Obeka, Temporal Mistress *Primer*
Commander / EDH Haste Midrange Multiplayer Primer Reanimator Sacrifice Theme/Gimmick Tokens UBR (Grixis)
Land (34)
- 1x Ancient Tomb
- 1x Badlands
- 1x Blightstep Pathway Flip
- 1x Blood Crypt
- 1x Bloodstained Mire
- 1x Clearwater Pathway Flip
- 1x Command Tower
- 1x Exotic Orchard
- 1x Haunted Ridge
- 2x Island
- 1x Luxury Suite
- 1x Maze of Ith
- 1x Morphic Pool
- 2x Mountain
- 1x Otawara, Soaring City
- 1x Plaza of Heroes
- 1x Polluted Delta
- 1x Reflecting Pool
- 1x Riverglide Pathway Flip
- 1x Scalding Tarn
- 1x Shipwreck Marsh
- 1x Steam Vents
- 1x Stormcarved Coast
- 2x Swamp
- 1x Takenuma, Abandoned Mire
- 1x Training Center
- 1x Underground Sea
- 1x Urborg, Tomb of Yawgmoth
- 1x Volcanic Island
- 1x Watery Grave
- 1x Xander's Lounge
Sorcery (5)
Creature (28)
- 1x Adric, Mathematical Genius
- 1x Anger
- 1x Archon of Cruelty
- 1x Arvinox, the Mind Flail
- 1x Ayara, Widow of the Realm Flip
- 1x Baral, Chief of Compliance
- 1x Braids, Arisen Nightmare
- 1x Brainstealer Dragon
- 1x Combustible Gearhulk
- 1x Dockside Extortionist
- 1x Etali, Primal Storm
- 1x Feldon of the Third Path
- 1x Hellkite Courser
- 1x Inferno Titan
- 1x Kiki-Jiki, Mirror Breaker
- 1x Kroxa, Titan of Death's Hunger
- 1x Ledger Shredder
- 1x Likeness Looter
- 1x Manaform Hellkite
- 1x Massacre Wurm
- 1x Nightscape Familiar
- 1x Orthion, Hero of Lavabrink
- 1x Puppeteer Clique
- 1x Purphoros, Bronze-Blooded
- 1x Saheeli, the Sun's Brilliance
- 1x Sepulchral Primordial
- 1x Terror of the Peaks
- 1x Wonder
Instant (10)
Commander (1)
Enchantment (11)
- 1x Black Market Connections
- 1x Collective Restraint
- 1x Cunning Rhetoric
- 1x Dawn of the Dead
- 1x Fable of the Mirror-Breaker Flip
- 1x Flameshadow Conjuring
- 1x Mind's Dilation
- 1x Phyrexian Arena
- 1x Propaganda
- 1x Rhystic Study
- 1x Sneak Attack
Artifact (11)
Maybeboard
Creature (3)
Instant (1)
Welcome to my Obeka, Brute Chronologist Primer. I've worked on and played this deck hundreds of times, with great fun and consistent success. The most important part of a deck like this is to keep it fun and dynamic for all the players, changing game by game but with consistent success, and with a lot of work and tweaking I’m happy to say that it's turned out fantastic.
The Key to this deck is that we can take advantage of many cards that have amazing, but short-term effects, and keep those permanently. Whether they sacrifice themselves upon entering, would be returned to our hands, or would exile permanently at the end of combat or the turn, they all put triggers on the stack, but most importantly, they only put those triggers on once. That means that with those on the stack we can use Obeka, Brute Chronologist to end the turn, clearing those triggers off the stack, never to be seen again.
Cards like Kiki-Jiki, Mirror Breaker, Feldon of the Third Path, Dawn of the Dead, and Sneak Attack are all perfect examples of this. Each requires us to exile or sacrifice those at the end of the turn, and yet we can just say no.
To take advantage of all of those cards, we want to set a few things up first. This is a deck that, while it can suddenly start ramping and attacking, does best with just one or two extra setup turns. Therefore, we're running cost reducers such as Baral, Chief of Compliance and Nightscape Familiar, ways to dump a few cards into our graveyard in Buried Alive and Entomb (I will discuss preferred targets later in this primer), and deterrents to attacking us with cards like Collective Restraint and Cunning Rhetoric to make sure we have all the time in the world to set our board up.
Now that we are set up for success, we’re going to start playing our engine. You’ll notice the higher curve among our creatures, and that is deliberate. Many of the best temporary effects sit on lower cost cards, cards which we can take advantage of, as they are permanent for us and allow us to access those high-power creatures far more easily than our opponents. Between graveyard recursion, stealing our opponents cards, and copying our own cards, we only really need to follow our curve up and the deck will provide for us. Overall, I’ve had a ton of fun playing this deck, and I highly recommend it to anyone looking to have a great time.
