I had several people request that I post this decklist.

We had a great conversation in another thread I

started when I was working on making this deck where I asked people for help identifying cards for it
(thanks everyone who contributed!!). You can [URL=http://www.mtgsalvation.com/forums/the-
game/commander-edh/744909-suggestions-for-heavily-themed-cthulhu-deck]find that thread
here[/URL].

This is a super casual list...several cards are underpowered and would probably be better off if removed,
but the point of this deck was to come as close as possible to the Cthulhu mythos flavor-wise, while still
being relatively playable. I don't expect this deck to win a lot, but it should be fun to play.

I have small sticker labels that I'm going to use to identify the mythos names during game play which I
will stick onto perfect fit sleeves (so I don't ruin my cards!) in a spot near the art/card border...hopefully
the labels I have are small enough to be readable but won't get in the way of the art or card text. I've
yet to add these so I'm not real sure how they are going to work out.

It took me a bit to type this up - it wound up being a long time in coming since I took the time to re-read
a lot of the mythos stories (as well as a few new ones I found!) and research those that I haven't read. I
have really enjoyed putting this deck together.

Commander

1 Wrexial, the Risen Deep

Creature

1 Black Cat

1 Blizzard Elemental

1 Blizzard Specter

1 Blood Artist

1 Consuming Aberration

1 Dark Hatchling

1 Dauthi Jackal

1 Dinrova Horror

1 Distended Mindbender

1 Drelnoch

1 Exultant Cultist

1 Guardian Beast

1 Gutless Ghoul

1 Hell's Caretaker
1 Initiates of the Ebon Hand

1 Lazav, Dimir Mastermind

1 Massacre Wurm

1 Mindleech Mass

1 Necrotic Ooze

1 Prized Amalgam

1 Rootwater Thief

1 Selhoff Occultist

1 Sewer Nemesis

1 Stitcher Geralf

1 Stronghold Rats

1 Sygg, River Cutthroat

1 Tar Fiend

1 The Unspeakable

1 Uncle Istvan

1 Undead Alchemist

1 Vault Skirge

Artifact

1 Altar of Dementia

1 Basalt Monolith

1 Brain in a Jar

1 Cryptolith Fragment

1 Dimir Signet

1 Elixer of Immortality

1 Grimoire of the Dead

1 Mindcrank

1 Rakdos Riteknife

1 Sol Ring
1 Trepanation Blade

1 Unstable Obelisk

Instant

1 Death Denied

1 Murmurs from Beyond

1 Psychic Spiral

Sorcery

1 Extract from Darkness

1 Eye of Nowhere

1 Mind Funeral

1 Paranoid Delusions

1 Traumatize

1 Waking Nightmare

1 Whispering Madness

Enchantment

1 Bottomless Pit

1 Claustrophobia

1 Gibbering Descent

1 Infernal Tribute

1 Memory Erosion

1 Waste Not

Lands

1 Ancient Tomb

1 Ancient Ziggurat
1 Choked Estuary

1 Command Tower

1 Darkslick Shores

1 Dreadship Reef

1 Drowned Catacomb

1 Geier Reach Sanitarium

1 Nephalia Academy

1 Nephalia Drownyard

1 Sea Gate Wreckage

1 Sunken Hollow

1 Tainted Isle

1 Temple of the False God

10 Island

16 Swamp

It occurred to me that, since this is heavily themed for specific mythos references (and I couldn't figure
out how to include the information within the decklist tags), that I should probably provide my thoughts
and descriptions of the respective mythos equivalents for each card I chose. I tried to include
descriptive quotes from the actual stories whenever I could that described the entity associated with the
card art.

(NOTE: I couldn't figure out how to properly italicize the titles within the spoiler tags - my apologies
about that.

Abhoth (Mindleech Mass)

"He described a sort of pool with a margin of mud that was marled with obscene offal; and in
the pool a grayish, horrid mass that nearly choked it from rim to rim... Here, it seemed, was the ultimate
source of all miscreation and abomination. For the gray mass quobbed and quivered, and swelled
perpetually; and from it, in manifold fission, were spawned the anatomies that crept away on every side
through the grotto. There were things like bodiless legs or arms that flailed in the slime, or heads that
rolled, or floundering bellies with fishes' fins; and all manner of things malformed and monstrous, that
grew in size as they departed from the neighborhood of Abhoth. And those that swam not swiftly ashore
when they fell into the pool from Abhoth, were devoured by mouths that gaped in the parent bulk."

