- You don't want to spend money on a two or three color mana base
- You like telling your opponents no
- You want to win instantly via combos
- You like having a lot of cards in your hand and keeping multiple different paths to victory open
- Wizards!
Why you shouldn't play Azami
- You think counterspells and control are unfun
- You don't like having lots of cards in hand at once
- You prefer to win by turning creatures sideways (though technically this deck does do that a lot)
- You don't like wizards for some odd reason
So what is Azami anyways?
Azami, Lady of Scrolls is, in my opinion, one of the top commanders if you're looking to play mono-blue, and is also one of the best options if you're looking for a non-stax control deck. If you want to play stax, you're looking at the wrong commander. Go play Teferi, Temporal Archmage or Derevi, Empyrial Tactician instead.
Azami's control is much more counterspell oriented, though she does have a good suite of removal spells at her disposal. Controlling an entire table is hard, though, so we don't want to try to overload the list with counter magic. Instead, we want to run just enough counterspells and removal to prevent other people at the table from going off before we do.
Variants
There several different ways Azami can be played. This particular list is a combo-control build, with a focus on early control to keep fast combo decks from exploding in your face. The rest of the primer will focus on this particular aspect of Azami and how cards fit into the overall goal of the deck.
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Dramatic Azami: Dramatic Azami focuses around the Dramatic Scepter combo. That's what this list is.
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Temporal Azami: This is another strong archetype for Azami. It has less of a control focus in exchange for faster combos through the use of extra turn effects. Take a look at AzamiLadyofScrolls's list here for a good Temporal Azami list.
What types of cards will Azami want to run?
Azami's ability is good on its own, sure. But once we start adding in more wizards, it becomes rather ridiculous. So, most of our creatures are going to be wizards to allow Azami to abuse her ability to its fullest potential. Primarily, we want low-cost wizards with good EtB or static effects. Tap effects need to compete with Azami's own ability, and while some, like Aphetto Alchemist, do, most will not be worth it.
Being mono blue means that most of our acceleration will have to come from artifacts. This includes cards like Sol Ring, Mana Crypt, Chrome Mox, and the like. Cards like Sapphire Medallion and Helm of Awakening will also be extremely useful to us. Sea Scryer is fantastic for this.
There are a few different types of control: Removal, stax/lockdown, and taxes (which are frequently used as part of stax decks).
Removal spells consist of spot removal, boardwipes, and counterspells. With some of the best spot removal spells, like Swords to Plowshares, unavailable in our color, we have to fall back on things like Rapid Hybridization, Reality Shift, and Chain of Vapor. Our primary boardwipe will be Cyclonic Rift. Counterspells are basically preemptive removal, and blue has an abundance of good counterspells. The best ones for this deck will be free counterspells like Force of Will and Pact of Negation, but I also run a lot of situational 1 mana counterspells that are here to hit specific targets.
Basically all we get here is Mystic Remora, but that's really all we need. Either it slows down opponents and lets us catch up, or we get a ton of free cards.
A lot of stax effects are detrimental to Azami. Things like Winter Orb that are auto-includes in Derevi and Teferi decks work against Azami if we play them in this list. We primarily want effects that don't hurt us, but that will bother our opponents a lot, such as Back to Basics.
Every deck needs ways to win, so we should probably have a few of those in here somewhere. Our primary goal is to combo out and kill the table, so we just need a few ways to do that. Infinite mana, infinite draw, and infinite bounce are just a few ways we can win. Win conditions will be discussed more in the "Key Combos" section below.
What types of cards do we want to avoid?
Only wizards draw cards. Non-wizards are therefore significantly less good. We can judge a wizard both by the words on the card and by our ability to tap it to draw a card every turn. That said, we probably don't want wizards with tap abilities that will have to compete with Azami. As mentioned above, certain cards can definitely do it, but we don't want too many of them.
- Cards with effects that are also on wizards
If a non-wizard card has an equal or almost equal effect printed on a wizard, we always want to run the wizard instead. A good example of this is Future Sight vs Magus of the Future. These two are functionally the same card, though the Magus is a bit easier to remove because he's a creature. In exchange, though, he provides a solid body, and we get to tap him to draw a card as well.
Azami already draws more cards than we will often know what to do with, so having any extra draw spells is often redundant. Certain cantrips like Ponder have proven to be quite useful though. Basically, a draw spell has to be really, really powerful in order to be worth a slot.