Borborygmos Enraged

Overview

This is not a deck that attacks people to death. It attacks once, maybe, to get paid — and then it converts its own lands into a burn spell that never runs out.

Borborygmos Enraged's second ability is the whole deck: discard a land card, deal 3 damage to any target. No mana. No tap. No limit. Every land in your hand is a Lightning Bolt and a half, and this deck plays 41 of them. The entire rest of the 99 exists to answer two questions: how do you get lands into your hand, and how much is each one worth when it gets there.

The engine you are assembling has three parts that all fire at once:

1. A damage multiplier — Fiery Emancipation (triple), Twinflame Tyrant (double), Solphim (double, noncombat only), or Mjölnir on the commander (double).
2. A way to turn your battlefield into your hand — Storm Cauldron above all, plus Life from the Loam and Shigeki.
3. A way to put the spent lands back — Splendid Reclamation, Lumra, Aftermath Analyst, with Amulet of Vigor untapping them so they can go around again.

Turn the crank: lands enter, you tap them for mana, Storm Cauldron bounces them to your hand, you discard them all for multiplied damage, they pile up in your graveyard, and a mass return puts them right back onto the battlefield to do it again. Each pass pays for the next one, because tapping the lands is what generates the mana for the next reclamation.

Mulligan Guide

This deck mulligans differently from almost anything else you have played, because lands are both your mana and your win condition. A seven-card hand with six lands in it is not a flood here — it is six Lightning Bolts waiting for a commander. Do not ship land-heavy hands.

Keep if you can tick two of these three:

• Three or more lands (four-plus is actively good, not a flaw)
• A green source plus an accelerant — Azusa, Dryad of the Ilysian Grove, Burgeoning, Oracle of Mul Daya, Icetill Explorer, Nature's Lore, Three Visits
• A payoff or a path to one — any multiplier, Storm Cauldron, Splendid Reclamation, Worldly Tutor, or Gamble

Ship it if:

• Fewer than three lands with no accelerant. The commander costs eight; you cannot afford a slow start on top of a two-lander.
• All action, no lands. A hand of multipliers and reclamation with two lands does nothing — this deck's payoffs are worthless without the resource they multiply.
• Nothing but lands and no green. Twelve Mountains and a Red Elemental Blast is not a keep even in a deck that loves lands; you need the green half to ramp and recur.

On the back of a mulligan to six or five, prioritize lands and accelerants over payoffs. The deck draws into its payoffs naturally — Abundance, Return of the Wildspeaker, and the wheels all refill you — but it cannot manufacture the land count out of nothing.

Game Plan

Turns 1–3 — build the land engine, not the board. Lead on accelerants: Azusa, Dryad, Burgeoning, Icetill Explorer, Oracle of Mul Daya. Every extra land drop compounds twice over, because it is a mana advantage now and a bullet later. Nature's Lore and Three Visits fetch untapped duals. Orcish Lumberjack is a turn-one play that gets much better later — see below.

Don't be in a hurry to cast the commander. Eight mana is real, and Borborygmos on an empty board into an untapped table just eats removal.

Turns 4–6 — deploy the multiplier and the bounce. This is where the game is decided. Fiery Emancipation is the best of them at triple damage, but Twinflame Tyrant doubles everything including combat damage and comes with a flying body, and Solphim doubles all of your noncombat damage — which is nearly all the damage this deck deals. Storm Cauldron is the other half; it looks symmetric and is not, because you are the only player at the table who wants their lands back in hand.

Casting the commander with Storm Cauldron already out is the deck's best sequencing. You tap eight lands for mana, the Cauldron returns all eight to your hand, and you resolve Borborygmos with eight bullets already loaded — 24 damage before any multiplier, 72 through Fiery Emancipation. That is lethal for the table on the spot in most games.

Turn 6 onward — turn the crank. With the multiplier down and lands flowing, start the loop described in Key Loops & Interactions. Fire in response to things, not on your own main phase for no reason — the ability is instant-speed, so the correct default is to hold ammo until either someone tries to remove Borborygmos (shoot them out in response, or shoot the thing that matters) or you have assembled enough to kill.

If the commander is being answered repeatedly, you have a second, entirely separate route to the same finish line: the Valakut package and the discard-payoff creatures both deal damage without Borborygmos on the battlefield at all. Don't tunnel on recasting into an eight-mana tax war when Splendid Reclamation plus Valakut ends the game from the graveyard.

How Borborygmos Enraged actually works

The reveal trigger is combat damage. "Whenever Borborygmos Enraged deals combat damage to a player, reveal the top three cards of your library. Put all land cards revealed this way into your hand." This is the only thing that makes attacking worthwhile — you are not swinging to reduce life totals, you are swinging to draw lands. With 41 lands in the deck, three cards off the top averages a little over one land per connection.