—Clark Ashton Smith, The Seven Geases

Arkham Sanitarium (Geier Reach Sanitarium) and Miskatonic University (Nephalia Academy)

Arkham was first created by H.P. Lovecraft and is a fictional town that can be found in many of
his (and other's) mythos works. The city is known for it's gambrel roofed architecture and many dark
legends. Arkham does not have a precise location, though many have assumed it is near Boston.

The insane asylum (Arkham Sanitarium) and college (Miskatonic University) are two locations
within Arkham.

Byakhee (Vault Skirge)

"Out of the unimaginable blackness beyond the gangrenous glare of that cold flame, out of the
tartarean leagues through which that oily river rolled uncanny, unheard, and unsuspected, there flopped
rhythmically a horde of tame, trained, hybrid winged things that no sound eye could ever wholly grasp,
or sound brain ever wholly remember. They were not altogether crows, nor moles, nor buzzards, nor
ants, nor vampire bats, nor decomposed human beings; but something I cannot and must not recall.
They flopped limply along, half with their webbed feet and half with their membranous wings; and as
they reached the throng of celebrants the cowled figures seized and mounted them, and rode off one by
one along the reaches of that unlighted river, into pits and galleries of panic where poison springs feed
frightful and undiscoverable cataracts."

—H. P. Lovecraft, The Festival

Cats of Ulthar (Black Cat)

Cats feature predominately in this story. There is one passage in particular that refers to a black
cat though:

"There was in this singular caravan a little boy with no father or mother, but only a tiny black
kitten to cherish. The plague had not been kind to him, yet had left him this small furry thing to mitigate
his sorrow; and when one is very young, one can find great relief in the lively antics of a black kitten. So
the boy whom the dark people called Menes smiled more often than he wept as he sat playing with his
graceful kitten on the steps of an oddly painted wagon."

-H.P. Lovecraft, The Cats of Ulthar

Color Out of Space (Cryptolith Fragment/Aurora of Emrakul)

"When they looked back toward the valley and the distant Gardner place at the bottom they
saw a fearsome sight. All the farm was shining with the hideous unknown blend of colour; trees,
buildings, and even such grass and herbage as had not been wholly changed to lethal grey brittleness.
The boughs were all straining skyward, tipped with tongues of foul flame, and lambent tricklings of the
same monstrous fire were creeping about the ridgepoles of the house, barn, and sheds. It was a scene
from a vision of Fuseli, and over all the rest reigned that riot of luminous amorphousness, that alien and
undimensioned rainbow of cryptic poison from the well—seething, feeling, lapping, reaching,
scintillating, straining, and malignly bubbling in its cosmic and unrecognisable chromaticism."

—H. P. Lovecraft, Color Out of Space

Cthonian (Dinrova Horror)

"Flowing tentacles and pulpy gray-black, elongated sack of a body...no distinguishing features at
all other than the reaching, groping tentacles. Or was there—yes—a lump in the upper body of the
thing...a container of sorts for the brain, basal ganglia, or whichever diseased organ governed this
horror's loathsome life!"

—Brian Lumley, The Burrowers Beneath

Other sources (Call of Cthulhu RPG art mainly) has these creatures looking squid-like with
elongated worm-like bodies which the card fits pretty well I think.

Cthulhu (Wrexial, the Risen Deep)

"A monster of vaguely anthropoid outline, but with an octopus-like head whose face was a
mass of feelers, a scaly, rubbery-looking body, prodigious claws on hind and fore feet, and long, narrow
wings behind."

-H.P. Lovecraft & Zealia Bishop, The Call of Cthulhu

Cultists (Exultant Cultist, Initiates of the Ebon Hand|Fallen Empires, Selhoff Occultist)

What more can I say here...the Cthulhu mythos stores mention cultists in several stories, and
what Cthulhu themed deck would be complete without a few cultists included?

Dagon (Rootwater Thief)

"With only a slight churning to mark its rise to the surface, the thing slid into view above the
dark waters. Vast, Polyphemus-like, and loathsome, it darted like a stupendous monster of nightmares
to the monolith, about which it flung its gigantic scaly arms, the while it bowed its hideous head and
gave vent to certain measured sounds."

-H.P. Lovecraft, Dagon

Deep One (Sygg, River Cutthroat)

"I think their predominant color was a greyish-green, though they had white bellies. They were
mostly shiny and slippery, but the ridges of their backs were scaly. Their forms vaguely suggested the
anthropoid, while their heads were the heads of fish, with prodigious bulging eyes that never closed. At
the sides of their necks were palpitating gills, and their long paws were webbed. They hopped
irregularly, sometimes on two legs and sometimes on four. I was somehow glad that they had no more
than four limbs. Their croaking, baying voices, clearly used for articulate speech, held all the dark shades
of expression which their staring faces lacked ... They were the blasphemous fish-frogs of the nameless
design - living and horrible."

