Zedruu the Greatest of All Time

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tstorm823
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Post by tstorm823 » 4 years ago

The thread title is a backronym from "Zedruu the Goat." I do think this deck is the best thing ever, but you don't have to.


Zedruu - The Greatest Of All Time
Zedruu standing in Barren Glory with a Mirror of Fate reflecting Mind's Possibility Eye of the Desire Storm



What is this deck, and why would I play it?

This deck is a lot of things. It's a solid amount of group hug, a unique selection of combos, and a tiny bit of chaos sprinkled on top. It is my understanding that every part of that last sentence has a bad reputation among magic players, but I think that's because of the way people tend to play those styles. It can be frustrating to play against a group hug player who pretends they aren't trying to win, or a chaos player who actually isn't trying to win, or a combo player who wins with efficiency and consistency. This deck is not going to do any of that. It yearns for the win, it does everything in its power to get it, and it takes the game on a wild ride in the process.

-You might like this deck if you enjoy varied and extremely unconventional lines of play.
-You might not like this deck if you're looking to have a consistent game plan.
-You should play this deck if you're looking for new crazy stories to tell.
-You shouldn't play this deck if your playgroup isn't interested in spectating a convoluted endgame.





Background

My Credentials
I have no credentials. I had never played in an event bigger than a local game store until years after starting this deck. I've played on and off, largely limited formats, since 1997, including the dubious break that skipped Mirrodin to come back for Kamigawa, and nearly all of my knowledge of competitive Magic comes from watching other people.
That being said, I hope you're not looking for competitive chops from me, because this deck is supremely casual. The essence of casual play is playing what you want, and I have decades of playing the cards that I want to under my belt. That's harder than it sounds. You can't just slap Knowledge Pool in a deck and suddenly have a good time, it takes some serious deckbuilding to make the cards you want to play shine in the way that you dream of. In the end, my credentials are this deck. This is the deck where the cards I love the most shine the brightest. So if you love some of the cards that I do, read on, and maybe my experience will help you make them shine.

Deck History
I started playing EDH not too long before the first precons and wasn't totally sold on the format... and then I went out at midnight when Zedruu was released because it was love at first sight. The deck they had constructed for Zedruu was, to be generous in my description, disappointing. The included win conditions were a) hope your opponents kill each other, b) make their creatures kill them, or c) play a different general. So I started off by adding some cards I like and a few really convoluted combos, expecting the deck to be silly but bad. Then something crazy happened: it started winning. And every time I came up with another weird unwieldy combo, it slotted in easily, and I still kept up at what people would now call a 75% table. I used to say that the deck built itself because I couldn't explain why it was working.

So the first few years of playing this deck were figuring out why it worked. The next few years were implementing the theories on why it was working to make it work better, still playing my ridiculous win conditions but making them work even better, to the point where this genuinely became the most threatening deck I owned for a time. Since then, the power has been toned down a little, as most of my changes have been dedicated to squishing as many of my favorite cards and strategies into a single deck as possible without devolving into an unplayable mess. And I've certainly tested out changes that cross the line into unplayable mess before, but I promise I don't post a list unless I've played games enough to make sure it's still working.

All About Zedruu

Why play Zedruu as your commander?


There are 3 mechanical reasons why Zedruu the Greathearted is the correct commander here. The most important reason by far is the card draw. Card draw is the foundation of this deck, and Zedruu is a powerful card draw engine in the command zone. It's not uncommon for Zedruu to draw 10-15 cards in a game if she's left alone, and very few commanders have that draw power, particularly on a 4 mana creature that doesn't demand a specific build like something like Edric, Spymaster of Trest.

