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Yomiji shitstack

Commander / EDH* Mono-White

SirLoinofHamalot

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Creature (36)

Artifact (24)

Instant (3)

Land (1)

Commander (1)

Commander: Yomiji, Who Bars the Way

Enchantment (11)

Planeswalker (3)

Sorcery (3)

Sideboard

Instant (2)

Sorcery (1)

Yomiji is a contentious topic among EDH players: being mono-white with a converted mana cost of 7 are both big drawbacks against him, as well as his parallel ability that benefits other commanders. Why would anyone choose mono-white, with it's limited energy, and why would anyone choose a commander like Yomiji when another mono-white commander might be better?

First of all, he's real cool. Have you seen this guy? What a dick. A classic mono-white dick. I love the idea of a white hegemon who bars access to the grave, who preempts the comfort of death to force his soldiers to fight another day.

Second, his effect is extremely powerful when built around. Legendaries are frequently more powerful than nonlegendary cards with the same effects might be, because their duplication would be game-breaking. In EDH, we don't have to worry about this issue due to the single-card rule, therefore having many diverse legendaries with repeatable effects is going to benefit us beyond the expectations of our opponents. I think there is a serious issue with how most players are building Yomiji, throwing every legendary they can find into the deck and expecting to create an unstoppable death-wall of unorthodox Kamigawa uncommons. This is the wrong way to build the deck, because it has very specific needs. The first is mana. This deck needs an unbelievable amount of mana, but fortunately we are in white. We run cards like Smothering Tithe , Weathered Wayfarer , and Oath of Lieges to be certain that we are keeping up. You will almost always encounter a deck that likes big mana at the table, so I consider these cards 85% effective, to pick an arbitrary number. We'll also be running cards like Thaumatic Compass  , Endless Horizons , and Honor-Worn Shaku . These provide more important strategic effects. Thaumatic Compass   flips into a fog machine, perfect for stalling the game. Endless Horizons thins our draws and can provide resources for landfall and Emeria, The Sky Ruin , and Honor-Worn Shaku is just broken when you can tap your equipment and enchantments for mana.

The second thing this deck needs, as hinted before, is big, sticky creatures. I'm talking folks like Avacyn, Angel of Hope , Zetalpa, Primal Dawn , Kozilek, the Great Distortion and Brisela, Voice of Nightmares . Really hard to remove, really ugly shit, ya know? Cards like this are the bread, and butter of Yomiji, not cards like Anafenza, Kin-Tree Spirit or Brimaz, King of Oreskos . We need things that are hard to remove, real threats in their own right. One of the big problems with mono-white is that many powerhouse cards are meant to be in a swarm strategy, or as a supplement to another color, like blue-white stax, green-white tokens, or black-white aristocrats. It's in the upper CMC's of white where cards become threats on their own. We need to be dropping threats as frequently and as quickly as possible to keep removal off of our fort pieces.

The third need, which was just mentioned, is to delay and deflect. We will be vulnerable until we can drop the threats that are most difficult to remove. This is why we're running cards like Baird, Steward of Argive and Ghostly Prison , and Michiko Konda, Truth Seeker . There are others that are perfectly runnable, but we prefer to stick to legendary creatures as much as possible to avoid running recursion for anything else.

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