-H.P. Lovecraft, The Shadow Over Innsmouth

Dhole (Massacre Wurm)

Below him the ground was festering with gigantic Dholes, and even as he looked, one reared up
several hundred feet and leveled a bleached, viscous end at him.

—H. P. Lovecraft and E. Hoffmann Price, Through the Gates of the Silver Key

Now Carter knew from a certain source that he was in the vale of Pnath, where crawl and
burrow the enormous dholes; but he did not know what to expect, because no one has ever seen a
dhole, or even guessed what such a thing may be like. Dholes are known only by dim rumour from the
rustling they make amongst mountains of bones and the slimy touch they have when they wriggle past
one. They cannot be seen because they creep only in the dark.

—H. P. Lovecraft, The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath

Dimensional Shambler (Sewer Nemesis)

"Shuffling toward him in the darkness was the gigantic, blasphemous form of a black thing not
wholly ape and not wholly insect. Its hide hung loosely upon its frame, and its rugose, dead-eyed
rudiment of a head swayed drunkenly from side to side. Its fore paws were extended, with talons spread
wide, and its whole body was taut with murderous malignity despite its utter lack of facial expression."

-H.P. Lovecraft & Hazel Heald, The Horror In the Museum

Dr. Allan Halsey (Prized Amalgam)

Herbert West's reanimated monster...

"For it had been a man. This much was clear despite the nauseous eyes, the voiceless simianism,
and the daemoniac savagery. They dressed its wound and carted it to the asylum at Sefton, where it
beat its head against the walls of a padded cell for sixteen years -- until the recent mishap, when it
escaped under circumstances that few like to mention. What had most disgusted the searchers of
Arkham was the thing they noticed when the monster’s face was cleaned -- the mocking, unbelievable
resemblance to a learned and self-sacrificing martyr who had been entombed but three days before --
the late Dr. Allan Halsey, public benefactor and dean of the medical school of Miskatonic University."

-H.P. Lovecraft, Herbert West: Reanimator

Dr. Muñoz (Undead Alchemist)

An undead man whose existence depended on alchemical solutions and keeping himself cold -
the card art doesn't look much like the description of Dr. Muñoz in the story, but it does look like I
imagine him to have looked like when the pump of the refrigerating machines keeping him cold failed.

-H.P. Lovecraft, Cool Air

Formless Spawn of Tsathoggua (Tar Fiend)

"At any rate, when the men of K’n-yan went down into N’kai’s black abyss with their great atom-
power searchlights they found living things—living things that oozed along stone channels and
worshipped onyx and basalt images of Tsathoggua. But they were not toads like Tsathoggua himself. Far
worse—they were amorphous lumps of viscous black slime that took temporary shapes for various
purposes."

-H.P. Lovecraft & Zealia Bishop, The Mound

Ghoul (Gutless Ghoul)

"These figures were seldom completely human, but often approached humanity in varying
degree. Most of the bodies, while roughly bipedal, had a forward slumping, and a vaguely canine cast.
The texture of the majority was a kind of unpleasant rubberiness. Ugh! I can see them now! Their
occupations—well, don’t ask me to be too precise. They were usually feeding—I won’t say on what.
They were sometimes shewn in groups in cemeteries or underground passages, and often appeared to
be in battle over their prey—or rather, their treasure-trove. And what damnable expressiveness
Pickman sometimes gave the sightless faces of this charnel booty! Occasionally the things were shewn
leaping through open windows at night, or squatting on the chests of sleepers, worrying at their throats.
One canvas shewed a ring of them baying about a hanged witch on Gallows Hill, whose dead face held a
close kinship to theirs."

-H.P. Lovecraft, Pickman's Model

There is another description in the book that is also (debatedly) a ghoul, though seemingly a
much larger version:

"It was a colossal and nameless blasphemy with glaring red eyes, and it held in bony claws a
thing that had been a man, gnawing at the head as a child nibbles at a stick of candy. Its position was a
kind of crouch, and as one looked one felt that at any moment it might drop its present prey and seek a
juicier morsel. But damn it all, it wasn’t even the fiendish subject that made it such an immortal
fountain-head of all panic—not that, nor the dog face with its pointed ears, bloodshot eyes, flat nose,
and drooling lips. It wasn’t the scaly claws nor the mould-caked body nor the half-hooved feet—none of
these, though any one of them might well have driven an excitable man to madness."