There are certainly a few (mostly bluer) generals with similar draw capabilities (a few have been in the deck), but the second reason to play Zedruu is the color combination. Jeskai is just the zaniest 3-color combination in magic and that's all there is to it. Adding the color identity to the draw requirement leaves basically 3 alternatives to Zedruu (none of which existed when Zedruu was printed).
  • Narset, Enlightened Master: digs 4 deep and plays them for free. Not technically drawing cards, but far more powerful. A Narset version would focus more on the powerful non-creatures (and paint a target on your head)
  • Kynaios and Tiro of Meletis: draws you cards every turn like the Howling Mines I love, but it also helps your opponents ramp if that's optimal, so I'd recommend more control spells if you use them.
  • Partners with Kraum, Ludevic's Opus: Kraum is the only partner for these colors that will passively generate more than 1 card of value a turn. If you wanted to focus in on things like Possibility Storm, you could build Kraum + Ishai, Ojutai Dragonspeaker as an interesting alternative.
But then there's the 3rd reason to use Zedruu, and that's the usefulness of the donate ability. Some cards function better for you under opponent's control. Some combos this deck has played require an opponent to have something specific. Some win conditions don't work if your opponent has no creatures. And all of that is on top of the political possibilities of handing a de facto teammate something they need to turn the tables on the opponent closest to victory. There really is no substitute for everything Zedruu brings to the table.

There are certainly weaknesses to Zedruu. If you build too much dependence on Zedruu's draw ability, you can lose a whole game from a Mind Control. And the ability requires a lot of mana of specific colors to get rolling, so color screw can be a big hurdle at times. But a deck built to make Zedruu shine will be playing other cards to mitigate these issues.

How to play Zedruu the Greathearted?


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Playing Zedruu properly requires an understanding of certain rules in the game, many of them specific enough that not all players would be familiar with them, so before I introduce my deck, I'd like to give a brief summary of rules that will likely come up if you play Zedruu.

Ownership: Zedruu counts cards you own but don't control. The owner of a card is fairly obviously whoever's using the deck it started in. Ownership in the game does not care about the real world owner of the card, only the person who is using that deck. As often as I've made the joke "I loaned you that deck, so I should get to draw 20, right?", it does not work that way. The only cards you own when playing Zedruu are the cards from the deck you're playing. Ownership of tokens works differently because they don't exist at the start of the game. For tokens, the owner is whoever made them. For example, if you were to play Kiki-Jiki, Mirror Breaker and use it to make a token, you would be the owner of that token. If you play Forbidden Orchard and make an opponent make a token, the opponent owns that token, so you do not draw off of those tokens. If you play Political Trickery and give someone Forbidden Orchard and then they give you the token (as will happen if it's 1 on 1), you own those and can donate them for value. This can get a little tricky with some cards because they've changed the rules over time, and most recently changed the text of cards to accommodate those rules. So while the text on Forbidden Orchard tells you to put a token under their control, the oracle text tells the opponent to create the token. As far as I know, no cards let you deliberately have a token you own enter under an opponent's control, but if you ever find it ambiguous who created a a token, you should look up the official oracle text for the card in question.

Control: Changing control is sort of the whole point of Zedruu. The two rules situations where control is iffy are auras and multiple control effects. Auras are easy, you just need to remember that control of an aura doesn't change what it's attached to. In my deck, the aura traditionally in question was Paradox Haze. If I enchant myself with Paradox Haze and then donate it, it still enchants me and thus I still get the extra upkeep. There are entire Zedruu decks dedicated to playing auras and then donating them to draw cards. In the situation where multiple effects are giving players control of an object, the most recently applied effect is the one that counts, and an earlier effect ending doesn't change later effects. Example, if you Mind Control a creature and then donate the creature (not that you would, but you could), there would be two static effects giving control of the creature, but Zedruu was more recent and would be the one that wins. If Mind Control is destroyed later, it doesn't change control back to the original controller because Zedruu's effect still applies (and will continue to apply until the object leaves play or you or the current controller lose the game). More likely, if you play a Threaten effect and donate the stolen creature, it will remain donated even after Threaten ends. And if someone plays Mind Control on something donated with Zedruu, that effect will be most recent and give them control, but you'll end up drawing anyway so who cares!