A few things I’d like to mention:
Firstly, is that a common mistake people make is with cards like Act of Treason and Insurrection, as well as any cards that say any version of “until end of turn” or “at the end of the turn”. There is a misunderstanding that we can keep those cards permanently. Obeka, Brute Chronologist allows us to clear everything off the stack and end the turn. This means that any card that puts a trigger on the stack to sacrifice it, exile it, etc. will stay permanently as those triggers only appear once. However, even when we end the turn early, we still discard down to hand size. This is because after every turn there is a cleanup phase where our mana pools empty, we drop down to hand size, and effects such as “until end of turn” are taken care of. We can’t stop or keep cleanup effects as they are in the grey area between turns. In addition, if we have to end our turn early, such as in response to removal or a board wipe, please note that our cards still retain their end of turn triggers. Any ability that says to sacrifice, exile, etc. at the beginning of the end step will only trigger one time. That is why we only have to end the turn once to keep them permanently. However, they still must trigger that one time. So, if we end the turn before our end step, before those triggers go on the stack, they will still trigger at the next end step, being our opponent’s end step. And as they both cannot end the turn early with Obeka, Brute Chronologist tapped and likely would not even if we did give them that option, you will lose anything that retains those triggers.
Secondly, I wanted to clarify one other thing with Obeka, Brute Chronologist’s ability. What it specifically does is give the player who’s turn it is that option to end the turn. There is nothing forced, and the only person who can decide that is the active player. Now, this can be in response to something like a board wipe on their turn, and you can use her ability politically, but more often than not we’re just going to use it to end our turn early and keep any new cards from being sacrificed or exiled.
Thirdly, you’ll notice that other than Buried Alive and Entomb we don’t run any tutors. I’ve found that unless I am in a high-power game, commander is a lot more fun to play without them. Tutors tend to lead me to play the deck the exact same way every time, always grabbing the same cards. And that is fantastic for certain decks and certain groups. But with how many cards we can “borrow” permanently from our opponents, the number of cards we can recur, and the consistency of this deck, it works perfectly without any and is a lot of fun. And that is a very important point for not only this deck, but every deck I make. I build in an extremely high level of consistency with a slightly below average level of interaction. My decks are designed to work every time, to move quickly and dynamically, and to always provide you with what you need regardless of whether you were just board wiped or are trying to close out the game. My build-style sacrifices a small amount of interaction for speed and consistency, choosing to leave my opponents alone a bit more and not draw attention to ourselves while stealing that extra turn or two to set up faster and more thoroughly than they have time to do.
- I will note that we do run Buried Alive and Entomb, but we run those for two specific reasons. Firstly, because we want to have a few cards in our graveyard to target with our recursion. We have a decent amount of it, but there’s no reason to heavily dump cards there as our recursion is a supportive engine rather than the primary one. A few cards will be enough as throughout the course of the game new ones will enter and leave it on their own. Secondly, the ability to throw Anger and/or Wonder into our graveyard is a really helpful addition to our deck.
Fourthly, and very importantly, we run several cards such as Corpse Dance that care about the order of your and your opponent’s graveyards (in the event your spell gets copied or stolen. The rules of magic state that your graveyard must always be in the same order that cards get put in it, but with so few cards still in use that care about the order, people have slacked off on this rule. You MUST tell your opponents before your start that their graveyards cannot be shuffled around, or the order changed as that can cause problems during the game.
Finally, don’t overthink everything. This Primer is designed to provide you with plenty of options every turn and every game, and it may seem overwhelming at first when you are not sure which card or effect to play or keep forever. There are rarely wrong answers. Relax, drop your shoulders, take a deep breathe, and choose the one that seems the most fun. Honestly. This is a deck that just works and Obeka, Brute Chronologist is a commander that you can only truly improve upon with play. She is very different from almost any other commander out there but is very rewarding and a lot of fun to play.
A couple of points on some of the card choices:
Creatures:
As I said earlier, this deck is heavily redundant, providing a consistent experience that allows for fun and dynamic games that still change every game. Unsurprisingly, we rely HEAVILY on our commander. I’ve played games without her as she had been board wiped 3 times, and everything works without her, but given that the entire design is built with her in mind, we want her in play at all times. As such there are very few cards that are absolutely essential to this deck. That being said, I will highlight a few of them.
Anger/Wonder: These are two of my favorite Buried Alive targets as we want them in our graveyards as soon as possible. Anger is the slightly more useful of the two for us as we want Obeka, Brute Chronologist to be able to tap as soon as possible, and we want to be able to fully utilize our creatures at will, but Wonder is amazing as well. You’ll note that Filth is in our maybeboard, a choice I made after running him for over a year. I decided that between the unreliability of our opponents running swamps (yes, we have Urborg, Tomb of Yawgmoth, but that’s 1/99 cards in our deck and not consistent) and the fact that I found it both made us very threatening and was not fun for any opponents running black. As such I chose to cut it.
