Draw your heart out (Commander / EDH MTG Deck)

Draw your heart out

Commander / EDH Control Discard UBR (Grixis)

GS10

Land (32)

Sorcery (12)

Artifact (16)

Enchantment (14)

Planeswalker (1)

1x Chandra, Flamecaller

Commander (1)

Instant (15)

Creature (9)

This deck was made after a random general was given to me to build around. Each of us builds a deck around the random general we are given and then we play them without previous knowledge of our oponnents' generals. This was the first time we did this kind of challenge and I got lucky with Nekusar, which I was almost banned to play again due to its overwhelming power.

What to do then? Adjust and play it online! This is the list I'm currently running in MTGO at a fairly low budget, and so far I've been loving it!

If you play paper Magic, I recommend that you take a look at my original list, right here.

At the time I'm writing this primer, and for some time now, Nekusar, the Mindrazer is the 5th most popular general according to EDHRec. And there are a few reasons for it, firstly I believe because Nekusar allows for a very competitive build within a short budget, and then because it is easily upgradable in time. Nekusar is a double edged sword for your opponents, who will most likely take the card draw and accept that life loss as a fair trade (reason why Phyrexian Arena is so powerful and popular). That will most times lead them to perilous life totals, and your deck will be the one optimized to take advantage of that. Be aware, though, that this is a one trick horse. If your opponents have faced a Nekusar deck before they will know what's up and will make you the primary target in most matches.

This particular build focus on getting the most out of Nekusar's ability and replicate it as much as possible, while taking incidental advantage from opponents discarding. While this particular build is not top tier competitively speaking, there is no well established meta in MTGO and the playfield is not all that balanced. Some players will run out amazing competitive decks, while others will run stock precons which are really toned down in power. For that reason, I managed my budget in a way that allowed me to face both scenarios - I can scrap for victory against a very competitive deck with some luck and the right plays, but I won't be the antagonizer 100% of the times. That's my personal choice simply because I have more fun with more play variance and less straightforward early turn wins. Below I'll talk about what each card is here to do, what relevant cards I've kept off the deck and why and some potential budget/upgrade advice for whoever feels like playing a similar list.

Remember, this is a deck built with MTGO prices in mind, so if you want to play this in paper you'd be better off looking at my paper list in this link!

Nekusar wants everyone to draw, getting everyone to draw a lot of cards is both our politics and our way to weaponize our general. Ideally we want some steady sources of card draw on the battlefield along with Nekusar, and then keep forcing our opponents to cycle their hands away. Sure, we are giving them a world of potential answers in the process, but we are taking advantage from it as well and forcing them to pitch their hands frequently forces them out of any long term plans they might be holding on to.

Steady Card Draw

These are permanents that affect either the whole table or our opponents, making everyone draw more cards each turn. These are the better options to scale up Nekusar's power. Our opponents might enjoy drawing a bunch of cards per turn, but Nekusar will punish them harder and harder as our engine grows stronger.

Howling Mine is the card that often is used as a synonym to drawing an additional card per turn so pretty easy inclusion

Dictate of Kruphix is funcionally the same, allowing us to be the first player to benefit from it, if we flash it on the last end step before our turn. Not sure we want that in Nekusar, but added versatility never hurts.

Font of Mythos functions as double Howling Mine. Just this and Nekusar means 4 damage per turn even without playing anything else. Perfect fit in this deck.

Teferi's Puzzle Box is a Winds of Change at each draw step, I expect this to draw a lot more hate than the aforementioned cards, but the way it works with Nekusar is too powerful to pass.

Fevered Visions is brilliant making everyone draw and punishing big hand sizes which tends to be a frequent scenario. This is one of our overperformers.

Master of the Feast is our biggest beater appart from Awoken Horror, it's no secret we are not looking to win on the red zone, but a 5/5 flyer for 3 that has perfect synergy with our general is hard to say no to.

Kami of the Crescent Moon is yet another Howling Mine, just on a much more frail body. Still worth running since it's hard for opponents to spend resources killing something that is giving them some kind of advantage.

