A View of the Maas at Dordrecht by Aelbert Cuyp (1645). Dragon is from Path of Bravery by Chris Rahn.
Last week we dove into the deep waters of Combo and talked about how players evolve and get better. On Reddit and in Facebook lots of readers made excellent suggestions and valid criticisms. Feedback is the fuel that keeps a good blog going and drives a writer to get better. I want to thank everyone who shared their thoughts with me.
We find ourselves drying off from last week's swim, and clambering onto the weathered planks of an old sailing vessel.
Today we set sail on the good ship Zedruu.
Let's Make a Deal
Before we leap into today's discussion about how I built a deck around one of the odder legendary creatures Wizards of the Coast has ever printed, I have to ask you a question.
If I were to offer you the choice between three booster packs, which one would you choose?
One of those packs is Magic 2014, and has been opened and displayed in the photo below. The second booster is Khans of Tarkir. The last one is wrapped in adorable penguin wrapping paper and is a mystery. It could be anything.
On the American game show, Let's Make a Deal, the host would sometimes offer a choice between prizes with an option sometimes being a mystery. Sometimes the mystery prize would big enough to put in a room, behind a big door with a number. What was found behind "door number 3" might be good. Sometimes it would be a furniture, or if you're really lucky, a car. Sometimes it would be less good. Once it was a llama. That's what I'm doing here - offering a theoretical choice between three booster packs.
The 2014 pack is a known quantity. You get Seraph of the Sword in the rare slot. For uncommons you get Battle Sliver, Glimpse the Future and Tenacious Dead. For the rest, if you're building a slivers deck, the Striking Sliver might be enough to make this pack tempting, but there are no great finds among the commons. The Khans of Tarkir pack is an unknown quantity, but you might get something good in there, and the mystery pack behind "door number three" is of course a mystery.
I don't know which you would choose, but unless I had a specific reason to go with one of the first two, I would always go for the mystery pack. Maybe the fact that I'm exclusively an EDH player plays into my decision. I'm capable of finding a hidden gem in any pack, not just packs from certain sets that are "legal" in my format of choice. Maybe I just like surprises. I suspect many players are like me and would pick "door number three" more often than not.
Many of you would go for Khans because you might get a fetch land, but you'll probably be wondering what the third pack was. At the end of this post, I'll show what was in the Khans pack and the mystery pack. Don't skip to the end. Be strong.
You can wait for the good ship Zedruu to complete its maiden blog post voyage before you find out what's behind the door you would have picked. Also, to be clear, this is theoretical. I'm not actually sending anyone these booster packs.
The Good Ship Zedruu
I've had a Zedruu deck for quite a while and it has led to some of the most interesting games of EDH I've ever played. By interesting, I don't mean successful. Zedruu the Greathearted is a bad commander for anyone who really cares about winning games. What I mean is that she's weird and different and you can build her in all sorts of ways that can make her fun.
Her party trick is that she allows you to give your permanents to other players.
For each permanent you own that an opponent controls at the beginning of your upkeep, you gain a life and draw a card. Let's break that down into its three components.
Giving Gifts: While there are times where this might be useful, by and large it is not what most EDH players are trying to do in a given game. The benefit you get for giving your permanents to your opponents is life and extra card draw, so for you to use Zedruu's ability at all, you're going to have to do this. The challenge is to do it in a way that either gives you an advantage on the board or gives you an advantage politically.
Card Draw: The three most important words you can find on any card are "draw a card". At least, that's what I've been told by players that are better at this game than me. I'm terrible at building card draw into my decks. Card draw is hugely important but if it is achieved at the cost of your boardstate, it can be a challenge to make it the benefit worth the cost.
Life Gain: Life gain is helpful, but Commander is a format where the advantage a high life total gives you is mitigated by the prevalence of combo and the constant threat of losing to commander damage or infect. The amount of life you will be gaining with Zedruu probably won't be enough to make it something to build around unless you add additional life gain into the deck.
