Maybeboard


The deck is meant to be played in a tuned/competitive environment. It is built to win fast and does so with great consistency. It offers several quick, effective and efficient paths to victory.

Below is discussion of some important points concerning the deck and its gameplay. This will hopefully provide readers with a better understanding and appreciation of the deck and perhaps elicit responses that will help me in its continuous improvement.

Leovold, Emissary of Trest

Leovold is not a fun commander to play against. On its own, it offers card advantage and prevents opponents from benefitting from the use of cantrips and draw engines. Used alongside cards like Teferi's Puzzle Box and other wheel effects, he strips opponents' hands and limits their ability to interact with you for the rest of the game. Because of this, Leovold has become one of those commanders that get hit with removal as soon as it sees the board. It is also for this reason that you want to keep him relevant enough to be a threat without making the deck too dependent on his presence. This being said, I have come up with a deck that makes use of a couple of win conditions that are independent from the Leovold gameplay yet benefits a lot from it.

Win Conditions

The deck makes use to two slightly overlapping win conditions:

The storm combo is primarily achieved using: Future Sight Helm of Awakening and Sensei's Divining Top . With these three cards, we will be able to draw out the entire deck (building storm counts in the process) then cast Tendrils of Agony for the win. There will be some cases that we might not have enough storm counts to kill off the entire 4-man pod. In such incidents, you can cast Time Spiral to build up more storm counts before casting Tendrils to end the game. Alternatively, you can just cast Laboratory Maniac and draw yourself out for the win.

One cool thing about this combo is that with enough mana, we can set all of this up using a single card – Insidious Dreams . This is how we do it:

  1. Cast Insidious Dreams at the end of an opponents turn, discard at least 3 cards and search for the combo pieces. You will now put them on top of your library in the following order. Future Sight (top), Helm of Awakening (2nd), and SDT (3rd).

  2. On our turn we will now draw and play Future Sight. This allows us to play the top card of our library which in this case is now Helm of Awakening followed by SDT. Voila!

*Note: The minimum number of mana you will need to pull this off is 5 mana. Enough to cast future sight. From this point, you can add cards like Mana Crypt or a couple of the cmc rocks to cast the Helm. This would require pitching more cards to Insidious Dreams though. You can also adjust the pile to include Yawgmoth's Will or Noxious Revival as a contingency plan.

A lot of people are probably familiar with how this one works as it is one of the most commonly used win cons for Leovold, Zur the Enchanter and several other top tier commander decks. In this deck, I make use of two Lab Maniac-based win cons.
The general concept is to cast Doomsday to cut the number of cards left in your deck to 5 and win using Laboratory Maniac . Simple enough right? The deck uses at least two Doomsday piles, both of which require at least 1 cantrip in hand prior to casting Doomsday. These are:

*Pile 1: Predict , Laboratory Maniac , Gitaxian Probe , Lion's Eye Diamond and Yawgmoth's Will .

Cast a cantrip to draw Predict. Cast Predict, name Lab Maniac (sending it to the graveyard) to draw Gitaxian Probe and LED. Cast LED followed by GP. You then respond to GP by cracking LED. With 3 mana and LED and GP in your graveyard, you can now cast Yawgmoth's Will (drawn using GP) to recast LED to cast Lab Maniac followed by GP to win.

*Pile 2: Gush , Frantic Search , Laboratory Maniac , Gitaxian Probe , one random card (preferably protection such as Pact of Negation ).

Cast a cantrip to draw Gush. Tap returning two Islands to your hand to cast Gush to draw Frantic Search and Lab Maniac. Use the mana to cast Frantic Search (discard the two islands) to draw the two remaining cards. Untap 3 lands, cast Lab Maniac then cast GP to win the game. This pile gives you one protection or Street Wraith which you can cycle in response to any removal targeting the LabMan.

Note: Street Wraith can be used as an alternative to GP. In some cases, it is better since it will be harder to counter than GP. There are many other piles which can be made but I chose these 2 just to show some examples.

This one is an alternate win con and is pretty straightforward. Play the LabMan and follow it up with Demonic Consultation. Name a card that isn't in the deck ( Storm Crow ) to exile your entire library followed by a cantrip to win the game.

Strengths and Weaknesses

The deck performs pretty well against aggro decks and against its fellow combo decks. It can accelerate to a win as early as turn 2 but wins most of its games between turn 3 to 6. It performs pretty well against pods that do not have a dedicated control deck since it often wins before any threat or anything disruptive to the deck's general gameplay hits the board.

Similar to other combo decks, the deck is generally weak against stax and control decks. Cards like Blood Moon , Ruination and Hall of Gemstone have caused me a lot of problems in the past. I have since then added more basic lands and strived to keep the mana requirements of the combos in the deck to a minimum. I believe this would allow for a higher resiliency against the archetypes mentioned above.

Thanks for taking time to browse through the deck's primer-of-sorts. I hope you enjoyed reading it and look forward to your comments and suggestions. Upvotes are very much appreciated!

Suggestions

Updates Add

Winning streak has ended. Seems the guys have made their own adjustments. I have also made some minor changes based on the trends I have seen the past few games.

Anvil of Bogardan out, Nihil Spellbomb in - most of the games I lost, I already had DD in hand but did not have a cantrip to jump start the win. Anvil seems like a logical cut since I almost never cast it unless I have Leovold in play and can cast it the same turn as a wheel. In short, it takes a substantial amount of preparation before it becomes really useful. I am starting to see Teferi's Puzzle Box the same way and might end up cutting it in the future.

Careful Study out, Insist in - was sifting through my old cards in search of cantrips and ran across Insist. It made sense. A 1 cmc cantrip that gives a bit of protection to the Lab Man. And it's green which makes it a bit unique. :)

Tandril's of Despair out, Aetherflux Reservoir in - this has been suggested numerous times in the past. So far I haven't won games using the Reservoir but it is primarily due to DD becoming my primary win con. Will test it just a bit more.

So far the DD win con has been performing splendidly. I am trying to focus on getting more cantrips in the deck and maybe better mana fixing. Suggestions regarding the land base are highly appreciated.

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Date added 7 years
Last updated 4 years
Legality

This deck is not Commander / EDH legal.

Rarity (main - side)

11 - 0 Mythic Rares

48 - 0 Rares

15 - 0 Uncommons

18 - 0 Commons

Cards 100
Avg. CMC 1.94
Tokens Bird 2/2 U, Emblem Jace, Vryn's Prodigy, Spirit 1/1 C
Folders Commander, EDH decks, Decks I Like, Fun, Edh, Decks I Like
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