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Perplexing Evolution

Commander / EDH

Joe0

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Land (30)

Instant (8)

Creature (25)

Sorcery (10)

Planeswalker (1)

Commander (1)

Commander: Kenrith, the Returned King

Artifact (16)

Enchantment (9)

Description: The goal of this deck is to clog up the board with Perplexing Chimeras and then win through activated abilities, which chimeras our opponents control can't interact with.

At worst Perplexing Chimera is a 5 mana stax piece that heavily discourages opponents from playing any impactful spells or tutors, that also happens to be a 3/3 (which dodges almost every board wipe in the format, with the sole exception of Toxic Deluge) and is a good attacker/blocker, especially with Kenrith on board to pump it.

While most of the clones aren't the most mana efficient, playing a 2-4 mana dockside is generally pretty good, and perplexing chimeras are pretty good as well. The real value comes from taking our chimeras back and stealing the things people dare to play, thus converting poor card quality into as good of card quality as our opponents. Even if we can't get our chimeras back, they're still acting as stax pieces on our behalf, until we draw into ways to either clone them or get them back on our side of the board. They also provide auxiliary utility of being able to clone Kenrith if someone has stolen ours, or cloning the best creatures (and sometimes just non-land permanents) our opponents control. To put more concretely, making a 2-4 mana Thrasios, Tymna, Seedborn, dockside, faeburrow elder, gilded drake, etc. isn't too bad, seeing we get to pick the best one on the table.

We have most of the dockside lines, plus breach to get us there if we're in the clear (if we've activated homeward path to take all the chimeras back, for example).

tl;dr: This is an adaptive stax/control deck that seeks to make the game state entirely unplayable for our opponents and when they do decide to play things, we steal it from them. Then, once we've leeched enough of an advantage from our opponents, we combo off in a way they can't use our chimeras against us.

Special Note: "In some unusual cases, you may not control Perplexing Chimera when its triggered ability resolves (perhaps because the triggered ability triggered again and resolved while the original ability was on the stack). In these cases, you can exchange control of Perplexing Chimera and the spell that causes the ability to trigger, even if you control neither of them. If you do, you’ll be able to change targets of the spell, not the spell’s new controller."

Having a perplexing chimera on board during a counter spell fight is absolutely insane, you get to change all the targets even if you don't control the chimera when the triggers are resolving. Sometimes people are foolish enough to try and layer two pieces of targeted removal, not realizing you can steal the second one and still change the target of the first, thus making it a nightmare to remove even a single chimera.

Why Kenrith? He's a beast. Even if someone kills your chimeras, you can just reanimate them with his ability. There are fancy shenanigans with sac outlets, Kenrith and dockside/chimeras(you can sac a chimera and change the target without letting your opponent get it)/clones(you can sac and reanimate them to change what they're cloning). He's a win con in the command zone.

WTF No Counterspells?! Nobody is going to counter our garbage, and even if they do, we can reanimate all the relevant things with Kenrith anyway. We do have some things like Vexing Shusher and Destiny Spinner to ensure our shit resolves. Early game, we're going to just put the burden of interacting on everyone else, much like Frog, Pod, etc. Once we land a chimera, we basically take care of all the interaction for the entire table.

Winning through cursed totem effects: Linvala is easy, just bounce, blink, fight or steal it. Cursed totem is much trickier. You basically need to just have more cards in your library than the person who has control of it, and kill them with wheel + breach, which isn't really any different than most other evolution decks. Alternatively, combat damage isn't entirely unreasonable in this deck. We could also just slot in things like brainfreeze or thassa's oracle to make it easier, but what's the fun in that?

Meme Dockside Lines: Equilibrium + Dockside + Clone effect creature. Dockside needs to produce ceil((cmc of dockside + 1) + (cmc of clone + 1)/2) + 1 treasures, or more simply: ceil((4 + cmc of clone) / 2) + 1. Our highest CMC clone creature is 4, so we need to make a max of 5, and a min of 4 (2 cmc clone, phantasmal image).

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Casual

94% Competitive