"What do you have that I cannot obtain?" (Commander / EDH MTG Deck)

"What do you have that I cannot obtain?"

Commander / EDH* Combo Control Primer Reanimator UBR (Grixis) Voltron

Sloanan

Land (34)

Sorcery (11)

Instant (20)

Artifact (11)

Enchantment (2)

Commander (1)

Creature (19)

Planeswalker (2)

Introduction

Hi all! Sloanan here with my first go at a Mairsil, the Pretender primer! Since I first started playing this format years ago with Commander 2013, I’ve longed to have a Grixis commander. Plenty of options have arisen, but varying roadblocks and stigmas stopped me from going further with any. Jeleva was a little too cEDH, a friend in my playgroup already ran a Marchesa deck, I had too many tribal decks to play Lord of Tresserhorn or Sedris, the Traitor King zombie decks, and Nekusar was just too easily solved. As soon as I saw Mairsil, though, I knew he was the one. Why, you may find yourself asking? Since I’m a bit of a sucker for lore, let’s start with who the man of the hour is first.

Mairsil was one of the central villains of the MTG storyline after the Brother’s War. There are literally novels written about this if you want to delve deeper, but basically after the war began the Dominarian Dark Ages, a time when magic was outlawed across the globe (because Urza loved him some magic nukes) and magicians had to resort to sneaky little places like the Conclave of Mages to practice their mad skillz yo. Intially, the Conclave was run by Ith, High Arcanist , he of the Maze of Ith fame. Mairsil didn’t like that, though, and captured Ith, putting him into a cage underneath the Conclave citadel. He drained the poor sap’s power and ruled with an iron fist until our main dude Jodah, Archmage Eternal (before he got archmaged) came and meddled with his plans. Mairsil Mairsil’d his way out of dying though by moving himself into a ring, which took over whoever wore it, including Lim-Dul the Necromancer and Jaya Ballard at one point. Essentially, it took Jodah hundreds of years to take the villain out, which is a feeling your opponents will certainly sympathize with.

To give a brief rundown of his abilities, let’s take a look at the card itself. To start, Mairsil is a 4/4 for 1UBR. When he enters the battlefield, you may exile an artifact or creature card from your hand and graveyard (note that he doesn’t target whatever you exile, getting around Ground Seal effects) and put a cage counter on the exiled card. As long as Mairsil is on the battlefield, he has all activated abilities of all exiled cards you own with cage counters on them. Yikes. Wizards knew that there were a plethora of ways to break that feature, so they added the footnote on the bottom of the card that you can only activate these abilities once per turn.

So in a nutshell, you exile an artifact or creature when he ETBs, then for the rest of the game he will have all activated abilities of the exiled cards. This gives Mairsil way more versatility than, say, The Mimeoplasm , which will unfortunately lose everything you exile with it once it leaves the battlefield. It’s stellar for longer, grindier games, since you won’t have to start rebuilding our commander from scratch once Mairsil dies (though it’ll be hard for that to happen, as you can see further down the primer).

What I love about Mairsil is his open-endedness. He’s got a hell of an ability (well, several abilities) and can eeeeasily snowball out of your opponent’s control. As far as how to build him, well, it’s up to you. Aside from some Mairsil staples listed below, most builds I’ve seen of him go in so many different directions, all of varying degrees of competetiveness. You’ve got some that go the voltron route, caging things such as Volrath the Fallen , Jodah's Avenger (a flavor fail, but still), and AEtherling to one-shot their opponents. You’ve got the cEDH, which uses things like Mirror-Mad Phantasm to mill your whole deck and pull a Laboratory Maniac win from nowhere on turn 3. And then you’ve got the janky combo builds, which is where you’ll see the most variety in terms of wincons, many of which are in here. I’ve even seen one build that is entirely a control build with only things like AEtherling to grind out a win.

I mentioned above that the biggest three variants I’ve seen for Mairsil are voltron, cEDH, and janky combo builds. This deck has been all three at varying points. Voltron wasn’t strong enough, cEDH grew a little stale after a while (admittedly my meta isn’t quite as cutthroat as some), and jank combo is just a little too much of a glass cannon for me.

So I decided to make a 75% combo-control build. How does that work? Read on below to find out! Or not. It’s no skin off my back.

