I know we aren't supposed to covet things and we aren't supposed to steal things. But when the Wright brothers were inventing the airplane, they were told man just wasn't supposed to fly. Breaking the rules gets you into the sky, and we want to be in the sky. So break the rules. Covet thy neighbor's Avacyn, Angel of Hope. Steal Hot Soup from a baby, then find out how a baby can play Magic.
To keep on theme with our sticky-fingered commander, we've packed our list with enough ways to steal opponents' stuff to land us a prison sentence. This deck is the perfect way to counteract extremely powerful but "fair" lists, and Dominates creature-heavy decks. Often, to win a game, you must simply wait until someone else plays a bomb, then you swipe it. And if you can't swipe it, clone it. And if you can't clone it, exile it. And if you can't exile it, then yell at your opponent for playing Emrakul, the Aeons Torn.
In order to steal your opponents' stuff you have to have the tools of the thief's trade. To that end, we've packed our duffel bag full of the Magic equivalent of crow bars and ski masks. Several of our creatures use their wiles, or brute force, to take that which does not belong to us, either from play, graveyard, or straight out of the library. Geth, Lord of the Vault digs through an opponent's trash while simultaneously helping them throw things away. And to make use of all that Geth is pouring into the graveyard, we've got a pair of seemingly unpronounceable cards in Diluvian Primordial and Sepulchral Primordial. Nearly as annoying as our "gimme" attitude will be is our opponents' inability to pronounce "Sepulchral" correctly, and this annoyance will make you feel justified in your stealing. (By the way, it's sep-ULL-krull.) Sower of Temptation straight up steals your opponent's best threat, or their favorite pet creature, depending on how cruel you feel like being. And sometimes we need to steal not only tangible things but hypothetical things as well, as we'll do with the help of Notion Thief, grabbing card draw for ourselves that would formerly have been for others. It's basically like stealing the future.
As for noncreature steal-y effects, we've got our sleeves packed with various instants, sorceries, enchantments, and artifacts to facilitate our forced changes of ownership. Counterspells like Desertion and Spelljack not only stop an opponent's threat from hitting the battlefield but they go even further to humiliate its former owner by giving it to you instead. We also have Memory Plunder to make use of a particularly alluring instant or sorcery that an opponent has collecting dust in their graveyard. A personal favorite combo of mine involves using Supplant Form to make a copy of an opponent's threat while bouncing it back into their hand, then stealing it right out from said hand with Treacherous Urge, only to sacrifice it. Sure, it costs somewhere in the neighborhood of a million mana to do all in one turn, but the possibility of snagging a clone of Blightsteel Colossus, bouncing the original, then stealing it right out of their hand, is too much to pass up.
Of course, in the enchantment slot, we've got the classic thief effect in Control Magic. Four mana for an enchantment that steals a creature has proven too broken to exist, and ever since Control Magic started stealing people's Serra Angels and ruining Magic, they've been trying to tinker with the fairest price and limitations for such a powerful effect. And, naturally, we're playing all the "fixes" as well, like Persuasion and Domestication. In addition to creature stealing, we've got a few stealies that don't limit us to nabbing monsters. Confiscate and Volition Reins only care that the target of our avarice is a permanent, so any pesky artifacts or planeswalkers can also be ours. As for enchantments, Confiscate and Volition Reins can steal them too, but obviously for that we'd just use Steal Enchantment, one of the most literally named cards in existence.
Sometimes, life demands that we stop stealing everything that's not nailed down. But what are we to do when we see something that we really, really want? Earn it for ourselves? No way, that sounds like work, and work is hard. Instead, we'll just make a copy. And we've got plenty of ways to do that. Led by the king of cloning effects, Sakashima the Impostor (and the other king of cloning effects, Lazav, Dimir Mastermind), we've got nearly every clone we can reasonably fit into the deck, including actual Clone. We can clone creatures with Phantasmal Image, we can clone artifacts with Phyrexian Metamorph, and we can clone anything else with Clever Impersonator. We've got clones that really hate their original version in Evil Twin and we've got clones that have an unhealthy interest in the recently deceased in Body Double. If your playgroup tends to play giant, game-destroying monsters, it's like we're playing giant, game-breaking monsters. If your playgroup is ruled by combo decks, then, well, at least we've got a Consecrated Sphinx.
We can't reasonably play exclusively clone and steal effects, as fun as that might be. We've got to protect ourselves as well, so we've devoted a handful of deck slots to interaction. I've been meaning to try out Fathom Feeder as a possible alternative to Baleful Strix, and now seems like a great chance at that. We've got a few ways to slow down aggressive opponents with Damnation and some defensive planeswalkers like Tamiyo, the Moon Sage and Jace, Architect of Thought. We can exile problem creatures with Rapid Hybridization and Oblivion Strike, and we can tutor for answers with Demonic Tutor and Sidisi, Undead Vizier. And if somehow all that fails, we'll always have our trusty Cyclonic Rift.
We've been told all our lives that stealing is bad and wrong and we should never do it. But maybe they're only telling us that because they don't want us to know how fun it can be? We'll never know for sure until we try it, and this decklist is a good place to start.