A specific case of changing control is during combat. If an attacking or blocking creature changes control, it is removed from combat, and thus takes no damage. Thus, you can block a creature with your own, let's say it's Memnite, and then pay 3 into Zedruu to donate that Memnite, the attacker remains blocked but instead of Memnite dying it moves to the other side to help you draw more cards. I highly recommend avoiding creatures as donations as they can be easily sacrificed or used as chump blockers to deny you cards, but it's better to donate than just chump block yourself.

Trigger Resolution: Zedruu's only trigger condition is that you reach the beginning of the upkeep with her. No player gets priority during the untap step, and upkeep triggers happen before priority passes, so as soon as someone passes the turn to you, you're guaranteed that Zedruu will trigger. Even if your opponents control nothing you own, Zedruu's trigger still goes on the stack. Then priority passes before the trigger resolves, which means you can do things before it resolves, which is important because you can donate things in response to the trigger, and then X is counted during resolution. A common play for me is Pentad Prism on turn 2 followed by Zedruu on turn three and donating the prism on turn 4 in response to the trigger. Mind that this works both ways though, so if your opponents remove your donations in response to the trigger you'll draw less. But the trigger resolves independent of whether you still control Zedruu when it resolves, so targeted removal at Zedruu won't stop the draw, and if you're desperate enough, you can donate Zedruu to draw off of Zedruu's trigger.

Players Leaving the Game: I'm just going to paste a section of the comprehensive rules here because this is important.
800.4a When a player leaves the game, all objects (see rule 109) owned by that player leave the game and any effects which give that player control of any objects or players end. Then, if that player controlled any objects on the stack not represented by cards, those objects cease to exist. Then, if there are any objects still controlled by that player, those objects are exiled.
If you die while someone controls one of your cards, your card leaves with you.
If they die while controlling a card donated to them, the effect giving them control ends and it returns to whoever would control it without that effect.
If a card you own entered play under an opponent's control (e.g. they used Bribery), there is no effect giving them control, thus it stays in their control and falls under the last clause where everything left is exiled.
Players dying is a big mess, which is ok, because big messes are sort of this decks M.O.

My Zedruu Deck

My Decklist
This is the deck mostly as it exists in real life pink sleeves (that make it easily identifiable when the cards get handed out to other people). This deck has reached a point where I can say comfortably there isn't a change I wish I could make. That is not to say that I don't ever change the deck, but rather that I'm long past the point where I keep a list of things I would play if budgets and availability worked out.
Greatest of All Time: Current Draft
Approximate Total Cost:

The Deck Philosophy


So what exactly is the theoretical basis I've found for why the deck above works? Just like in the introduction where I described the deck as a combination of multiple things, here I'd like to break down those things.

Group Hug: I'm not a particular fan of the moniker "group hug" because it gives the impression that I'm being kind, but I don't play Howling Mine for that purpose. I play these things because they rebalance the resource management of the game in a way that benefits me more than my opponents. It's the theoretical inverse of stax: where stax restricts resource development, we expand it. Stax decks are designed to play through their own restriction, winning with cards that would be individually weak against fully developed opponents. A competent hugging deck does the opposite: plays effects that are not efficient or compact because it makes a game state where players have a glut of resources. A normal Commander deck builds with a curve, it wants to play a land and a spell each turn, it wants to have redundancy for consistency's sake, and tutors for even better options. Zedruu plays no tutors, only 33 lands, and a pile of unique 6+ mana effects. It looks bad on the surface, but when drawing 3-4 cards a turn, everyone else has fist fulls of redundant effects that they can't play all of, and Zedruu is developing towards a synergy or combo win safely in hand.

The other advantage of everyone drawing lots of cards is the two-fold tendency of people to tap out because of it. Your opponents will always have a proactive option on their turn, and some people will succumb to the temptation to tap out for their own things. And even the ones wise enough to keep mana up when it means discarding to hand size will at some point have to answer someone other than you who's trying to win the game. Particularly with the flash-enabling effects, this can create an opening where everyone is tapped out and you're free to play something that would never have a chance to get by unanswered under normal circumstances.

