Ephara Flash & Taxes

Commander / EDH Control Death and Taxes Hatebears Multiplayer Primer WU (Azorius)

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Creature (33)

• 1x Archaeomancer
• 1x Body Double
• 1x Boreas Charger
• 1x Containment Priest
• 1x Eldrazi Displacer
• 1x Elesh Norn, Grand Cenobite
• 1x Ethersworn Canonist
• 1x Flickerwisp
• 1x Gilded Drake
• 1x Glen Elendra Archmage
• 1x Hushwing Gryff
• 1x Karmic Guide
• 1x Leonin Relic-Warder
• 1x Linvala, Keeper of Silence
• 1x Monastery Mentor
• 1x Phantasmal Image
• 1x Phyrexian Metamorph
• 1x Recruiter of the Guard
• 1x Remorseful Cleric
• 1x Reveillark
• 1x Silver Myr
• 1x Snapcaster Mage
• 1x Spell Queller
• 1x Spellseeker
• 1x Stonecloaker
• 1x Stormscape Familiar
• 1x Sun Titan
• 1x Teferi, Mage of Zhalfir
• 1x Thalia's Lancers
• 1x Trophy Mage
• 1x Venser, Shaper Savant
• 1x Weathered Wayfarer
• 1x Whitemane Lion

Land (37)

• 1x Academy Ruins
• 1x Adarkar Wastes
• 1x Ancient Tomb
• 1x Command Tower
• 1x Emeria, the Sky Ruin
• 1x Flooded Strand
• 1x Glacial Fortress
• 1x Hallowed Fountain
• 1x Inventors' Fair
• 1x Irrigated Farmland
• 4x Island
• 1x Marsh Flats
• 1x Mistveil Plains
• 1x Misty Rainforest
• 1x Myriad Landscape
• 1x Mystic Gate
• 1x Nimbus Maze
• 1x Nykthos, Shrine to Nyx
• 9x Plains
• 1x Polluted Delta
• 1x Prairie Stream
• 1x Skycloud Expanse
• 1x Strip Mine
• 1x Temple of Enlightenment
• 1x Tundra SL
• 1x Windswept Heath

Sorcery (2)

• 1x Austere Command
• 1x Supreme Verdict

Enchantment (2)

• 1x Land Tax
• 1x Sacred Mesa

Planeswalker (2)

• 1x Elspeth, Sun's Champion
• 1x Venser, the Sojourner

Commander (1)

Instant (12)

• 1x Capsize
• 1x Cyclonic Rift
• 1x Enlightened Tutor
• 1x Forbid
• 1x Intuition
• 1x Mana Drain
• 1x Muddle the Mixture
• 1x Mystical Tutor
• 1x Swords to Plowshares
• 1x Teferi's Protection
• 1x Tithe
• 1x Unexpectedly Absent

Artifact (11)

• 1x Azorius Signet
• 1x Blasting Station
• 1x Mana Crypt
• 1x Mox Diamond
• 1x Oblivion Stone
• 1x Pearl Medallion
• 1x Sensei's Divining Top
• 1x Sol Ring
• 1x Sword of Feast and Famine
• 1x Talisman of Progress
• 1x Umezawa's Jitte

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Sideboard

Artifact (2)

• 1x Aether Vial
• 1x Cloudstone Curio

Creature (2)

• 1x Mother of Runes
• 1x Timestream Navigator

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Introduction

The Azorius guild has a host of strong commanders for various archetypes, but up until recently there were not many Azorius creature decks. The guild typically played value creatures that interacted with non-creature spells ( Auratouched Mage , Snapcaster Mage , Archaeomancer ) or that draw you cards ( Consecrated Sphinx , Sphinx of Uthuun ). Creatures are very fragile in Commander, and often wind up being a liability if they don't generate value immediately or extreme value, and our guild in particular didn't have as many game busting creatures or the means to cast them as Green. Creatures that break the game open (e.g. Jin-Gitaxias, Core Augur ) also are often prohibitively costed and tend to go either in reanimator or ramp strategies that Azorius is typically weaker at. So most Azorius decks leaned toward playing creatures that fuelled playing more non-creature spells.

As such, traditional Azorius decks in Commander have tended to be prison or control decks with lots of counterspells, sweepers, or lockdown pieces. The colors make it easy to dig out things like Winter Orb, and have a variety of very powerful board control, counterspells, and targeted removal spells.

With Ephara, God of the Polis and Brago, King Eternal we have two relatively new creatures that incentivize a much different style of Azorius play - though both are pretty different, they encourage playing a lot of guys. Since I really like creatures, but am also a huge fan of the Azorius guild, this is a pretty special time in Commander history for me.

Why Should You Play Ephara?