My Take on Zedruu
A good Zedruu deck will probably pillow-fort like crazy, give opponents control of permanents with global effects for which ownership doesn't matter, and dig until it finds the combo and counterspells needed to drive home a win. There are combos in Jeskai colors and Zedruu is a reasonable Commander to help you dig for them. Voltron is another possiblity, but Zedruu brings nothing to the table to help with a commander-damage approach to the game. You could build any number of other Jeskai-friendly strategies around Zedruu, but she probably isn't going to be your best choice for any of them. In building my Zedruu deck I gave myself the challenge of figuring out how to build a deck that would be fun for everyone - not just fun for me.
I would need the ability to do some damage to opponents and exert some control on the board. I also wanted it to be interesting enough to everyone else that I might be kept around for a while, rather than just being knocked out early. I will almost always be the weakest link at the table, and the easiest player to knock out first when playing this deck, so being entertaining is a key part of the plan.
If I am only ever giving "bad" or even neutral gifts I should expect to see lots of counterspells, lots of opposition from my opponents, and a hard time establishing enough of a board to actually start executing my plan.
To build this deck I wanted to be able to reward players but also have ways to cause problems for them. I also want to play a game that requires me to play politics, because politics can be really interesting. This means I need to have both good gifts and bad gifts.
Good gifts for players that are nice to me.
Bad gifts for those naughty players who attack me or who dare to blow up and threaten to end the game.
Good Gifts
What makes a good gift?
For a moment, forget we are talking about Magic the Gathering. Think about the gifts you get on holidays or for your birthday. What makes the suspense and excitement of seeing a pile of wrapped presents under the tree on Christmas morning such a magical experience for a child? The key is the fact that they are wrapped. Sure, some presents can't be wrapped, but the wonder of not knowing what you are going to be given until you've torn off that wrapping paper is a huge part of the experience of opening a gift. It's about suspense. You have to not know what you are going to be given until the gift is unwrapped.
So if Zedruu is giving gifts, how do we wrap them?
You can't build suspense by playing a Goblin Piker and giving it to someone the next turn. There's no mystery there, unless you mean the mystery of why anyone would play Goblin Piker in EDH in the first place. We need to have a way to have players wonder what they will be getting. We need to find a way to wrap our gifts. As it turns out, the solution was an easy one. I wrap Zedruu's gifts by having them be morph cards. Morph cards are cast for 3 of any color mana and are played face-down. Only the card's controller may peek under to remind themselves of what the card will be when its morph cost is paid to flip the card over. You can pay the morph cost at any time to un-morph your creatures. Many morph cards will include an ability that is triggered when the cards is un-morphed. This action can be done at any time, which means combat tricks and instant-speed responses are sometimes available to the controller of a face-down morph creature. The goal of the deck, which I share with my opponents at the start of every game, is to try to give each of them a face-down morph card that they will have the colors to be able to turn up so they can benefit from its morph ability. Zedruu can only have red, white and blue cards, so it can be a challenge to convince players without any of those colors that I'll be giving them any decent gifts. I still try, but it's a harder sell with opponents playing only in black and/or green. Zoetic Cavern is only so exciting and while I run cards like Rainbow Vale and Humble Defectors, they are fine gifts but aren't morph cards.
Remember the three decks at the top of this blog post? Did you skip down to the end to see what the mystery pack was? This entire deck's plan is to rely on my opponents being curious about what I'm going to give them, so I have to make sure I run morph cards that are worth giving to someone. I want my opponents to wonder what's behind door number three, and I want them to get a chance to find out.
Listed below are the morphs in this deck, and the things they do when they are un-morphed:
Aven Liberator: Gives protection from the color of your choice.
Frontline Strategist: Fog for all non-solider creatures.
Karona's Zealot: Redirect damage that would be done to it to target creature instead.
Kolaghan Stormsinger: Target creature gets haste until end of turn.
Shaleskin Plower: Destroy target land.
Stratus Dancer: Counter target instant or sorcery spell.
Thousand Winds: Return all other tapped creatures to their owners' hands.
Voidmage Apprentice: Counter target spell.
Zoetic Cavern: It becomes a land!
Belltoll, Shieldhide, Stormwing Dragons: Put a +1/+1 counter on each dragon you control.
You can see that there are lots of reasons why a player might want the chance to flip one of these morph creatures. Once my opponents understand my game plan and realize that I'm really giving them useful stuff, I often get a little breathing room on the battlefield.