-H.P. Lovecraft, Pickman's Model

Gug (Guardian Beast)

"It was a paw, fully two feet and a half across, and equipped with formidable talons. After it
came another paw, and after that a great black-furred arm to which both of the paws were attached by
short forearms. Then two pink eyes shone, and the head of the awakened gug sentry, large as a barrel,
wabbled into view. The eyes jutted two inches from each side, shaded by bony protuberances
overgrown with coarse hairs. But the head was chiefly terrible because of the mouth. That mouth had
great yellow fangs and ran from the top to the bottom of the head, opening vertically instead of
horizontally."

-H.P. Lovecraft, The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath

Hastur, The Feaster from Afar (The Unspeakable)

I've not read the story this description came from, but during my searches on the internet I
came across several Lovecraft Wiki sites that described this version of Hastur as "...a black, shriveled,
flying monstrosity with tentacles tipped with razor-sharp talons that can pierce a victim's skull and
siphon out the brain." which is pretty close to the card art in my opinion. The story was by a guy named
Joseph Payne Brennan, published in The Hastur Cycle which was a more recent publication...I'm not sure
if Joseph was a more modern writer, or wrote back in Lovecraft's era. I couldn't find a lot of information
on him.

Herbert West (Stitcher Geralf)

Herbert is the inventor of a solution that when injected, can resurrect the dead. He was
responsible for the 'insane' Dr. Allen Halsey, whose corpse he dug up and reanimated.

-H.P. Lovecraft, Herbert West: Reanimator

Hound of Tindalos (Dauthi Jackal)

"Beyond life there are'—his face grew ashen with terror—'things that I cannot distinguish. They
move slowly through angles. They have no bodies, and they move slowly through outrageous
angles...God, they are breaking through! They are breaking through! Smoke is pouring in from the
corners of the wall. Their tongues—ahhh—"

—Frank Belknap Long, The Hounds of Tindalos

Hunting Horror (Dark Hatchling|Urza's Saga)

"And in the air about him were great viperine creatures, which had curiously distorted heads,
and grotesquely great clawed appendages, supporting themselves with ease by the aid of black rubbery
wings of singularly monstrous dimensions."

—August Derleth, The Lurker at the Threshold

Ithaqua (Blizzard Elemental)

To be honest, I've never actually read August Derleth's short story "Ithaqua", so all I can't quote
the exact description. All I have to go on is the internet here...looks like another book I'm going to need
to track down! The H.P. Lovecraft Wiki page (lovecraft.wikia.com) has this description:

Ithaqua is one of the Great Old Ones and appears as a horrifying giant with a roughly human
shape and glowing red eyes. He has been reported from as far north as the Arctic to the Sub-Arctic,
where Native Americans first encountered him. He is believed to prowl the Arctic waste, hunting down
unwary travelers and slaying them in a gruesome fashion.
 Blizzard Elemental's art at first doesn't look much like this description, but it does have a face,
arms and hands in the art. Close enough for me!

Jospeh Curwen (Lazav, Dimir Mastermind)

A sorceror from the late 1600's / early 1700's who is resurrected by his relative, Charles Dexter
Ward, who happens to look almost exactly alike. Joseph pretends to be Charles (copy target creature)
during the story. The clothing Lazav is wearing in the card art isn't very period appropriate, but he does
look like a cultist/warlock to me.

—H. P. Lovecraft, The Case of Charles Dexter Ward

King in Yellow (Hell's Caretaker|9th - 9th ed. art version specifically)

I am mostly familiar with The King in Yellow through the RPG. I haven't actually read Chambers'
works on this. Lovecraft's references to Hastur in his works are thought to be inspired by Chambers'
stories however.

Since I don't know much about Chambers' work, this is what I could find researching The King in
Yellow online: The original King in Yellow was a collection of short stories written by Robert W.
Chambers in 1895. In these stories, Hastur is a mentioned as a supernatural character, a place, and
mentioned without explanation in The Yellow Sign. Yet more books I need to find and read...

I suppose I'm taking some 'artistic license' with the Hell's Caretaker card, but from what little
research I've done (along with some of the RPG experiences I've had) the figure on the throne of the 9th
edition Hell's Caretaker art looks like what I imagine when I think of Hastur in the form of the King in
Yellow.

Mi-Go (Distended Mindbender)

“They were pinkish things about five feet long; with crustaceous bodies bearing vast pairs of
dorsal fins or membraneous wings and several sets of articulated limbs, and with a sort of convoluted
ellipsoid, covered with multitudes of very short antennae, where a head would ordinarily be.... As it was,
nearly all the rumours had several points in common; averring that the creatures were a sort of huge,
light-red crab with many pairs of legs and with two great bat-like wings in the middle of their back. They
sometimes walked on all their legs, and sometimes on the hindmost pair only, using the others to
convey large objects of indeterminate nature.”

