The Cataract Kill: CEDH Xiahou Stax Combo

Commander / EDH* Combo Competitive Mono-Black Necropotence Stax Suicide Black

Yellowcandy

Artifact (31)

• 1x Aetherflux Reservoir
• 1x Anvil of Bogardan
• 1x Arcane Signet
• 1x Basalt Monolith
• 1x Bolas's Citadel
• 1x Charcoal Diamond
• 1x Chrome Mox
• 1x Expedition Map
• 1x Fellwar Stone
• 1x Grim Monolith
• 1x Jet Medallion
• 1x Jeweled Lotus
• 1x Lion's Eye Diamond
• 1x Lotus Petal
• 1x Mana Crypt
• 1x Mana Vault
• 1x Mind Stone
• 1x Mox Diamond
• 1x Mox Opal
• 1x Nim Deathmantle
• 1x Pithing Needle
• 1x Ratchet Bomb
• 1x Rings of Brighthearth
• 1x Sensei's Divining Top
• 1x Sol Ring
• 1x Tangle Wire
• 1x Thought Vessel
• 1x Torpor Orb
• 1x Trinisphere
• 1x Voltaic Key
• 1x Wishclaw Talisman

Planeswalker (1)

• 1x Karn, the Great Creator

Land (34)

• 1x Ancient Tomb
• 1x Blast Zone
• 1x Bloodstained Mire
• 1x Bojuka Bog
• 1x Buried Ruin
• 1x Cabal Coffers
• 1x Command Beacon
• 1x Deserted Temple
• 1x Inventors' Fair
• 1x Lake of the Dead
• 1x Marsh Flats
• 1x Polluted Delta
• 19x Snow-Covered Swamp
• 1x Urborg, Tomb of Yawgmoth
• 1x Verdant Catacombs
• 1x Volrath's Stronghold

Instant (13)

• 1x Ad Nauseam
• 1x Cabal Ritual
• 1x Corpse Dance
• 1x Dark Ritual
• 1x Dismember
• 1x Entomb
• 1x Fatal Push
• 1x Go for the Throat
• 1x Imp's Mischief
• 1x Plunge into Darkness
• 1x Slaughter Pact
• 1x Vampiric Tutor
• 1x Withering Boon

Creature (4)

• 1x Dark Confidant
• 1x Mindblade Render
• 1x Opposition Agent
• 1x Pain Seer

Commander (1)

Sorcery (14)

• 1x Beseech the Queen
• 1x Dark Petition
• 1x Demonic Tutor
• 1x Exsanguinate
• 1x Feed the Swarm
• 1x Grim Tutor
• 1x Imperial Seal
• 1x Infernal Tutor
• 1x Mind Twist
• 1x Night's Whisper
• 1x Praetor's Grasp
• 1x Thoughtseize
• 1x Toxic Deluge
• 1x Yawgmoth's Will

Enchantment (5)

• 1x Chains of Mephistopheles
• 1x Contamination
• 1x Dark Tutelage
• 1x Leyline of the Void
• 1x Necropotence

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Sideboard

Artifact (5)

• 1x Defense Grid
• 1x Mana Web
• 1x Pithing Needle
• 1x Sphere of Resistance
• 1x Winter Orb

Instant (1)

• 1x Withering Boon

Enchantment (4)

• 1x Lethal Vapors
• 1x Leyline of the Void
• 1x Nether Void
• 1x Oppression

Planeswalker (1)

• 1x Liliana of the Veil

Sorcery (3)

• 1x All is Dust
• 1x Deathmark
• 1x Thoughtseize

Creature (1)

• 1x Mindslicer

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Welcome to the Basement

Playing the Dark Horse

When I say basement I mean a place where forgotten, old, or maybe useless things are thrown to rot and don't get me wrong, this deck in a CEDH environment this deck lies at tier 2. But trust me, what you give up playing the dark horse you will be paid back in dirty looks from across the table and ridiculous comboing. A basement is also a place where dark things lie, where secrets lurk ready to pounce, this deck can pounce and will often come out of nowhere so tread lightly my friends, there is merit in being a dark horse. Watch your friends target the Najeela player or perhaps the more threatening Sidisi, but once the cards are down, and the answers are gone, it's your time to shine.

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What Does Xiahou Brings to the Table

Xiahou Dun, the One-Eyed is commander that offers renuable recursion for your deck's black spells. Recursion from the command zone adds a diverse resilience to the deck's combos and additional value to its control. Xiahou allows for most any starting hand containing a tutor to be playable, being able to recur something like demonic tutor even just a couple of times throughout a game can often turn the tides when digging for answers or racing to combos.

The Synergies Show

While in all honesty most games Xiahou will be cast at most twice because commander tax soon destroys his value, we do have a couple of ways to change this. Cards like Volrath's Stronghold and Command Beacon can fix that by allowing Xiahou to hit the yard. Another one, Rings of Brighthearth, a card included for combos anyway, can allow you to copy Xiahou's recursion ability and target his own corpse with it to get it back to your hand ready to cast for four mana again. The true synergy lies with a card called Nim Deathmantle however. Once on the field, you can recur a card for four colorless whenever you like which is not an ability to be underestimated.

Flipping the Table

With a large number of tutors and a way to reuse them in the command zone, the deck will often early game decide if it will race or grind to a combo win. The deck can do both depending on the matchup and what resources are available.

Keeping a Hand

Do not be afraid to mulligan in this deck. The draw is crucial to its success. A few things to look out for are tutors or card draw. Most hands with one of these are keepable and should be sought after even if the hand looks good without them.

