Some Goddamn Peace and Quiet: Grand Arbiter Primer

Commander / EDH* Competitive Control Pillow Fort Primer Stax WU (Azorius)

valoopy

Land (31)

• 1x Ancient Tomb
• 1x Arid Mesa
• 1x Command Tower
• 1x Flooded Strand
• 1x Hallowed Fountain
• 11x Island
• 1x Marsh Flats
• 1x Misty Rainforest
• 6x Plains
• 1x Polluted Delta
• 1x Prismatic Vista
• 1x Scalding Tarn
• 1x Strip Mine
• 1x Tundra
• 1x Wasteland
• 1x Windswept Heath

Rocks (9)

• 1x Arcane Signet
• 1x Chrome Mox
• 1x Jeweled Lotus
• 1x Lotus Petal
• 1x Mana Crypt
• 1x Mana Vault
• 1x Mox Diamond
• 1x Sol Ring
• 1x Talisman of Progress

Removal (5)

• 1x Council's Judgment
• 1x Detention Sphere
• 1x Gilded Drake
• 1x Path to Exile
• 1x Swords to Plowshares

Wraths (3)

• 1x Supreme Verdict
• 1x Terminus
• 1x Wrath of God

Card Advantage (12)

• 1x Brainstorm
• 1x Consecrated Sphinx
• 1x Dig Through Time
• 1x Mangara, the Diplomat
• 1x Mystic Remora
• 1x Ponder
• 1x Preordain
• 1x Pull from Tomorrow *f-pre*
• 1x Rhystic Study
• 1x Search for Azcanta  ^Flip
• 1x Sensei's Divining Top
• 1x Time Spiral

Hate (9)

• 1x Aven Mindcensor
• 1x Back to Basics
• 1x Drannith Magistrate
• 1x Hullbreacher
• 1x Hushbringer
• 1x Narset, Parter of Veils
• 1x Rest in Peace
• 1x Teferi, Time Raveler
• 1x Winter Orb

Tutors (7)

• 1x Enlightened Tutor
• 1x Fabricate
• 1x Idyllic Tutor
• 1x Mystical Tutor
• 1x Spellseeker
• 1x Stoneforge Mystic
• 1x Tezzeret the Seeker

Misc (3)

• 1x Approach of the Second Sun
• 1x Crucible of Worlds
• 1x Helm of Obedience

Commander (1)

Countermagic (10)

• 1x Arcane Denial
• 1x Counterspell
• 1x Dovin's Veto
• 1x Fierce Guardianship
• 1x Force of Negation
• 1x Force of Will
• 1x Mana Drain
• 1x Mental Misstep
• 1x Narset's Reversal
• 1x Negate

Utility (8)

• 1x Cryptic Command
• 1x Cyclonic Rift
• 1x Land Tax
• 1x Muddle the Mixture
• 1x Smothering Tithe
• 1x Snapcaster Mage
• 1x Teferi, Hero of Dominaria
• 1x Teferi, Master of Time

Swords (2)

• 1x Sword of Feast and Famine
• 1x Sword of Fire and Ice

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Background

So around Christmas 2014 I got into Magic. My friends all played Commander, so naturally I wanted to do what my friends were doing. The format seemed so cool; you play big flavorful creatures and ram them into each other! Well, I played with friends' decks for a while, then the white 2014 precon, then decided I wanted something my own. I took a personality test and came up Azorius. I looked through every WU commander and settled on one in particular: Grand Arbiter Augustin IV . Upon making my choice, a buddy of mine said to me "don't be that much of a douche". Well, alright then, challenged accepted, and Arbiter it was.

I started out with complete, pure jank. Sure, I bought Counterspell , Swords to Plowshares , Ghostly Prison , Propaganda , but let's be real here- they were backed up by Medomai the Ageless , Gwafa Hazid, Profiteer , and the Dovescape + Guile combo. Hardly a fitting deck for someone as infamous as Augustin. So I buckled down, tested every card I could, and gleefully began asking my (now rapidly dwindling) friends: “Are you going to pay for that?”

I've tried a TON of stuff in this deck, and this version is my reboot of my old deck. Not that it was bad, just that this is by far better. I used to run a mess of cards, including Gideon Jura , Chancellor of the Annex , Frost Titan , Containment Priest , Torpor Orb , and Beacon of Tomorrows just to name a quick few. While many Arbiters like to play all-in pillowforts and taxes, my version works very well, and is extremely fun to play. The trick to it, I find, is to have all your answers be totally efficiently priced, then have nothing but threats that WILL end the game. Also, play Arbiter on turn two as often as possible. Screw fun little 18 card combos, just play good cards.

Why play Arbiter?

Arbiter is a control deck, pure and simple. It will accrue plenty of hate just for trying to sit at the same table as everyone else, so be prepared to put your fists up and defend yourself heavily. Luckily you edge out way more value than everyone else will, since your stuff costs as little as or .