Double strike doubles the trigger, not just the damage. First-strike damage and regular damage are two separate combat damage events, so a Borborygmos with double strike triggers the reveal twice — six cards, not three. That is what Lizard Blades, Temur Battle Rage, Critical Hit, and Genji Glove are actually for in this deck. Genji Glove goes further: its "whenever equipped creature attacks" trigger untaps Borborygmos and gives you an additional combat phase, so a Glove-equipped commander that connects in both combats reveals twelve cards.

The damage ability is a cost, not a target. "Discard a land card" is the activation cost. Nobody can respond by making you discard something else, and it doesn't target the card you discard — only the damage has a target. This matters when you are being pressured: you can dump your entire hand of lands into an opponent's face in response to a removal spell, and the removal resolving afterward doesn't get any of that value back.

Kediss, Emberclaw Familiar is in the 99, and it converts one connection into a table kill. Whenever a commander you control deals combat damage to an opponent, it deals that much damage to each other opponent. Three points of nuance, all confirmed by ruling:

• The copied damage is not combat damage. It does not trigger Borborygmos's reveal ability a second time, and it does not add to anyone's commander-damage total.
• Because it is noncombat damage, Solphim doubles it even though Solphim can't touch the original combat hit.
• It only triggers off a commander connecting — Kediss's own attacks don't do it, because Kediss isn't your commander here.

A Xenagos-pumped Borborygmos hitting one player for 14 therefore hits the other two for 14 apiece. Kediss is frequently the card that ends the game, and it is the easiest card in the deck to forget you control.

Key Loops & Interactions

The main loop

With a multiplier out, Storm Cauldron out, and lands in the graveyard:

1. Mass-return — Splendid Reclamation, Lumra, or Aftermath Analyst puts every land from your graveyard onto the battlefield tapped.
2. Untap — Amulet of Vigor untaps each one as it enters (it triggers per permanent, so a ten-land Reclamation untaps all ten).
3. Tap for mana — Storm Cauldron returns each tapped land to your hand. You keep the mana; this is what pays for the next mass return.
4. Discard for damage — fire Borborygmos once per land, multiplied. The spent lands go straight back to the graveyard.
5. Repeat from 1 with the next return effect.

Lumra is the best crank because it mills four before returning, so it partly fuels itself, and it enters as a creature whose power equals your land count — often a lethal attacker in its own right after the return resolves.

Shigeki's channel ability is the loop-extender. , discard Shigeki: return X target nonlegendary cards from your graveyard to your hand. That rebuys Splendid Reclamation and Aftermath Analyst in a single activation — but not Lumra, which is legendary. Bala Ged Recovery does the same job for one card with no such restriction.

Note that every one of those discards is itself a trigger if Glint-Horn Buccaneer, Magmakin Artillerist, or Surly Badgersaur is on the battlefield. Which brings us to:

Discard payoffs stack onto the loop

Borborygmos's ability discards a card every time you fire it, and three creatures care:

• Glint-Horn Buccaneer — 1 damage to each opponent, once per card discarded.
• Magmakin Artillerist — damage to each opponent equal to the number discarded, once per batch. Firing Borborygmos five separate times gives Magmakin five separate 1-damage triggers; a single five-card discard gives one 5-damage trigger. Same total, but it matters for what your multipliers are doing and for how many draws you get off an attached Aura.
• Surly Badgersaur — every land you discard makes a Treasure. In a turn where you machine-gun ten lands, that is ten mana toward the next reclamation.

All three are triggered abilities, not outlets — they need Borborygmos (or a wheel) to do the discarding.

The refill package

Three cards turn a spent hand back into a full one, and all of them are batch discards that your payoff creatures love:

• Change of Fortune draws a card for each card you've discarded this turn, for any reason — not just the ones it discards. After a ten-land Borborygmos turn it draws eleven-plus. This is the single most underrated card in the deck.
• Misty Knight, Hero for Hire reads the same way for the same reason, repeatably, for and a tap.
• Wheel of Fortune and Imposing Grandeur dump your hand and refill — Grandeur draws eight off the commander's mana value, and both hand your whole grip to Magmakin as one enormous trigger.
• Return of the Wildspeaker draws equal to your greatest non-Human power. Borborygmos is a Cyclops at 7, and a post-Reclamation Lumra is far bigger.
• Abundance replaces every draw with "reveal until you find a land" — turning your card draw directly into ammunition. Two rulings matter: nothing that triggers on drawing will fire, because the draw is replaced; and with an empty library Abundance stops you losing to an empty draw, which is your safety net on the combos below.