The Primer

Overview

You Might NOT Like Playing Mairsil if:

You hate being archenemied - Even if you manage to avoid infinite combos with Mairsil, your opponents will likely be frustrated enough with Mairsil’s abilities that they will target you from the getgo.
You like decks that can run on autopilot - for better or for worse, you’ve got a lot of decision making to do in this deck, as Mairsil’s abilities/cage targets are myriad and you need to figure out which ones are the best to select.
You hate combo- Totally understandable, but that’s what we’re here for. You can downgrade the deck to more of a voltron build, but you’re going to lose a lot of consistency in doing so.
You like removing enchantments. We’re in Grixis colors, which means most enchantments your opponents stick out are going to be safe and sound. This can be troublesome with things such as Prison Term or Song of the Dryads . We do have a couple of answers and plenty of counters, but do be cognizant that these things can be hard to deal with if we don’t have them in hand.
You don’t like keeping up with abilities - Mairsil gets a lot of them and it can be easy to get lost.
You’re Jodah and you hate this bastard - Considering you’re immortal, I’m surprised you haven’t gone all Dr. Manhattan and lost interest in human emotions, but hey, some wounds never heal.

Alternative Commanders

Like I mentioned above, Mairsil gives you tons of room to build with him. In my build, we’re going to focus on comboing out through a variety of ways. As such, the deck is built heavily around Mairsil. Unfortunately, that means there simply aren’t very many other commanders that can work as a suitable alternative. If you change up the style of the deck, though, there are PLENTY of excellent Grixis commanders. Kess, Dissident Mage and Jeleva, Nephalia's Scourge are both high-tier storm commanders if you like spell slinging. Sedris, the Traitor King lends himself to both Zombies and reanimator builds quite well. Inalla, Archmage Ritualist is great for tribal kicks, combo, and control altogether. Marchesa, the Black Rose is an awesome aggro/reanimator hybrid that probably would’ve been my first Grixis deck had a friend of mine not beat me to it. And of course Nekusar, the Mindrazer is the dry hump of Grixis commanders, but he’s a very consistent dry hump if nothing else.

The Strategy

General Strategy

So your basic line of play is to first tutor for an enabler for Mairsil. What I mean by this is a creature whose abilities give Mairsil a chance to cage another card. Once you’ve found a suitable cage target, get to casting Mairsil. You don’t always want to cast him as soon as you have mana - it often helps to have a land or two open for either a counterspell or an ability activation. Once you’ve got Mairsil properly caged and protected, you want to simply play the control game for a while, countering and removing threats all while caging whatever items need caging and setting up your win engine. There are several abilities that prove fairly useful in these situations, so you can treat There are several winning combos in here, which are detailed below, but you might not always want to go all in on your wincon - caging all your wincons ASAP usually means you’re going to get gang-ganked by your playgroup before you have a chance to untap.

Early Game

Your first couple of turns will involve tutoring up an enabler for Mairsil. Your first choice should almost always be AEtherling , the spine of the deck. Once you’ve caged Aetherling, your opponents are going to have a very hard time killing Mairsil, and you are going to be able to cage multiple things over the next several turns. If you can’t cage Aetherling for any reason, the deck runs some suitable backups. Cavern Harpy is usually my second choice, since it can return Mairsil to your hand for no mana. You do have to recast him though, so it’s not always the best option. Pack Rat is another good option, as you can discard a card to make a token copy of Mairsil. One of them will die to state-based effects, but you still get the cage trigger (and if the legend rule somehow stops applying, both will have all abilities you’ve caged!). Arcanis the Omnipotent can work as a last resort as well. If you want redundancy (say if an opponent is playing removal.dec), cage more than one of these fellas. That way your opponents are going to have a ROUGH time killing Mairsil. I’ve often found that once you get even just two of these down, Mairsil rarely if ever truly dies that game.

As mentioned earlier, once you’ve got an enabler in hand/graveyard, don’t feel like you need to immediately get Mairsil out. I prefer waiting until a counterspell is in hand juuuust in case an opponent has some interaction ready. They can, afterall, still kill him before you’ve caged anything, which can often be frustrating to deal with.

