not need to do this exclusively, and plenty of Reanimator decks will mill other players to potentially revive their creatures. Popular methods of rapidly filling other players’ graveyards include Mesmeric Orb, Consuming Aberration, and Mind Grind. Reanimator players may also use Altar of Dementia and Phenax, God of Deception to target either themselves or others to fill various graveyards.

## **Choosing a Commander**

If Reanimator is the main focus of your deck, then ideally speaking you should choose a Commander who fills one of the Key Components of your deck (namely filling the graveyard, or reanimating out of it)

* **Fill the Graveyard**: The best commanders to fill this role are non-expensive so they can put cards into your graveyard early. When using a creature like this as the commander, you may want to include fewer ways of filling the graveyard into your deck and also consider adding more protection. (*Both for your commander, and any large threats that were Reanimated*)
* **Reanimating**: Many commanders that do this are quite mana-intensive which means they will likely enter the battlefield late, and after a few times being removed may be unable to be cast altogether. As such the Commander's reanimation ability might often have to be considered a back-up plan, and one should be careful not to remove too many replacement reanimation effects from your deck, and/or to be sure to focus on ramp / rituals.

## **Strategy**

Reanimator decks take a variety of forms, but follow a similar play pattern: fill the graveyard with one or more creatures, then use a spell or ability to revive them. Reanimator decks may operate at a very fast pace (*for instance, by using Entomb and Reanimate to put an enormous creature into play as early as turn two*). Others may take their time, preferring to accumulate a large number of creatures in graveyards, which may give them more options and resiliency over the course of the game.

### **Winning with Reanimation**

Reanimator decks differentiate themselves based upon how they intend to fill the graveyard, but also differ in how they intend to use the reanimated creatures. Some Reanimator decks, especially those that can reanimate multiple creatures, will use the sudden and overwhelming board presence to attack with a very large army of previously-dead creatures.
Other Reanimator decks may instead elect to repeatedly revive creatures with powerful enter-the-battlefield effects. Creatures such as Gray Merchant of Asphodel or Kokusho, the Evening Star, when repeatedly brought in and out of play, will drain enemy life totals.
### **Sacrifice Outlets**

A fairly constant feature of Reanimator decks tends to be the prevalence of sacrifice outlets. Cards such as Viscera Seer, Ashnod's Altar, or Greater Good allow the Reanimator player to put creatures they control back into the graveyard at any time they desire, often to recur a powerful enter-the-battlefield effect via reanimation, or to avoid exile based removal.
### **Propensity for Combo**

Infinite combos are not necessarily a common feature of Reanimator decks. However, given the ease with which Reanimator players are able to abuse the resources available to them in the graveyard, some of the cards that appear in Reanimator decks can also be used to create game-ending combos. Some examples may include:
* Animate Dead + Worldgorger Dragon: Reanimating the Dragon will exile all permanents that belong to its controller, including the reanimating enchantment. This puts the Dragon back into the graveyard. Once there, the reanimating enchantment will come back into play, able to re-reanimate the Dragon. This can allow the user to tap their lands for infinite mana each time their lands come back into play, or abuse inifnite enter-the-battlefield triggers of their other permanents.

* Mikaeus, the Unhallowed + Triskelion: Triskelion can remove counters from itself to deal damage to any target. By dealing damage to a player, then using the counters on itself to target itself with lethal damage, it will trigger Mikaeus's ability, which brings the artifact back with another counter. This can be repeated to deal lethal damage to each opponent, a few points of damage at a time.

* Reveillark + Karmic Guide: Each of these creatures is able to revive the other, and Reveillark is also able to bring back other creatures along with it. Combined with a sacrifice outlet, these creatures can repeatedly loop themselves back into play.

Combos like these are not mainstays for all Reanimator decks, but decks intent upon using such combos are able to make use of the Reanimator strategy by holding important combo pieces in the graveyard, where they are harder for opponents to remove than if they were on the battlefield.
## **Common Deck Categories**

* Big Creatures
* Discard Outlets / Self Mill Cards / Wheels
* Reanimation Effects
* Protection Cards
* Card Draw
* Ramp
* Removal
* Board Wipe Cards

**10 cards** will probably give you **2 cards in a given game** from that category, and a good chance to **start with 1** in your opening hand. Critical categories for your deck may require a similar or larger number than this, depending on expected levels of Counterspells or Removal.
**5 cards** will probably give you **1 card per game** of that category. Cards you don't want to overload on but still want access to (*board wipes in a tokens deck for instance*) may want a similar figure to this... Going smaller than this number makes receiving a card of this category very unlikely without Tutors or some other Toolbox approach.