Chaos: Just like a good stax deck is built to play through the resource denial, and a good hug deck is built to prosper with the extra resources, a good chaos shell is one that is built to play through its own chaos more optimally than opponents. This isn't exactly a chaos deck, just a few effects here and there, but that doesn't mean there's any less consideration to the ones included. Possibility Storm is the prime example here. It's a card that for most players makes their spells utterly unpredictable, but this deck is constructed in a way that mitigates that. The spread of spell types makes it so bombs can be dug for by focusing on casting sorceries or enchantments. One of the two planeswalkers can remove Possibility Storm to let cards be cast from hand when necessary, allowing for a statistically significant chance of having that option. Probably the best example I've seen of playing best through chaos was an opponent of mine who tapped out floating mana and played Thieves' Auction, took no artifacts, and then cast Shatterstorm and completely ran away with the game. Chaos for chaos' sake earns its bad reputation, but benefiting from an effect that is hampering everyone else is really impressive to see.




Combo: There are two aspects of this deck's combos that are different than a stereotypical combo deck. The first is that they are all 4+ cards to go infinite. That doesn't explain why the deck works, it's quite obviously a big limitation, and one I put on myself to generate the sort of gameplay I enjoy. But the second difference is part of why this deck runs well: all of the combo pieces have purposes outside just an infinite. Font of Mythos can be a combo piece, Cursed Mirror can be a combo piece, Gilded Lotus can be a combo piece, Detention Sphere can be a combo piece, Turnabout can be a combo piece. All of these are cards that are going to be relevant in many games of magic even if they only combo in a select few. And if you want to build a deck full of wild and wacky combos, that is something you should aim for.

But that brings up another difference between this and linear combo decks: there are more combos woven into this deck than a linear combo deck usually has because that sort of deck would rather tutor pieces and play more efficient combos than play a dozen combos and hope to pull the right pairs. This feels a bit counter-intuitive, playing both more combos and combos with more pieces, but it's actually helpful because of the insistence on playing combo pieces that are also functional cards you're happy to play proactively. Sometimes you play out a combo piece early and lose access to it later, so having a wide variety of backup plans ensures you don't run out of win conditions.

Politics: It's not right to call this a political deck because very nearly every imaginable deck is political in a multiplayer environment. If you have removal, that's a political tool. If you can choose who to attack, that's political. That doesn't leave many decks left that lack political options. But Zedruu is itself a political option, so it's more of a conscious effort here than most places. That doesn't mean table talk. Politics is the art of making what's good for you also good for other players. Verbally making deals to do things for each other is both the most obvious and second worst form of politics (next to lying). Letting someone else play a threat first so a 3rd player can remove it is good politics, it gets rid of a threat to them while also burning the removal for you. Donating someone a blocker so that they don't die to the 3rd player who will come for you next is good politics, as them being alive can make your survival more likely. These things that don't require you saying a single word are so good because they don't require any loyalty or trust, they just rely on people acting in their self-interest because you made their interests coincide with yours. Zedruu's donate ability gives you more opportunities to use others self-interest for your own benefit, and if you recognize threats correctly, the ability to cooperate smoothly can give you a big leg up that you wouldn't have based only on your own merits.

The Deck Strategy


How to play Zedruu breaks down into essentially 3 phases.

Phase 1: Fix the mana, set up card draw, and hopefully get flash.
Phase 2: Interact, sow chaos, and continue drawing cards.
Phase 3: Win in one big swoop.

Phase 1 is all about making mana and playing Howling Mines and then the Howling Mines will find you more mana and you're ready to go, and that usually takes the first 4 or 5 turns. The early game strategy is the only easy part of the game, just get as many cards and as much mana as you can for the future. Your turns at this point in the game should be very quick.

