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A much more streamlined variation on the "wheel and deal" archetype inspired by Nekusar, the Mindrazer.

Nekusar, while being my personal, and fan favorite, runs into some interesting deck building issues that you don't see in other wheel and deal variations. Because Nekusar has , Nekusar runs into the classic idea of putting in counterspells.

The idea behind such interaction is to prevent very specific things from happening. Such as removing nekusar, countering a wheel spell/nekusar or otherwise game ending plays. Adding in Force of Will, Force of Negation, and Pact of Negation fill that role nicely while also technically being discard fodder to Windfall.

The one problem is that it takes up important deckslots to use on creatures, or other means to make the deck generally more adaptable, and able to go longer in games.

Enter: Kroxa, Titan of Death's Hunger Wheel and deal!

We take the original concept and shell that nekusar operates under, but we focus on the other half of the gameplan: Discard. We not only keep the much more lucrative discard damage, we also can have more room for spot removal and defensive creatures if the game goes into the long term.

While we have no counterspells (other than Pyroblast and Red Elemental Blast) to use, we can utilize discard as our primary means to take away our opponent's ability to stop us from using Wheel of Fortune type effects to end the game, or to forcibly refill our opponent's hands.

We then have the classic gameplan of using enchantments that punish our opponents discarding cards, cards like Liliana's Caress, and Raiders' Wake to deal damage off our wheels, with cards like Waste Not, and Geth's Grimoire being good value off our opponent's discard.

We even have things to benefit off of us discarding cards as well, solid work arounds to not feel so bad after discarding our spells to a wheel is to have cards like Conspiracy Theorist, and Containment Construct. And in the case of the construct unlike the theorist, we can play lands we discard, and we can keep every card, unlike the theorist. (And generally, we will still have cards with madness in case we don't get the construct or the theorist.)

We can also deal damage to everyone when we discard as well! Though it won't be as good as our opponent's discarding, we have Glint-Horn Buccaneer, Brallin, Skyshark Rider  , and Feast of Sanity to continue our incentive to play wheel effects.

We then have repeatable discard outlets, like Liliana of the Veil, and Angrath, the Flame-Chained to keep up the discard when we can't find our wheel spells, and to start discarding cards after we do wheel them.

And finally, we have an infinite combo with our commander that uses Worldgorger Dragon and a reanimation enchantment like Animate Dead to generate infinite mana, then we cast our commander an infinite number of times from the command zone to empty our opponent's hand(s) and make them lose 3 life repeatedly until they die.

The gameplan:

Try to discard our opponent's hand of resources early to slow them down as we build up our discard synergy pieces. This should also mean in the majority of cases that Kroxa should be played around turn 2 to maximize our disruption off of our discard.

Though, if you have an opening hand that has something like a Waste Not, it might be better to play that turn 2 and then on a later turn we play Kroxa or another discard spell ASAP.

Then we use our wheel spells to force them to discard and to refill our opponent's hands to then force them to discard more cards, or we play back-to-back wheels to rack up that discard damage.

Plan B:

If we can't get our synergy pieces, then we need to find them: Tutors can generally help with that problem, or we use our wheel spells to find what we need so we can put on the pressure. Using our wheel spells like this isn't great, but it should hopefully be disrupting their hands enough to put down a discard synergy piece to at least get started, and it should fill the graveyard to enough of a degree to start playing Kroxa's escape cost.

Ultimately, when all else fails in plan A, or the initial part of "plan B", if we can't wheel into our discard synergy cards we'll try to put Worldgorger Dragon into the graveyard to combo off that way and finish the game.

Final plan C:

In the case they stop us from using our enchantments or exile our graveyard (Which is the red-herring solution in most cases) we still have creatures to play, and a self-discard/madness sub theme. An aptly played/discarded From Under the Floorboards should suffice and still be respectable, even though it isn't the strongest solution. So the rough tanslation is: We play a regular game of commander.

And if your playgroup gets mad, just tell them: "I missed the part where that's my problem", and "I'm going to put some dirt in your eye".

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80% Casual

20% Competitive

Date added 1 year
Last updated 11 months
Legality

This deck is Commander / EDH legal.

Rarity (main - side)

18 - 0 Mythic Rares

36 - 0 Rares

23 - 0 Uncommons

12 - 0 Commons

Cards 100
Avg. CMC 3.32
Tokens Bird 1/1 B, Day, Emblem Liliana, Waker of the Dead, Goblin 1/1 R, Night, Zombie 2/2 B
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