Selenia, That Kills People!

Commander / EDH Group Slug Necropotence Suicide Black Theme/Gimmick WB (Orzhov)

herpdederp92

Sorcery (15)

• 1x Beseech the Queen
• 1x Cleansing Nova
• 1x Day of Judgment
• 1x Deliver Unto Evil
• 1x Diabolic Tutor
• 1x Exsanguinate
• 1x Fraying Omnipotence
• 1x Increasing Ambition
• 1x Mastermind's Acquisition
• 1x Merciless Eviction
• 1x Obzedat's Aid
• 1x Repay in Kind
• 1x Reverse the Sands
• 1x Revival / Revenge
• 1x Single Combat

Artifact (12)

• 1x Aetherflux Reservoir
• 1x Bolas's Citadel
• 1x Chromatic Lantern
• 1x Commander's Sphere
• 1x Darksteel Ingot
• 1x Fellwar Stone
• 1x Gilded Lotus
• 1x Mana Geode
• 1x Orzhov Signet
• 1x Sensei's Divining Top
• 1x Sol Ring
• 1x Talisman of Hierarchy

Land (38)

• 1x Ash Barrens
• 1x Cabal Stronghold
• 1x Caves of Koilos
• 1x Command Tower
• 1x Emergence Zone
• 1x Evolving Wilds
• 1x Exotic Orchard
• 1x Forsaken Sanctuary
• 1x Isolated Chapel
• 1x Orzhov Basilica
• 11x Plains
• 1x Reliquary Tower
• 14x Swamp
• 1x Temple of Silence
• 1x Temple of the False God

Creature (10)

• 1x Burnished Hart
• 1x Cataclysmic Gearhulk
• 1x Crypt Ghast
• 1x Grand Abolisher
• 1x Gray Merchant of Asphodel
• 1x Leonin Relic-Warder
• 1x Plaguecrafter
• 1x Platinum Angel
• 1x Solemn Simulacrum
• 1x Tree of Perdition

Enchantment (9)

• 1x Axis of Mortality
• 1x Bloodchief Ascension
• 1x Font of Agonies
• 1x Grasp of Fate
• 1x Necropotence
• 1x Phyrexian Unlife
• 1x Solitary Confinement
• 1x Tainted Remedy
• 1x Zombie Infestation

Commander (1)

Instant (14)

• 1x Ad Nauseam
• 1x Angel's Grace
• 1x Anguished Unmaking
• 1x Dark Ritual
• 1x Dash Hopes
• 1x Despark
• 1x Imp's Mischief
• 1x Lapse of Certainty
• 1x Mortify
• 1x Path to Exile
• 1x Snuff Out
• 1x Stunning Reversal
• 1x Swords to Plowshares
• 1x Vendetta

Planeswalker (1)

• 1x Liliana Vess

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Maybeboard

Creature (4)

• 1x Exquisite Archangel
• 1x Kambal, Consul of Allocation
• 1x Magus of the Mirror
• 1x Skirge Familiar

Instant (2)

• 1x Cabal Ritual
• 1x Enlightened Tutor

Planeswalker (1)

• 1x Sorin Markov

Sorcery (3)

• 1x Dread Return
• 1x Torment of Hailfire
• 1x Toxic Deluge

Artifact (2)

• 1x Soul Conduit
• 1x Tainted Sigil

Enchantment (3)

• 1x Near-Death Experience
• 1x Smothering Tithe
• 1x Wound Reflection

Land (2)

• 1x Bojuka Bog
• 1x Godless Shrine

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Hi! This is my dumb Selenia deck. And that's not an insult, it's just an objectively stupid deck. Why, you may ask?

Because our goal is to kill ourselves for the fun of it.

(Deck is new and needs work, gimme suggestions people)

Suicide for fun and profit Show

So our primary goal is to play Suicide Black to its limits. Suicide Black is a deck meta that involves paying your own life total into costs to get a greedy advantage over opponents. For example, this deck would totally run Griselbanned if he wasn't... you know.

But it goes deeper than that.

For some players, paying life is just a bad habit. They board in Birthing Pod and Phyrexian Metamorph and all of the relevant shock lands and laugh about it. But we're going much harder. We're going to embrace the idea of losing as much life as possible and we're going to weaponize it. We're not going to win in spite of being at 1 life; we're going to win because we're at 1 life.

And we're playing Selenia, Dark Angel in the command zone just so we can pay our life away whenever we need to. After all, holding priority and paying 38 life into Selenia's ability is both objectively stupid and fun as hell.

You should play this deck if:

--You are into masochism.

--You think tutoring for Repay in Kind every game is funny.

--You agree that life total isn't a meter, it's just a number. You also agree that the only point of life that matters is the last one; 1HP is infinitely greater than 0HP.

