Welcome to my latest unnecessarily convoluted deck! Today we will be playing with some older mechanics: cumulative upkeep and fading. We'll start with our win-cons, since they're fairly straightforward!
Final Countdown
Approach of the Second Sun will be one of the easiest for us to do, since we just have to cast it twice! Even if it gets countered we have some ways to pull it back, so no worries there! Darksteel Reactor will be one of the hardest for our enemies to deal with, since it has indestructible (and can be given shroud as well, more on that later!) What I think will be more unique is a combo using Mechanized Production + Replicating Ring
but don't make a mistake by putting Mechanized Production on the original ring! Instead we will place it on one of the token copies that we make, letting us sneak a win out of nowhere! So we know the end game, how do we get there? We dig.
Lets Go Digging
We can start by moving some stuff into our graveyard, with Codex Shredder, Mind Stone, Azor's Gateway
, and Soul-Guide Lantern. Remember, just because we sacrifice them, doesn't mean they're gone, with the help of Tameshi. Fate Foretold and Ior Ruin Expedition can help us get a few cards out and be recurred with Tameshi as well! We can always claim the Monarch with Court of Cunning and Court of Grace and get some added benefits out of them! But the real fun comes with our Cumulative Upkeep cards! Using Ancestral Knowledge we can either stack the top 10 cards of our deck or clear out up to 10 cards that we don't need! (Say we just cast Second Sun and want to recast it right away...). Mystic Remora can help us out the more our enemies decide to keep casting! Urza's Saga can help us find our low cost artifacts (and make some decent blockers when we have all our 1 drop artifacts out). So we're digging through, looking to hit our win cons. But these ask for recursion from our commander, and doing that repeatedly can become tiresome! So! We speed things up!
Gotta Go Fast
For starters here we'll begin with our mana dorks (SPOILER: not many...) Silver Myr and Gold Myr we have 1 in each color. Azorius Signet of course lets us add both our colors in at the cost of 1 mana. Adding in Talisman of Progress can get us either of our colors with a little pain. And Sol Ring because... well.. Sol Ring! But we aren't just looking at ramp here! We need to get lands faster than our opponents, so Walking Atlas can also let us throw out an extra land per turn (and is a good target for Mechanized Production to really push those lands out! Given that we are running numerous Artifacts, Metalwork Colossus can be a very cheap friend for us to bring back! But to really have some fun with Tameshi's ability we need to make it cheaper for us! Heartstone + Training Grounds
will let us get artifacts and enchantments up to 3 CMC back for a single plains! And if an enemy wants to destroy them, we can just get them back! But maybe we can get our enemies to leave us alone...
Don't Touch Me
So to start in typical W/U fashion, we will make ourselves a pillow fort using the standard Ghostly Prison+Propoganda with an added bonus from Sphere of Safety which with Enchanted Evening will make us nigh untouchable from attacks. Callaphe, Beloved of the Sea will give spells that target our enchantments a slight increase in cost. Inner Sanctum and Energy Storm will protect our creatures from any burn spells or combat, while Glacial Chasm will keep us safe from burn and any creatures who attack. If our opponents do choose to attack, we can slow them down with Halls of Mist. Ethereal Armor + Helm of the Gods
can give us a good defender (or a very very painful hit if we have a chance to use it). We may need to protect our commander from more threats so we have a few ways to do this with Lightning Greaves, Swiftfoot Boots. Parallax Wave will work 2 fold, we can use it to exile our commander under it and either wait for it to fade away or exile some other creatures to get them back sooner. Or we can exile our opponents stuff just to watch the fun, which can just become an almost permanent thing with Parallax Inhibitor being recurred and adding more and more fade counters! Enchanted Evening + Fountain Watch
will give all our permanents shroud, so good luck with that! Now suppose our enemies are about to go Nuclear, well keep your finger on the button for Nevinyrral's Disk. With Sigil of the New Dawn in play, we can pay 2 and return our commander to our hand if we have to hit that button and avoid the commander tax! And Finally if we keep getting hit we can always Worship to stay at 1 life and stay in the game! So lets see how we can keep our enemies busy...
Irritants
Given the popularity of Green in commander, it shouldn't be too hard to find a target for Mind Harness to grab onto, either taking a key piece away or just grabbing the biggest MFer we can. The Parallax Tide and Parallax Wave can be made perpetual with Parallax Inhibitor being recurred, we can either protect our stuff or just lock down our enemies lands and creatures. Prison Realm, Seal Away, and Sea Legs are just annoying, they can be replaced with any lockdown spells, such as Pacifism. Seal of Cleansing to get rid of any troublesome artifacts or enchantments, either our enemies or our own if we don't want to deal with the Cumulative Upkeep. Seal of Removal can get us one of our creatures out of harm's way or send our opponent's creatures away, temporarily. Shambling Suit can be a very painful hitter or a hard defender, while Sky-Blessed Samurai is a decent flyer, and both can be recurred with Tameshi. Tangle Wire can be quite irritating as it will force our opponents to give up a few different permanents for the turn, we have a way to avoid this by generating (what I would call) an absurd amount of mana. Second Chance will basically guarantee we hit our endgames if we get low enough on life. Trickster's Talisman can be thrown onto any of our creatures to create multiple defenders as we need them, and snuck through with Rogue's Passage. So we really need an unreasonable amount of mana to do things as many times as we want. How do we get there?
Gonna Go Far, Kid
This is one of the simpler sections we have, but it does require a few very specific steps. So lets start with our pieces: Serra's Sanctum needs to tap for more than 6 for it to work (shouldn't be too hard), Oboro Breezecaller, Terrain Generator, Rings of Brighthearth, and our plains and islands.
Step 1: Tap Serra Sactum for 7 (7 mana in pool)
Step 2: activate Oboro Breezecaller (5 mana in pool)
Step 3: activate Terrain Generator and return the basic Oboro bounced to the field (3 mana in pool)
Step 4: Tap Sanctum (10 mana in pool)
Step 5: activate Oboro Breezecaller + Rings of Brighthearth
to untap Sanctum and Terrain Generator (6 mana in pool)
Step 6: activate Terrain Generator to bring land back to field (4 mana in pool)
Repeat Steps 4-6 to generate as much White mana as you need! the more you can get from Serra Sanctum, the fewer times you need to repeat this process!
Hunt Them Down
These are our methods of pulling lands from the deck, mostly basics. Flood Plain and Flooded Strand should be used to find Tundra Prairie Stream or Hallowed Fountain. We can leave the basics to the other hunting pieces.