The Midgame

Once you’ve got your engine up, play it like a Grixis control deck. Opponents swinging at you with everything? Boardwipe! Opponents playing problematic cards? Counterspells! Opponents binning nasty creatures in the GY? Reanimate them for yourself! At the same time you want to be building Mairsil into the ubermensch he must become to win. Let’s say you’ve got Aetherling caged. You obviously can flicker him now once per turn and build up value. A fine plan for sure, but you want to be cautious about when you flicker him. Always try to leave a few lands untapped so you can flicker him at your opponent’s end of turn. There’s nothing worse than him getting Path’d in response to the flicker activation, so you want to save your counterspells for things that can directly affect your gameplan.

Late Game

By this point, you should have your wincon built up. Maybe you were sneaky and caged the three you needed over several turns, hoping that your opponents didn’t notice. Maybe you just tutored for all three and chained together Pack Rat activations. Either way, once you’re ready to go off, dew it. Having counters in hand will definitely help you pull it off. Most of the combos involve either exiling your opponent’s libraries, or making infinite mana and drawing your deck. It’s honestly your call. My only advice is that if you’ve clearly got the game won with a certain combo, be nice to your fellow players and just end it...then again, we are in Grixis colors, so being cruel is kind of our thing. Food for thought.

Backups/Contingency Plans

So despite Mairsil’s resiliency, there may come a time where your opponents manage to play a solid removal game and take care of our Gangly Grixis Guy. To be blunt, many of the cards we run are mostly unplayable by themselves. Either they’re too expensive to cast or their abilities aren’t as useful on their own. It happens, unfortunately. Fortunately, though, we’ve got some options. As this is a grixis deck, Reanimation is always a thing we can do. Animate Dead and Dance of the Dead do wonders in the deck, either reanimating our biggest creatures, stealing our opponent’s creatures we just boardwiped, or, best of all, reanimating a dead Mairsil to avoid that commander tax! We’ve also got The Scarab God and Memnarch for additional reanimation/deck theivery. Oona, Queen of the Fae also can do some work, milling and giving you a board state.

Mulligans

An ideal hand for Mairsil involves 2-3 lands, some artifact ramp, some interaction, a cage target, and a draw/loot/tutor spell. While Tutors are obviously the best in terms of consistency, I’m honestly a fan of looting effects in this deck. Draw 2, then discard 2 is nice because we can bin multiple cage targets and keep a fresh hand of cards we’d rather play.

Matchups

My meta is fairly diverse for the most part. Reanimator decks, storm decks, aggro, combo, voltron, you name it and we have it (except MLD). As such, I’ve seen a decent bit of variety and can somewhat cover Mairsil’s strong and weak matchups.

Grave hate, particularly Rest in Peace is mean against this deck, but we’re not a dedicated reanimator deck, so it doesn’t ruin our plans. Just means we have to do a bit more work to get everything to gel properly. We can either bounce it and counter it or use Nevinyrral's Disk as an emergency out.

Enchantress decks are surprisingly tough to work around. Many enchantments don’t matter all that much to us, but staxy effects like Suppression Field can hurt. It’s because of things like that that I don’t always encourage caging your Nevinyrral's Disk right away.

Spellslinger decks are actually pretty fine to play against. We’re typically trying to simply outrace them to our combo wincon, and even if we’re not feeling like going combo, shotgunning them with the Tree/Hateflayer combo listed below will usually be enough to not have to worry about them.

Aggro decks can be a mixed bag. Typically it’s fairly easy to dominate, playing boardwipe after boardwipe while flickering Mairsil and continuing onward. But sometimes you might get something like a Najeela, the Blade-Blossom or a low-CMC variant of Edgar Markov . These can be admittedly kinda tough if they can outrace you, but in situations like these I would either go for Tree/Hateflayer or even just cage Nevinyrall’s Disk to keep them in check.

Finally, hatebear decks that run things such as Linvala, Keeper of Silence , Torpor Orb , and Pithing Needle are rough. We’ve got removal for all of these, but we might not necessarily always have it in-hand. If you see someone playing this type of deck, I usually say kill them on sight. Either Tree/Hateflayer them up or just go for your most ready combo of your choice asap.

C-C-C-Combos!