--You are perfectly okay with looking up weird rulings like "What happens if I double a life total that's already negative?"

--You have the sort of personality that enjoys the bitter moment when an opponent attempts to win the game and you respond by killing yourself.

--Finally, most importantly, you don't mind occasionally losing games to your own cards and your own bad decisions. 'Cuz that's gonna happen, guaranteed. That will always happen when your deck is designed to make itself die to a random Lightning Bolt . Just embrace it and move on to the next game.

Ways to pay our life away Show

So we've got 40 life to work with and our goal is to throw it away. But life is a resource, and we want to get as much value out of that resource as possible. To that end, the deck runs three major life-funnels to turn our life total into massive card advantage:

Ad Nauseam : Ad Naus is both the most powerful and the most dangerous card in the deck. Necropotence and Citadel require us to pay life as a cost, meaning we have to stop once we hit zero life. Ad Naus causes us to lose life as the spell resolves, meaning it can very easily kill us. To that end, the deck is prepared with plenty of cards like Phyrexian Unlife to allow Ad Naus to draw our whole deck and dig us a deep, deep hole of negative life. Then we Repay in Kind and laugh maniacally.

Bolas's Citadel : Citadel is quite frankly an awesome card. This deck is more than happy to pay life into casting free spells off the top of our library. The big problem arises when we hit lands on top, since Citadel only lets you play one land at the natural timing. We can fix that problem using either Necropotence or Sensei's Divining Top ; the Top also lets us grab a huge storm count simply by drawing us a card and then recasting itself for one life. Did I mention the Aetherflux Reservoir ?

Necropotence : Necropotence is our watered-down version of Griselbanned . Yes, the enchantment adds a bunch of irritating conditions (discarding to exile is more than a little bit annoying), but it makes up for everything by keeping us constantly at 7+ cards in hand. Once Reliquary Tower hits the field, our game plan is to pay our life down to about 5 and see if the 20-30 cards we draw can win the game next turn. (If your combo deck can't win after drawing 30 cards, you have problems, amirite?)

Of course we have our backup plan, Selenia, Dark Angel : Selenia is both the most obvious and the least useful outlet for our life. We'll happily spend life bouncing our flying chumpblocker back to hand and replaying her, but it doesn't accomplish much. She is a really good chumpblocker, though.

Now, as mentioned above, we're running plenty of cards with "can't lose" mechanics. These protect us from our own Ad Nauseam , they let us pay our life down to exactly 0HP without losing, and they make it a lot safer to hang around on single-digit life totals without dying to random Lightning Bolts .

Angel's Grace This 1-CMC instant is our cheapest card to enable the critical 0HP setup. Use Angel's Grace alongside pricey wincons like Repay in Kind .

Phyrexian Unlife While Unlife doesn't keep us from dying to damage, it does allow us to lose any arbitrary amount of life with no consequences. Unlife --> Ad Naus typically works pretty well.

Platinum Angel Expensive but worthwhile.

Stunning Reversal Reversal is a bit of a funky spell. While it doesn't let us stay at or below 0HP, it a) protects us from Ad Naus, b) gives us a plan to reach exactly 1 life after Citadel combo chains, and c) draws 7 cards for the low, low price of committing suicide. Seems fair.

Ways to win the game Show

So this deck's strategy for winning is separated into a few basic plans. We have the main "lifeswap" wincons that delete opponents by trading our 0HP life total to them; we have the combotastic wincons that work with our life-funnels to instakill after we've drawn our deck; and we have the value wincons, the "siphon" effects that execute our enemies while giving us more of the resource we care about most: life.

First, the "lifeswap" cards. These should be instantly self-explanatory.

Repay in Kind Instakill everybody.

Reverse the Sands Kill one opponent and get back to 40 HP.

Axis of Mortality Kill one opponent each turn. (No effect until your upkeep rolls around, so be careful with the timing on Axis.)

Next, the combotastic wincons. Since most of our life-funnels just dig through our deck drawing and playing cards, we're looking for cards to abuse those scenarios the most. These cards, in fact:

Zombie Infestation I'm looking to upgrade this sucker to a Skirge Familiar ASAP, but regardless: After drawing (for example) 40 cards with Ad Nauseam/Necropotence, we can discard those 40 cards to make 20 2/2 Zombies. Seems like a decent board state.

Dark Ritual Notable because in the above scenario, we can now play Swamp - Dark Ritual - Zombie Infestation.

Aetherflux Reservoir because gaining life off spellcasts works inversely with Citadel to let us storm through the whole deck. We just need a topdeck filter, either Necropotence or Sensei's Top, and then we should be able to storm up to 150+ life and shoot the laser at everybody.