The "Let's Make a Deal" approach I talked about earlier comes into play. They know I'm giving away some good stuff but they don't know what they're going to get. Were you the kind of person who would go for the mystery booster pack? I'm hoping my opponents are, and each of them wants that moment of having me slide a morph creature over to them so they can see what it is. Curiosity is a powerful thing, and I'm hoping it will help me stay alive long enough to close out the game. That's the plan anyways, but it doesn't always play out that way.
This deck's approach also doesn't work with all players, even if they do share my colors. Some opponents have a mindset that the game is all about winning and the sooner they eliminate every opponent, the better. They hear my explanation of what the deck is trying to do, and they watch me start giving away face-down creatures and don't give a damn if they get one or not. In their eyes, I'm a fool and the sooner I am eliminated, the better. I'm giving away blockers and helping everyone else, so I'm a problem and a problem that is best removed as soon as possible because it probably won't be that difficult to do so.
They are right. I'm easy to kill for any decent deck.
I can't do much about the local Spike playing a tuned Prossh deck. The chances that I will have any way to deal with a strong Animar or Maelstrom Wanderer are miniscule. Even a really good Breya or Atraxa deck will be able to just ignore my shenanigans and roll over me with little effort. Such is life. Playing a deck like Zedruu, you deal with things you can deal with and try to politic your way past things you cannot deal with. With certain players that can be quite a challenge and might not ever work.
Bad Gifts
For the players who won't "play ball", or who just blow up too quickly, I run cards that are BAD gifts.
I run Grid Monitor, Steel Golem and Rust Elemental. I run Aggressive Mining and Statecraft. I can cast Delusions of Grandeur or Illusions of Mediocrity to gain 10 or 20 life and then can give them to someone else so they have to worry about losing that much life if it's removed.
The goal is to give good gifts to players until someone either gets out of control or does something mean to me. Then the bad gifts become an option for that player. Once you give bad gifts it is hard to go back and win their trust again, especially if the gift is truly horrible. I have gifted Statecraft to a player who was had an immense board state with tons of creatures and was poised to win the game. Needless to say, he was not pleased and I'm pretty sure he didn't win the game. I have gifted Grid Monitor and Steel Golem to players running decks like Animar and Maelstrom Wanderer. They were counting on being able to cast lots of creatures for nothing or next to nothing so it slowed them down for a while. Eventually I think they were able to remove their gifts and get on with their games. I have even given bad gifts to players who haven't done a thing to me and who had mostly been ignoring me but they were so far ahead that somebody had to do something or the game would be over. Extending the game, within reason, is a higher cause than helping to end it by giving a morph creature to someone who is already out of control. It's a judgement call based on who you're playing with, what deck they are playing, and how well you feel you can talk your way out of giving a bad gift after promising you'd try to start everyone with a good gift.
The Result
The result has been a really janky, weird deck that people don't always know what to do with.
When my Zedruu deck works it is fun and interesting for me and my opponents. They wonder what gift they're going to get and they hope they can either kill me before I give them something horrible, or dodge my ire and watch someone else get hamstrung with some goofy card nobody would ever want on their battlefield.
Getting the occasional kill and shutting the occasional opponent down with cards they never even knew existed makes for a good time provided I'm OK with having little chance at winning. It's especially fun to play with less experienced players, as it really opens their eyes to what you can do in this format. It's not just all combat and combos - you can play decks that aren't just outside the box, they're off the reservation and engaging opponents in ways you might never have imagined were possible. This deck has led to some really memorable exchanges and games. I don't record my games or keep a journal after each play session, but I'm going to try to recall a few of them for you. Santa's Little Helper
Before the NexGen EDH League started in February of 2016, there was a short-lived league at Myriad Games in Salem. The location closed down, forcing us to find a new home, but in the months that it ran we had some great games there.
