Tom, Bert, and William: the 5 gems EDHRec won't show you

Three trolls in a trench coat, but the text doesn't lie: and a sacrifice are enough to draw cards equal to the dead creature's power, then discard. A simple engine, almost rustic. The real value, though, is in the second paragraph of the text: when they die as a creature, they come back as an artifact. You never truly lose them, you just reclassify them. This opens two paths that the average deck ignores: sacrificing them themselves for a big draw, and then exploiting them as an undead-artifact for synergies that don't care about creature type. The EDHRec list tends to stop at the first layer ("sacrifice engine, add Ashnod's Altar and call it a day"). Here, instead, we dig into where card advantage multiplies and where the commander's artifact identity stops being a mere lore quirk.

The five gems

Priest of Forgotten Gods — Sacrifice a creature and an artifact, drain the opponent's board, and produce mana/treasure. With Tom, Bert, and William, the sequencing is surgical: sacrifice a small creature to the Priest for its effect, then use the real multiplier elsewhere, or reverse the order and use the commander itself as the "artifact" to offer the Priest after it's died once. The real multiplier is that the Priest gives you two bodies of fuel per turn (creature + artifact) while the commander gives you conversion into cards. It performs best in bracket 3, where incremental board control matters more than raw speed.

Eye of Yawgmoth — Sacrifice a creature, draw a card, and optionally give another creature permanent deathtouch. It seems redundant with the commander, but it's actually the opposite: here the draw is fixed (one card) and mana-free when you recycle your own tokens, while Tom, Bert, and William scales with big creatures. The real combo is using the Eye on small, expendable creatures (tokens, tapped-out mana dorks) and saving the commander for high-power bodies. Multiplier: you double your sacrifice outlets without duplicating cost, and the deathtouch turns every surviving creature into a combat-removal threat. Great in midrange lists that need both card advantage and a way to hold back opposing attackers.

Whisper, Blood Liturgist — Sacrifice a creature to put a creature of equal or lesser cost into play from the graveyard or hand. Here the multiplier is hidden: using her to bring Tom, Bert, and William itself back after it's died (before it transforms, or by recycling the artifact version if you have ways to turn it back into a creature) puts the engine back on the table while you've already gotten value from its death. In general, she functions as a second sacrifice outlet that generates board presence instead of just cards, balancing a deck that risks emptying out too fast. She shines in bracket 3-4, where you need resilience against single-target removal.

Coffin Puppets — Tap to exile a card from an opponent's graveyard or to reanimate one of your own permanents with power ≤2 from your graveyard, if it has a +1/+1 counter on it. It seems off-theme, but it's one of the few tools in the pool that lets you recycle the small bodies you've sacrificed to the commander, as long as you load them up with counters (blink, proliferate, counter doubling). The real multiplier is free graveyard hate combined with a value loop: while you deny opponents' reanimation, you rebuild your own board. A niche card, but in a meta with reanimator or grave-based decks it becomes a bracket 4 gem.

The Deck of Many Things — Risky, chaotic, and precisely for that reason underrated: the multiple outcomes (creatures from graveyards, extra draws, additional permanents) give the deck a flow of bodies and resources that the commander can instantly convert into cards. The multiplier is that, unlike pure risk in an aggro deck, here even the "negative" outcomes (losing permanents) are digestible because you have a sacrifice outlet that makes every loss nearly neutral: if you have to lose a creature anyway, you might as well sacrifice it to the commander first and draw a card. Recommended only in bracket 4, where variance is accepted and the table plays slowly enough to absorb a "swingy" turn.

What NOT to add

Casual instinct number one: Ashnod's Altar and generic sacrifice ramp by the handful. The problem isn't the card itself, but the redundancy: the commander is already a decent outlet, and filling out the list with more mana-based outlets without draw turns the deck into an engine that generates mana but not cards, when the real bottleneck of this commander is having enough sacrificial bodies of good power, not enough outlets.

Casual instinct number two: generic passive draw like Phyrexian Arena or similar. The commander IS your draw engine: adding redundant passive draw without sacrifice synergy dilutes the slots that should go to creatures with useful dying-triggers (ETBs, death triggers) that better fuel the whole package.

Casual instinct number three: indiscriminate mass removal/board wipes as a first choice. A deck that lives off sacrificial creatures doesn't want to reset its own board along with the opponent's: targeted or edict-based removal is better, leaving room to keep feeding the commander.

The bottom line

Tom, Bert, and William isn't an engine to be forced with outlet after outlet: it's a value converter that asks for quality bodies and a useful second life as an artifact. The real gems are the cards that double up outlets without duplicating cost, that recycle the small sacrifices, or that embrace risk as part of the plan. What to watch for going forward: how the table reacts to graveyard hate, and whether your group plays slowly enough to justify the variance of the Deck of Many Things — that's where you'll see whether this deck really has bite, or remains just a troll costume.