The first thing that drew me to Ephara was just the idea of playing lots of creatures. But there's a subtle power to her ability that is core to my philosophy of the deck, and probably the most important aspect of her design. Ephara rewards you for playing lame creatures that wouldn't be playable in other decks because they don't generate value when they come down, and are liable to be functional card disadvantage. Her ability to essentially replace every creature you play is amazing, and tokens take it a step farther.

The second piece of her ability is that she rewards playing creatures or tokens at instant speed, which makes for an interactive and fun style of play - you're often doing things in other people's turns but not quite to an annoying level most of the time.

The third major draw to Ephara is that she's an indestructible enchantment most of the time, and thus extremely annoying to get rid of. Her resiliency makes the deck tick by getting rid of slots normally needed for protecting your commander and letting those slots be used for other things.

All of Ephara's abilities combine to make a general that doesn't need a lot of support in the form of card draw or protection spells, but in order to fully replace those abilities you need to play some cards that are not that great on their own - you have to replace resilient instant/sorcery/enchantment/artifact answers with creature based answers, and often make some sacrifices to be able to have creatures come out more frequently (flash enablers, cheat-into-play effects, ninjas, bounce spells, etc.). I love the commander and the deck because it encourages playing a very different set of cards.

Strengths

• Resilient
• Provides a built-in source of card advantage
• Relevant body (easily turned into a 3-turn clock)
• Best hatebears
• Excellent sweepers
• Excellent flash creatures

Weaknesses

• Lack of strong ramp
• Creature bodies are often smaller and less efficient
• Lack of creature tutors and means to cheat creatures into play
• Slightly weak to artifacts
• Somewhat reliant on the general for card advantage

Alternatives

There are honestly not many alternatives for a deck like this. While there are many strong Azorius commanders, very few of them will reward you for playing cards like Spirit of the Labyrinth or Thalia, Guardian of Thraben or Aether Vial . Brago, King Eternal can create a pretty viable beatdown deck but it'll naturally focus more on reusing ETB creatures and thus be more vulnerable to Torpor Orb effects which we can largely deal with.

Since no other commanders really generate card advantage in this way, they'll generally incentivize a different style of gameplay. I think the closest you could come to an effective hatebears style of play with any other commander would be Karador, Ghost Chieftain - but leveraging the graveyard (and probably sacrificing them) instead of Ephara's ability as a source of card advantage from mediocre creatures. I promised my group I wouldn't make another hatebears deck, but if I ever do retire Ephara, Karador's Junkyard Bears is how I would do it.

Gaddock Teeg can do an OK job of it, but not having access to blue is a pretty serious weakness in my opinion. Blue's clones and theft are hard to do without. Teeg also has to bring a bunch of ways to draw cards that make the deck likely to be a little less consistent (and less interesting, since you've got to dedicate a bunch of cards to drawing more cards as opposed to furthering your gameplan). You also lose out on a lot of the instant speed interaction that I find fun (blue's flash creatures and Teferi, Mage of Zhalfir ).

Deck Philosophy

While there are many ways to build Ephara, I've elected to play mostly creatures and make the deck somewhat less than is "optimal" for a variety of reasons. I consider this deck to be moderately competitive, or a 75% deck. It plays a lot of powerful cards but isn't tuned to be as hyper-competitive as possible, and frankly I am not sure Ephara's potential gameplans can be made hyper-competitive successfully - that's probably best left to the more objectively powerful UW generals.

It's possible that the deck would be stronger with more control elements; there's a user with a fairly similar deck to mine that eschews some of the more questionable hatebears for more powerful non-creature spells. If you want to take the deck that direction the best thing to do is probably start removing the worst creatures and replacing them with stronger spells or creatures that are stronger on their own - it ought to be relatively obvious from looking at the list which creatures are the weakest.

With that said, the way I have elected to build Ephara is to maximize the efficiency and smoothness of the deck but sacrificing some raw power to get there. While it doesn't always play the same game, the deck always has game. It is very carefully curved to maximize the ability to play multiple creatures across multiple turns and be as efficient as possible in spending mana. I very rarely have untapped mana by the time my upkeep comes around.

Since our gameplan is to play Ephara and draw cards with her every game, there are almost no sources of card draw. There are sources of recursion to get back key tools and we can generate some decent card advantage through cards like Sun Titan if Ephara is not on the field we are at a decided disadvantage. The deck runs a lot of mediocre creatures who are just not that great of an investment if they don't replace themselves, but if they do they are quite strong. There are several strong sources of card advantage such as Stoneforge Mystic and her swords, and Sun Titan but it's definitely the exception.

We don't play a lot of tutors; despite having a lot of artifacts, there's no Fabricate or Transmute Artifact because they don't wield swords or provide card advantage. We don't run a lot of counterspells (instead running things like Venser, Shaper Savant and Glen Elendra Archmage . We run Hushwing Gryff but no Torpor Orb . We run Stoneforge Mystic and Elesh Norn, Grand Cenobite instead of Cathars' Crusade or Eldrazi Monument .