Temple Bell is essentially one additional plus activation from Jace, but we can do it just before our turn, denying our opponents that one extra card on their own main phases. It is not a world of difference with all this card draw, but it certainly doesn't hurt. It is also one of our win conditions.

Wheel Effects

Again, having our opponents draw cards is how we weaponize Nekusar, but on the other hand, letting them keep those inflated hands for too long will let them find too many answers and plan accordingly in the long run. We don't want that so we need to keep them in fear of losing their window of opportunity and therefore use their resources in more of an hurry. This is why our wheel effects are probably the best cards in our deck, outside of our game winners (and sometimes, they are game winners too).

Wheel of Fortune is the namesake card and it is not in this deck. Picking up in my first few words regarding the playfield in MTGO, there's both very competitive and more layed back decks, I feel like I don't need every single best version of every single card to have a functioning fun deck, so I cut expenses where I can, and while Wheel is not one of the most expensive cards in the world, it represents a few tickets saved by running just its similar effects as explained below.

Wheel of Fate has a cheap suspend cost and lets us plan ahead, optimizing our mana to cast whatever we need before we pitch our hand. It's not the best if you're in a rush to get a new hand, but 90% of the time it will be one of your better options, letting you choice and sequence your most important spells before pitching your hand. (Keep in mind that if you want to run something like As Foretold you can cast Wheel of Fate right away and for free. I personally don't run it, but it's probably going to be a card in contention for some potential builds)

Windfall, Whispering Madness and Dark Deal all follow similar patterns, changing slightly based on number of cards in hand.

Winds of Change is our cheapest wheel effect, still great, the one downside is the fact that it doesn't discard, since we have some ways to punish opponents for discarding too and some ways to recurr our graveyard.

Molten Psyche does double duty, wheeling and then dealing extra damage based on the number of cards drawn before, more frequently than not. Again, doesn't discard, but it is punishing enough as is.

Reforge the Soul is yet another plain Wheel effect with a different ability printed on it, sometimes it will be cheaper based on its miracle cost, other times more expensive than a regular wheel, but we don't mind the extra cost for yet another wheel effect. Again, in MTGO some decks won't even be showing anything for their money by turn 5, while others might be already tutoring for their crucial pieces by the time you get to Reforge either way it is a fairly costed card even disregarding its Miracle cost and it will be useful and very much playable pretty much every single game.

Jace's Archivist is a Windfall on a body. Frail, yes, but repeatable, HELL YES!

You'll get hurt if you keep drawing like that

Nekusar is our mission statement, per say. He is what the deck does. But as soon as people start fearing their life totals, he will be heavily targeted to a point where we might not be able to keep casting him. So we need redundancy and additional ways that scale up with his ability to weaponize card draw.

Underworld Dreams is basically half of Nekusar on an enchantment, very relevant if Nekusar starts drawing hate and gets to expensive to keep recasting.

Fate Unraveler and Psychosis Crawler are pretty much Underworld Dreams on bodies. They're usually easier for our opponents to remove, but on the flipside, just like Nekusar, you can enchant them with a Phyresis and just win the game out of nowhere in most game states.

**Niv-Mizzet, the Firemind is similar, with two relevant points to make: It is one of our alternate win conditions, with the Curiosity or Mind Over Matter combo, and it targets at each trigger, meaning that you will have to select a player or a creature for each card you draw and it will drag your clock, especially if you have to demonstrate infinite damage. I run it mostly for critical mass, but if you have to combo off with him, it's a very slow and annoying way to finish the game on MTGO.

Spiteful Visions is a full Nekusar on an enchantment. The reason why I count it in the damaging part of the plan is because this card hurts us for drawing as well, so the relevant part in it is the damage dealt and not so much the extra card. We accept that trade, granted that we can lower our opponents' life totals faster than our own. Redundancy is key here.

Venser's Journal lets us have as many cards in hand as we want and gains us back life based on hand size. We have a few cards that punish our life total too, so lifegain while not being our way to victory is an important factor to weigh in to stay alive for long enough to win the game. It is also our best way to break parity with Spiteful Visions.

