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Maze's End: Attacking is for Chumps

Commander / EDH

Monduck

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Land (45)

Sorcery (16)

Artifact (9)

Enchantment (8)

Commander (1)

Commander: Garth One-Eye

Creature (14)

Instant (7)

Maybeboard

Land (8)

Sorcery (3)

Artifact (2)

Creature (2)

Instant (1)

Finally, an ALL-IN Maze's End deck! This deck is truly about showcasing all the durdl-ey glory of winning with a pile of god-awful dual lands, because attacking is for chumps.

The commander is incidental; I'm using a house-ruled Genju of the Realm, simply because it's sort of on-theme in a lands-based deck, but really I don't think it's going to get cast. Winning by beating down with an enchanted Maze's End is still technically winning with Maze's End, though.

The goal here is to win with Maze's End, 100% of the time, or not win at all. This means protecting our lands, since we only have a handful of Guild Gates. Think Crucible of Worlds, Life from the Loam, Ramunap Excavator, Splendid Reclamation, and in the most dire of straits Riftsweeper and Pull from Eternity. Nobody keeps Maze's End down.

As for actually pulling off the Maze's End win, there are a few go-to ways to make it happen:

  • Scapeshift into the win. Far and away the easiest way to pull it off, you just need 9 lands in play (since you'll have to activate Maze's End's ability to actually win, you can get gate #10 that way). Since it's a singleton we do have to have some backups of course.

  • Maze's End grinding, literally activating the ability enough times to win. This obviously takes awhile, but there are a few good ways to make it go much faster. The best way to accelerate this process is with Amulet of Vigor, which lets Maze's End enter untapped along with the gate it fetches, which can then be used to pay to activate the ability another time. Once you have multiple land drops to make (via Exploration etc) you can start using End as many times per turn as you have mana and land drops. Rings of Brighthearth is another nice way to speed it up by copying the Maze's End ability.

  • Just put all of the lands into play the old fashioned way. This does actually work, and is basically the universal backup plan. Having lots of Gate tutors like Circuitous Route, Tempt with Discovery, Hour of Promise, Gatecreeper Vine and Realms Uncharted helps a lot in the process. Eventually, you'll still need to find and activate Maze's End, but without Amulet or Rings it's often faster to ramp the Gates out with other cards and just save End for the finish. Cantrips and card draw also help a lot here, ensuring we keep hitting land drops to feed Azusa, Lost but Seeking and company and avoid needing to run as many non-gate lands as we would have to otherwise.

On top of all this, our opponents may well be trying to beat us down, which puts a damper on everything. Since the deck really doesn't play to the board much, we need a few dedicated slots to stay alive. In general, these are going to be prison cards rather than sweepers, since they tend to get more mileage in keeping us alive longer with fewer resources. These slots include things like Meekstone, Island Sanctuary, Solitary Confinement and Glacial Chasm.

A few other ideas coming down the pipeline to top it all off:

  • It occurs to me that we're going to need at least a little bit of removal, since Pithing Needle naming Maze's End is a game breaker. Ideally I can find some removal that can provide some synergy with the rest of the deck.

  • Splendid Reclamation seems stong. Very very strong. This card could potentially play out like Scapeshift, if there's a decent way to mill most or all of the deck and fish this out of the graveyard all in one go. Seems pretty possible, but I don't do a lot of dreging in general so I'll need to dig a little deeper. Ideally, this could be a chain that one/two cards could kick off, that won't take up a ton of slots.

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98% Casual

Competitive