Phase 2 is all about card interactions, the subtle synergies within this deck as well as the interactions between these cards and things opponents might play that will keep people guessing instead of winning the game or destroying the card draw, and this part of the game could be 2 turns or 200 depending on the opponents. The synergy section below as well as the card selection section of this thread go into great detail on what combinations of cards to look out for, but it's important to note right away that you should be on the look out. The key to quickly and accurately finding the right line in a deck as potentially complex as this one is in taking stock of your resources during everyone else's turn and determining which draws are going to swing the game swiftly in your favor. If you have 7 devotion to blue and Minamo, School at Water's Edge in play, you can recognize that Nykthos, Shrine to Nyx is a potential draw ahead of time and be careful not to waste your land drop on something else. If you play Knowledge Pool, you can know that Replication Technique will probably give you 3 more Knowledge Pools, a position that's close to "can't lose" territory. Don't just spectate when it isn't your turn, plan out your best draws so that you don't miss when they do arrive.

Phase 3 is doing something immensely stupid and flashy to win the game, and that almost universally takes 1 turn, 2 turns, or infinite turns and nothing inbetween. This tends to be where you make up for the short early turns where you didn't play anything threatening by playing all of it all at once. See the synergies and combos sections for more info.



The Synergies


"This deck is not only able to go crazy - it also needs to do so."

Zedruu has won many games of edh in many remarkable ways, but casting individual spells and letting them act as a win condition alone is an incredibly rare outcome. In order to reach the point of victory, this deck almost requires that select pieces be strung together that grant the pilot an unfathomable board state or direct access to most or all of the deck. On occasion, I've claimed I either need 10 mana and 30 cards or 10 cards and 30 mana to end the game, It's not quite as formulaic as that, but while I pride myself on winning in comically unique ways, the truth is that the win conditions are often purely academic exercises once one of the major engines get up and running. Any one of these strategies could be picked out and made into a more focused, more consistent deck. Having done so with more than one of them, I've found it's my preference to weave them all into one deck and let chance decide what strategy to pursue in any given game.

Drawing cards to draw more cards to draw more cards
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We've established that this deck intends to draw a lot of cards passively over time, but when the time comes to close the game out, we switch to active drawing effects. After drawing cards each turn with Howling Mine effects, you eventually hit faster engines: Jeskai Ascendancy loots whenever you cast a spell. Azor's Gateway loots for each time you can untap it. Chance (from Leave // Chance) lets you rummage any number of cards away. Swans of Bryn Argoll lets you draw cards whenever you can damage it or loot away cards with Firestorm. Most of that doesn't actually increase the number of cards in hand, but eventually they draw into direct draw spells: Temporal Cascade, Echo of Eons, Sea Gate Restoration, and Vanish Into Memory, at which point you can often string together draw effects or copy them with Rootha, Mercurial Artist/Bonus Round/Narset's Reversal until the entire library is evaporated.

If you choose to play draw doubling effects like Thought Reflection or Alhammarret's Archive, all of these cards go into turbo overdrive with a reasonable threat of decking by accident. Moment's like that are why my planeswalkers are designed to sneak through Possibility Storm, as Mindmoil + Possibility Storm + Thought Reflection has lead to accidental decking in the past.
Making Mana to Make More Mana to Make More Mana...
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This deck doesn't use too much mana until it's gotten that big ol' fist of cards, and then it uses a lot of mana that it makes in a hurry. How do we make lots of mana in a hurry? First up is mana rocks. Once you're far enough in, the moxen add a mana, the signets effectively cost 1, Gilded Lotus costs 2, Pentad Prism and Crystalline Crawler are effectively free, Cursed Mirror on Crystalline Crawler generates an extra mana, and all these things at the right time can jump you from a few mana on your turn to double that the next turn. Having flash on your mana rocks means you can do this on your opponent's end step and then take a huge turn out of nowhere.

Another way to make a ton of mana is to untap mana sources repeatedly. Turnabout, Mind Over Matter, and Unbender Tine are the cards that do this, Turnabout is generally a mega-ritual, Mind Over Matter converts card draw directly into mana, and Unbender Tine lets multi-mana permanents pull double duty. Put Turnabout into Eye of the Storm and instants and sorceries become free. This is a dangerous play if any of your opponent's can respond, but do it anyway cause it's super fun. Additionally, these cards and Minamo, School at Water's Edge can untap Nykthos for increasing amounts of mana as your board grows.

