Sideboard


Nath's Palace of Stax

First of all, Welcome to my Palace of Stax. Ill begin this primer with a quote from the deck creator.

To quote the original creator of this deck. "In fact, this deck actively discourages all combo. All combos playing against this deck will promptly have their combo pieces discarded and have their face beaten in with 1/1 squirrels as punishment." - Coinman1863

This is the final version of this deck, as such, the ONLY changes that will be made now will be set to set modifications or foil changes.

This variant of Coinman1863's Nath Stax was developed in response to a competitive meta forming at my game shop. With the development of decks such as The Locust God and Nekusar being a thing, as were Teferi Chain Veil and Edric, this deck came to my possession to combat such decks. The typical Bob for additional cards, the Necropotence to ensure that you can keep filling your hand. The essential Stax pieces to ensure no one does anything while you set up. And lastly, the finale, the combos. The package that puts away the long game. Torment of Hailfire Death Cloud Pox Earthcraft + Squirrel Nest The package that ensures a mutually ensured destruction of the pod I am in. Now on to the primer.

As such, this deck has been designed to basically force your opponent to waste resources to cast things, and be punished in the process.

Earthcraft + Squirrel Nest = Infinite Squirrels

Nath of the Gilt-Leaf + Sadistic Hypnotist = All opponents have no hand

Mana Web + Urborg, Tomb of Yawgmoth = Tap 1, tap all

Helm of Obedience + Leyline of the Void = Infinite Mill

Bitterblossom + Contamination = Perma-Lockdown

Contamination + Nath of the Gilt-Leaf = Same Effect as Bitterblossom just no loss of life

Contamination + Dryad Arbor + Volrath's Stronghold = Infinite Sac Outlet to Contamination for Lockdown.

and the famous:

Cabal Coffers + Urborg, Tomb of Yawgmoth = As much black mana as you have lands

Nath's Strategy is simple. Slow the game down to where we can take advantage. We do this by stripping there hand away with key cards like Sadistic Hypnotist and Bottomless Pit. Nath of the Gilt-Leaf himself is great for targeting people like the typical blue player at the table and stripping away the counters.

While this is being implemented we are able to hit combos like Leyline of the Void and Helm of Obedience or squirrels nest and Earthcraft. Stax the competition away.

The overall goal of this deck is to strip win conditions and combo pieces out of players hands as quickly as possible and remove them in the fashion that you see fit from the game. Deathrite Shaman seems to do this quite well with Faerie Macabre.

This deck is constructed to work in both a multiplayer format and a head to head format, with a lot of the sideboard cards being sided in and out depending on what you are playing. As my LGS is more into multiplayer games, I find that my deck stays in a Multiplayer attitude for most of the time. It punishes the entire board while removing crucial pieces from ALL enemies you have. This deck does not need to function of the power of tutors like other decks, but rather, it functions off of the stupidity of the opponents you play against

Exsanguinate is in the SB, why not the MB?

Exsanguinate is not in our mainboard due to lack of space for it. While it is a GREAT card in the deck, we find that just adding it from SB to MB works perfectly fine and catches our opponent off guard when we cast to kill.

Why Nath over Glissa, Meren, Mazirek?

Nath's functionality is why he is the commander. It seems that every one of the other commanders listed above has an answer to them in 1 or 2 cards. I.E: Leyline of the Void + Rest in Peace So we run Nath with near 0 reanimator cards Volrath's Stronghold is our only "Reanimator-esk" card in the deck. With this knowledge, Nath's plan of attack to rip cards from the opponents hand seems significant in a way that we can completely dispose of there game plan.

Why do we play Chains of Mephistopheles with Sylvan Library?

This is quite a easy answer. We don't do Library trigger. But we do Dark Confidant + Dark Tutelage triggers instead to get extra cards. We get Necropotence Triggers. We get draws for life. And with Chains in play, it stops blue decks from getting out of hand with there draw power. We actively discourage drawing extra cards. I have thought about making this BUG Stax a few times and adding in Notion Thief with a way to give him to my opponent for when someone plays a Consecrated Sphinx.

In previous updates you talked about Orb of Dreams a lot. Why is it not in the MB anymore?

Orb of Dreams I thought was a superb card for this deck. It did everything that I wanted it to do, BUT it impacted us hard. I found that dropping a Root Maze turn 1 was just as good. The bigger issue is that I needed another piece to make Orb of Dreams a go to card. I needed Amulet of Vigor in play to make it a viable card. Because of this, I initially tested "Amulet of Dreams" and I found it to be sub-par. Only happening rarely, and Root Maze became a more effective thing as my Meta grew into a more Artifact loving Meta. So we wanted to focus on taxing lands and artifacts early game. In order to tax them early game, we needed a very selective hand that involved 2 mana rocks that are 0 drops and 1 mana (Or if it was a Crypt/Vault just cast off of that) But the punishment for the card, was a huge burden. It slowed the deck down significantly to where I didn't like where it was going. Instead of being a lackluster deck, I decided to cut it for Root Maze which was the most effective option possible at the time.

It is NOT a 70% deck by any means. This is NOT a deck you can build and play casually with friends. If you are looking to have haters, then you've come to the right deck. People will know why this is called the Palace of Stax by the time you are done playing the deck.

I bid a warning. TRIGGERS ARE HUGE IN THIS DECK. We have 9 Upkeep triggers and 2 draw step trigger (If we don't have Necropotence on the field) 1 Draw Trigger and 9 Upkeep triggers otherwise

Thanks for the time guys! Make sure to upvote this deck if you like it!

This deck is VERY heavily influenced by Coinman1863 and his Nath Stax deck. (link below)

Special thanks goes out to Coinman1863 for working with me build this deck to where my meta can fear the deck.
Any and all other questions feel free to ask in the comments below and I will post in the Q&A/FAQ

Suggestions

Updates Add

It's been little over a year since I've made some updates. For the record guys, I've tore this deck apart. But i'm going to definitely give you some updates today on the new additions or what I would add to this deck.

Tinybones, Trinket Thief was added tonight for his capability to draw us cards every single turn off of Nath forcing a discard.

Opposition Agent (We all knew it was coming) was added to help get around decks that still want to attempt to run hulk among other things. (This replaces the once powerful Ravenous Slime

Yawgmoth, Thran Physician has made it into our maybeboard. I am unsure if Yawgmoth is worth running in this deck, but if he is, it's to sacrifice my tokens to draw cards and kill other peoples creatures or in some cases, kill a Dryad Arbor I think this would highly benefit the deck to have in there, whether I add a 4 drop to the list or not is in the air though.

Bonus card: Three Visits has finally been added to the deck. With Commander Legends reprinting the sought after card, i find that im willing to add the card in now. (I know right, I can buy a $400 Chains, but I can't buy a $78 Three Visits Ouph.)

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