How to build Olag and Miau, New Friends

The counters on the first two lines are not how this deck wins. The third line is, it counts tapped bodies rather than power, and a Vehicle taps a board faster and more safely than an attack does.

Olag and Miau, New Friends costs for a 3/3 with three abilities, and the two you read first are the two that matter least. Another Zombie entering puts a +1/+1 counter on a Cat. Another Cat entering puts one on a Zombie. Then, at the beginning of your end step, each opponent loses life equal to the number of tapped Cats and Zombies you control.

That last clause is the deck. It does not look at power, it does not look at counters and it does not care whether anything attacked. It counts creatures that happen to be tapped when it resolves. Ten tapped bodies in a four player pod is thirty life gone in one end step, and a 1/1 Cat token contributes exactly as much as a 6/6 does.

The third line is the win condition and it counts bodies, not power

Once you accept that, most of the deckbuilding falls out. Width beats height, so the list is built around cards that put several Cats or Zombies on the table at once rather than cards that make one creature enormous. Regal Caracal is three bodies in one card. Grave Titan is three more, twice. Army of the Damned is thirteen.

The other half of the job is getting those bodies tapped. Attacking does it for free, but attacking asks the board to survive blockers and removal first, and a deck whose payout is measured in bodies cannot afford to trade them off every turn. So the list buys tapping separately.

Crew never asks you for the minimum

Crew reads “tap any number of untapped creatures you control with total power N or greater.” The number is a floor on total power, not a cap on how many creatures you may tap. Smuggler's Copter is crew 1, and crew 1 will happily accept your entire board.

Crew is also an activated ability with no timing restriction, so the real line is to hold it. The end step trigger goes on the stack, combat is long over, everyone has already spent their removal, and only then do you crew and turn nine untapped creatures into nine points per opponent. Six Vehicles run here at crew 1 through crew 4 and the crew number barely changes how they play. Cryptcaller Chariot and Esika's Chariot pull double duty by making the bodies they later tap, Cultivator's Caravan is a mana rock that becomes an outlet, and Skysovereign, Consul Flagship shoots something on the way in.

Three cards do the same job without being Vehicles. Springleaf Drum turns one creature into a mana of any colour, Cryptbreaker taps three Zombies at a time to draw, and Chord of Calling is an instant with convoke, so casting it at end step taps the team and tutors a creature onto the battlefield in the same motion.

Vigilance is the one keyword this build reads as a downgrade

A creature with vigilance attacks and stays untapped, which means it has to be tapped by hand later to be worth anything at your end step. It is not a disaster when you hold a crew outlet, but it turns a free tap into one you have to pay for, and it is the reason two very similar white Cat legends end up on opposite sides of the cut.

Leonin Warleader makes two 1/1 Cats that are tapped and attacking, so both of them drain the turn they arrive. Brimaz, King of Oreskos makes a 1/1 Cat that is attacking and has vigilance, so it drains nothing, and Brimaz himself has vigilance too. He is a better Magic card and he is not in this list. Prideful Parent is out for the same reason. Felidar Retreat stays because you choose its mode on resolution, and in this deck you take the Cat token every time rather than the counters that hand out vigilance.

Seven cards make tokens that arrive already tapped

A token that enters tapped has already paid for itself before you reach for an outlet, and the list leans on that hard. Army of the Damned is thirteen tapped 2/2s off one card, which on its own is thirteen life from every opponent at the end of that turn. Dread Summons scales the same way for whatever X you can pay.

Cryptcaller Chariot creates a tapped Zombie for every card you discard, and Smuggler's Copter is the card that keeps discarding. Diregraf Colossus creates one for every Zombie spell you cast, and because changeling makes a card every creature type in every zone, Nameless Inversion and Crib Swap are both Zombie spells, so two pieces of removal double as token production.

Zahur, Glory's Past is the neatest fit of the seven. It is an actual Zombie Cat for , its max speed ability makes tapped Zombies when your nontoken creatures die, and speed increases once on each of your turns when an opponent loses life. Your commander makes an opponent lose life at every end step, so Zahur reaches max speed on its own schedule with nothing else asked of you.

