Overview
Posting this to keep track of what I currently have and am considering for my current Nekusar deck.
This deck really scales exceptionally well depending on group composition, especially in team formats (I usually play in groups of at least 4).
Deck Construction
While building this deck (and most decks for that matter) I have tried to focus on 3 major themes, and 4-5 minor themes that all work well together. I like for three of my themes in basically every deck to be ramp, removal, and draw (in this case there are actually two centered around drawing). Then I splash several of the staples/high value cards of my colors to give me balance and consistency.
You can view the cards that fit into each of my themes/subthemes by selecting "Custom Categories" from the drop down menu.
Typical Win Condition
This deck works by steadily reducing all opponents life throughout the course of the game and then combos off for the win. The winning combo will usually consist of having more than one effect that triggers off of drawing or discarding in play and then repeatedly casting wheel-like spells (discard hand and draw a new one) in a single turn to kill each opponent simultaneously.
Major Themes (~10 cards each)
These are the core mechanics that the deck focuses on, all of which work exceptionally well with, or are also provided by Nekusar himself.
- 1) Steady Draw - Continuous effects from permanents that increase cards drawn each turn.
- 2) Bomb Draw - Wheel-like effects that cause everyone to discard/shuffle their hands and draw new ones.
- 3) Triggered Damage - Mostly from drawing, but also from discarding and even hand size (Including Molten Psyche even though it only "triggers" once on casting)(Excluding smaller damage that's only triggered once per turn by the cards own effects, i.e: Fevered Visions, Seizan, Perverter of Truth).
Minor Themes (~7 cards each)
These are the mechanics that the deck benefits from greatly, but aren't quite abundant enough to be core mechanics
- 4) Ramp - Mana Sources | Cost Reducers.
- 5) Removal - Mass Removals | Spot Removals.
- 6) Hand Size - No Max Hand Size | Big Hands | Asymmetric Card Draw. (This category seems a little bloated for a minor theme, but it overlaps with many bomb draw cards that get even better with bigger hands, and ends up just happening due to the massive amounts of drawing being done).
- 7) Triggered Effects (Other than damage) -Discard Effects | Draw Effects | Life Loss Effects | Death Effects.
- 8) Commander Protection - Counterspells | Untargetable | Cheaper Commander Recast. (Worth noting here that Baral, Chief of Compliance, while mostly added for cost reduction, also has synergy with the few counterspells in the deck).
- Bomb Discard - This is sort of a bonus minor theme as it comes entirely from wheel-like effects that are also included in the Bomb Draw Theme, and noted just for tracking and deckbuilding purposes.
Splashed Utility Cards (~3 cards each)
These are things that aren't quite focuses, but still come up frequently enough to be noted
- Double Casting - Instant/Sorcery Recursion + Reverberate to casting those juicy wheels multiple times.
- Mill Defense - Depending on the board state you get yourself into this may be very much needed to prevent yourself from milling out and I might add more to this in the future, the biggest offenders of this are Notion Thief or Consecrated Sphinx, but also any time the hand size theme combos with the wheels that draw based on hand size (can easily result in 20+ cards drawn over and over).
- Big Graveyards - Graveyards get huge with this deck. I wouldn't mind making this a minor theme, but I find myself spread pretty thin on themes as it is.
- Clones - For now just Clever Impersonator, but I really like this as a theme in general since it scales both up and down with the quality of your opponents' decks.
- Life Gain - This is there just to help combat the indiscriminate damage triggers that also hit you, and a couple of them are quite powerful in this deck (Exquisite Blood).
Land choice
I run very light on lands (36). This is to keep my later game plays more valuable by drawing more spells than lands in those brand new hands, setting up that wheel->wheel->wheel->dead combo.
I run quite a few accelerators and cost reducers to keep the deck relatively fast and allow for multiple spells to be cast same turn late game. Coupled with the fact that this deck has massive draw potential to keep me dropping a land each turn, even with the reduced amount, it's still very manageable on the mana front.
As you can see I have very few Basic Lands (And would have even less if I dropped the money for the big ones). Being a 3 color deck that's light on lands, I've tried to smooth out my mana with as many mana fixing lands as possible, with a slight emphasis on blue.
Sideboard
This deck started as a budget deck combined with cards I already owned. So, the cards I would like to add but haven't brought myself to drop the money on yet are in the Sideboard. And I've labeled the cards I'm likely to cut first under the Temp Custom Category.
Maybeboard
The Maybeboard is just a dump of pretty much every card I've considered at some point for this deck in wildly varying degrees.
Remarks
I play in a semi-competitive but still very casual group. So, there are a couple of mechanics I try to avoid because I feel like the pain it causes other players isn't worth the win (I know this is Nekusar, but I have my limits =P)
- Land Destruction (Especially Including Annihilator)
- Stacking defensive effects that restrict play (and sometimes straight prevent it)
- Infinite Combos that instantly win (unless they take several turns to set up, and are just simply cashing in on an already busted board state to finish the game)
- Excessive Tutoring (tends to result in the same exact win con every game, and makes turns take longer).