One of my most memorable games at Myriad was one in which I was playing my Zedruu deck. It was December of 2015. I had reworked Zedruu to feature morph creatures and I had gone so far as to make custom Christmas present tokens for them. The table was a big one. We had two long tables put next to each other to make a square, and we must have had at least six players, if not seven players in the game. My high-school aged son was across the table from me and I happened to be sitting to the left of another kid his age who played a strong simic Kruphix deck with the ability to combo out with the right boardstate. There were lots of midrange decks at the table, including mine, and it was long enough ago that I don't recall the fine details of each turn. I had Zedruu out by mid-game and had a bunch of stuff on the field when the player to my right declared that he had game.
"Kid Combo" proceeded to start messing with his cards, counting, looking at his hand, and then realized that he was one mana short. The game was not won, but next turn it would be. If nobody could do anything on their turn and Kid Combo got another chance, it would be over. He was a little miffed that he'd have to wait, but what can you do? Sometimes you have to wait a turn before you combo off. Of course, normally you don't announce it to the table. Kid Combo passed turn to me. I drew for turn and honestly don't remember whether I drew it then or already had it, but I found myself looking down at the answer to our problem. I had Celestial Dawn in my hand.
Sometime in the Winter of 2016 the EDH Rules Committee decided that players would be able to create any color of mana even if it were outside of their commander's color identity. Until this rules change, you could only create colored mana that matched your commander's color identity. Our combo player was playing a simic deck, so for the next few month, he would still only be able to create blue or green mana per the rules Commander was being played by.
If a player were gifted Celestial Dawn by Zedruu and that player did not have white in their commander's color identity, they were essentially locked out of doing anything but playing lands and colorless cards if they had sources of colorless mana.
They were screwed. I played Celestial Dawn.
No responses. I used Zedruu to give Celestial Dawn to Kid Combo. He read the card.
He looked at me.
He looked at the card.
He looked at me again, disbelieving... I told him I was sorry, but you can't just declare that on your next turn the game is over and expect nobody to do anything. It was a spectacularly effective way to respond to such a declaration, and short of mass land destruction or just killing him there weren't many worse things we could have done. He could have scooped. He could have stormed out. He was faced with the kind of lock that he had no way to get out of. He was in his teens at the time, so such a reaction probably wouldn't have surprised anyone that much. Kids can run hot sometimes. This kid didn't - he was cool as a cucumber. To his credit, Kid Combo stayed in. For the better part of the next hour he drew cards and played lands every time he could and then passed the turn to me. Nobody else was able to blow up. We were all playing fairly midrange decks, and while the balance of power moved back and forth a bit, nobody developed a board that was so overwhelming that they could win the game. Me? I was in a great position. Nobody could kill me because as soon as I was out of the game, Kid Combo would win. I think he must have had some pillow-fort stuff like Propaganda out because nobody was able to kill him. Honestly, I felt a little bad. It was right before Christmas. He was probably hoping for a good game that day, and was achingly close to winning. I asked Kid Combo if, since he had nothing better to do, if he'd like to play Santa's Little Helper and choose for me who gets what presents. He was kinda bored, so he said sure... The turns to follow were fun. I played Form of the Dragon getting my life down to 5, and then let Kid Combo choose who to give it to. The player that got it didn't last long.
I played Transcendence.
I was under 20 life so I didn't die immediately to its effect. Kid Combo had me use Zedruu to give it to my son, who was instantly and unceremoniously killed because he had the misfortune of being over 20 life. He wasn't thrilled, but took it well. I was having fun. Santa's Little Helper was having fun. The folks getting gifts were no longer having fun, but I was OK with that. Zedruu is not a group hug deck - it's way more complicated than that. Apparently the Karlov player wasn't having fun. I still don't understand why. Maybe he was bored. Maybe he just wanted the game to be over. Maybe he forgot in the long, long time since I locked out Kid Combo what would happen if I were killed. Maybe he just had a colossal brain fart. I don't know, but Karlov did the unthinkable. The Karlov player killed me.
Zedruu doesn't exactly play for a strong board presence. I still don't remember exactly how he did it, but he killed me. I was vulnerable and Karlov couldn't resist. I was out of the game. Celestial Dawn was out of the game. Kid Combo was back in the game. After sitting around with nothing to do for what must have felt like an eternity, the Kruphix player for the second time looked somewhat disbelieving... and when Karlov ended his turn, he passed to Kid Combo, who immediately did his combo and won the game. I have rarely been happier for someone to win. He could have scooped. He could have gotten mad. He could have been a bad sport, but he hung in there. He played his lands.