Both triggers need something standing on the other side

The counter triggers target. A Zombie entering wants a Cat to put the counter on, a Cat entering wants a Zombie, and a board that is all one tribe is a board where half your commander is blank. Six changelings answer that, because a changeling is a Cat and a Zombie at once, so it triggers both abilities on the way in and is a legal target for either.

Sacred Cat is the cheapest version of the idea. It is a Cat, and its embalm token comes back as a white Zombie Cat, so one card covers both halves at two different points in the game. Maskwood Nexus is the expensive version and the one that changes the deck: every creature you control becomes every creature type, so every creature entering fires both triggers and every tapped creature counts for the drain.

Mirror Entity is the cheap trick people will miss. Activating it for gives your creatures all creature types until end of turn, which at your end step means every tapped creature on the board is a Cat and a Zombie for the trigger. The base 1/1 it sets is irrelevant by then, because combat is finished and the effect wears off in the cleanup step before an opponent can attack into it.

Realmwalker asks you to name a type as it enters. Name Cat. Fourteen of the twenty two creatures in the ninety nine answer to Cat against twelve for Zombie, and the six changelings are in both counts, so naming Cat costs you access to Cryptbreaker, Diregraf Colossus, Cemetery Reaper, Headless Rider and Undead Augur off the top and nothing else.

One card in the list reads the counters and the rest ignore them

Two thirds of the commander's text box hands out +1/+1 counters and the win condition does not look at them. That is the trap this card is going to set for people, because the counters are the part that reads like a theme, and a Cat and Zombie deck built on counter payoffs is building around the weakest third of its own commander.

The counters are still worth something. They make attacks profitable, and profitable attacks tap creatures for free, which is the resource the deck actually spends. Kutzil, Malamet Exemplar is the one card here that converts them directly, drawing a card whenever creatures with power greater than their base power connect, and the commander is what makes that clause true on a board of 1/1 tokens. Kutzil's first line matters more. Opponents cannot cast spells during your turn, which covers the end step, which is the exact window in which someone would otherwise kill a creature in response to the drain.

Every turn ends with nothing left to block with

This is the honest cost of the plan and it should decide how you play the deck. Tapping the board at your end step leaves you with no blockers until your untap step, through every opponent's turn. A pod that works out what you are doing will simply attack you on the way round.

Three cards answer it and none of them care about being tapped. Ghostly Prison taxes every attacker, Settle the Wreckage exiles a whole attack after it is declared, and Kutzil shuts opponents out of your own turn. Regal Caracal handing lifelink to the Cats is the fourth answer in practice. The cheapest answer costs nothing at all, which is remembering that crew lets you choose the number. Tapping six and holding three back is often more life than tapping nine and losing four creatures.

Thirty one black sources, and only one spell that wants two green

Thirty six lands, eight ramp pieces and an average mana value of 2.95. Black comes to thirty one sources, green and white to twenty six each, and all three clear a single pip on turn two at ninety percent or better. The double pips are where a three colour deck always pays, and here they are lopsided: ten spells want against six that want and exactly one that wants . That one is Chord of Calling, and convoke means creatures pay for most of it, so the green half of the mana base is doing far less work than a raw pip count suggests.

Path of Ancestry is better here than it looks. It scries when you tap it for a creature spell that shares a type with your commander, and your commander is a Zombie Cat, so both halves of the deck switch it on with no naming decision to get wrong.

The Cat and Zombie cards this list leaves out

Anthems are the big category. A lord gives your team +1/+1 and the drain does not read power, so Death Baron and its relatives are combat cards in a deck that would rather not be in combat. The ones that survived the cut all bring bodies as well: Regal Caracal makes two Cats, Cemetery Reaper exiles graveyards into Zombies, Arahbo, the First Fang makes a Cat for every nontoken Cat that lands.