The Locust God is not strictly a pinger. He lets us have hasty creatures that can either attack into our opponents for damage increment, or that you can keep back for emergency blocks since by that point in the game, most likely all the plagues will actually be descending upon you. It's hard to deal with and it piles tokens really fast, really hard, which makes it an alternate win condition on its own and one of my preferred options when Nekusar starts to get too expensive to cast over and over again.

Discard Synergy

Since we need to make our opponents discard a lot, and they'll probably run over their maximum hand size naturally too, a few ways to take advantage from all that discard are yet another way we can profit from this strategy. I'll go over both the cards that care about opponents discarding cards and additional permanents that will make them discard or punish them for not doing so.

Bloodchief Ascension is straight up one of our win conditions and one of the ways we can regain some life otherwise. Auto include in this deck.

Breathstealer's Crypt is one of my favorite cards in here. We run very few creatures and sometimes we won't even need them, so it doesn't hurt us badly, but it heavily punishes creature decks, keeping them in check. Love this card.

Waste Not is INSANE. The one way you can understand how strong this card is, is by playing it or against it. Probably the best argument for me to include Laboratory Maniac, but I'm counting on Elixir of Immortality to keep me from decking myself out rather than the frail Maniac to get me out of having no cards to draw.

Liliana's Caress and Megrim plain and simply scale up with all the damage on card draw.

One notable exclusion is Painful Quandary. This enchantment was on my first list but it is bugged in MTGO, making for broken and unfun games. Even if it functions in our favour, I'd rather not run it until the bug is fixed.

Since the deck is almost creatureless, we'll need a respectable suite of control spells. Ranging from a handfull of countermagic to mass removal and spot removal, this takes up a big chunk of the deck, granting me enough answers against more aggressive decks.

Countermagic

Our countermagic package helps us protect our plans while keeping major threats off the board. Also, there are some pesky cards that Grixis colors are not very well prepared to deal with and that end up being very relevant in the EDH panorama, countering is our best way to deal with those.

To start with, as usual, the card that names the effect: Counterspell. No introduction needed, a staple and an auto include here.

Disdainful Stroke is cheap and effective. Most spells that matter in EDH will be 4 or more mana, which makes this one of my favorite counterspells for the format.

Swan Song is one of the cheapest hard counterspells in the game and personally the bird token doesn't scare me given all the removal we pack. The restrictions aren't that worrying on this since most times we will be countering enchantments or instants with this.

Counterflux, since storm is definitely more common in MTGO than on my paper Magic local meta, is a slightly more expensive counterspell that might, from time to time, win the game. Fully countering a lethal Tendrils of Agony or Guttersnipe seems like a nice deal for that overload cost, and 3 mana for yet another counterspell doesn't move me away from it.

Arcane Denial is another one of those budget choices. I didn't own a copy and it was more than a ticket for one more counterspell. I eventually deemed that it was not worth the trade since we already had enough countermagic according to my plans. If you have one, you'd probably be better off running it over Swan Song or Disdainful Stroke, maybe even in addition to these, it definitely belongs in a Nekusar deck.

Removal

Probably the biggest chunk of the control cards consists of hard removal. Board Wipes and Targeted Removal are vital here since we run so few creatures. We need to keep all the boards in check so these are the cards that help us doing so.

Mass Removal

Blasphemous Act is more often than not a one mana board wipe. There's not much else I need to say about it.

Cyclonic Rift is, according to EDH Rec, the second most played card in all EDH Decks posted online and for good reason, versatile instant speed board wipe (or as close as blue gets it), I can't think of a reason not to play it in any EDH deck running blue.

Evacuation again at instant speed, the fact that it removes all creatures doesn't hurt us too much since we run few, and holding onto it until we are in fact getting attacked is pretty relevant IMO. It's a personal choice to run this over something like Crux of Fate, Life's Finale or Decree of Pain but my reasoning is that instant speed board wipes in this deck give us a huge edge over the opposition. Board wipe if you are the target, lay low if people are leaving you alone, let them kill each other and reap the benefits. It can also deal with most creature based combos on your opponents' turns so in a unfamiliar playfield it becomes almost as good as a Cyclonic Rift for that reason alone.