-H.P. Lovecraft, The Whisperer in Darkness

...and since they are known to remove the brains of humans and encase them ('alive') in metal
cylinders to transport to their home planet, the card art is pretty spot on I think!

Mi-Go Brain Cylinder (Brain in a Jar)

“There was a harmless way to extract a brain, and a way to keep the organic residue alive during
its absence. The bare, compact cerebral matter was then immersed in an occasionally replenished fluid
within an ether-tight cylinder of a metal mined in Yuggoth, certain electrodes reaching through and
connecting at will with elaborate instruments capable of duplicating the three vital faculties of sight,
hearing, and speech. For the winged fungus-beings to carry the brain-cylinders intact through space was
an easy matter. Then, on every planet covered by their civilisation, they would find plenty of adjustable
faculty-instruments capable of being connected with the encased brains; so that after a little fitting
these travelling intelligences could be given a full sensory and articulate life—albeit a bodiless and
mechanical one—at each stage of their journeying through and beyond the space-time continuum. ”

-H.P. Lovecraft, The Whisperer in Darkness

Necronominicon (Grimoire of the Dead)

Lovecraft's evil textbook of magic, first appearing in the short story "The Hound", and used by
other mythos writers.

Old Man from The Picture in the House (Uncle Istvan)

Just a crazy old man who owns a book with pictures that "...make me hungry fer victuals I
couldn’t raise nor buy..."

-H.P. Lovecraft, The Picture in the House

Rats in the Walls (Stronghold Rats)

Never truly decribed well, but the rats featured quite prominently in this story...escecially the
sounds they made in the walls.

-H.P. Lovecraft, The Rats in the Walls

Richard Upton Pickman (Blood Artist)

Pickman is an artist who painted horrifying works which got him banned from the Boston Art
Club. It's a fun story to read and is one of my favorite Lovecraft tales.

-H.P. Lovecraft, Pickman’s Model

Shantak and Rider (Blizzard Specter)

"Winged and whirring, those forms grew larger each moment, and the traveller knew his
stumbling was at an end. They were not any birds or bats known elsewhere on earth or in dreamland,
for they were larger than elephants and had heads like a horse's. Carter knew that they must be the
Shantak-birds of ill rumour, and wondered no more what evil guardians and nameless sentinels made
men avoid the boreal rock desert."

"It was hard work ascending, for the Shantak-bird has scales instead of feathers, and those
scales are very slippery."

-H.P. Lovecraft, Dream-Quest Of Unknown Kadath

Shantaks are known to carry riders - at least in the Call of Cthulhu RPG. We've had several
sessions featuring cultists riding these things. I haven't read Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath in quite a
while though. I have a book with it included somewhere, which will be on my reading list as soon as I
finish the short stories Lovecraft book I'm on now.

Shoggoth (Necrotic Ooze)

 It was a terrible, indescribable thing vaster than any subway train—a shapeless congeries of
protoplasmic bubbles, faintly self-luminous, and with myriads of temporary eyes forming and un-
forming as pustules of greenish light all over the tunnel-filling front that bore down upon us, crushing
the frantic penguins and slithering over the glistening floor that it and its kind had swept so evilly free of
all litter.

—H. P. Lovecraft, At the Mountains of Madness

Star Spawn of Cthulhu (Drelnoch)

"Another race - a land race of beings shaped like octopi and probably corresponding to fabulous
prehuman spawn of Cthulhu - soon began filtering down from cosmic infinity and precipitated a
-monstrous war which for a time drove the Old Ones wholly back to the sea..."

-H.P. Lovecraft, At the Mountains Of Madness

Smaller versions of Cthulhu, basically...though the card art doesn't have wings. Most RPG art
depicts them with wings, but Lovecraft's describes them as a land race so I'm OK with this card being
very close to how I envision them.

Yekub (Consuming Aberration)

This is a less familiar mythos entity, but I really like Consuming Abberation in this deck so I was
happy to find a mythos monster that mostly fit the look of it:

"It was a gigantic, pale-grey worm or centipede, as large around as a man and twice as long,
with a disc-like, apparently eyeless, cilia-fringed head bearing a purple central orifice. It glided on its rear
pairs of legs, with its fore part raised vertically—the legs, or at least two pairs of them, serving as arms.
Along its spinal ridge was a curious purple comb, and a fan-shaped tail of some grey membrane ended
its grotesque bulk. There was a ring of flexible red spikes around its neck, and from the twistings of
these came clicking, twanging sounds in measured, deliberate rhythms."

—C. L. Moore, A. Merritt, H. P. Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard and Frank Belknap Long, The
Challenge from Beyond

Enjoy!