This deck came about after being bored with playing the same control strategy over and over again. I love to be a complete and utter dickbag when it comes to playing EDH, at least against other competitive people or people who I just find obnoxious and need a proper ass whooping. Anyways this deck is kind of straight forward but not so much. YES, I know Grand Arbiter is a better commander but I already have a Prison/Lockdown deck with him and I love Derevi's colors even though I only have a minute amount of green cards. Plus Derevi's ability is pretty nice considering I can untap some of my stuff to keep a Stasis going or what not. I will update the deck with descriptions of my choices soon. Suggestions and criticism is welcome.
So it probably makes sense to first go over the essence of the deck and its win conditions and overall game plan and what not, so let's do it.
To start off, the style of this deck is called Stax. What it basically is is a prison deck with taxing abilities that makes games painfully long and boring if your opponents stick through with it or ends games extremely quickly from rage quits. The deck maintains itself by playing cards that stall your opponents from playing bombs and hopefully keeps them from doing anything productive. I don't worry myself too much with cards like Fracturing Gusts for probably bad reasons, but countermagic does not fit into the niche of the deck style to prevent one-sided board wipes on my field. I simply hope and pray they can't get to a point to wipe my field from all the taxing and slowing down abilities. I have a few win cons, all of which seem pretty fragile and almost anemic in some cases, but they have multiple functions in the deck as well.
So, starting off with win cons in the deck. There aren't any "main" win cons, meaning that there are a variety of ways to achieve the same victory:
One win condition is the use of Sword of Feast and Famine with any of the creatures in the deck, but usually Derevi. Having that out equipped to Hokori, Dust Drinker or another brutal lock down card gives you ridiculous and basically unbeatable advantage because you have so much resource to spend on whatever you want when your opponents should have a fairly anemic board.
Basic win conditions that take time to finish the game but can definitely close them out are
Frost Titan
and Gideon Jura. Gideon acts as a pseudo-removal spell for pesky creatures and can end games fairly quickly with empty boards. The same idea applies to Titan. Especially in this kind of deck, landing this card basically shuts down the game and puts your opponents on total lockdown. Keep in mind this is a multiplayer deck, as Derevi is banned in 1v1 competitive play. Even as a multiplayer deck these win cons are fairly consistent and strong.
Other win cons, while harder to maintain and slightly more fragile, is the ultimate on my planeswalkers. I definitely want to find room for Tamiyo, the Moon Sage and Karn Liberated to make my deck more controllish. Anyways Jace, the Mind Sculptor is so beyond busted and when it can't get answered it sits there upticking until you exile an entire library, which is absolutely hilarious. Tezzeret the Seeker and his ulti can easily kill an opponent with all the artifacts I have in the deck.
Now that that's is out of the way, I can go more in depth to each card and why I chose to put it in the deck.
Let's start with sorcery choices. All of the sorceries in the deck play a similar role and accomplish the same task, which is keep the board clear of creatures that can kill me:
Day of Judgment, Wrath of God: Fairly self explanatory board wipes that keep me in the game and get me out of sticky situations. It keeps the board clear and clean of threats and annoyances, creating an equal field for all except me who still has all of his asshole stax cards, which for the most part are not creatures.
Hallowed Burial, Terminus: Nothing is more frustrating than getting your commander tucked to the bottom of your deck, because chances are you'll never see it again. Not only that, but these cards are great against graveyard decks that want creatures just chillin out in the graveyard. It also efficient against annoyances like Avacyn and the such.
My instant choices are fairly simple. I already said I want to avoid countermagic for numerous reasons, not because it is frowned upon in my play group but because it goes against some of the cards in the deck and it gets difficult to hold up countermagic because I'm also locking myself down early:
Swords to Plowshares: Easy addition as a permanent answer to an indestructible creature or something blocking my path to victory. Especially nice against Avacyn and the Eldrazi titans.
Cylonic Rift: EDH blue staple. It's very hard to run a blue deck in commander without this complete and total powerhouse. It completely resets the board and puts my opponents in a very tough position once I have established a board presence that stops them from playing numerous spells each turn.
