Just take a second to revel over the decklist and take it all in. A lot of stuff is going on here.......
OK, ready? Well let me first start off by warning you about the deck. Its co-designer and I have worked on this monster for somewhat over 2 months. This deck goes against the basic principles of EDH, which are fun, interactive, and often times long games. The deck has been designed to win at all costs. Even at the lose of friendships and playgroups. This is not a deck you can play if you want your friends to actually keep playing games of magic with you. The idea behind creating the deck came when my lgs started holding actual cash prizes for its edh league winners. So we set out on a mission to find the fastest and most brutal combo deck in all of edh. What we found were a bunch of mono blue and storm combo decks. None of those excited us very much. Yes they were powerful, but they weren't doing anything particularly flashy. Then while browsing through the internet, i found several discussion threads regarding Hermit Druid combo decks in edh. I found several lists, mosty B/U/G variations. After testing a few B/U/G variations of the deck, we decided that it was imperative that we ran all 5 colors. for one, having access to all 5 colors allows us to play the best possible answers to any threat that would prevent us from going Secondly, adding 2 extra colors actually makes our mana base better. Let me explain, hermit druid requires that you have no basic lands in your library. So adding 2 extra colors allows for us to play more fetches and more dual lands. After searching through the internet, I couldn't find a list that I particularly liked. You can argue that they all do the same thing, so they have to be the same deck. But things like consistency, protection, and speed all varied greatly between lists. So my co-designer and I took to the brew station.
First we established the kill. There are several ways to go about killing your opponents with hermit druid. After hours of testing though, we established that Druid, into Dread Return bringing back
Angel of Glory's Rise
which brought back Azami, Lady of Scrolls and Laboratory Maniac was the cleanest kill we could use and most strongly fit our purpose.
Next we needed some protection. The deck is over 50% protective spells. I won't go over all of them because that would take forever, but there are a few I think are very important. Pact of Negation is one of the reasons why it is so hard to lose post Dread Return. Snapcaster Mage can target Pact of Negation when it enters the battlefield off of
Angel of Glory's Rise
. This is basically free protection. Snapcaster Mage can target other spells in your graveyard to, but you will have to pay for their flashback. Mental Misstep and Abrupt Decay basically stop any of the early game answers that can stop us from going off and winning. Whatever Mental Misstep can't counter, Abrupt Decay can blow up. Mother of Runes acts as on board protection for when your hermit druid resolves and your opponents try to kill it. Along with being a creature to sac to Dread Return and
Cabal Therapy
, she also comes back when
Angel of Glory's Rise
enters the battlefield.
Utility spells where the third most important. One of the most powerful things about the deck is in its ability to tutor seemingly every turn until it goes off. With a total of 15 tutors, its easy to see why. Alot of you may be wondering how this deck wins when you get stopped from comboing. Well, even if your opponent stops you in your tracks, you aren't dead in the water. Looping Memory's Journey and Pull from Eternity allows you to shuffle in any answers you need as well as being able to set back up to kill again.
Now all we need is a commander. There are a few options for commanders in 5 colors. You have Cromat, Reaper King,
Child of Alara
, Progenitus, and Scion of the Ur-Dragon. Out of all of these, Cromat is the least appealing and we have yet to even test him. We did not like Reaper King because we felt that you had to dilute your strategy in order to better your commander. We started with
Child of Alara
because we felt that it was a commander that allowed us to wrath the board before going off. However after testing, we found child was to slow and it's effect was so minimal post disrupted combo that we were better off running a commander that actually threatened players and not one that they could just play around until it was dealt with. So we moved on to Progenitus. Initially i loved him as the commander. But my co-designer got me to realize that it cost to much mana for a deck that ran so few lands and was trying to win by turn 3-4. So we moved on to Scion. Scion, while requiring we add non combo/protection orientated cards to our list, did allow us to 2 shot our opponents with commander damage. Scion copying Nicol Bolas empties their hands and puts them at 7 commander damage. You then copy
Dragon Tyrant
to finish them off with commander damage. While this dilutes our strategy somewhat, it fits perfectly into our Memory's Journey and Pull from Eternity post fizzle plan. We can continue to shuffle in the two necessary dragons to kill everyone.
Well that's about it. That's a basic rundown of the deck. Remember, this list is all about winning. Please feel free to leave some suggestions and comments about the deck