Finally, the value cards, because after some testing I had to concede that the direct combo plans don't always work out. Sometimes, we end up needing to just cause opponents to lose some life, because we're missing part of our strategy but we still want to kill somebody. Here's our tools for those purposes:

Exsanguinate I should probably spring for another copy of Torment of Hailfire to sit alongside this. Regardless, Exsanguinate lets us pay X and kill everyone we've dropped below X life.

Gray Merchant of Asphodel 5 mana for Exsanguinate-on-a-stick. Good ol' Gary.

Tainted Remedy locks opponents out of gaining any life. Once they're low, they're stuck, and any life-gain kills them.

Bloodchief Ascension Once stacked, annoying early on but absolutely brutal when opponents drop to single digit HP. Two damage per instant/sorcery limits their options, and a simple Wrath of God can knock players out of the game instantly.

Fraying Omnipotence Best fallback plan if we can't dig into Repay in Kind . At the least, Fraying drops everybody down below 20HP, which is close enough to kill via Exsanguinate.

Revival / Revenge We cast the Revenge portion of this card every time. Cut an opponent down in size, double our life total back up. Great card to chain into with Citadel.

Tree of Perdition No matter what their life total, Tree will put them back into quick kill range.

Control and pillowfort Show

We're not looking to play quickly here. The cheapest our deck combos out still requires about 8 mana: Angel's Grace , pay to 0HP with Selenia, Repay in Kind . And we're not green so we don't hit 8 mana on turn 3. That means we're playing control to keep our face from getting pounded in.

Notably, we're not horribly vulnerable against creature aggro, since we really don't mind getting beaten up in the early/midgame. In fact, I've played against aggro opponents who purposely avoided sending attacks my way, since they figured reducing my life total was just helping. Hence, we're not running anti-aggro cards like Ghostly Prison . On the flip side, we've got to fight the fast combo decks that can win with less derpy strategies, so destroying combo cards is imperative.

Instant-speed destruction:

Path to Exile

Swords to Plowshares

Vendetta

Despark

Anguished Unmaking

Mortify

Snuff Out

Plus countermagic (who expected the Orzhov deck to run countermagic?):

Imp's Mischief

Lapse of Certainty

Dash Hopes (a little ineffective, but this deck can create plenty of scenarios where paying 5 life really isn't an option)

And some boardwipes:

Day of Judgment

Cleansing Nova

Merciless Eviction

Single Combat (locks us out of playing Selenia, but most of our wincons are sorceries anyway.)

Cataclysmic Gearhulk (because boardwipe on a stick is funny)

Plus some spot removal and stax tuned precisely for this deck's needs:

Plaguecrafter Extra spot removal

Grasp of Fate Extra spot removal

Leonin Relic-Warder Extra spot removal (yeah, so I needed an anti- Dovescape card... my playgroup is delightful.)

Grand Abolisher protects our combo turn against our one greatest enemy, the Lightning Bolt . Now we can pay life safely! Curse you for existing, red deck!

Solitary Confinement also blocks Lightning Bolts and enemy Aetherflux Lasers, and is our token tool for turning aggro aside. Solitary also works quite well alongside Necropotence .

Font of Agonies frequently turns into a bug zapper of doom that can Murder tons of creatures.

And while I called Tainted Remedy and Bloodchief Ascension value wincons, they're also decent combo-breakers.

Ramp, tutors, utility, etc. Show

Our combos are expensive, so we need tons of mana sources. Burnished Hart and Solemn Simulacrum ramp out lands; meanwhile, we've got plenty of mana rocks, from Sol Ring to Gilded Lotus , as well as a Crypt Ghast and a Dark Ritual to help power out those combo turns.

But paying for the combo is the easy half of the problem. Finding it is the difficult half. So here's how we tutor combo pieces!

Beseech the Queen

Increasing Ambition

Mastermind's Acquisition

Diabolic Tutor

Liliana Vess (remarkably good alongside Bolas's Citadel , since she can place a card where Citadel can cheat it out)

And of course, we've gotta run a couple of strategies to rebuild after a foiled attempt to kill everyone:

Deliver Unto Evil actually seems to be the next-best thing to Yawgmoth's Will for a black deck to recur its instants and sorceries.

Obzedat's Aid lets us reanimate any permanent card, even a Platinum Angel . Good deck tech to run, especially when we can flash that combo out with Emergence Zone .

Date added	4 years
Last updated	4 years
Legality	This deck is Commander / EDH legal.
Rarity (main - side)	7 - 0 Mythic Rares 35 - 0 Rares 21 - 0 Uncommons 12 - 0 Commons
Cards	100
Avg. CMC	3.53
Tokens	Zombie 2/2 B
Folders	OLD Liam