## **Strengths and Weaknesses**

### **Strengths**

* Reanimator decks put enormously powerful creatures into play long before other decks are able to play creatures of a similar caliber. Reanimator players may even revive a powerful creature so early in the game that other players are not yet prepared to respond to those creatures, staunching opponents’ abilities to set up their own plans properly.

* Reanimator players frequently fill up graveyards with dozens of cards. This gives them access to such a large number of creatures that they will frequently be able to find any effect they require. This flexibility is so great that Reanimator players will often care far more about the contents of their graveyard than the contents of their hand.

* Reanimator decks are enormously resilient to typical forms of creature removal, such as creature combat, Wrath of God-style board wipes, or pinpoint spells like Terminate. Whenever creatures die, they are eligible to be returned with a new reanimation effect, which can make those effects difficult to remove for good.

### **Weaknesses**

* Exile effects are the bane of a Reanimator player’s existence, and are generally a silver bullet against the archetype. Exile-based removal like Swords to Plowshares and Merciless Eviction are much more effective than Hero’s Downfall or Damnation, since they eliminate the Reanimator player’s ability to bring back the removed creature. Scavenging Ooze and other instant-speed abilities are famous for exiling the very creature the Reanimator player targeted with their Animate Dead, fizzling the spell. These effects drastically reduce Reanimator’s resiliency.

* Mass exile effects such as {{card|Rest in Peace, Relic of Progenitus, Leyline of the Void, Bojuka Bog, Scavenger Grounds, and many other cards can eliminate graveyards completely, leaving the Reanimator player without any targets whatsoever. This effectively blanks all reanimation spells in their library, and forces the Reanimator player to actually cast their creatures. Since those creatures have such high costs, and Reanimator decks may not always be built to actually ramp into those costs, they may be left stranded until much later in the game, when they have acquired enough mana.

* Reanimator decks rely upon a few integral pieces: the reanimation spells, and the creatures to reanimate. An imbalance in either direction can offset a reanimator player's strategy. Drawing too many high-cost creatures with no ability to put them into the graveyard can be a large setback, while drawing too many reanimation spells without any creatures to revive will leave the deck spinning its wheels. Reanimator players also often prioritize looting effects (spells like Frantic Search, which draw and discard) over general card draw. As a result, if their initial reanimations are countered or removed, they may be left with fewer cards in hand than other players, and may become dependent on their draw step to help put their strategy back on track.

## *Reanimator in non-standard colors*

EDH is known for unusual deckbrewing, for instance taking a mechanic and using magic's long history to demonstrate ways of doing it in a highly unusual color combination. See below for advice on building a Reanimator style deck without Black

 **Artifact Reanimator**: Both Blue and Red have a focus on Artifacts, with wheels and looting effects to help put cards in your graveyard. These two colors together open the possibility for an Artifact reanimator deck as seen in Mind Bend - Izzet Reanimator

 **Legendary Reanimator**: Niambi, Esteemed Speaker is a low CMC commander that functions as a discard outlet in the command zone... couple that with White's access to reanimate effects in the past and you have the makings of a Azorius Reanimator deck as featured in Archetune-Up – It Was a Graveyard Smash?

### **Mill**

Since you need to put cards into your graveyard to reanimate anyway, why not also attack your opponent's libraries at the same time? you may also take a juicy creature from their library that you yourself can reanimate
### **Self-Mill**

Since you need to put cards into your graveyard to reanimate anyway, why not also get rewarded for filling Your Graveyard?
### **Discard**

If you are considering discarding cards to reanimate, why not lean on effects to share the misery? Not only do you get to put cards from your hand into the graveyard and disrupt your opponent's plans, you may also get them to discard a juicy creature you yourself can reanimate
### **Wheels**

Since you need to put cards into your graveyard to reanimate anyway, why not replace them while doing so? wheel spells allow you to exchange cards you don't need right now for cards you may want later while also emptying your opponent's libraries and disrupting their hand and you may also get them to discard a juicy creature you yourself can reanimate
### **Blink**

If you find yourself reanimating certain creatures over and over again for their enter the battlefield effects... why not consider recurring those directly? Blink spells can trigger these effects without touching the graveyard, which can be useful when certain cards like Rest in Peace or Leyline of the Void prevent you doing your Plan A, and can often also double as a means of avoiding removal which can sometimes set a reanimator deck back significantly
**References:**

* EDHREC Reanimate theme
* EDHREC Graveyard theme
* Reanimator tagged articles on EDHRec
* Deep Analysis - Aristocrats
* Mind Bend - Izzet Reanimator
* Archetune-Up – It Was a Graveyard Smash?