Awoken Horror is kind of another instant speed board wipe, since you can flip Thing in the Ice with an instant, but it is cheap to play and easy to manage in a spell heavy deck like this. I really like this card and it surprises me not to see it in EDH more often.

Chandra, Flamecaller is also a bit of a board wipe. The reason I count her in our mass removal suite is because none of her other abilities actually feed our main goals that well. She's useful, but 6 damage per turn is nothing to write home about, and she wheels, but not our opponents, which means that the function she fulfills more clearly is mass removal. It's probably one of our most versatile cards and while I didn't see her importance at first, she is probably one of the best planeswalkers we could fit in this deck.

While Damnation and Toxic Deluge are not insanely expensive online, I opted them out since I feel our mass removal package is strong enough as is and so we can happily save a few more tix.

Targeted Removal

Terminate is our best removal spell here. Cheap instant speed removal, there is no reason not to play it.

Murderous Cut is a close second, since we will almost always play it for just with lots in our graveyard to delve.

Reality Shift is, like Thing in the Ice , a card I think people underestimate or forget about. This is almost Path to Exile power level, in blue! Sure it costs one more mana and leaves a creature behind, but what's a Manifest token when you probably just dealt with a huge threat, even an indestructible one? Love this card and had to include it.

Doom Blade cheap and effective, that's what we are looking for.

Hero's Downfall instant speed removal spell that deals with Planeswalkers (in fact one of our only ways to deal with those), is a card that I believe should be in a lot more decks.

Chaos Warp and Crosis' Charm add some much needed versatility in our instant speed removal suite, something often much needed in this color combination.

Here be Dragons

This is the "Prison" part of the deck. These cards aren't your traditional Ghostly Prison / Propaganda type of permanents, since being almost creatureless, opponents won't mind paying extra and killing us since we will most times be defenseless. Even though these are few, their importance in the deck makes them deserve their own category. Meant to disencourage players from hitting us, or at least leave us for last, these are just 3 permanents that will help us stay alive for long enough to eventually win.

No Mercy is as clear as a "Stay Away" sign can be. If our opponents are willing to hit us, they will lose their creatures. It's a big stop sign for the table and if someone wants to disregard it will probably become an easier target for the rest of the table. It's really often a removal magnet, and we're happy with it. If our opponents are removing our enchantments that prevent us from losing the game, they aren't removing our enchantments that win us the game. In my experience that's often enough to get us across the finish line faster, even if we have to go through some rocky turns before we actually win.

Dissipation Field is similar in what it does, only it ruins tempo rather than destroying creatures. Against fast reanimator decks this might be better than No Mercy, otherwise, this is just an additional way to make people stay away from our red zone. This one is not that much of a removal magnet, but there's a downside: if we're playing against some sort of blink deck, or heavy ETB effects Dissipation Field will eventually function as sort of an enabler for that deck.

Finally, this card is a happy synergy with the last two: Mindcrank mills everyone while they are hitting each other, so it is yet another good reason for your opponents to hit each other rather than you. Drawing this many cards there will be times where they will be at higher life totals than cards in deck so Mindcrank provides opponents an alternate way to win, while helps keeping our deck with more cards than the opposision, since decking out should be something to worry about while playing this deck.

While this deck is obviously meant to win with the build-your-own-Nekusar-Gun plan, there's a few other ways out.

Master of the Feast and Niv-Mizzet, the Firemind are heavy beaters in their own, while Guttersnipe will deal respectable ammounts of damage on its own.

Locust God presents at least 5 damage in the air (by the time it turns sideways he will have at least an insect keeping him company) and the insect tokens pile up real fast. This is probably our best beater if we are to win in combat.

We also run a few 2-card combos that we will likely draw into with our card draw engine and these will end the game on the spot most likely.