Brainstealer Dragon: This is one of my favorite big creatures in this deck to pull out. It’s big without being too threatening, has flying coverage, constantly gives us access to more cards, and is not legendary. We don’t want too much attention until we’re ready for it, and Blargalarga Dragon gives us exactly that (I’ve long called him that as rather than roaring he looks like he’d try and instead it would come out as Blargalargalargalargalarga, so he’s become the Blargalarga Dragon in my play group). He is a fantastic deterrent given his size and flying, but even better, his effect is automatic. People tend to take notice when you actively cast spells against them. But, with consistent effects that automatically trigger every turn, they become accustomed to them and within a turn or two stop noticing it has heavily. Lastly, he’s not legendary. That means that we can make as many copies of him with Kiki-Jiki, Mirror Breaker, Feldon of the Third Path, Fable of the Mirror-Breaker , etc. as we want. And his final effect stacks with each other, so any card we bring out from our opponents hurts them exponentially more for each Brainstealer Dragon we control. He’s a fantastic card and a lot of fun to play.
Hellkite Courser: Unlike with most commanders, Obeka, Brute Chronologist can take far greater advantage of our hellkite. As an ETB (Enter the battlefield) trigger, it doesn’t matter if we cast him, copy him, or recur him from the graveyard. Drop him on your board, play your commander for free, and in response to the trigger to return it to the command zone at the beginning of the next end step we can just end the turn and keep her permanently.
Instants and Sorceries:
We run very few instants or sorceries in this deck, and the majority of them are designed to either Counter problematic spells, Place or Recur cards from our graveyard, or remove individual threats. We may take a few from our opponents, but we have a few in here for consistency and because occasionally you will run into a problem for which you need an answer and can't afford to just pray you exile one off the top of a deck.
Instants:
Corpse Dance: Always pay the buyback if you can, but if you can’t it’s not the end of the world. Being able to consistently grab the top creature in your graveyard and keep it over and over is delightful.
Sorceries:
Buried Alive: While it is obviously situational, I often try to grab Anger, Wonder, and then something like Brainstealer Dragon,Arvinox, the Mind Flail, or Kiki-Jiki, Mirror Breaker and put them in the graveyard in that order. As a reminder, several of our recursion spells and enchantments care about the order of our graveyard and recur specifically the top creature in it. As such, you want to make sure Anger and Wonder are as far down in your graveyard as possible so you don’t accidentally grab them with your recursion and weaken your whole board. I recommend Anger be your bottom card, as while Wonder giving everything flying is amazing, the ability to always have haste is far more powerful in this deck and allows us to recover from board-wipes an entire turn earlier since Obeka, Brute Chronologist is our linchpin and needs to tap to activate and resume our engine.
Enchantments:
Our enchantments are designed to help us do one thing and one thing only: More. They’ll give us more cards (both ours and our opponent’s), deter and prevent us from being attacked, or give us more creatures. And boy do they do it well.
Collective Restraint: A less well-known sibling of Ghostly Prison, Propaganda, and Koskun Falls, this card is fantastic in any deck that 3 or more colors. Every additional mana it costs to attack someone matters, as it adds up quickly. People see cards like this and expect it to cost one or two mana, and budget as such. Losing three mana per attacker is a lot and more often than not people will not remember to set that much mana aside before combat, or will simply elect to attack someone else.
Dawn of the Dead: Synergizes beautifully with Obeka, Brute Chronologist, but make sure you have plenty of options in your graveyard first as this will hurt you regardless of whether you have viable targets.
Sneak Attack: With Obeka, Brute Chronologist allowing us to keep all of our creatures, this is an amazing addition that lets us play all of our creatures for one red mana.
Artifacts:
Anvil of Bogardan: One of my favorite artifacts for any deck that interacts with graveyards. The group hug aspect of drawing additional cards keeps our opponents happy, while the discard part allows us to stock both our own as well as our opponents graveyards with plenty of targets for our graveyard theft and recursion.
Thank you for taking a look at my Primer for Obeka, Brute Chronologist. Please feel free to post thoughts and suggestions in the comments as I love working with people on my decks and their own, and every chance to improve it is appreciated. In addition, I’m happy to explain any other card choices and you're welcome to use this deck list as Obeka always loves to meet new friends!
Feedback and +1's are always appreciated!
Enjoy!
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96% Casual
Competitive
| Top Ranked |
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| Date added | 3 years |
| Last updated | 2 weeks |
| Exclude colors | WG |
| Legality | This deck is Commander / EDH legal. |
| Rarity (main - side) | 17 - 0 Mythic Rares 64 - 0 Rares 10 - 0 Uncommons 3 - 0 Commons |
| Cards | 100 |
| Avg. CMC | 3.53 |
| Tokens | Bird 2/2 U, Copy Clone, Dragon Illusion */* R, Goblin Shaman, Shapeshifter 3/2 C, Treasure |
| Folders | Decks to play, Favorites |
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