The Quicksilver Conjecture

Before we go much further, I have to make a special disclaimer: With almost all of these combos, you NEED to have Quicksilver Elemental caged for Mairsil to go off. There has been a slight bit of controversy surrounding Quicksilver Elemental when Mairsil was first released concerning how its abilities work with Mairsil, with some folks thinking it gave Mairsil infinite activations and other folks (WotC) thinking that it didn’t. However, we’ve got it down pretty well after some official rulings have come out and here’s how it works. Let’s say you have the elemental caged and have any other random ability. You activate the ability of the random other card and now you’ve used up that ability for turn, right? However, once you activate the Quicksilver Elemental’s ability (targeting Mairsil himself), Mairsil gains all abilities that the targeted card had. Since he targeted himself, he gains an additional copy of each ability that he has. So for both the QE’s ability and the random other, he now has 2 activations, one of which has already been used. You activate the Elemental’s ability again and he now has 4 activations, 2 of which have been used. Do it again and he’s got 8, 3 of which have been used, and so on. You can still go infinite but you just need to do some workarounds to do so.

With that out of the way, on to the combos!

The Dominarian Rattlesnake

This one is admittedly not a 1-turn kill the table combo, but rather a great bit of insurance. Once you cage Tree of Perdition , Mairsil can now tap to switch his toughness with an opponent’s life total. In most cases, this means dropping your opponent from 40 life to 4 with a simple tap. From there, if you have Hateflayer caged, you can untap Mairsil for 2R to deal damage equal to his power to target player. And since they’re at 4 life from the Tree activation, him dealing 4 damage to them will be lethal. It’s lean, it’s mean, and it’s instant speed. Works as a great deterrent to keep folks from attacking/targeting you. The ONLY downside to this one is that once you do kill one player with it, the rest will target you for the rest of the game, so you want to be careful with this one. Having a haste enabler and Aetherling caged will make this a little safer to play, as you can just flicker it each turn to kill each opponent one at a time.

Knacksaw Jim Duggan

This simple and effective one requires only three caged cards - Knacksaw Clique , Gilded Lotus or Prismatic Geoscope , and Quicksilver Elemental . Tap Mairsil for UUU. Spend U to activate the QE ability, then spend the remaining UU to untap Mairsil and exile the top card of an opponent’s library. Repeat until the table has no library except yours. Coincidentally this generates infinite mana if you want to insult your opponents and play all their exiled cards that turn before they lose on their next draw step.

Fae Dunaway

This spicy one involves Gilded Lotus or Prismatic Geoscope , Quicksilver Elemental , an untapping effect (such as Morphling or Staff of Domination ), and Oona, Queen of the Fae . Basically you generate infinite mana similarly to above, by tapping him for UUU, untapping him and activating QE, then with your infinite mana you can exile everyone’s library. All at instant speed and you can at least get some cool faeries out of it too!

Rise of the Machines

This one uses the new C18 card Retrofitter Foundry to make an infinite army of Servos, Thopters, or Constructs. Basically you generate infinite mana through whatever way works best for you, then use Retrofitter’s abilities to make your army. Only wins if you’ve got a haste enabler, but it’s instant-speed, so you could just do it at an opponent’s end step. UPDATE: This combo is gone. Haste enablers will usually be out when we try to go off, buuuuuut they won’t always be, so I’ve replaced this with a Theater of Horrors combo listed below. Still listing this here for posterity’s sake.

Nicolas Cage Steals Everything

This steamer involves using Memnarch . Generate infinite mana through whatever means the deck gives you, then use Memnarch’s abilities to subsequently gain control of the entire board. If your opponents don’t scoop to this after fifteen minutes, you are legally allowed to leave and still be the winner. For bonus points, you can simply turn everything into an artifact, then use Viashino Heretic ‘s ability to burn your opponents. Props to you if you go that way.

Thy Rod and Thy Staff

A simple one where you generate infinite mana with Staff of Domination in particular, then use that mana to draw your deck. Once you’ve got the deck drawn, you can kill everyone with that great chase mythic, Comet Storm . If that doesn’t tickle your fancy, you can usually just cage Pack Rat , then proceed to cage whatever targets you want to and win from there.