Token generation is a subtheme of the deck; Elspeth, Sun's Champion and Sacred Mesa are our primary methods of token creation. They tend to follow a theme: Elspeth is free and provides an alternate effect that is strong. Sacred Mesa creates tokens very cheaply and they have evasion. Cards like Mobilization are not mana efficent enough, don't generate enough additional value, and don't provide evasive bodies.

Examples of other token generators I consider strong enough to potentially be in the deck:

• Thraben Doomsayer - is free, and generates a card when he comes out
• Brimaz, King of Oreskos - is free, can threaten to generate on defense, relevant sword wielder, and generates a card when he comes out
• Hero of Bladehold - free tokens, provides an anthem effect, relevant sword wielder, generates a card when he comes out.
• Monastery Mentor - free tokens, generates a token when he comes out, can be a relevant body. Would probably belong in a deck with a slightly higher spell count (maybe 12-ish instants would be where I would consider him. His tokens having prowess can also be relevant.
• Elspeth Tirel - Makes tokens the turn she comes out, provides some lifegain potentially, and can wrath the booard in a way that leaves Ephara. Very high on the list.

Generally, a token generator that is not on a body needs to be amazingly good (re: Sacred Mesa , Elspeth, Sun's Champion ).

Win conditions

The #1 win condition and the goal of the deck is to win with creature combat damage. Elesh Norn, Grand Cenobite and her pegasi army presents the serious threat of killing one person a turn late in the game just by going over the top.

That said, the means of getting there is the key to the deck. It strives to set up any of a number of soft locks that achieve either a massive tempo advantage or a complete lockdown. There are a variety of means of achieving that end, but they usually involve a combination of hatebears that allows Ephara to build up a huge board presence while everyone else stalls on the bears.

There are multiple other ways of achieving a soft-lock that I haven't listed but they usually come when you're down to 1v1. The deck can absolutely win by just going over the top without lock, but it's much harder since we rarely have huge amounts of mana to work with.

The Infinite Combo

There are numerous infinite combos that I consider good enough to be in the deck, and have tried several over the years. The two most recent are a couple of wombo combos involving taking infinite turns with a blink outlet, Recruiter and Timestream Navigator , and an even wombier combo with infinitely sized creatures off of about 4 cards plus Archangel of Thune

After a lot of years playing this deck, I don't think it's worth playing any particularly bad cards to enable weird multi-piece combos with a huge mana investment. I do think the deck needs a kill switch to be able to end games quickly as needed. As a result, I have started playing Blasting Station as a very compact way to win -- combined with Reveillark and any clone or Karmic Guide we can kill the entire table, or potentially combine with Venser, Shaper Savant to bounce the entire board if needed to stop a hate card.

This combo can be set up almost entirely off of a single resolved Intuition by searching for a variety of cards. The most common piles will be something like Reveillark , Sun Titan , Recruiter of the Guard which enables you to do all kinds of nonsense. Tossing Body Double in can make piles even more attractive.

There are a ridiculous number of ways to get any of these chains started, from Recruiter of the Guard , Spellseeker , Mystical Tutor or similar. This allows a number of hail mary options to win games that are out of reach, or to close close games, etc.

What makes a good Ephara creature?

• Cheap
• Evasive
• Flash
• Makes Tokens
• Replaces a non-creature spell

The Locks

• Venser, the Sojourner + Gilded Drake
• Venser, the Sojourner + Elspeth, Sun's Champion
• Venser, the Sojourner ultimate
• Forbid + Land Tax
• Forbid + Ethersworn Canonist
• Venser, Shaper Savant + Eldrazi Displacer
• Helm of Possession + Sun Titan + Blasting Station

Infinite Combos

• Karmic Guide OR Any Clone + Reveillark + Blasting Station
• Sacrifice either Karmic Guide or the Clone cloning Reveillark, pinging for one
• If Clone, cloned Reveillark trigger goes on stack returning clone
• If Guide, sacrifice Reveillark returning Karmic Guide , returning Reveillark
• Repeat until dead table{/li>

Date added	5 years
Last updated	4 years
Legality	This deck is Commander / EDH legal.
Rarity (main - side)	15 - 1 Mythic Rares 50 - 2 Rares 11 - 1 Uncommons 8 - 0 Commons
Cards	100
Avg. CMC	2.87
Tokens	City's Blessing, Emblem Elspeth, Sun's Champion, Emblem Venser, the Sojourner, Monk 1/1 W, Pegasus 1/1 W, Soldier 1/1 W
Folders	Commander, edh, Inspiration, Deck Inspiration