A third way to turn your mana into more mana is Jeskai Ascendancy with creatures that make mana. It could be Crystalline Crawler and clones of it, it could be active man-lands or lands animated by Noyan Dar, Roil Shaper, it could be mana rocks animated by March of the Machines, or maybe a handful of legendary creatures with Relic of Legends. Whatever the combination of things is, you can start untapping mana with every non-creature spell, and suddenly you realize that over a third of the deck is non-creature spells that cost 4 or less and by the end of the turn you've spent 20 or 30 mana. Displacer Kitten can act the same as Jeskai Ascendancy, but instead of untapping mana producers, it flickers them. This only really works with mana rocks, but the Kitten is also more easily cloned than Ascendancy, which can increase velocity in a big way. Just remember that you have to pick targets from multiple kittens at the same time, so you cannot flicker the same permanent twice off of the same non-creature spell.

And then there's Azor's Gateway, a card that can tap for 40 of any color. This deck has 5 cards to untap the gateway to turbo flip, or to untap it as a land after flipping, and a 6th in Jeskai Ascendancy if it becomes a creature. There is an extra secret way to flip it in this deck as well. Saheeli, Sublime Artificer can turn Azor's Gateway into a clone of Golden Guardian, and then they can fight to flip Azor's Gateway into its printed backside, Sanctum of the Sun. I promise it works that way, and probably nobody will believe you when you try to do this.

An aside on Azor's Gateway's transform effect (since this is likely the best place for me to put this): transform only happens if the card in question is a double-faced card and if it hasn't transformed since the ability was put on the stack. The second part there leads to a weird bit of optimization in the case of Azor's Gateway.. Imagine you have Azor's Gateway and Unbender Tine and 20 life. You activate the Gateway for a mana, exile the 5th card, flip it, gain 5 life, and untap it. Tap for 25, untap with Tine, tap for 25 more. 49 net mana, neat! But instead, try this: activate the Gateway for 1 mana, untap with Tine in response, activate a second time for a mana. The second activation resolves for a loot, 5 life, a transform, and an untap. Tap for 25 mana. Then the first one resolves, but the rules say it can't transform again, so you end up with a loot, 5 life, and untap Sanctum of the Sun, which can tap for 30 mana now, a net of 53 instead. If you have the one extra mana to start with, it's likely better to do this method and get your extra loot and extra life. Now imagine this with Mind Over Matter instead, and the extra loots and life add up. Last side note, if you clone Azor's Gateway with a non-double-faced card and manage to get 5 different cmc's beneath it, it still can't transform but will do the rest of the ability, making a permanent that essentially reads "1: draw a card, exile a card from hand, gain 5 life".
Knowledge Pool, Possibility Storm, Eye of the Storm
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These three cards have a lot in common. "Whenever a player casts a spell, exile that spell, then they play another spell." The trick is what happens when you control more than one at the same time and they all want to exile the same spell. Knowledge Pool is the simple one because it uses the word "if." If they exile the spell, they get one out of Knowledge Pool, but if they don't exile the spell to Knowledge Pool, they get nothing out. There could be 1000 Knowledge Pools, there would still only be one that gets the card and gives one back. Possibility Storm is similarly simple, but in the opposite way; there is no if, so the ability resolves to the end whether or not the spell is actually removed by Possibility Storm. If the spell gets countered or exiled by something else, you still get a spell from your library from Possibility Storm. This means, if there were 1000 Possibility Storms and you cast an artifact, you'd end up flipping through looking for 1000 artifacts (and the first trigger puts the triggering spell on the bottom, so you'd end up getting that one back as well.) Eye of the Storm lies somewhere between the two. There is no if in Eye of the Storm, so you get to cast the spells exiled by Eye of the Storm whether or not the original spell is exiled by it, but you only get to copy that spell if Eye of the Storm does eat it, so letting another permanent exile the spell means you only get to copy the cards otherwise exiled by Eye of the Storm. Another distinction of Eye of the Storm that differentiates it from the other two is that it triggers from spells cast from zones other than the hand. Possibility Storm and Knowledge Pool only trigger off cards cast from the hand, where Eye of the Storm triggers off of any instant or sorcery card played. (The "card" distinction is what keeps it from triggering itself). But this means that Eye of the Storm accepts spells cast off Knowledge Pool, Possibility Storm, and Mind's Desire.

