Toshiro Umezawa has been one of my favorite cards for a long time. I've built many decks around him, but none of them have felt quite right. The decks with him as the commander lacked spice: they just killed all the creatures on the board and did nothing else. The secret commander decks were either abysmally bad or they were good enough that Toshiro Umezawa didn't even feel like one of the best cards in the deck. In both cases, though, Toshiro Umezawa either sat on the table doing nothing, or he gave me one crazy turn, after which everyone wanted to kill him. What I really wanted was for him to be on the table for a long time, slowly accruing value.

With this deck, I think I may have finally cracked the code. Salvaging Station is a fun build around card that likes when creatures die, just like Toshiro Umezawa. So, this deck is packed full of tutors for Salvaging Station and zero and one mana artifacts that sacrifice themselves so that we can be drawing cards or ramping while Toshiro Umezawa is allowing us to mow down our opponents' boards.

In building this deck, I gave myself the restriction that I could only use cards that were printed in a standard-legal, non-Universes Beyond set. I also required that I use the original printing of the card, which priced out some cards that have been around since Alpha.

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