Lucifer's Hammer

This torturous combo won’t win you the game, but it’ll make everyone miserable at the very least, especially if you’re behind. Basically just cage Nevinyrral's Disk , AEtherling , and have a haste enabler (preferably Anger ). For just 2 mana and a tap (one mana to activate the disk and one to flicker him), you can keep nearly everything off the table except for superfriends decks. Though my playgroup hates this combo with the passion of a thousand suns, it has effectively let me win games I had no business winning.

Plague of Locusts

This isn't a huge combo or anything, but typically speaking, if you've got a way to draw your deck (almost exclusively through Staff of Domination or possibly Arcanis shenanigans) and have The Locust God out, it's going to be very hard not to kill the table with a swarm of locusts, which is somewhat metal of a way to go, I think.

Machine Gun Kelly:

This last little bit is a fairly common line of play once you've got infinite mana, but once you've got Walking Ballista either caged or in hand with your infinite mana, you can just gun the table down. It's a pretty decent alternative if another infinite mana sink gets foiled somehow.

Il Teatro Grottesco:

This one uses a new enchantment from RNA, Theater of Horrors as our wincon. Basically, as with most of these, generate infinite mana as you need, then activate Theater’s ability an infinite number of times to kill the board. An added benefit of being able to get you card advantage as you play, though to be perfectly honest it’s better to save this till you’re ready, otherwise you May exile the wrong card with it.

Card Choices Explained

Lands

I won’t go into too much detail here, primarily because it’s mostly just a smorgasbord of shocks, fetches, painlands, checklands, trilands, and basics. I don’t run a massive amount of lands primarily because despite the wonky average CMC of the deck, I’m almost never casting anything more than 4 mana. Almost anything that costs more simply goes to the cages, so I don’t have quite the need for an abundance of lands.The only few that aren’t for color fixing are simply Ghost Quarter (no EDH deck shouldn’t have some form of land destruction), Command Beacon to save yourself some commander tax, and Cephalid Coliseum . The Coliseum in particular is nice because it has a looting effect on it, which is always something this deck can happily use.

Creatures

AEtherling : MVP All star here. This should never not be your first cage target unless an opponent somehow gets rid of it.

Anger : The best haste enabler in the deck. You usually want to try to bin this as quickly as you can unless you suspect grave hate is coming your way.

Arcanis the Omnipotent : Card draw on a stick. His second ability is OK at best, but you’re only ever using his first to refill your hand.

Cavern Harpy : This lady is never a bad cage target. Being able to bounce Mairsil back to hand at instant speed for only 1 life is well worth having to recast him in many situations.

Doom Whisperer : This gem from GRN has a few uses. It can serve as an undercosted beater (with no friggin' downside! What the hell, WOTC?), or as a combo enabler (use it's ability multiple times to just dump your library to your GY and find whatever you need to cage). Its stats are good enough that I don't mind hardcasting it instead of caging it. Either way, the card selection is real.

Dralnu, Lich Lord : Dralnu has one of the best abilities on one of the worst creatures. Fortunately, the downsides don’t matter when Mairsil has him caged up! One of my favorite lines of play is to play Buried Alive / Intuition to dump AEtherling , Dralnu, and typically Anger into the GY before playing Mairsil on my next turn. You play him, cage Aetherling, then flicker him and cage Dralnu. Then you can give flashback to the Buried Alive/Intuition to find whatever you need to go from there.

Hateflayer : Not very useful on its own I admit, but this will flat-out kill an opponent when combined with the Tree.

Knacksaw Clique : Even if you’re not using it to combo out, it’s still a nice ability. Deck theivery is always a fun option.

Kozilek, the Great Distortion : I like Big Daddy Koz in most parts of the game. If you do somehow get to the late game and can cast him, you’ve got a solid finisher set up. If not, caging him on to Mairsil gives you essentially multiple Force of Will ’s in the deck (plus you can cage what you discard later!)

Memnarch : Purely there for the combo, though stealing an opponent’s Sol Ring or Blightsteel Colossus can be nice.

Morphling : I partly wish Mairsil was 5-color, simply so we could make this a X-ling tribal deck. The original X-ling creature, Morphling has several uses. Primarily, you want to use it as an untap effect for Mairsil, along with a protection piece, giving him shroud when needed. You can use the other abilities to Voltron it up in grindier games, but I’ve rarely needed them for that.

