Welcome to Zur's Prism Prison, a prison control deck based on color hosing enchantments and color-switching effects! Ever wanted to play
Blind Seer
or
Eight-and-a-Half-Tails
but didn't want to constrict yourself to a single color? Do you like playing with unexpected cards and and confusing your opponents? Want to think about color in a brand new way? Then Zur might be the commander for you!
Setting them up
With access to 3 colors, I've picked what I think are the most effective hosers regardless of their targeted color. With Zur, you can pick and choose which enchantment to fetch based on what your opponents are playing or rely on using a
Sleight of Mind
effect to target whoever is in first place. Sizing up your opponents' colors right from the start should give you an idea of which lines of play you want to follow.
Or if you're facing down a lot of different colors, which is probably the case in a 4-player EDH pod, you can use Zur to tutor for
Shifting Sky
first to even the battlefield. I usually make everything red in case I need to
Hydroblast
something, or green for
Hibernation
or
Dystopia
. Once
Shifting Sky
is down, you can find
Celestial Dawn
to make all your nonland permanents white while everyone else's remain red. This makes
Wash Out
and
Llawan, Cephalid Empress
affect each of your opponents and
Light of Day
can effectively turn off combat. With
Spreading Plague
out, your opponents can only collectively have 1 creature at a time and you can get around your own restriction with
Distorting Lens
.
Locking them down
One of the win conditions for this deck are assembling the
Solemnity
/
Decree of Silence
combo. If
Solemnity
is out, you can cheat
Decree of Silence
into play pretty easily with
Lost Auramancers
, though you might have to
Hydroblast
your own Auramancers to get the trigger.
It's also possible to lock someone down by resolving a
Drought
and changing the mana color to an opponent's color. Then if they want to cast, for example, a green spell, they'll have to sacrifice swamps, which they probably don't have. This isn't perfect, as an
Urborg, Tomb of Yawgmoth
can still let a removal spell through and you have to watch for colorless spells like
Ugin, the Spirit Dragon
and
Oblivion Stone
. Also,
Celestial Dawn
no longer changes the mana symbols on cards, so you won't be able to play black spells until you change its effect.
Solemnity also works great with the cumulative upkeep cards like
Dystopia
and
Tidal Control
and even
Glacial Chasm
. If Celestial Dawn is out when you play Glacial Chasm, you don't have to sacrifice a land or pay upkeep costs, but it will only act as a Plains.
Tips and tricks
Tracking all of these color shifts can get confusing fast. Bring some kind of colored token, or colored card sleeves to remind your opponents (and yourself) which colors are which.
If you run into a troublesome land and your
Ghost Quarter
is transformed into a Plains by
Celestial Dawn
, you can change the color of the land to red with
Distorting Lens
and remove it with a
Hydroblast
. Remember that
Hydroblast
can target any spell, even nonred ones, but
Blue Elemental Blast
can't. In a pinch, you can use
Hydroblast
to counter a spell and
Spectral Shift
the
Hydroblast
to name the spell's actual color.
Be careful with playing
Gloom
or
Dystopia
after
Celestial Dawn
is down. If you play
Gloom
, and target it with
Sleight of Mind
while it's on the stack, it will enter with its color changed and you won't be taxed the extra 3 for the white instant. If
Dystopia
gets back to you while still naming white, you'll have to sacrifice a white permanent even if you don't pay its cumulative upkeep. But, if you have
Celestial Dawn
out you can sacrifice
Dystopia
to itself and choose not to pay its cumulative upkeep. If
Dystopia
doesn't hit one opponent's colors, a
Distorting Lens
can be used as spot removal that gets around indestructibility.
Note that some older printings of
Insight
and
Mystic Remora
say they trigger if the spell is "successfully cast," but it's been errataed to an on cast trigger, so you can draw even if you counter it with
Tidal Control
or
Deathgrip
.
Final thoughts
The budget for this deck really is all over the place. I tried to make it as affordable as I could but still included big budget cards that I happened to have in my collection like Teferi's Protection and Replenish. It's by no means optimized, but I kind of enjoy the jank.
A big thanks to smileylich for his visual collection of color hosers, they were a great help in building this deck.
http://www.smileylich.com/mtg/magocracy/visual/Color_Hosers_visual.html
