Zara, Renegade Recruiter - Polymorphing Scourge of the Skies
Zara, Renegade Recruiter
Approximate Total Cost:
About The Deck
With this deck running Polymorph effects, you want to minimize the number of smaller utility creatures since getting one of those is not particularly impressive. The only actual creatures included in this deck are bigger creatures and most of them are fliers. Fault Line type red mass damage effects do not affect Zara, Renegade Recruiter or most of the creatures in the deck, so these can be useful for clearing the board and doing a bit of damage to everyone.
Bounce effects are super useful with Zara to essentially remove a creature an opponent has and then swing it right back in their face.
If opponent's are running decks light on creatures, or you are having issues with Zara, Renegade Recruiter being removed too often, you have a number of token producing planeswalkers and enchantments to create Thopter and Servo tokens to serve as Polymorph or altar fodder to keep your game plan on track. These token generators are also useful for just creating chump blockers.
Telepathy and Glasses of Urza are very useful tools to know what your opponents have in hand, otherwise you will be swinging in blind with Zara, Renegade Recruiter and hoping your opponents have something worthwhile. If you do not have one of these effects in play, hopefully you have an idea of what kinds of decks your opponents are running so that you can take an educated guess as to who is the best target. Sometimes you will be choosing creatures that are just huge beaters to do a bunch of damage, sometimes you will be choosing useful ETB creatures. Hitting an opponent with their own Craterhoof Behemoth definitely feels good.
Zara, Renegade Recruiter is capable of using cards like Sundial of the Infinite, Conjurer's Closet, Thassa, Deep-Dwelling, and a number of phasing effects to permanently steal opponent's creatures that you have put into play with her ability, once the return the creatures to their owner's hand effect is put on the stack in the end step. I believe these to be a bit of a trap for her and that they dilute the plan of using opponent's creatures as a resource. There are also many cases where opponents are not running creatures that you really care too much about keeping around. It might not hurt to include one of these effects just in case but these are generally only useful with Zara, Renegade Recruiter on the field and otherwise don't have much use. I think if you really wanted to go this route you would want to go with a bit of a different game plan or different commander.
Cards like Howling Mine would be useful to increase the odds of your opponents have creatures in their hands for Zara's attack trigger but I am not a fan of giving my opponents more opportunities to have answers so I have not included those effects. In a more relaxed playgroup these might work but I know I'd suffer for it in my own playgroup.
Further Notes
Keiga, the Tide Star is on my short list of creatures to try in the deck since it swings for decent damage and I have a number of ways to sacrifice it when I want to utilize its death trigger.
There are a few more Fling effects and Polymorph effects that I don't have in the deck at the moment. The deck seems to work pretty well with the current balance on these effects but it may end up being adjusted in the future.
