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Cptn. Sisay/ legend engine

Commander / EDH Combo GW (Selesnya) Stax

Jmax13


Maybeboard


Introduction!

Welcome to the skyship weatherlight! Captain Sisay will guide your way through any storm. With cunning, careful planning, and a favorable wind at our back, we can dismantle our opponents as quickly as turn 4. The 99 cards that back up our favorite captain form a complex but adaptable toolbox of answers and win conditions. How you navigate your way to victory is up to you. This deck works in tandem as both shield and sword, stemming off our opponents advances and parrying with our own.

At it's core, this is an elfball combo deck based around Captain Sisay's ability to tutor legendary permanents and the absolutely busted new card Paradox Engine. The game plan is to get as much non land mana on the battlefield as possible in the early turns and then use sisay to assemble our combo to win. Not every matchup allows us to just go for the win that fast, though. So sisay also packs a list of stax effects, especially ones that we can break parity on, to slow our opponents down and bring ourselves closer to the win.

This deck is extremely fun and adaptable with a lot of design space available from the most casual of selesnya super friends builds to the fast combo table killer that we have here. I hope you enjoy the decklist and, as always, feel free to like and comment.

Game Plan:

  • to ramp sisay out as early as possible
  • to land Paradox Engine
  • to combo off from there

  • our main win con depends on paradox and the ability to produce at least 3 non land mana

The Combos:

This combo is fantastic because most of it is directly tutorable with captain sisay. The only thing that we stumble on tutoring blasting station however, Inventors' Fair makes it easy. It's also worth noting that we have Azusa, Lost but Seeking available to tutor out if we have already played out land drop and need to play blasting station.

Essentially, we can sac hope to blasting station dealing 1 damage, put it back in our library with bow, tutor it with sisay, cast and untap because of paradox engine, and then just do it all over again.

This is a very adaptable and easy combo. Because of Selvala's ability to tap based on power, you can generate infinite mana with umbral mantle. Tutoring for Selvala is easy. The umbral mantle can easily be tutored for by either casting Nazahn, Revered Bladesmith or Inventors' Fair depending on what is easier at the time.

With this infinite mana, we can do almost anything. Probably the easiest thing to do is to generate the mana, attach the mantle to sisay, and tutor out your entire deck of legendaries. While that's fun, my favorite combo is a little more evil than that. I like to tutor out Elesh Norn, Grand Cenobite and Kamahl, Fist of Krosa and using the infinite mana to blow up everybody's lands before I overrun a million times for the win.

This one is a little complicated. To be honest, I have never pulled it off in a game because it is one of those very long combos that takes an hour to actually play out. Hopefully your playgroup will understand what is happening and just allow you to win without showing the whole combo.

The idea is to essentially mill out our opponents. Selvala allows us to force all our opponents to draw one. We can then use sisay to tutor something, cast it to untap, draw a card because of reki, and then activate selvala again. This forces a loop where, if our opponent can't remove selvala, we can make them draw their whole deck while playing our whole deck. If you run out of cards in your library, you can repeatedly cast Green Sun's Zenith for 0, shuffling it back in your library, and leaving one card to draw.

This combo is not one that directly wins the game. However, this combo will put your whole deck in your hand. The idea is to tutor Garruk with Sisay, cast him with paradox engine on the field, untap everything, -3 him drawing X cards. This will kill garruk because he only enters with 3 loyalty. Now we draw our cards. Then tap bow of nylea to put garruk back in the library, tap sisay to put garruk in your hand, float your non land mana, and cast garruk again. You can keep doing this loop until your whole library is in your hand, which means that you should be able to do anything that you need to combo off right there and win.

General Guidelines:

This deck, when uninterrupted, will pull off a turn 4 win at least 60% of the time. Because sisay gets us to all of our combo lines, all we need to worry about is getting her on the field as soon as possible. That's why we play 24 non land mana sources. That means that roughly 1 in every 4 cards will be a non land mana source. With all of these activated abilities, there are certain things that we are super weak to.

Linvala, Keeper of Silence and effects like hers are especially troublesome for us. Null Rod, Stony Silence, Hushwing Gryff, and Torpor Orb all shut down what we are doing. With that in mind, it serves to know what outs you have to them. Glissa Sunseeker is our out to artifacts, as well Aura Shards and the list full of artifact and enchantment removal spells. Arashi, the Sky Asunder is probably our most techy choice of cards. I've included him in the list due to his channel ability. If a linvala or hushwing gets cast, we can tutor for Arashi with Sisay in response to the cast and use arashi to gun linvala down at instant speed. It also makes for a fairly cheap untap with paradox engine, so it's never dead in hand because we can channel for 0, which only costs 2 mana.