Path 1: The Grind (Stax Combos)

The deck has the ability to play around with Stax effects when needed. The deck includes two soft locks that can often mean the game and insurmountably tip the odds in your favor. Hands with any of these in them or lots of card draw often mean you will be employing a grindier game plan.

1. Contamination+Bitterblossom/Ophiomancer/(Nim Deathmantle + Xiahou Dun, the One-Eyed )
   
   • This combo makes it so that everyone's lands will only produce black and only one of it. The combo has multiple viable pieces making it more consistent. IT can be a great way to slow down the game in your favor as all your cards cast for black anyway. Black also has the least enchantment destruction of all colors so the combo will stay around for a while until your opponents find appropriate enchantment removal and enough artifacts that tap for colored to cast them. Even without creatures to sack, Contamination is solid on and can in some cases can even just be a time walk.
2. Chains of Mephistopheles+Anvil of Bogardan
   
   • This combo makes it so that no one will ever gain additional cards on their draw step. When they go to draw the second card of Anvil, Chains will replace it with a discard draw instead. Then combined with the discard at the end of Anvil's effect, it makes it so that during everyone's draw step they **draw discard draw discard** instead of drawing a card as normal. Soon out of cards, players will not be able to draw any cards and instead have to mill two. Good thing for our deck it is ripe with recursion and we can use this to our advantage. Often enough this combo can be good enough to win the game on the right board state as your opponents will be stuck unable to gain any card advantage.

Path 2: The Race (Win Combos)

Most games will be oriented towards you assembling your combo in this deck. Some hands are good enough to go for it as fast as you can, but it can be wise to wait for opponents to be tapped out, or for them to blow a counter. Heres our worst \/

1. Bolas's Citadel+Sensei's Divining Top/Necropotence
   
   • If you are going to be able to make it to the 6 mana quick enough, this is the go-to combo for the deck. It works especially well since both Citadel and Necroptence are recurable with Xiahou. Citadel is sometimes even capable of playing into necropotence or top if you get lucky. Citadel is usually stopped because you can't cast two lands per turn but top allows you to tap it to draw that land and put Sensei's Divining Top on top of your library and then cast it for one life. This equates essentially to pay one draw one. Necropotence works very much the same but a bit worse since it exiles lands off the top instead of drawing them. Eventually, especially with the high number of tutors and ramp spells in the deck, the plan is to eventually find card: Aetherflux Resovoir and cast your deck to gain more than enough life to shoot all the opponents for 50+.
2. Painter's Servant+Grindstone
   
   • Oldist trick in the book but its a good one. This combo allows you to shoot down players one by one by milling their deck. While only being able to kill players one by one the combo is very easy to assemble and with cards such as Rings of Brighthearth and Voltaic Key you are sometimes able to kill more than one player at once.
3. Rings of Brighthearth+Basalt Monolith
   
   • By copying the untap ability of monolith with rings and tapping before the second untap effect, this combo can produce infinite colorless mana. This mana is best used on Exsanguinate but can be used with Grindstone to copy the mill effect infinite times through rings or copy the draw from Sensei's Divining Top, Mind Stone, or Necropotence to draw your deck. The combo can also win by copying Bolas's Citadel's ability and can win if you have Voltaic Key and an artifact that taps for black. This allows you to copy the untap trigger and filter the colorless into black. With the black, you can cast and recur with Xiahou infinitely. Lastly there are lines involving Xiahou Dun, the One-Eyed, Nim Deathmantle, andBeseech the Queen that allow you to regrowth Beseech infinite times and tutor up your deck as well as ways to cast exsanguinate or grindstone copying the mill trigger with rings.
4. Xiahou Dun, the One-Eyed+Nim Deathmantle+Jet Medallion+Cabal Ritual+Threshold
   
   • While a bit unwieldy, this combo produces infinite black mana. The mana most of the time can be used on Exsanguinate but with Xiahou also allows you to infinitely cast whatever is in your graveyard which is hopefully something since you need threshold to go off anyway. While this combo isn't easy to piece together it is also wholly unexpected. None of these cards are any red flags and are unlikely to ever be countered or removed. So if you ever find yourself naturally with most of the pieces to this combo, it might be worth it to go for it.
5. Cabal Coffers+Deserted Temple+Rings of Brighthearth+ 5 swamps
   
   • This combo also produces infinite black by copying the untap ability of temple with rings. This combo isn't really ever sought out but can be fell into in grindy games, especially with cards like Urborg, Tomb of Yawgmoth and Expedition Map. The black mana can once again be either spent on Exsanguinate or used to infinitely recur cards such as tutors from the graveyard with Xiahou.

In Finish

If you like being the underdog and winning because of it, this deck is perfect. If you enjoy showing people something they've never seen, I've found this deck to be sufficient. While naming it CEDH is a bit ambitious,it can do it. My goal is to push Xiahou to its absolute limits of competitiveness and make the deck as viable as possible. Any tips for optimizing go a long way, Keep brewing boys and girls.

### Any feedback is appreciated, and if you enjoyed the list an upvote would be awesome. Thanks folks.

Date added	4 years
Last updated	3 years
Key combos	Nim Deathmantle + Xiahou Dun, the One-Eyed
Legality	This deck is not Commander / EDH legal.
Rarity (main - side)	13 - 2 Mythic Rares 49 - 11 Rares 14 - 2 Uncommons 8 - 0 Commons
Cards	103
Avg. CMC	2.10
Folders	Commander