The most basic element of this deck is cards that control your opponent, mostly with ETB or LTB effects. After all, little is more demoralizing than spending a couple mana to undo someone's entire turn. To that end, you'll run the following cards:
Act of Authority
: ETB exile an artifact or enchantment. You can technically give it away on our upkeep to get rid of another thing, but you shouldn't unless absolutely mandatory, since doing so gives the table a tool to fight against your board, and you can usually cause the same effect other ways.
AEther Adept
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Man-o'-War
: Bounce a creature ETB. Pretty simple, but still effective at stopping someone from ever getting their big threat to stay in play. These also force your opponent to keep wasting mana replaying the same stuff if they don't want you to shrink their board down to nothing.
Reality Acid
: LTB sacrifice the enchanted permanent. This card is AMAZING. This targets any permanent. IT makes your opponent sacrifice the target, so it beats indestructible or regenerate. Heck, because of how flickering auras works, it can attach to hexproof or shroud permanents after the initial casting (auras re-entering play attach to permanents without targeting said permanent). The only downsides are that is has to attach, then stay put until you flicker it to move to new things, so if the thing it is attached to dies for any other reason you lose your cool enchantment, and if you lose the ability to flicker the card then it does nothing for a long time before eventually removing itself.
Reflector Mage
: Bounce a creature ETB. This one has the added benefit of stopping your opponent from replaying the creature for a turn, keeping things gone for longer and making it almost twice as good as our other single target bounce cards.
Nevermaker
: LTB put a permanent on top of your opponent's library. This is one of the best cards in the deck. If you target a single player with this every turn, and they don't have a way to draw extra cards repeatedly, they never get to draw new cards again, making them a non-threat. This also keeps working until your opponent has literally no cards left in play, so it is nearly impossible to get out of unless they already had a way to disrupt your engine in hand or in play.
Stonehorn Dignitary
: ETB force a player to skip their next combat step. Because it is skipping steps, not just stopping creatures from attacking, you can even stack this ability on someone for multiple turns if you get the ETB multiple times in a row. Creature damage decks of all shapes and sizes beware!
Lavinia of the Tenth
: ETB detain all non-land permanents you don't control with CMC 4 or less. Completely shuts down many token or aggro decks, stops almost all mana generators other than lands from functioning, and randomly hurts most other decks as well, since everyone uses low CMC cards at some point or another. Getting all your opponents with one card is great, and the protection from red is also occasionally helpful.
Riftwing Cloudskate
: ETB bounce a permanent. This being able to target any permanent increases its value drastically. Focus fire on a single opponent and their lands, and they'll be stuck with their current number of land drops forever.
Azor, the Lawbringer
: ETB prevent sorceries and instants from your opponents' during their next turns. The instant ban is mostly pointless other than disrupting some combos since they can just be played on other people's turns, but stopping sorceries altogether is AMAZING, because it shuts off most board wipes, which tend to be one of the biggest weaknesses for your permanent-heavy deck. 6 power in the air is also nothing to sneeze at, and the second effect is worth mentioning in a later section.
Sunblast Angel
: ETB destroy all tapped creatures. Take out all those pesky creatures on the first play, then frighten your opponents into not attacking. Your creatures can still attack willy-nilly, because as long as Brago hits you can flicker all the ones that attacked to make them return untapped. Be mindful when you play this card, though. If you have token creatures, your commander can't protect them from being wiped because they can't be flickered. This also hurts your use of auras on
Brago, King Eternal
, because he must be flickered to avoid being wiped, which means all the auras on him must be dissipated to other, unflickered creatures, potentially stalling your engine depending on what your auras were doing.
Vedalken Dismisser
: ETB putting a creature on top of its owner's library. This is a worse version of
Nevermaker
due to higher cost and more limited targets, but it can still lock players out of the game if they aren't careful, or at least make them skip several turns while they wait to run out of creatures you can put back.
Luminate Primordial
: Giving your opponents extra life is not something you like to do, but this is worth it. Exile one creature ETB for each opponent! That's up to three exiles per turn, and can be a crippling swing play. Just, you know, aim it at the lower toughness things when possible, let your other removal get the bigger targets.
Resolute Archangel
: ETB bring your life total up to 40. While not exactly controlling your opponent, this does effectively nullify any non commander damage that they deal to you without killing you each round, so... close enough?
Scourge of Fleets
: ETB bounce all of your opponents' creatures with a low toughness. So kill all small tokens, bounce all utility creatures, every turn? Sounds good. This gets stronger as you get more islands, too, until it is eventually just bouncing everything every turn.
Spine of Ish Sah
: ETB destroy a permanent. Any permanent. Plus if someone destroys it, it goes back to your hand instead, making it highly resistant to being removed by others.
