Dumpster Fire.Jpeg
Hey-O, this is my
Lavinia, Azorius Renegade
deck tech. This card is pretty interesting as a commander, it certainly has a better place in Modern I think, but I thought it would be interesting to brew around. Now looking around TappedOut it seemed like most people were building her as your typical Azorius prison or stax deck. That's not fun, I won't have it. I've played against a
Grand Arbiter Augustin IV
deck once and that was enough for me to clean my hands of that strategy. Now that being said, this is kind of a control deck. It's mostly just being annoying and aggravating everyone else at the board without preventing them from playing the game necessarily. I'm not going to tax everything they play, and there's not a stupid amount of counterspells.
This isn't my traditional type of deck to build, I'm much more of a Jund boy at heart. Regardless this is obviously how Lavinia wants to play, so I went along with it. I think we do a good enough job of aggravating our opponents without the use of cards with
Winter Orb
,
Static Orb
,
Aura of Silence
,
Sphere of Resistance
,
Smokestack
,
Hokori, Dust Drinker
,
Tangle Wire
, etc.
We can all agree these cards are just inherently not fun and slow the game down to a snail's pace. Now you might say "well
Armageddon
isn't very fun either, and it also slows games down." and you might be right, but it plays into our commander's abilities just like
Overburden
,
Mana Breach
, and
Mana Vortex
so we're gonna play them. Anyway, this deck might be annoying in the eyes of some people but it's what Lavinia wants, don't blame me. Let's get into the breakdown for this deck.
Making Things Difficult:
Most of the deck fits neatly into this theme, where the purpose of the card is just to make life less easy for our opponents. Let's start off with a card most people will recognize
Angelic Arbiter
, this angel does a great job of having our opponents make tough choices every turn, which is generally good for us. Another notable angel is
Angel of Jubilation
which works as a lord for all out non-black creatures as well as totally cutting out the idea of any sac-mechanics.
Aven Mindcensor
and
Leonin Arbiter
make it harder to search libraries, which is generally good for us.
Chancellor of the Annex
and
Spelltithe Enforcer
are two of the only tax-related cards in the deck and that's just because they're so good. Pay the mana or you'll regret it, this is just one more thing we can do to make our opponents feel like they never have enough land.
Containment Priest
is just circumstantially annoying, and I happened to pull one in Ultimate Masters.
Fatespinner
just straight up takes a phase from our opponents, which is crazy.
Grand Abolisher
makes their instants feel worse, who wants to play those things at sorcery speed anyway?
I included the package of
Hushwing Gryff
,
Torpor Orb
, and
Tocatli Honor Guard
just because they're always obnoxious whenever anyone else plays them against literally any deck I own. Also we included a few key creatures who might like it if those cards are out.
Loxodon Gatekeeper
is so annoying, and I like that he hits lands too.
Meddling Mage
can just shut out a commander, worth the include.
Damping Sphere
can really mess with people's non-basic lands, as well as make it so it's even harder to play more than one spell per turn.
Grafdigger's Cage
says no to Graveyard interactions. A fun combo a lot of you are likely familiar with is the ol'
Teferi, Mage of Zhalfir
and
Knowledge Pool
. This is in here, because it's uber annoying. Also included is
Omen Machine
for obvious reasons.
A few more annoying enchantments are:
Solemnity
because I don't know if there's a card in here that this impacts (there's one). Also the aforementioned
Mana Breach
,
Mana Vortex
, and
Overburden
as well as
Back to Basics
really just to make having lands as difficult as possible. I apologize in advance.
Removal, wipes, etc.
So, since we basically just wanna say "no" to everything our opponents want to do, removal seems like a good thing to have in the event that they play cards. First off,
Intrepid Hero
has got to be one of the most annoying cards for any Timmy to see across the table. It's very annoying if you can't get rid of it, it can just lock down your board.
Palace Jailer
is like
Oblivion Ring
on a creature that also has the upside of providing the monarchy to us, which I think is always fun.
Elspeth, Sun's Champion
can get rid of any big baddies that might be lingering, as well as provide us with much needed blockers.
Oblivion Stone
is a nuclear option for us, but it's nice to have and sometimes just having it out on the field is enough to incentiveize opponents to not play their best cards.
Austere Command
and
Mystic Confluence
are both modal spells that provide us with removal.
Cataclysm
is a good way to thin down the board, and ensure that not much else gets added to it as it also gets rid of lands, the only downside is that your opponents get to choose what they keep.
Cyclonic Rift
is everybody's favorite multiplayer bounce spell at instant speed, and it's also pretty nasty if we have
Mana Breach
or
Overburden
out.
Disenchant
is in here for our opponents things, as well as ours. There are certain cards in the deck that don't work together well (I'm looking at YOU
Solemnity
and
Azor's Elocutors
).
Misdirection
I'm sure will act as removal for us from time to time.
Swords to Plowshares
is also quite good, I decided to include this instead of
Path to Exile
because I don't want my opponents to get any more land than necessary.
Card Draw
We're playing a control deck here, and as such we definitely want to have as many answers as possible. I didn't work in a ridiculous amount of card draw, and I might tweek that as time goes on, but here's what we have:
Dragonlord Ojutai
is one of the few real beaters in this deck, and he also has some built in evasion and gives us card selection.
Jace's Archivist
let's us dig for answers while also disrupting our opponents and, hopefully, they'll be able to play less cards than we will so we'll net a couple cards from the archivist every time it goes off. The aforementioned
Palace Jailer
does make us the monarch, so there's some card draw there.
Dovin Baan
is in here because he can debuff our opponent's creatures, making their attacks worse. He also can draw us cards if we need him to, and in the unlikely event that he gets to ult, that's a win-con.
Windfall
needs no explanation.
Fact or Fiction
is one of my favorite ways to draw cards, so it's in here. Of course, the aforementioned
Mystic Confluence
can draw us three cards at instant speed. The next few cards aren't exactly card draw, but they're quasi card draw:
Fabricate
and
Idyllic Tutor
both let us grab a combo piece or the answer we need to shut somebody down.
Endless Horizons
is a card that I feel like a lot of people sleep on. It's maybe a little risky but it serves to thin out our deck and make our draws feel better as well as reliably giving us a land every upkeep. I'm a huge fan of it.
Win-Cons
Alright, so we know how the deck works and what it wants to do, so the next logical question is "How do we win?". It's a good question too. There's a few ways, and I wanted to use as many alternate win-cons as possible.
Azor's Elocutors
is a card I've always wanted to win with, but have just never been able to (largely because it's not in any of my decks).
Approach of the Second Sun
is another card that falls into that category, seems like it would be cool but I've never pulled it off. We're stalling for enough time that I think it's possible. It may seem a bit 'pie in the sky' but
Luminarch Ascension
could get us there if we're able to deprive our opponents of enough resources and options.
Mechanized Production
is another alternate win-con that puts us on a 7 turn clock. This isn't the best card since we're not using nay other means to make tokens or token copies of our artifacts, but it's fine enough for the value it provides and the option to win if our opponents can't stop us. We touched upon this earlier, but
Teferi, Mage of Zhalfir
and
Knowledge Pool
shut all our opponnets out of the game, it also works with
Omen Machine
. What's really great is that our commander can act as an alternative to
Teferi, Mage of Zhalfir
in this combo, since those cards would be letting our opponents cast cards without paying their mana cost.
Anyway, that's all she wrote. If you have any suggestions, they're much appreciated. I don't build decks like this really, so it definitely helps me improve the deck.