Play Arbiter if you like:
- controlling the board state
- Cawblade
- playing powerful cards that are banned in Modern and define Legacy
- incremental advantages
- having answers
- encouraging politics
- making people salty

Do NOT play Arbiter if you like:
- big stompy creatures
- always having to combo to win
- having a gigantic monster as your commander (though many view Arby as such ;3)
- having friends

Playing the Deck

When deciding on keeps and mulligans you need to be conservative. This deck is finely crafted around Arbiter's price reduction. Ergo you want a hand that can cast him turn 4 at the latest. I frequently will mulligan to 6 just so I can get fast mana, because a turn 2 Arbiter is so backbreaking many people will scoop. When I’m deciding to mulligan, my ideal hand is a turn 2-3 Arbiter with some way to draw cards/refill my hand. The longer my hand will take to cast Arbiter, the more cheap interaction/card draw I want in the hand. I’ll keep a slow roll 4 lander if I’ve got, say, Swords to Plowshares , Counterspell , and Ponder , just as an example.

So playing Arbiter really comes down to a few different phases. First, we're going to want to stall out and set up. Then, we'll create the lockdown. Lastly, we maintain a board state and go for the win.

Stalling and setting up are the essence of this deck. We run plenty of mana rocks- it's fine to mull to them, but don't get overly carried away on this fact. You can afford to slam a little draw-go if needed as long as a fast hate card is available to you. Especially be careful with Mana Crypt - we play long games with only almost no life gain, so don't keep a hand with Crypt and 0 action. This phase is where our setup spells first see play. Cards like Mystic Remora , Rhystic Study , and Smothering Tithe serve roles to pad yourself a little while taxing the other players and slowing them down. Search for Azcanta   is a great card to slam here, as it smooths your early draws, then later it fills your hand with gas. Grand Arbiter Augustin IV is himself part of this plan, as he asymmetrically taxes and cheapens spells. Your goal is to create a resource imbalance that you'll abuse while denying your opponents their spells with the likes of Counterspell and Path to Exile . Normally, 1-for-1 counters and removal can be subpar in this format, but when you trade 5-8 mana for your 2 mana counterspell, you're often in the green. If you're setting up with Back to Basics , remember to fetch wisely! You almost only have basics, and should really just prioritize them, but remember you have a ton of double and even a few triple pip cards. You'll generally want to see UU before you see white lands, since the white removal spells can generally be deployed later in the game. Just don't forget that Arbiter costs 2UW- so you need to fetch your colors appropriately. A few of our hatebears are important to look for here if you can find them- Aven Mindcensor , Drannith Magistrate , Hushbringer , Mangara, the Diplomat , and Hullbreacher all slow down games, and later on can be the only thing keeping you from dying.

You want to milk this phase until you see any wincon (swords, Rest in Peace + Helm of Obedience , Approach of the Second Sun ) coupled with any lockdown piece such as Back to Basics , Winter Orb , or Crucible of Worlds + Strip Mine . If you resolve Stoneforge Mystic , your goal is to bury your opponents in card advantage and force them to deal with her or Arbiter strapped to a sword. Both Sword of Fire and Ice and Sword of Feast and Famine cause a card disparity, and the untapping lands on Feast and Famine seriously makes any lock piece you have just straight up unfair. We have a ton of ways to find these swords outside of Stoneforge, as well. Muddle the Mixture can get Stoneforge; Fabricate , Enlightened Tutor , and Tezzeret the Seeker can all directly get the swords; Mystical Tutor can get any of those other tutors minus Tezz. If you plan on trying to lock the game out with Crucible of Worlds here, set up a large threat before going for it. Putting out Grand Arbiter Augustin IV or Sphere of Resistance before going for Crucible is also huge game, as it'll make the game speed grind to 0.

Once the lock is all but confirmed, you'll move to close out the game. This is as easy as strapping Arbiter to a sword and getting your beats on, but this usually is just a means to generate a ton of card advantage or extra mana (depending on which sword you're using) while also protecting Arbiter, or any of your hate creatures that are in the deck.

On of our “I win” buttons is the 2-card combo of Rest in Peace + Helm of Obedience . RIP-Helm is not a fast combo, and other than Tezzeret the Seeker , we dont have any way to untap the Helm. Play the combo in one turn where you can play and activate it, then start off with whoever is most likely able to destroy parts of the combo. After them, work down to the next player that can break the combo; and if none exists, the next player that is likely to win. Obviously if someone will kill you or win immediately next turn, you instead exile their library first, but be aware you might need to protect yourself from removal spells now. The rest of your deck has teeth, remember. If they focus on killing the combo, they're out of removal for your swords. The deck is set up in order to tutor for either of these cards quite nicely. To find either card, you can use Mystical Tutor to get Enlightened Tutor to grab the card you're missing. To find Rest in Peace , you can use Idyllic Tutor or Muddle the Mixture . To find Helm of Obedience , you can use Tezzeret the Seeker or Fabricate . The benefit to using these is that they get more than just this combo, and have multiple uses. Tezzeret of course works with our mana rocks, while Muddle can find us many other 2 drops in the list (and is a counterspell when you need to use it for that reason).