My enchantment sweet it totally awesome. Something that makes good commander decks good is the redundancy within the deck itself which is tough to accomplish in commander, but nonetheless is easily done in this deck:
Taxing Enchantments:
AEther Barrier
, Rhystic Study, Overburden, Propaganda, Ghostly Prison, Aura of Silence,
In the Eye of Chaos
,
Invoke Prejudice
, Karmic Justice, Martyr's Bond,
Pendrell Mists
,
Squeeze
: All of these enchantments serve similar purposes: Make my opponent trade 2 for 1 or even more for playing relevant cards and set back their board state. The idea of these cards is to "tax" players, which means that by playing a spell or activating an ability they must sacrifice something in return, effectively "taxing" them for their given play.
The rest of the enchantments serve to slow down my opponents and give me an advantage:
Arcane Laboratory, Rule of Law: Both of these are amazing against combo decks, fast decks, basically any deck that wants to play more than one spell a turn, so most EDH Decks. It also pairs nicely with Erayo's Essence, which I suprisingly flip more often than not and cause a hardlock for my opponents.
Kismet,
Frozen AEther
: Great enchantments that slow my opponents down in so many different aspects. These cards are a little weak against ramp decks but still suffice to be absolutely amazing in every situation.
City of Solitude: One of the reasons I chose to avoid countermagic mostly. It also makes it so I'm safe to do whatever I want on my own turn without worry of opposing countermagic or removal.
Stasis: No words for how dumb this card is with Derevi, just no words at all.
The creature suite is also simple to explain:
Angelic Arbiter is fantastic at getting opponents to second guess their plays and give me much needed time to get answers or pull ahead on board and advantage. It also has a good body.
Aven Mindcensor is anemic but useful against black decks. Yes it shuts off my fetchlands but it rarely occurs where the two conflict with each other. Any tutoring strategy and this card just goes nuts. It is tiny however and usually doesn't survive long.
Erayo and Titan have been covered above.
Grand Arbiter Augustin IV is my baby. He is a secondary general basically to Derevi and is so insanely good and frustrating. It might seem like changing the mana costs by 1 isn't so obtrusive but it totally throws off players game plans.
Hokori, Dust Drinker is awesome and provides a similar effect to Winter Orb, plus it's a body to put my sword onto.
Lighthouse Chronologist is just a dick card, I probably am going to take it out, but it's performed well so far.
Linvala, Keeper of Silence is good against a number of creatures and is just a solid card with a great mana cost for her ability.
Lodestone Golem doesn's usually slow me down to much and is a solid body with a nice Sphere of Resistance barring artifacts attached to it, allowing me to throw my mana rocks onto the board without hesitation and get ahead on mana.
Magus of the Tabernacle is just a cheaper version of its land bound cousin The Tabernacle at Pendrell Vale also considering how hard it is to find a tabernacle.
Prophet of Kruphix and Seedborn Muse serve the exact same purpose for untapping my lands and just giving me such a huge advantage on board.
Spelltithe Enforcer
is so absolutely insanely good in every way shape and form. I love it as a card so much and it's just such a great taxing creature.
Vorinclex, Voice of Hunger is my second favorite praetor right behind Jin-Gitaxias, Core Augur, and is great in a deck like this where it bascically gives me Winter Orb and Mirari's Wake for the same amount of mana but with a huge nasty body attached.
All of the artifacts are self-explanatory. They serve as mana rocks to avoid a need to use my lands,
Crawlspace serves as a temporary out or a restraint against token decks, as does Silent Arbiter.
Mana Web is awesome and serves a similar function to City of Solitude and also stops weird combat tricks or whatever random shenanigans that happen to be laying around,
Grafdigger's Cage for graveyard decks and the occasional
Panglacial Wurm
Sphere of Resistance to slow my opponents down, as well as myself, but hey, I'm in no rush.
Static Orb and Winter Orb serve the same purpose to simply slow my opponents down to give me time to set up a game plane.
Tangle Wire totally messes with game plans and mana curve draws and buys me so much time to sit and gain enough of an advantage to act on it.
Unwinding Clock and Voltaic Key keep my mana rocks open to add massive amounts of mana, epsecially because some require mana payments to untap.
Ward of Bones keeps the board state equal so I don't have to worry about being out raced or what not.
