Unlimited spell works
Have you ever wanted to cast an overloaded cyclonic rift on each of your turns? Re-cast all of your combat tricks every combat? Draw 5 cards every turn? Then this is the deck for you. This deck lets you control the game by noping, bouncing, and countering your way to victory.
How to Pilot
This Zethi deck plays kind of like a voltron deck. However your not going to dish out a ton of damage but you are going to want to protect and attack with your commander every turn that you can. This deck is tuned to have plenty of cheap instant spells that are perfect for Zethi to kick and cast every turn. From bounce target permanents, exile, card draw/discard, and counterspells we got them. Zethi is a cheap commander but that doesn't mean that we want to cast her turn three, ideally we are casting her around turn 5-8 once when we have some saucy instant spells in our graveyard to kick. Before casting and multi-kicking Zethi we want at least 1 combat trick, 1 card draw, and 1 bounce/exile instants in our graveyard. These give us consistent performance and control on our turn.
Some notable cards to kick asap: Consider, Curate, Leap, Frantic Search, Snap, Take Up the Shield.
This is a slow deck and has only 15 creatures (including our commander). With just a 15% chance of having a creature on a draw, we need to treat these creatures as our babies. This is why we run white combat tricks to keep our creatures alive. HOWEVER the best way to keep our creatures is to never allow threats to enter the battlefield.
Zethi technicalities
- Zethi, Arcane Blademaster and Chun-Li, Countless Kicks do not have a page on gatherer.wizards.com so here we will go over some of her technical rules.
- You must pay the casting cost for copied exiled-kicked spells from Zethi, Arcane Blademaster.
- Because we MUST pay for these copied spells, we ARE allowed to pay alternate casting costs such as overload
- You can only cast exiled-kicked spells after declaring attackers, Zethi, Arcane Blademaster must be one of the attacking creatures.
- Zethi, Arcane Blademaster's spell copy ability triggers and is on the stack the moment after you have declared attackers. You get to choose and cast your copied spells right then. You hold priority during this step.
- When triggering Zethi, Arcane Blademaster's spell copy ability you must select, pay, and cast all copied spells that you want then. The moment you pass priority, the copied spells dissipate (thus you cannot use a copied counter spell in response to someone/something else).
- Due to the copied spells dissipating after you pass priority, you cannot have multiple spell stacks.
Finding the right pieces
Draw, draw, and more draw. We run 12 instants (At the time of writing) that let us draw. We also love discarding cards. Sometime we will get great instant spells in our hand but cant cast it yet, discarding those spells lets us kick it later without having to cast it before hand. Good cards to discard early game would be Mystic Confluence, Cryptic Command, Akroma's Will. Also kicking Flawless Maneuver and Fierce Guardianship are fantastic because those are free spells to cast (casting counter spells can still help us will cover that in the next section). Every one of our combat steps we can easily gain a ton of value and deny board state for our opponents.
Combat spell stack and board synergies
Notable infinite turns:
- Have Mystical Tutor and Shadow Rift (or some other cheap draw instant) exile-kicked, Zethi on the battlefield attacking, and 9 mana (4 must be blue for this example).
- When Zethi Attacks, cast Shadow Rift and then Mystical Tutor, which is fetching Nexus of Fate
- Mystical Tutor resolves and then Shadow Rift draws you Nexus of Fate
- Cast Nexus of Fate on your turn and repeat
We are going to be casting a bunch of spells on our turns, The more that we can cast for "free" the better. To reduce costs we run Mindsplice Apparatus, Primal Amulet
, Baral, Chief of Compliance, Grand Arbiter Augustine IV , and Stenn, Paranoid Partisan. Other "free" spells that that we can cast are Flawless Maneuver, Fierce Guardianship, Snap, and Frantic Search. Free and cheap spells are great for triggering Magecraft abilities on our other creatures. We still have to have to pay to cast our exile-kicked cards but this can be a benefit for us because we can then choose to cast alternate costs of our spells. Overloading Cyclonic Rift every turn is one of my favorite ways to truly stax the board. Because we are paying for spell costs, Snap and Frantic Search can untap some of our lands giving us mana for our second mainphase or to respond to opponent actions on their turns. We can also cast Fierce Guardianship for free targeting any of our spells on the stack and then cast Mana Drain targeting Fierce Guardianship which will net us 1 floating colorless mana until the end of combat. This gets us two spell cast triggers and nets us 1 mana, it's better than free. Having Jin-Gitaxias, Progress Tyrant on the board is fantastic as this can double your spell cast triggers and allows each exile counter spells to cancel itself. Whew, That's a lot of spells. This is why we run Aetherflux Reservoir, Sentinel Tower, and wizards. Our wizards Magecraft abilities will let us Draw, draw and discard, create creature tokens, or tap our opponents creatures.