The next is the slowest UW control win condition ever printed - Approach of the Second Sun . With a spell that costs this dang much to cast, you're usually only going to want to throw it out there with a grip full of counters to protect it with. The first cast is, of course, practically irrelevant, but this spell absolutely cannot get put into the graveyard. With this list, the only way to bring back Approach from your graveyard is Time Spiral , so you cannot afford to lose this spell, ever. You can usually survive long enough to just wait for Approach to show up again through drawing it naturally, but our many ways to draw and filter cards can help us speed up that process. The biggest of these is of course, Dig Through Time , which can blast a surprise Approach right back into your hand before your opponents can prepare, and maybe snag you a counterspell at the same time. There is also the super cheeky plan of using Narset's Reversal to bring approach back to your hand, but

Lastly, there's Crucible of Worlds , to be used in conjunction with Strip Mine and Wasteland . Crucible locks are hard to completely achieve; it's more often that you'll be tactfully stripping key lands from opponents, preventing them from being able to contest you exactly when you want to cast something juicy. Crucible's biggest use, honestly, is to make sure you can reliably hit land drops for the entire game, allowing you to run as few lands as this deck has.

Political Play

This deck will not gain you many friends. Most people hate taxation based control. Your goal is to make it so no one else can play magic, which it turns out tends to aggravate most people. Remind every one that if you weren't at the table, that player who keeps trying to play scary spells would have went unchecked. Sometimes you might sacrifice a counterspell because the table collectively gasped at what someone tried to do. Don't do it too often though; the beauty of this deck is it has a lot of 1-of answers that can hose entire decks. Use these to your advantage.

Don't be hesitant to lightly remind (threaten) people that your deck is full of answers. Bluff if you have to- my group knows that for every time I did actually have Terminus at the ready, there was a time where I was nowhere near it and just bluffed them into submission. If someone wants to attack you, tell them that they'll have to pay in the blood of their creatures, because obviously you always have Path to Exile . Convince them that they're better off killing the big early threat with your blessings (and support), then once it's down to the players you can control, lock the board to high hell.

Matchups

Your best games are against fragile combo decks and other control decks. Versus combo you just need to never tap out and tax the hell out of them. Early hate pieces can lock these decks out, and judicious timing of any of these cards can make it a nightmare for these decks to ever set up.. However it's going to take a lot of your resources to stop them, and eventually they might get one spell through while your shields are down. Just make sure early game is no good for them, then force them to grind it out on a locked up field. Always keep in mind what hate cards are in the deck, and figure out how they pair against their win cons to make it impossible for them to win they want to.

Against control just out value them- make them pay more for their cool flashy cards and turn them into big wastes of mana. Once you set up with any card advantage engine you should hopefully make them submit to your control.

Any deck that can stick a BIG threat under your nose before you can stop it is a big challenge for this deck. Decks that either cheat out big threats, or decks that that have cheap commanders with big value effects can be rough. A lot of these decks will show themselves for what they are at commander reveal; you shouldn't truly be SURPRISED by what your opponents will do to you form that point on, just get ready for it.

The biggest issue I tend to find is when opposing decks can either make more mana faster than you or altogether ignore paying mana for spells/putting cards into play without casting them. Since the primary goal of Arbiter's mana denial doesn't matter if they make excessively more than they needed anyways (or don't even need mana), your deck's first line of attack can become completely null and void. If these decks are commander-centric, the easy solution is to just never let them have their commander. If these decks just have combos inside of them that cause major headaches/the game to end, attack those combos with whatever necessary hate card you have first, THEN move in for the kill.

A Few Last Thoughts

Rest in Peace IS PROBABLY YOUR MOST IMPORTANT HATE CARD IN THE WHOLE DECK. I cannot stress this enough. I could write in so many decks in here that RIP just completely dunks on, whether you're trying to tune this list upwards a bit for cEDH or just jamming in regular old commander. It will save your butt more times than you realize, since everyone and their mother wants to recur things in EDH.

When deciding on whether to counter a card or wait for removal, keep in mind that you have more creature removal options than removal for artifacts and enchantments. Counterspells likely get pointed at artifacts and enchantments. Also be very wary of Planeswalkers. You're a low creature build, plus some of your creatures barely do anything in combat. Your main outs to them are Sword of Fire and Ice and Detention Sphere if they stick. If a walker could cause you a huge headache, just counter it if you don't have a good creature to kill it at the waiting.

Conclusion

This is a strong deck for both 1-v-1 and multiplayer, with the potential of answering every threat you might see. If you're into playing something like this, don't half-ass it though. I didn't want to play the heavy lockdown effects originally, but realized I'm the only one who can play through them. This deck is mean, it's cruel, it's a chore to battle against- and it's fun as hell to pilot.

Date added	8 years
Last updated	2 years
Legality	This deck is not Commander / EDH legal.
Rarity (main - side)	31 - 0 Mythic Rares 32 - 0 Rares 8 - 0 Uncommons 10 - 0 Commons
Cards	100
Avg. CMC	2.59
Tokens	Emblem Teferi, Hero of Dominaria, Treasure
Folders	EDH WANT, decks to learn/steal from, Need to playtest, watching you mister man, Interesting Commander Decks, ye, control, Things I like, commander, Interests
Based on	All Rise! Court is Now in Session! valoopy EDH