This deck is all about playing at instant speed to surprise your foes and gain big advantages by reacting to what your opponents do, from punishing big attacks or big spells to outright killing your opponent for their greedy excesses. At the same time this deck wants to be as greedy as possible, using Thrasios every turn it can to draw cards and generate big mana advantages while also holding onto most of its spot removal for when it needs to spend it. Thrasios is the main engine of the deck, and everything in this deck revolves around protecting both ourselves and Thrasios from dying until the lategame where this deck can take over, all while playing a fair game with no combos, just good old creature combat.
By letting our opponents develop while we keep ourselves guarded with Maze effects and the threat of retaliation via removal, we let them play into our punisher effects. If we start taking heat, slam a big guy down and give it double strike with Bruse to pad our life total and send a message to the people swinging at us. Our deck is about 99% spells that can be played at instant speed and we aren't playing any ramp outside of Thrasios, so sit back, play passive, take it slow, develop your mana, and win via a surprise attack.
The deck usually plays out as follows:
Early game - Your goal in the early game is to simply develop your mana as much as you can. This deck can't really start doing some of its big value and tricksy plays until it has a lot of mana, and the best time to get that mana is early on when both our life total and cards are under less pressure, so keep any hand with 4+ lands, even 7 land hands (we're playing 41 lands with multiple landcyclers for a reason), hit your land drops every turn, and once Thrasios is online just keep activating him with the goal of putting lands into play. This deck plays no non-Thrasios ramp specifically to avoid looking threatening, and it can be a good idea to make it known earlier on that you don't have any X spells or big mana spells or combos that can instantly win you the game or kill a player outright.
Mid-game - By this point other players have set up their boards and many will be trying to push for their win conditions. Let them. Obviously not to the point where they actually do win, but enough to where they are clearly threatening, and even if they end up getting answered, by you or someone else, the table will remember their threat level and will be more likely to consider them a threat over you. That's really all this deck is trying to do: avoid the spotlight as much as possible, let everyone fight each other, and poke in when the opportunity is ripe to take a power player out. So let them draw cards, let them get mana, let them create big boards, so long as you have an answer to what they can dish out when they start to push for the win, especially if they start coming for you. Continue to develop your mana, use a bit of your removal and ambush people attacking you to send a message, but think about holding onto counters and big creatures to keep for the endgame.
Late game - The deck's main strength is its ability to keep itself alive, so hopefully you were able to politick and surprise attack your way into having one or two opponents left. Your main goal is really to get the game down to a 1v1 where the strength of this decks lategame really shines, as its abundant answers to everything and the strength of Thrasios' draw when you have lots of mana should lead you to being able to dismantle the last remaining opponent's board into landing a huge creature and smacking them once or twice with the aid of Bruse's double strike.
There's a couple cards that might look strange or that have specific roles in the deck, so I thought I'd point them out:
Crop Rotation - This deck plays as many utility lands as it can fit in a 4-colour manabase, and Crop Rotation can get them at instant speed. Between 3 different maze effects, Scavenger Grounds graveyard removal, Reliquary Tower for that sick handsize value, and Yavimaya Hollow for protection for Thrasios, there's lots of powerful options even to grab, and at worst it can fix your mana if the manabase isn't working out.
Containment Priest - This card's role as a hate card is self-explanatory, just be careful using it with some of the blink effects in the deck as that's obviously a nonbo.
Sunforger, Akroma's Vengeance, Treacherous Terrain, Rout - As the only non-instant/flash cards in the deck, these cards stick out a bit, but they have important roles in the deck. Sunforger is the most justifiable inclusion in this style of deck as the number of different effects it can tutor is incredible, and it provides a great kill condition in combination with Bruse. Rout is obviously an honorary instant in the deck with its flash for 2 extra mana mode, but the deck is still lacking instant speed wraths, especially ones that hit noncreatures, so Akroma's Vengeance fits that role while technically having an instant-speed "mode" with cycling. Treacherous Terrain's main mode is actually cycling, with its spell half part of the package of "gotcha" kill conditions, this one targeting people ramping too much. These 3 Sorcerys also make Invert / Invent into a playable card and a strong one at that, able to tutor for half the cards in our deck plus a wrath when needed (and the power flipping half fits our theme of narrow answers very well as a bonus).
Dust Elemental and the various blink/bounce cards - The main reason these cards are in here is to protect Thrasios from removal, whether its single target or boardwipe. Dust Elemental in particular is very strong in that we can repeatedly use strong ETBs like Mystic Snake to create endgame locks (that are still beatable via removal and playing more spells than I have mana for this expensive pair of cards), but its main use is to jump in to save Thrasios to stop his commander tax from getting too high.
Kessig Wolf Run - The secret REAL wincon of the deck, Kessig is possibly the most important card for this decks gameplan and its important to protect it as much as possible, to the point where you shouldn't play it as your land drop unless you absolutely have to. This deck has no other way of taking advantage of all the mana it can produce except with this card - a purposeful decision so that repeated plays of this deck against the same opponents won't cause them to immediately target you because they know if you get to 20 mana or whatever they'll just die to a Comet Storm or you'll draw your deck with a Sphinx's Revelation. The lack of reliable wincon in this deck makes you less of a threat and thus more likely you can make it to the lategame with one or two players remaining where your deck starts working overtime. Kessig is unique in that it provides an outlet for your big mana but requires both an attacking creature in play and for you to tap out on your turn, both of which can allow your opponents to react and kill your threat, making the card a lot more "fair" and thus you are a lot less threatening in our opponent's heads. Of course that isn't really true, with some of our cheap protection and the double strike from Bruse magnifying Kessig's power we can usually hang on to a cheap protection spell for the 1v1 endgame scenario to stop the removal, but what's important is to hide the fact that you have both so that it can't get blown up and so your opponents don't know you have it yet.