He even played the part of Santa's Elf, and in the end, he was the last man standing. A few weeks ago I wrote about one of the worst games I had ever had (which I won). This was one of the BEST games I ever played in which I still managed to lose. Stop Hitting Yourself... After a while I decided that Zedruu needed more ways to actually compete at tables. All upgrades and changes to the deck still had to involve using and abusing his ability to give permanents. After some research, I found a new angle... I found cards that allow you to sacrifice your own lands or pay 2 life as the cost of an ability the creature has.
Trenching Steed and Troubled Healer do the former and Moltensteel Dragon and Immolating Souleater do the latter. Needless to say, giving these cards away and then trying to convince an opponent to pay all of their life or sacrifice all their lands isn't going to get you very far.
I also added Mindslaver to the deck.
Mindslaver can be a risky card to run. Let's just say it's a prime target for in-game theft. My new goal was to give a player one of these "self-harm" cards, use Mindslaver to take their turn and then cripple them so badly that they won't be able to recover. So far I have only successfully used this trick once, taking a friend's turn and then sacrificing all of his lands by using Trenching Steed. He had to leave anyways, so it wasn't nearly as feel-bad a move as it could have been. I'm glad it's in the deck as it makes it decidedly more interesting.
Mindslaver will someday backfire against an opponent who kills Zedruu, steals the Mindslaver and forces me to suffer the pain I'm hoping to give to them. It's worth the risk, as it gives the deck a powerful surprise that can really take advantage of Zedruu's ability.
Even if I just have Mindslaver available to me and nothing extra to give to someone, taking someone else's turn is a powerful move on its own and worth including in the deck. Victory at Last This past Fall I finally won a game with Zedruu.
I'm pretty sure it was the first and only game the deck has won.
All I remember is that it was the usual mess of politics and gift-giving in the early to mid game. I played a strong political game and gave away stuff like I usually do.
I believe I got out Azor's Elocutors (an alternate win con) but one of my opponents stole it from me.
I was dead to rights at the end but one player chose to kill the other player rather than me. The player who had stolen Azor's Elocutors would eventually win with it, so the other player got my word that I wouldn't go after him. He needed to try to remove the other player, as that player was now a bigger threat to win the game.
Promises like that are all about timing. The other player would soon win, so I agreed to not go after my buddy. He could swing in with everything and I wouldn't swing on him on my turn. He was able to knock that player out, and now I had to decide how to proceed.
With only two players left, and my life under 20, I played Transcendence, used Zedruu to give it to my opponent and I won the game.
Easy peasy, and it felt good.
Transcendence is just fantastic with Zedruu, no matter what kind of deck you are building. It's only a win con with one other player still in the game, but it is always a good addition for a deck that is built around giving away permanents. Hugging it Out Zedruu has been involved in more than a few weird games but one of my favorites was a game where I was playing against three other decks, including a Phelddagrif player. The early game was fairly straightforward. I was able to get some morph creatures out and pass at least one of them over to an opponent while Phelddagrif set up his pillowfort.
I was able to flip a Frontline Strategist to stop one of the players from killing the other, earning a league "Bodyguard" point for that game. I think the very next turn he got the kill anyways but immediately afterwards I played my trusty Transcendence and gave it to that player to knock him out and get a league "Avenger" point for that game. He was stunned, as he had never been eliminated from a game that way before. The Phelddagrif player has played in our EDH league many times and has shown an enormous amount of patience for the fact that Phelldagrif pretty much never wins games. He built it as a group hug deck and either has no win-cons or has very, very few. He is sometimes picked off early by players who look for easy kills or who dislike hug players on principle. More than anything, I think he plays for the social interaction and for the fun of it. I have never seen him win a game with Phelddagrif.