Oona, Queen of the Fae : Primarily a combo piece, but she’s great at building up a boardstate if you’ve looking at a full board on your opponent’s side, particularly against mono-colored decks.

Pack Rat : This Draft Nightmare is fantastic at giving Mairsil more cages. Oftentimes you can just discard the card you want to cage. One of the better options early-game.

Pili-Pala : Basically here for more infinite mana shenanigans. You tap Mairsil for Lotus mana, spend a mana for a quicksilver activation, then spend the other two to untap him, netting a mana and going infinite.

Quicksilver Elemental : If Aetherling gives you the setup, QE gives you the payoff. So many ways to use this little buddy to go infinite. Usually my second tutor target after Aetherling.

Razaketh, the Foulblooded : This guy’s an absolute beast. To be fair, you won’t always have a board state, but there are enough token generators in the deck that it’s worth having Razzie in here as a payoff.

The Scarab God : This is one of maybe a small handful of these cards I don’t mind hardcasting, as those abilities are just brutal. It’s great when caged on to Mairsil, but even if not, it’s a very hard-to-remove threat that’s worth running.

The Locust God : So the activated ability is not amazing I admit. But it has a few uses. First up, there's enough card draw in here to get a decent bit of bodies out of this guy. Bodies I can then either use for attacks, blocks, or sac fodder for Razaketh. Plus if I can draw my deck with him out, it's yet another way to close out the game from that moment. This is thoroughly a flex spot for me and I've no guarantee I'll keep this, but it's in here for now.

Torchling : See Morphling, but red.

Tree of Perdition : Even without the Hateflayer kill, dropping someone to 4 life is just demoralizing and wrong and beautiful.

Viashino Heretic : Another flex slot, I simply run this because it’s artifact removal with a little bit of burn added on. It’s not a combo piece, but you caaaan do some interesting things with it and Memnarch. - UPDATE: This poor little guy is dead and gone. Now that I have a Walking Ballista, I don't care too much to keep this one around. It was fun while it lasted, little guy!

Walking Balista: This multi-format all star has plenty of uses, but is primarily an infinite mana sink for the win. Whether it's cast on its own or caged by Mairsil, this guy ends games.

Artifacts

Coveted Jewel : C18 may have been a bit shite overall, but this card actually isn’t too bad in the slightest. I wouldn’t normally play it because of the card draw an opponent can steal, BUT it’s a beautiful card to draw and basically serves as copy number 3 of Gilded Lotus, which helps with the consistency of the deck.

Gilded Lotus : One of your best cage targets for fairly clear reasons.

Mirage Mirror : While I think Aetherling is the best protection piece for Mairsil, this has proven to be one of the most versatile alternatives I’ve seen in a while. Someone plays removal, you can turn him into a land or anything else the card can’t target. Liking your opponent’s Consecrated Sphinx? Turn him into it and draw to your heart’s desire.

Prismatic Geoscope : This one is essentially a backup Gilded Lotus in case your opponent somehow gets rid of it. What I like about this one over Gilded Lotus is that it can produce more than one color if you have the right manabase. You usually are going to be making blue if you're comboing out, BUT the versatility to make other colors is really nice for general purposes.

Sol Ring : Without gravity, we’d float into space!

Staff of Domination : Dat sweet sweet versatility. So many uses in this deck, but best served as an untap effect and infinite mana sink.

Talisman of Dominance / Talisman of Indulgence : I’m not a fan of the signets. I much prefer these. If you’ve got a good opening hand, these will often lead to a turn 3 Mairsil if you’re feeling brave.

Thousand-Year Elixir : One of our haste enablers (sort of), this is one of the few non-mana rock artifacts I will actually play instead of cage.

Enchantment?

Animate Dead / Dance of the Dead : These serve multiple purposes in the deck. Primarily I use them to cheat Mairsil back out if he gets countered (oftentimes the only way to stop him), but they also do wonders when looting in the early game. Nothing like a T2 Razaketh!

Fervor : One of my haste enablers for the deck, and likely the weakest. Buuut haste is haste and it keeps Mairsil alert and can also help us swing for the win if we go the infinite token route.