The Valakut package — a second win condition

Dryad of the Ilysian Grove makes every land you control every basic land type, which means every land you control is a Mountain. Valakut, the Molten Pinnacle then triggers on essentially every land that enters, dealing 3 (9 through Fiery Emancipation, 18 with Twinflame Tyrant as well).

The payoff is mass returns: when Splendid Reclamation or Lumra returns ten lands simultaneously, Valakut triggers ten times, because each trigger counts the other lands that entered alongside it. That is 30 damage to any targets before multipliers, from the graveyard, with the commander nowhere in sight.

Tannuk, Memorial Ensign rides along on the same effect — 1 damage to each opponent per land entering, drawing a card on the second one each turn.

Scapeshift and Entish Restoration are Valakut triggers in spell form. Both sacrifice lands and replace them with a batch entering simultaneously, which is exactly the pattern Valakut wants — and the sacrificed lands go to the graveyard where Splendid Reclamation and Lumra can find them. Scapeshift trading six tired lands for six fresh ones with Dryad and Valakut out is 18 damage split anywhere you like. Entish Restoration finds three basics instead of two while you control a creature with power 4 or greater, which the commander satisfies by itself.

Tutors and the rest of the toolbox

• Crop Rotation sacrifices a land to find any land — usually Valakut when the Dryad is already down, or Urza's Saga when you need the Amulet. The sacrifice is upside here.
• Worldly Tutor finds the creature the board is missing: Dryad to switch Valakut on, Lumra to crank the loop, Solphim or Twinflame Tyrant for the multiplier.
• Gamble finds anything at all, at the cost of a random discard — see the pitfall below.
• Hammer of Purphoros gives your whole board haste, which matters more than it looks: the commander does nothing the turn it lands unless it can attack, and every turn Borborygmos sits untapped is a turn an opponent gets to answer it. Its second mode sacrifices a land for a 3/3, converting spare ammunition into a body.
• Hull Breach is your answer to the permanents that actually beat this deck: graveyard hate switches off the reclamation half entirely, and an effect that blanks enter-the- battlefield triggers turns Lumra and Aftermath Analyst into vanilla creatures. It kills one of each type, or both at once, for two mana.
• Red Elemental Blast is narrow by design — it answers blue only, but for one mana it beats the counterspell aimed at your eight-mana commander or the bounce spell aimed at Storm Cauldron.

Small interactions worth knowing

• Dryad + Orcish Lumberjack: with Dryad out every land is a Forest, so Lumberjack can sacrifice any land for three mana — and the sacrificed land goes to the graveyard as Reclamation fuel. Storm Cauldron doesn't interfere, because Lumberjack taps itself and sacrifices the land, so the land was never tapped for mana.
• Urza's Saga fetches Amulet of Vigor. Chapter III finds an artifact with actual mana cost or , and Amulet () is the only card in the deck that qualifies. The Saga is a tutor for your loop's untapper, and it sacrifices itself afterward into the graveyard.
• Icetill Explorer lets you play lands from your graveyard, which turns all of your self-mill into land drops. It only works at sorcery speed on your own main phase.
• Sylvan Safekeeper sacrifices a land to give shroud — protection and graveyard fuel in one activation, and the cheapest way to beat targeted removal on the commander.
• Constant Mists buys back by sacrificing a land, fogging every combat while feeding the graveyard. Against an aggressive table it is a repeatable turn-skip that costs you nothing this deck actually minds losing.
• Fetchlands and Amulet of Vigor: Fabled Passage and Wooded Foothills put the land in untapped anyway with Amulet out, and each fetch puts a land in the graveyard for later.
• Kessig Wolf Run is a mana sink that adds trample-relevant power to a connecting commander; its activation taps it as a cost rather than for mana, so Storm Cauldron leaves it alone.
• Protection suite: Heroic Intervention and Tamiyo's Safekeeping for the board and the commander, Snakeskin Veil as the one-mana answer, Mithril Coat flashing in to attach to a legendary creature, and Legolas's Quick Reflexes with split second — the one protection spell nobody can respond to at all.
• Redirection: Deflecting Swat is free while you control a commander, and Bolt Bend costs while you control a creature with power 4 or greater — which, in this deck, is most of the time. Untimely Malfunction does the same job or blanks a blocker.
• Hellkite Courser puts the commander onto the battlefield with haste without paying commander tax, and per ruling the tax doesn't increase. Because it arrives before attacks are declared, you declare it as an attacker normally and everything triggers.
• World War Hulk chapter I lets you cast the next red or green creature spell for free — point it at the eight-mana commander. Chapter III doubles a creature's power and grants trample.