With only two players left, it never entered into my mind that I'd have trouble winning. I was playing against Phelddagrif, with a deck full of weird, effective, and slightly unfair ways to hamstring or just kill players. I didn't even worry about what I'd draw or what I had in hand. I would probably be able to find some way to close out the game. Given enough time I'd find a way. I might play Delusions of Grandeur, gain 20 life, give it to him, bounce it to my hand so he lost 20 life and repeat that cycle until he was dead. I was sure I'd be able to dig to something eventually, even if it wound up being my janky Mindslaver / Moltensteel Dragon combo to force him to pay his own life down to nearly nothing. I might even be able to win by combat damage - I have lots of creatures. They are weird, janky creatures, but they can still do damage. i was fine. With my life total at 19 and my Transcendence safely tucked away into my graveyard, the Phelddagrif player took his turn.
First he used Phelddagrif to bump my life total up to 21. Then he cast Open the Vaults, returning all enchantments from everyone's graveyard back to the battlefield... including Transcendence!
I was dead, dead, dead. I deserved to eventually get hit by my own hateful little wincon, but to be honest, I was super happy to be able to see our local Phelddagrif player finally net a win.
He was ecstatic, it was generally deemed hilarious by everyone present and was a good enough story that I just had to include it here.
Conclusions
I don't know if my morph Zedruu deck is truly unique, or if I'm the 89th person to brew up this particular pile of jank and think it's a new idea, but I love it. It gives me a unique experience that I can pull out every now and then for a game that will be different and more challenging than almost any other EDH game I play.
Maybe someday I will build a voltron Zedruu deck, or a stax Zedruu deck, or some other weird build. I'm very curious as to whether it would be fun, but i can't imagine it being more fun than the build I've got. It doesn't see much success in terms of winning games, but I've got my budget Narset deck for when I want to play Jeskai and have a shot at winning.
A link to the deck is included below. I change all my decks a lot, but if I ever rework it away from the "morph" build I'll save this one as a retired build and set up a new list so this link still works.
Zedruu Christmas Goat on TappedOut.net
Those Booster Packs
So I promised I would show you what I opened in those booster packs, but first I have to ask... did you skip to the end?
Were you even tempted to?
Whether you read the entire post or skipped ahead to find out what was in the second pack, or what the third "mystery" pack even was, I hope you get my point. When playing politics, and when trying to find reasons to get players to not just kill you, a little psychology can go a long way. If you can get opponents wondering what morph they'll be given and whether or not it will help them win or advance their boardstate, you are helping to keep them from thinking about how quickly they can kill you.
So which door did you choose?
Door Number One
Door number one was a M14 pack. Not much go over - you saw what you were getting. Personally, I was uninspired by anything in the Magic 2014 pack shown above but maybe you're the kind of player who likes to play things safe, doesn't like surprises and would rather know what you're getting into. After all, the two other packs might have been filled with spiders. Not cards to throw into your spider tribal deck - actual spiders! Who knows - it could happen. Best to be safe.
Door Number Two
Were you tempted by the Khans of Tarkir pack? If you were, this is what you would have opened. Sorry - no fetch lands.
In the rare slot you got an Avalanche Tusker. Not exactly a money card. The uncommons are Nomad Outpost, Seek the Horizon and Mardu Blazebringer. These aren't terrible cards, and could find their way into the right decks but again, you didn't hit the jackpot here. The commons didn't have anything I recognized as particularly good cards. If you're building a Mardu EDH deck, this deck could have some stuff you might use, and the Temur Banner and Tusker go together, but all in all, this isn't a fantastic pack.
Door Number Three
So what was the mystery pack?
The mystery pack was Conflux!
I figured something a little older and harder to find in 2017 would be a fun mystery pack to choose.
As luck would have it, the rare slot is Wall of Reverence, which is apparently worth a few bucks. It isn't going to net us a box of Aether Revolt if we sell it to our LGS, but it's better than the rares in the other two packs, at least in terms of raw value. Our uncommons are Hellkite Hatchling, Manaforce Mace and Knotvine Mystic, none of which are new to me but which could be usable in decks I have. Knotvine Mystic might well slot into my Sidar & Tana deck or my Mayael deck if I don't already have one in there. I'll have to check. The foil is Yoke of the Damned, which isn't worth much, and the commons don't contain anything I'm particularly excited about. My Sidar & Tana deck is definitely going to get that saproling token, but if that's one of the more exciting cards in the booster, I think this one was something of a whiff as well.
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