If multiples of these are on the field and controlled by different players, what happens becomes dictated by whose turn it is and you better hope you've got instant speed everything, but there's not a strategy you can plan ahead for that situation, so go find a judge if you get bogged down or confused. In the much more likely scenario that you're in charge of everything, you can stack the triggers in the order that benefits you. With the most common situation of multiple Knowledge Pools, this means that you get to pick which Pool each player is casting spells from for each spell cast. Replication Technique is particularly great with Knowledge Pool, as the cast trigger will copy Knowledge Pool as you cast from hand without any chance of another player stealing the opportunity from you, and trigger a second time when cast from the Pool for a total of 4 Pools if you've cast Zedruu once.

If you want a spell in Eye of the Storm, you have that resolve first and you've gotten what you want, you can still Possibility Storm if that's out, and you get nothing out of Knowledge Pool. If you have Knowledge Pool and Eye of the Storm, you can have Knowledge Pool resolve first, get a spell out of that, and still cast everything in Eye of the Storm. If the spell cast out of Knowledge Pool is an instant or sorcery, that will trigger Eye as well, and then you copy every spell exiled by Eye (including the one out of Knowledge Pool) twice. If you have Possibility Storm and Knowledge Pool, you can let Knowledge Pool resolve first, get a spell out, then Possibility Storm anyways, getting two spell from each cast from hand. Letting Possibility Storm resolve first on spells your opponents cast can keep them from accessing Knowledge Pool or filling Eye of the Storm (though you can't prevent them from casting spells already in Eye of the Storm). And if you have all 3 permanents out and you cast an instant or sorcery, you can get something out of Knowledge Pool, cast an instant or sorcery from your deck, and cast all the instants and sorceries in the Eye (atleast twice).

As an illustration of how rediculous this can be, I will use an extreme example: you control all 3, you have 7 mana available, Knowledge Pool has an inconsequential instant or sorcery in it, and your hand contains Mind's Desire and Firestorm. Cast Mind's Desire, all 3 trigger, storm count 1. Knowledge Pool trigger on top eats Mind's Desire and casts an instant or sorcery out (from here referred to as "spell"), triggering Eye of the storm. Storm count is 2, stack is Eye/spell/PS on sorcery/Eye. With those on the stack, cast Firestorm from hand and let Knowledge Pool eat that as well, casting out Mind's Desire and triggering Eye again as well as the storm trigger. Storm count is 4, and the stack is Eye/storm trigger/Mind's Desire/PS on instant/Eye/Eye/spell/PS on sorcery/Eye. Eye exiles Mind's Desire, then copies it and triggers storm for 4 more copies, then the first storm trigger makes 3 more copies for a grand total of 8. 8 Mind's Desire, storm count 5, stack is PS on instant/Eye/Eye/spell/PS on sorcery/Eye. Possibility Storm finds an instant, triggering Eye of the Storm, recasting the instant and Mind's Desire for 7 more copies. Then eye trigger from casting Firestorm resolves casting the two spells for 9 more Mind's Desires up to 24. That's 24 Mind's Desires, storm count 10, and the stack is Eye/spell/PS on sorcery/Eye. Eye eats the spell first cast out of Knowledge Pool, then cast it and the two other spells in the Eye making 11 more Mind's Desires for 35 Mind's Desires, 13 storm, and just the original 2 triggers left. Possibility Storm resolves finding a sorcery to cast, triggering Eye of the Storm and casting all 4 things in the Eye, making 15 more Mind's Desire copies and getting up to 18 storm, and then the first Eye trigger that has been waiting since we cast Mind's Desire resolves, casting all 4 things in the Eye again for 19 more copies of Mind's Desire, making a grand total of 72 copies of Mind's Desire. And by the time you finish this, that's probably the entire library exiled and castable.