Phyrexian Arena : A Commander staple, though I’ll admit I think that it’s mildly overrated. That being said, with all the caging you do in this deck, you can burn through a hand pretty quickly, so any card draw helps. - UPDATE: This one is temporarily taken out in favor of some Locust God experimentation. It'll probably go back in eventually, but for now it's on the sidelines.

Rhystic Study : Despite annoying the hell out of your opponents, this is one of the best card draw pieces in this deck.

Search for Azcanta : The Card Advantage Powerhouse That Is Search for Azcanta has proven to be pretty awesome in this deck so far. Surveilling each turn is great because most of the time your GY is practically your hand in this deck. I’ve never even really wanted to have it flip to be perfectly honest.

Theater of Horrors : While I’m not a fan of the exile on upkeep trigger, you can get the card back (or save for later), but more importantly, it’s an infinite mana sink that doesn’t have to be caged into Mairsil, and I imagine most folks aren’t going to hit it with removal till it’s too late.

Training Grounds : I actually took this out because it never really helps break the deck (also because I like it more in my Lazav, the Multifarious build since his ability is colorless and this is degenerate in that deck). I’m still keeping this up here to mention that it IS good in this deck, but I just don’t find myself needing it.

Instants

I won’t delve into the counterspell explanations, though I’ll say that Swan Song , Dispel , and Delay are probably my favorites. I will freely admit that you could probably do to upgrade some of these counters to more expensive ones like Pact of Negation , Force of Will , and Mana Drain , but I’m a poor little plebe with no money. Ah well.

I’m not running an incredible amount of removal, but the ones I do run have done me well. Chaos Warp can save me from permanents Grixis usually couldn’t get. Bedevil kills just about anything killable by the Grixis color pie. Cyclonic Rift is a classic. Reality Shift is a great exile effect in blue, and Rapid Hybridization kills most things for only one mana.

Looting/milling effects are nice in this deck. Fact or Fiction , Forbidden Alchemy , and Frantic Search all can get some nice things in the graveyard. Most of the times it helps me to dump that many cards to the graveyard.

Lastly, the tutoring effects in this deck are crucial. Entomb is Entomb, and Mystical Tutor and Vampiric Tutor need no introduction, and Lim-Dul's Vault is Vampiric Tutor #2. The true star, though, is Intuition . At 3 mana and instant speed, this is better than Buried Alive . Hell, in this deck, it’s effectively just a tutor for whatever 3 cards you need to win, as it makes no difference to you whether they go to GY or hand.

Sorceries

You’ve got your fair share of boardwipes, all of which, well, wipe the board. You’ve got looting effects like Careful Study to get some early game setup going on. Then you’ve got your tutors. Gamble is nice because in this deck it really doesn’t matter if you randomly discard what you searched for - it’s often a cage target, so what does it matter where it goes?

Random Points/Info

Alternate Builds I don't run

Voltron

So this deck has been through the ringer a bit when it comes to deck building. It started as voltron. I won’t give an alternate primer here, but I will say that if you do go that route, you don’t want to run too many voltron pieces. Just having AEtherling as your commander with a solid control package can often be enough. That being said, Jodah's Avenger , Trespassing Souleater , Pestilent Souleater , Cephalid Inkshrouder and Volrath the Fallen are nice includes.

cEDH

Then I went cEDH with it and started playing the Mirror-Mad Phantasm route. For the uninformed, due to the wording of the Phantasm, if you cage it on to Mairsil and activate it’s ability, your entire deck will be milled because you’re searching for “A card named Mirror-Mad Phantasm,” which is no longer in your deck. Once you’ve milled your library, you’ve got plenty of ways to win, but oftentimes it will involve popping Narcomoeba form your library to play, then playing Gravecrawler and Fatestitcher from your GY, then saccing all three to Dread Return a Laboratory Maniac and flashback a Deep Analysis to draw and win the game. It’s fun and flashy as hell at first, but to be perfectly honest I kind of grew tired of it. My playgroup wasn’t quite cEDH enough for me to run it as much as I did. Kind of just lost the fun for me. That being said, it’s almost definitely the most efficient way to play Mairsil if you only care for wins. Plus the combo takes up a lot of space in the deck and you really have to commit to it at that point, which like I said, just grew old for me.

