Started working on a new Oathbreaker deck using pieces from one of my existing Commander decks. I basically culled the stax pieces off my
Aminatou, the Fateshifter
deck to create a 60-card combo-control deck for Oathbreaker. The deck also has Aminatou at the helm with
Eerie Interlude
for its Signature Spell. I have managed to do a bit of playtesting and the deck performed a lot better than I initially expected. Despite having almost half of the original deck, we are still able to exert a decent amount of control against a fairly competitive 4-man pod. I will be doing more playtesting in the coming days but for now let me give you guys a quick rundown of what the deck is all about.
Deck Tech
As mentioned earlier, this is a combo-control deck with relies a lot on abusing ETB abilities. This requires a sufficient amount of creatures and permanents with relevant ETB abilities such as draw, bounce, sacrifice and detain effects to keep the table and the game under our control. Creatures like
Wall of Omens
and
Baleful Strix
provide us with early game defense and card advantage. Creatures like
Venser, Shaper Savant
and
Reflector Mage
gives us with some bounce effects while
Rishadan Footpad
and
Rishadan Cutpurse
force our opponents to sacrifice permanents. As i'm sure you can imagine, the more creatures we have in play, the more oppressive our gameplay becomes. And with every trigger and re-trigger of these ETB abilities, we can watch the gap between our boardstate and that of our opponents gets wider and wider. The deck ends to win games using a number of game-ending combos. They are listed and discussed in the next section.
Key Cards, Win Conditions and Notable Interactions
Altar of the Brood
Aside from the cards which allow us to assert control, the deck also has several key pieces that allow us to combo off and win the game. The easiest of these is using
Felidar Guardian
and
Altar of the Brood
. In this combo, use Aminatou and Felidar Guardian to flicker each other to repeatedly trigger Altar of the Brood. This decks out our opponents, making them draw from an empty library during their draw phase which results to a loss. Alternatively, we can also accomplish this by substituting Aminatou with
Restoration Angel
.
Panharmonicon
In this combo, we replace Altar of the Brood with
Panharmonicon
. Similar to the first combo, we use Aminatou and Felidar Guardian to create a flicker loop only this time, the Guardian triggers twice because of Panharmonicon. We can use the second trigger to flicker another permanent. Although this does not win us the game outright, it gives us access to an arbitrarily large amount of mana and/or infinite ETB triggers. One way of winning using this combo is by repeatedly flickering
Inquisitor Exarch
.
Parallax Wave
and
Felidar Guardian
In this combo we use
Parallax Wave
and
Felidar Guardian
to set up infinite ETB triggers. Doing this requires at least one more creature with an ETB ability. Here, we use Felidar Guardian's ability to flicker Parallax Wave. Upon targeting, we respond by removing up to 5 Fade Counters from Parallax Wave to exile Felidar Guardian and up to four other creatures. This creates a loop resulting to infinite ETB triggers.
The deck has several similar, albeit clunkier interactions that I did not include in this primer-of-sorts. I will leave them for you to discover when you decide to make this deck for yourself. If these win cons fail, we can always rely on the tried and tested method of turning our creatures sideways.