Some times we will run into a ton of removal. From board wipe tribal decks, to that one annoying guy who plays tribal deathtouching pingers, we need to be prepared to protect ourself from any threat. If targeted removal is the problem Sigarda, Heron's Grace is often just the protection we need to get our combo off. Typically we only need to untap with sisay for one turn to win. If she is not enough, Avacyn, Angel of Hope is a hefty stop gap. Giving our permanents indestructible is typically enough to win through everything but counter magic, and we have something in mind for that as well. If edict effects are stopping you, Sigarda, Host of Herons will shut that down every single time. If big spells and board wipes are stopping you from dedicating the the board, Gaddock Teeg stops all but a couple of them and allows you to cast everything but paradox engine from our combo through his effect. Keep that in mind when comboing off. Dusk//Dawn should also get mention here as it serves dual purpose in this deck. Its top side will almost always act as a one sided board wipe against whatever our opponent is running. The Dawn side of the card will allow us to bring all of our small drops back to our hand, which gives us another try at our combo, even when our whole board has been dealt with.

Control magic can often be tough for us, but not unbeatable. Because we are not playing a lot of high costed spells and most of our combo pieces are easily able to be recovered from the graveyard, even the most well timed counterspell is not that great against our plan. It just set's us back a little time and a little mana. Even so, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. With that in mind, we do pack way of getting around counter magic. Namely, Ethersworn Canonist, Grand Abolisher, and Dosan the Falling Leaf all stop our opponent from interacting with us during our combo turn. Dosan is able to be tutored from sisay before we go off in order to ensure we push our combo through. Neither Canonist nor Abolisher can be tutored from sisay but, they can be tutored by Yisan, the Wanderer Bard on the second activation, meaning they aren't ever far away if we need them. Ethersworn Canonist should get a special mention because we can cast our entire Hope of Ghirapur loop through its stax effect while our opponents will only get one shot a piece at interrupting our combo. Most times that means that we can just push our combo through with no trouble. It should be noted, as well, that if you're facing even more blue matchups, Dragonlord Dromoka is a shoe in for this deck and is amazing at pushing your combo through just about anything. As I don't face a ton of control, he isn't in my list.

The beautiful thing about this deck is how adaptable it is against your meta. You can change any of the "non-combo" slots to whatever effect that you want. Facing mono green stompy? Elspeth, Sun's Champion is a tutorable one sided board wipe. Facing big mana strategies? Hokori, Dusk Drinker will keep those lands tapped down. Facing infect? Melira, Sylvok Outcast will take away the fangs and poison. Realistically, this deck can always have the silver bullet to whatever your playgroup throws at you. The deck you see before you is tuned to play against the widest range of threats, as I often take this to tournaments and can't be sure what i'll be facing.

Suggestions

Updates Add

It's time for another Mad - Maxfield update. Or something like that.

I was too busy to play for the better part of december but I've been pounding out some games over the last week and have arrived at a few changes to the strategy. Some have already been made, some are yet to come. Let me walk you guys through it.

I have realized that the deck as I had it before just didn't have enough interaction or speed to fight storm. Right now, there is two storm decks running around my local meta along with a couple storm type combo decks in the league I play in on the weekends. In order to combat those decks, we go to our tried and true STAX effects.

Thalia, Heretic Cathar, Thalia, Guardian of Thraben, Kataki, War's Wage, eidelon of rhetoric, Gaddock Teeg, Ethersworn Canonist will all help us in our push to get rid of storm.

Kataki and thalia will keep their mana tight, while eidelon, teeg, and canonist outright stop their plan of playing multiple spells.

I still want to work in more stax effects. On the top of my list are Blind Obedience, Manglehorn, and Winter Orb. All of these do a fantastic job of keeping storm off of their mana and draw out the game to a point that I can force through my combo.

Blind Obedience deserves it's own special mention. This card works two fold as a stax piece and as a win con. Because of this card and my new stax effects, i'm debating on changing the win condition in this deck from the Blasting Station loop, to a Cloudstone Curio loop where we bounce and recast all my creatures, extorting each time for infinite damage. It slots right in to my current strategy, and keeps me from being effected by things like Rest in Peace or graffdigers cage.

This also allows much more flexibility to the combo as I don't have to be able to find Paradox Engine, Bow of Nylea, Blasting Station, and Hope of Ghirapur all in the same turn.

Instead, we only have to land Paradox Engine and Cloudstone Curio and at least two creatures we can cast and bounce in order to generate positive mana. From there, we find Reki, History of Kamigawa and cast and bounce legendary creatures, causing us to draw. We do this until we draw to blind obedience. From there, we cast and bounce reki, and continue the bouncing shenanigans, extorting each time we cast, infinitely draining all our opponents. As you can probably already tell, this makes our plan a lot less susceptible to removal, as we only have to be able to get creatures, but no specific ones.

I haven't made this change yet, but it is in the works. there will be other changes made around it to accommodate. I will update when that happens.

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Date added 6 years
Last updated 5 years
Legality

This deck is not Commander / EDH legal.

Rarity (main - side)

15 - 0 Mythic Rares

53 - 0 Rares

12 - 0 Uncommons

10 - 0 Commons

Cards 100
Avg. CMC 2.50
Tokens Elf Druid 1/1 G, Emblem Elspeth, Sun's Champion, Soldier 1/1 W
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