commander · Teval, the Balanced Scale
Sultai Arisen (TDC).
A Sultai graveyard recursion deck led by Teval, the Balanced Scale — fill your graveyard, recur your best threats, and grind opponents out with creatures that get better the second time around.
The Commanders
Sultai Arisen is a Tarkir: Dragonstorm deck built around grinding opponents into dust through recursive graveyard value. You fill your graveyard with powerful creatures, bring them back bigger than before, and use mass recursion spells to deploy your entire dead zone at once. The Sultai philosophy: nothing in Magic is truly gone if you control the graveyard.
Teval, the Balanced Scale rewards filling your graveyard and using it as a resource. Teval generates value from creatures dying and returning, incentivizing the loop of sacrificing and recursing that defines the deck's engine. With Teval in play, every creature that enters or leaves the graveyard advances your position.
Kotis, Sibsig Champion is the aggressive graveyard alternative. Kotis generates power from creatures in your graveyard directly, making it the better choice when you want to turn your dead zone into a direct board presence rather than a value engine. Against faster pods, Kotis closes games quicker than Teval's grind.
Key Cards
Meren of Clan Nel Toth
Meren is the most consistent recursion engine in Sultai Commander decks. She accumulates experience counters every time a creature you control dies, and at your end step she returns a creature from your graveyard to play or hand depending on your counter count. In a deck that sacrifices creatures constantly, Meren quickly reaches the threshold to reanimate your most powerful threats for free every single turn. She is the backbone of the grind plan.
Jarad, Golgari Lich Lord
Jarad is a win condition that doesn't require combat. He sacrifices a creature and deals damage equal to that creature's power to each opponent. With Avenger of Zendikar producing twelve 6/6 Plant tokens after multiple land drops, a single Jarad activation can deal 24 damage to the table. He also gets +1/+1 for each creature in your graveyard, growing into a massive attacker over the course of the game. Sacrifice him to himself and return him with Meren.
Living Death
The deck's nuclear option. Living Death causes all players to simultaneously exile their graveyards and return all creatures from those graveyards to the battlefield. You spend the first half of the game filling your graveyard with the best creatures in Magic. When you cast Living Death, you get all of them at once while opponents typically return far less. Use this when your graveyard is packed and you need to reset a bad board state or instantly win a stalled game.
Victimize
Sacrifice one creature to return two from your graveyard to the battlefield tapped. This is exactly the engine the deck wants: a creature dies, triggering Meren's experience counter, and two better creatures come back. Sacrifice a token or a small utility creature, return Meren plus Avenger of Zendikar. Return Jarad and Avenger. The math almost always favors Victimize, and it accelerates your graveyard plan by multiple turns in one three-mana spell.
Avenger of Zendikar
The biggest single-card board state in the deck. Avenger of Zendikar enters and creates a 0/1 Plant token for every land you control — commonly six to eight tokens by the time you cast it. Each subsequent land drop makes all those Plants bigger. When you reanimate Avenger with Meren or Victimize, you get an entirely new set of Plants. Sacrifice them to Jarad for a lethal drain, or attack with a 6/7 Plant army after a couple land drops.
How to Play
The early game is ramp and setup: cast mana dorks, fill your graveyard with value creatures, and establish Meren before turn five. The mid-game is value accumulation — sacrifice mediocre creatures to accumulate experience counters, let Meren return your best threats every end step, and build a graveyard full of top-tier options. When you have Meren, Teval, and five-plus creatures in the graveyard, you're in a position to win from almost any board state. Deploy Living Death or Victimize at the right moment to swing a game decisively. The deck is methodical, resilient, and nearly impossible to permanently interact with because everything you lose comes back.