Niv Mizzet Infinite Draw

Curiosity + Niv-Mizzet, the Firemind

As I've touched upon previously, this combo is really slow to pull off in MTGO. If your opponent's don't concede right away after you demonstrate it, you will have a bad time sequencing all the draws, while they will have a bad time seeing it through. While I don't prioratize combos in MTGO, it's there as a failsafe and low cost oportunity, so if you're opponent's are cool with it, its a fine option, if not probably prioratize winning some way else for the sake of fun gameplay.

Mind Over Matter Infinite Draw

Mind Over Matter + Niv Mizzet Firemind / Temple Bell

Again, infinite card draw. Niv Mizzet wins by its damage clause, Temple Bell requires Nekusar or any similar effect. Just keep discarding whatever you don't need to Mind Over Matter to untap whatever one you're using to draw your entire deck. With Temple Bell you should keep 3 mana open to cast and break Elixir of Imortality and save yourself from milling out. As the previous combo, this is a very slow one to pull off so, keep that in mind while playing Online Magic.

Mindcrank Insta-Mill

Bloodchief Ascension + Mindcrank

Once the Ascension is turned on, it will deal damage each time your opponents lose something, and Mindcrank will make them mill twice, activating Bloodchief Ascension twice. Everyone decks out, and you end up with a huge life total.

The big thing with MTGO is that you only really need a copy of each card to play as many EDH decks as you want, and most of the times, those really expensive paper cards are actually really affordable online. Below I'll go over some cards you might usually never consider in paper due to it's high price. Remember, if you play MTGO regularly this investment will probably be worth it, since most of these cards are staples that you will run in most of your other EDH decks.

Notes on Budget and Cheap-ish MTGO staples

The bulk of this deck's value is in its staples. Once you've traded those for one of your online EDH decks, you'll be able to play them in any deck you build later and so you'll build better decks for cheaper.

Mana Crypt and Mana Vault are a few tix for the couple of them, they are definitely worth it, since they will allow you really fast ramp, which is the most vital feature of any deck you run, facing a competitive build.
The same is true for Ancient Tomb. All these cards are a couple of tix and if you want to cut somewhere, these will probably save you some money, but if you really like playing online, I cannot recommend enough that you get a copy of each. You can even get the Masterpiece Editions for a negligible price change.
Wheel of Fortune is about 3/4 tix, you can easily make room for it or upgrade into it. But as explained later, I chose to spare those few tickets at this point and the deck is fine as is.
I also touched upon not including Arcane Denial. Well if I were to include another counterspell I'd probably move in for Mana Drain. It's only a couple of tix, playable in pretty much any blue EDH deck and easilly best value for your money. Also, more likely to rise in value in time if you feel like reselling it later on.
Most tutors are also chaper online, so there's an obvious way to make some improvements. As is I chose to run only the cheapest "real" tutor, in Vampiric Tutor but for a few more tix you could easilly get into all the tutors you might need.
All check lands are now in standard, so their prices might be influenced by that. I traded mine for less than a ticket and you can still do so, but keep in mind their standard playability heavilly influences their current price.
If you're worried about the budget, one card I'd probably stay away at this point is Thought Vessel. It carries a big price tag in MTGO right now, and if you really want that effect you'd probably better run an Expedition Map for Reliquary Tower, even Spellbook or Fabricate to get Venser's Journal. I don't think that Vessel adds that much advantage to be worth the investment at this point if you don't own one.

If you have any suggestion, feel free to share it in the comments below, and if you like the deck, give it a +1.

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Date added	6 years
Last updated	6 years
Legality	This deck is Commander / EDH legal.
Rarity (main - side)	5 - 0 Mythic Rares 39 - 0 Rares 23 - 0 Uncommons 17 - 0 Commons
Cards	100
Avg. CMC	2.88
Tokens	Bird 2/2 U, Elemental 3/1 R, Insect 1/1 UR, Manifest 2/2 C, Zombie 2/2 B
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Based on	By all means, draw GS10 EDH
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