At last! Finally I have achieved the perfect balance of delicious flavor and raw, villainous power!

Basically I tried to build a relatively high-powered and truly villainous deck that would be faithful to the character and story of Nicol Bolas, playing cards that are in his arsenal or at least in his wheelhouse. I kind of think of it as a Role Playing deck, where you as the decks pilot are playing the character of Nicol Bolas. How does Bolas enact his plans? He manipulates the plans and actions of his opponents, he destroys what he can't seize hold of, and then he brings together a collection of strange artifacts to bring about his endgame. And that's exactly what we're going to do.

The plan here is to ramp into the sort of powerful spells that do the types of things that Nicol Bolas is known for: spells like Expropriate and Torment of Hailfire; spells in the style of Cruel Ultimatum (though better suited for multiplayer) that can cripple our opponents while greatly increasing our relative position. These are the sort of cards that define Bolas's style of magic, and the Grixis shard as whole. We want to make our opponents discard, reanimate and seize control of their creatures, planeswalkers, and permanents, and lay waste to their board state. We want to overpower them with card advantage, planeswalkers of our own (Bolas and his henchmen: Liliana and Tezzeret), and God-Eternals and Forgotten Gods, reminding them that there is always a greater power.

More often than not the deck plays control and ramps, draws tons of cards, then whittles down our opponents, attacking their hands, countering the spells, and devastating their board states, then casts a crippling if not fatal Torment of Hailfire for the win. This is the grindy, control-deck line of play.

Alternatively we can play the deck as a combo deck, making use of the totally on-flavor combo Aetherflux Reservoir + Bolas's Citadel + Sensei's Divining Top for a storm win. From there we can easily storm off by activating the draw ability of the Top over and over, drawing our deck, and casting Top from the top of our library, triggering the Reservoir again and again to gain boatloads of life that can then be weaponized against against our opponents.

Since our commander transforms into a planeswalker in the form of Nicol Bolas, the Arisen   there's a solid planeswalker suite as well. The previously mentioned henchmen, as well as all of the Bolas planeswalkers (except for the egregiously bad Planeswalker Deck one, Nicol Bolas, the Deceiver). Nicol Bolas, Dragon-God shines in this deck, being able to make bigger pluses from the other planeswalkers in the deck (including our commander), not to mention our opponents planeswalkers. He's not hard to ultimate at all, making it another strong win condition.

WATCH ME TALK ABOUT BOLAS LORE & WHY NICOL BOLAS IS AWESOME:


If you like the deck then please +1 or face the wrath of the Tyrant of Worlds.

Check out all of my EDH decks and give a +1:

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Casual

84% Competitive

Revision 19 See all

(2 years ago)

-1 Dauthi Voidwalker main
+1 The Elderspell main
Top Ranked
Date added 5 years
Last updated 1 year
Key combos
Legality

This deck is Commander / EDH legal.

Rarity (main - side)

15 - 0 Mythic Rares

57 - 0 Rares

13 - 0 Uncommons

12 - 0 Commons

Cards 100
Avg. CMC 3.40
Tokens Bird 2/2 U, Insect 1/1 UR, Treasure, Zombie 2/2 B
Folders Commander, Commander, Future Possible Decks, BOAS IDEIAS, Archenemy Idea, Vorthos, Gorgon's Eye, Cool Deck Ideas, Fun stuff, Commander decks
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