Jank

Next up was the janky combo phase. Here’s where you saw stuff like Heartless Hidetsugu and Pestilent Souleater , or Hidetsugu, Prakhata Pillar-Bug , and Aetherflux Reservior, or perhaps jankiest of all, Maddening Imp and Aboshan, Cephalid Emperor to do one-sided boardwipes each turn. It was during this time that I saw one of Mairsil’s more commonly used combos, Sage of Hours and Anthroplasm . For just five mana, you can take infinite turns! This is an awesome combo and I did run it for a while. However, much like the cEDH route mentioned above, I found myself tutoring for this specific combo pretty consistently. My friends hated it and I started to after a while. It is well worth running if you’re on the fence about it - I simply just don’t use it out of personal preference.

End Result

Finally, I’ve settled to where I am now with it. Rather than jank, I’ve gone for what I guess you could call a 75% build. It’s still fast and mean enough to hold its own against a variety of decks, but it’s not necessarily what I’d call oppressive. My meta has slowly gotten better in terms of deck quality, so I don’t mind running some infinites in here.

Why aren't you running X?

Here’s a few commonly played cards I’ve seen in Mairsil decks online that I don’t run for varying reasons:

Basalt Monolith - It’s actually quite good for infinite mana, but I kinda just prefer having colored mana most of the times, as most of his abilities will require colored mana.

Myr Propagator - It’s solid if you need more enablers, but most of the other options are better, as this one needs haste in order to really get some damage done. Still, it’s solid on a budget.

Pili-Pala - I just don’t have one and I’m lazy. Probably would run it though if I could.

Conjurer's Closet - It just feels like a trap to me. It’s a free caging at the end of your turns, yes, but it’s five mana. I don’t like leaving that much mana tapped down until late-game.

Illusionist's Bracers - Yeah there’s combo potential, but it’s too mana-intensive for me, considering Mairsil flickers in and out of the field a bit too much.

Lightning Greaves - The sorcery-speed equip is what ruins this. As above, he flickers too much for equipment to be of much use.

Deadeye Navigator - A little too mana-heavy. It can lead to some crazy shenanigans, but I like other options a little more.

Planned Upgrades/Cards in Upcoming Sets

For the most part, I am happy with the deck. That being said, there are a small group of cards I plan to buy at some point to upgrade the deck with.

Walking Ballista : This is number 1 on the list. Only reason I’m not running it is because I’m waiting for it to rotate out of standard. It’ll enable so many combos and close out so many games. - UPDATE: Finally got this baby! Swapped out for Disciple of the Ring. Disciple is pretty good, but this actually wins games.

Cavern of Souls : This will ease a lot of my worries about Mairsil being countered. Problem is it’s got reserve-list prices for a card reprinted less than two years ago.

Doom Whisperer : Once this card comes out in GRN, I do plan to put it in here. It’s a thoroughly playable card, whether caged on Mairsil or just on its own. An awesome creature for this deck. - UPDATE: Got one at the prerelease! This will fall firmly into the I-don't-mind-casting-this-one category, as it's a great enabler for stupid Mairsil shenanigans.

Lazav, the Multifarious : I’m not quiiite as wild about this one in a Mairsil deck, but I’ve got a couple of flex slots I use for experimentation. You can turn him into a copy of Mairsil if he gets into your GY, which is interesting, though flickering him isn’t a good idea. Additionally, you can see Lazav as a sort of snapcaster mage for whatever other creatures you’ve got in your GY. Not the best card I’ve seen, and i probably won’t even keep it in here ultimately, but eh, it’s fun to dream. - UPDATE: Not going to add this one in after all. It's cute, but nothing beyond that. To really make it broken you need to build the deck around Lazav, and this ain't a Lazav deck.

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Date added	6 years
Last updated	4 years
Legality	This deck is Commander / EDH legal.
Rarity (main - side)	6 - 0 Mythic Rares 57 - 0 Rares 20 - 0 Uncommons 9 - 0 Commons
Cards	100
Avg. CMC	2.83
Tokens	Bird 2/2 U, Copy Clone, Faerie Rogue 1/1 UB, Frog Lizard 3/3 G, Manifest 2/2 C, Servo 1/1 C
Folders	EDH, Casual, Mairsil, immediate make, Fun Decks, Temp, Commander Decks, Commander, Decks of Interest, EDH
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