Combos

All three of these are the same shape: an Aura that draws on damage, attached to a creature that deals damage when you discard, looping through your cleanup step. You start them by having more cards in hand than your maximum hand size at end of turn — the refill package above is how you get there.

The loop works because triggers that go on the stack during a cleanup step cause another cleanup step, so you discard down again, and again. Every one of these draws is optional ("you may draw a card"), which is your off switch: stop drawing before you deck yourself. With Abundance out you cannot lose to an empty library at all.

Each is "near-infinite" rather than infinite because your library is the limit — but with any multiplier attached, the table is dead long before your library is.

Glint-Horn Buccaneer + Keen Sense — infinite draw, rummaging, and self-discard triggers; near-infinite damage. Attach Keen Sense to the Buccaneer with more than seven cards in hand. At cleanup you discard down; Glint-Horn triggers once per card discarded, dealing 1 to each opponent; Keen Sense draws you back up; the extra cards force another cleanup. Repeat. Because Glint-Horn triggers per card rather than per batch, this is the version that draws the most cards — a five-card discard is five separate damage events and five separate draws.

Magmakin Artillerist + Keen Sense — near-infinite damage, infinite draw and discard triggers. Identical loop, different arithmetic: Magmakin triggers once for the whole batch, dealing damage equal to the number of cards discarded to each opponent. Same damage per cleanup, fewer individual triggers.

Magmakin Artillerist + Snake Umbra — near-infinite damage, infinite draw and discard triggers. The same loop with Snake Umbra in the Aura slot. Umbra costs two more mana but pays for it: it grants +1/+1 and, more importantly, umbra armor — if the Artillerist would be destroyed, the Aura dies instead and the creature survives. This is the version to assemble into an open table with removal up. Its trigger fires on any damage, not just combat damage, exactly like Keen Sense.

Note that both Auras are live on Borborygmos too — Keen Sense on the commander draws a card every time you fire the discard ability at an opponent, because it triggers on any damage dealt to an opponent, not just combat damage.

Common Pitfalls

• Storm Cauldron shrinks your own board as you tap. Valakut needs five other Mountains when its trigger goes on the stack and when it resolves — if you have bounced your lands to hand in between, the trigger does nothing. Lumra's power falls off the same way. Count your board before you start tapping, and fire Valakut triggers before you empty the battlefield, not after.
• Storm Cauldron is genuinely symmetric. It hands every opponent an extra land drop per turn and returns their lands too. Against a table that can use that better than you can, it is a liability — don't deploy it until you can actually convert, and remember they will be untapping into more mana than usual.
• Trample under a multiplier assigns unmodified damage. With Fiery Emancipation out, a 7/6 trampling Borborygmos blocked by a 2/2 assigns 2 to the blocker and 5 to the player from its base power, and only then multiplies — 6 to the blocker and 15 to the player. Assign the small unmodified number to the blocker; you do not need to assign enough to survive the tripling.
• Mjölnir can only equip a legendary red creature. "Equip worthy " is the only equip cost on the card — there is no normal equip. Borborygmos qualifies (legendary, red), as do Solphim, Tannuk, Kediss, and Misty Knight. Glint-Horn Buccaneer and Magmakin Artillerist do not, so Mjölnir can never be the doubler for your combo creatures. Its discard mode (, discard it, 2 damage to each creature) is a real sweeper against small boards, and discarding it triggers your payoffs.
• Lightning Greaves grants shroud to your own creature. Once the Greaves are on Borborygmos, you cannot target it with Xenagos's combat trigger, Temur Battle Rage, Critical Hit, Keen Sense, Snake Umbra, or Mithril Coat. Equip the Greaves for the haste, then move them off before you try to pump. If you only control one creature, you cannot move them at all.
• Battlefield returns are not reloads. Splendid Reclamation resolving with an empty hand and no Storm Cauldron gives you a big board and zero ammunition. Sequence the bounce effect before you commit the return.
• Don't fire the commander's ability on your own main phase out of habit. It is instant-speed and free. Holding the lands until an opponent commits removal, or until you can count lethal through the multiplier, costs nothing and wins games.
• Gamble discards at random. With a hand full of lands that is usually harmless — and often actively good, since a discarded land is fuel — but if you are holding your only multiplier, tutor first and cast it before you gamble.
• Valakut Awakening bottoms cards, it does not discard them. It filters your hand without triggering a single discard payoff. Use it to fix a flooded-on-spells grip, not as an outlet.