Kemba, Kha Regent wants equipment this deck does not run. Every equipment and aura wants one creature to be good, and this deck wants nine mediocre ones. Three creatures in the ninety nine are neither Cat, Zombie nor changeling, which means their own bodies drain for nothing: Grave Titan, Ghoulcaller Gisa and Gisa, the Hellraiser. All three earn the slot by making Zombie tokens, and that is the test a non-tribal creature has to pass here.

The core list

One hundred cards at a bracket 3 floor for at least $310.94. Hover any card name to see the card, and the two rungs below start from this list.

Load into the deck builder Copy decklist

“Load into the deck builder” opens this list in your account, ready to edit or save. “Copy decklist” gives you plain text for Moxfield, Archidekt or Arena — no account needed.

Both rungs keep the outlets and trade around them

The tap outlets and the token engines are the deck, so neither rung touches them. What moves is the money and the ceiling. The budget rung drops to at least $102.76 and clears bracket 2 by cutting the one Game Changer in the list, and it gives up the two doublers and the good duals rather than the plan. The bracket 4 rung goes to at least $726.73 and buys two effects that multiply the drain instead of feeding it, plus the tutors that find them.

What release day will change about this page

This was written during preview season, which means three of its numbers have a shelf life and it is worth saying which. The commander is not legal yet rather than not legal, and 9 November 2026 is when that flips. It also has no price at all yet, so every total quoted here is a floor built from the other ninety nine cards, each priced at its cheapest paper printing rather than whatever a new set preorder is asking. New cards are dear before release and cheaper after it, so the floor is the number likely to move least.

The bracket number is the third. Field of the Dead is the only Game Changer in the core list, which is what sets the floor at 3, and the Game Changer list is revised at bracket updates rather than when a set comes out. A three mana commander that drains a whole table every turn is exactly the sort of card that gets looked at, so it reading as harmless today is a statement about the calendar and not about the card. Expect this page to change on 9 November, starting with the price of the Zombie Cat at the top of it.

FAQ

Why does a Cat and Zombie deck run Vehicles?

Because crew taps creatures without sending them into combat, and the end step trigger counts tapped creatures rather than attacking ones. Crew asks for a total power, not a number of bodies, so a crew 1 Vehicle can tap an entire board at once. Doing it in response to the trigger also means the drain lands after every opponent has already had a chance to remove something.

Do the +1/+1 counters matter in this deck?

Less than they look like they should. The drain counts tapped Cats and Zombies and never reads power, so a 1/1 token is worth the same as a 6/6. What the counters do is make attacks profitable, and profitable attacks tap creatures for free. Kutzil, Malamet Exemplar is the one card here that turns them into cards directly. A deck built on counter payoffs is a deck built around the weakest third of this commander.

Is Olag and Miau, New Friends good?

Yes, and the third ability is the reason rather than the two counter triggers everyone will read first. Three mana for a repeatable end step drain that scales with how wide you go is a real clock, and the tapping half of it becomes free as soon as one Vehicle is down. The weakness is fragility, because the plan leaves you with nothing untapped on every opponent's turn.

What bracket is this Olag and Miau deck?

The core list sits at a bracket 3 floor, and Field of the Dead is the only Game Changer in it. Cutting that land is most of what the budget rung does to reach bracket 2. The upgrade rung adds tutors and fast mana and comes out at 4. A floor is the lowest bracket a list can honestly claim rather than a ceiling, so a bracket 3 deck is still welcome at a stronger table.

What colours is Olag and Miau, New Friends?

White, black and green, which is an Abzan colour identity, on a three mana 3/3. This list plays thirty six lands, thirty one of which make black, twenty six green and twenty six white. Black is the heavy half because ten spells in the deck ask for two black pips and only one asks for two green.

When is Olag and Miau, New Friends legal in Commander?

Mystery Booster Commander Edition ships on 9 November 2026 and the card is playable from that day. A deck check run this week rejects it, and the cause is the release date rather than anything printed on the card. Every other card in this list already passes, so a check today returns exactly one refusal.