Introduction
Do you enjoy Interacting with your opponents?
Do you like Disrupting their plans in order to achieve yours?
Do you feel satisfied after winning a game of long strategy and good threat assessment?
Well boy have you come to the wrong place
Welcome to Interactive _Gameplay.deck, which does the exact opposite of what the title says.
Real Introduction
This is a deck with a "Flip" Commander, which means, by definition, that is is complete jank.
Sasaya, Orochi Ascendant / Sasaya's Essence
Is a gem given to us by the extravangant Kamigawa block.
With this Commander, the goal of the deck is to flood ourselves with 7 lands in hand, Flip Sasaya, and then win with an absurd amount of mana. Pretty easy right? The deck is filled with ways to either draw more cards every turn or fetch lands, as well as spells that benefit from having 100+ mana. This deck is meant to be very casual and win on turn 7-10. In fact, I have included very few ways of winning on the spot when making absurd amounts of mana. Giving my opponents an entire turn cycle to deal with whatever monstruosity i've put on the board is part of the fun, in my opinion.
Interaction
What makes this deck so interesting and fun to play is that your opponents have very little information about how your game plan is going, and also very few ways of interacting with you. The only way to stop you is to either
-Prevent you from having 7 Lands in hand, which, unless someone is running heavy hand disruption, means that they have to destroy janky utility artifacts like a literal
Renegade Map
, and no one wants to do that.
-Use a plain old counterspell to prevent you from having your commander. In my meta, this doesn't happen too often, so I just have a
Veil of Summer
to get me out of it. If your meta runs more Blue Controlling decks, consider adding
Autumn's Veil
and even
Cavern of Souls
to ensure the win.
One thing that people overlook when first seing sasaya is that it's virtually immune to creature removal spells. If an opponent ever tries to kill it, you can just reveal your hand to flip Sasaya into an enchantment, fizzling the kill spell. Even if that spell was a catch-all removal, like
Beast Within
, you can transform sasaya and float absurd amounts of mana before it gets destroyed.
All of this makes our deck extremely hard to stop and allow us to focus almost exclusively on our own game plan, which is the reason why I've only included 2 pieces of interaction in the whole deck;
Beast Within
and
Primal Command
.
Winning With 7 Lands In Hand
Because we need to have a full grip of lands before safely casting Sasaya, keeping Game-winning cards in our hand can prove to be difficult. Because of that, God-awful cards like
Renegade Map
,
Armillary Sphere
and
Journeyer's Kite
can finally have their glory day. These types of cards allow us to Fetch lands right before our turn while also having room to keep a wincon in our hand. All that's left to do is Flip Sasaya and take out your calculators.
The best possible line of play to win is to cast Sasaya with 5-6 lands in hand, and some sort of instant speed land-fetcher in hand or on board. With this set up, we can get to 7 Lands in hand during our opponents turn if they try to kill our Commander, while also having a Wincon ready for when we next untap. This line is pretty risky though, as our opponents have an entire turn cycle to use 2 Removal spells (First Creature, then Enchantment), or one catch-all Removal to ruin our plans. The safer way to go would be to cast sasaya and immediatly flip it, althought we would be using 3 of our lands in the process.
From the moment we have a bunch of mana available, the deck can win in a variety of ways. Most of the time that includes swarming the board with tokens like
Gelatinous Genesis
and waiting a turn to kill everyone. Other Times we pump one of our utility creature into oblivion and knock our opponents one by one with stuff like
Kamahl, Fist of Krosa
. If we're lucky, our opponents ignored us all game and we can
Hurricane
them out of the game all at once. And the best of times we use the good old
Genesis Wave
, Get a bunch more lands, any kind of mana-sink, and we tap for an actually absurd amount of mana into it and watch our opponents scoop.
Is This Deck For You
Now of course, as stated above, this deck is very light on interaction, and your opponents have very limited ways of dealing with you too. Because of this, 4 player games with Sasaya in them should be considered as 3 player games with a random Doom clock around turn 8-10. And that's part of the fun! The deck itself is very casual, and is meant to be stopped in its rails by a boardwipe or literally any permanent that hinders attacks. I consider it to be part of the fun! Having games with insane comebacks really make the game more enjoyable, and this deck lets people do whatever they can to make that comeback. It's the polar opposite of a control deck. Let people have their fun! Just let them know they're on a clock, though.
Of course, because of the way the deck rolls, it most likely gets boring to play it over and over again. I personnaly use the deck about once or twice a week, when I start to get tired of politics and arguing with others. It's more of a filler deck really, and it's fine to consider it that way because it's also a fairly cheap investment! Half of our cards are complete jank, the other half are forests! there's a few more expensive cards here and there but overall, this deck can easily be built under a 50$ budget, if you wanted to.
This will probably never be your favorite deck that you play over and over again, but it will always be a nice trick to pull off every so often when new people come to your LGS and you want to jank 'em out. It's a flip Commander, what else can i say?
If you like the idea of the deck but want some upgrades to fit a more intense meta, there are some options : as mentionned earlier, protection cards like
Autumn's Veil
and
Cavern of Souls
are a must, but also generic more expensive card draw in green, such as
Sylvan Library
, can be considered. Foiling out the forests in the deck is also a good way to improve your win percentage, as everyone knows! An important thing to note though is that Sasaya only Increases the mana production of lands that share a name, so although
Reliquary Tower
could have its place in the deck, i prefer to avoid it as it greatly reduces the mana we get on our winning turn.
And that's about it for my Sasaya deck! I hope you enjoyed it and hopefully pull off the
Genesis Wave
"X= My Deck" once in a while!
Suggestions are welcome!