Even without something absurd like Mind's Desire, all those cast triggers will be triggering things like Jeskai Ascendancy and Displacer Kitten. And one more addition on top of these things is Bonus Round, which copies the instants and sorceries you cast regardless of whether something tries to eat them or not. With Bonus Round resolved Turnabout would copy before going into Eye of the Storm, and then copy again on the way out for 3 copies of Turnabout in total, and if Bonus Round is in Eye of the Storm, the rate of copies grows fast.
Mirrorweave Shenanigans
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Mirrorweave is shenanigans. You can make all your stuff really good for a turn, or you can make your opponent's stuff really bad for a turn. A Memnite turns into an Inferno Titan, or your opponent's Lord of Extinction turns into a Vedalken Plotter. While Mirrorweave can certainly be used aggressively, the instant speed and effecting opponents creatures makes Mirrorweave a great defensive card. I've said enough about shrinking threats into 1/1s, but even more than that, you can give things defender and make them not attack, which is a big deal when it's something like a 40/40 protection from creatures Uril, the Miststalker. This format is plagued with evasion and protection abilities, and Mirrorweave is great at blanking them. Ground flyers, make hexproof targettable, remove trample, destroy through indestructible. This gets even more significant with the additions of March of the Machines and Opalescence. Mirrorweave can (and has) dug through some of the most elaborate pillowforts I've ever seen. When someone has enchantments to make them and their permanents hexproof and limit me to one spell a turn and make me pay 16 mana per attacker or some such nonsense and they think they're safe, I can turn all their creature and enchantments into simple Inferno Titans and then wipe them out with my own Inferno Titan attack triggers.

But then there's the aggressive use of Mirrorweave with noncreatures turned into creatures. Wanna play Doomsday? Mirrorweave Mirror of Fate and go to town (more on this shortly). Need to do some damage fast? Mirrorweave Pandemonium. Wanna cast a rediculous amount of spells? Mirrorweave Possibility Storm and get replacement spells from every creature in play. Wanna steal an opponent's creatures? Mirrorweave a manland, and then Vedalken Plotter the creature away. Bonus there, your opponent's creatures turned lands aren't creatures so they can't block. Just need a lot of mana? Mirrorweave a Gilded Lotus. Wanna Vanish Into Memory every creature in play? Mirrorweave Precursor Golem. Wanna exile all creatures? Mirrorweave anything and play Detention Sphere. Wanna mill people to death in combat? Mirrorweave Swans of Bryn Argoll. Or you can cast Arcbond at an opponents creature after piling on blockers, and then Mirrorweave Swans in response to the Arcbond trigger to make them draw out. Wanna use your token creatures for Nykthos devotion? You can Mirrorweave Swans for that too! The options are plentiful before you even account for other people's creatures as targets.

One last shenanigan with Mirrorweave is when March of the Machines and Knowledge Pool are out. If you turn all your creatures in play into Knowledge Pools, they have no imprinted cards and can just eat spells without giving anything back until they've all been satisified. That's like having a field full of Decree of Silence for the turn, except they're all 6/6 creatures. Just some food for thought.
Build Your Own Doomsday
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In the card by card breakdown, I will mention building a Doomsday like 48,000 times, so now it's important to talk about what that actually means. Well, if my card tags worked right, you can just read Doomsday yourself and then I don't have to explain anything. Frankly, if you're reading this on a magic forum, you're probably familiar enough with Doomsday that I don't have to go on a long rant about what it is, certainly not all this trash I'm typing instead of "it picks a few cards from your library and replaces your library with those cards in the order of your choice," so let's move on to the "how" and "why" parts of playing jeskai doomsday. To turn Mirror of Fate into Doomsday, you need to exile your library first, and the easy way to do that is activate Mirror of Fate twice. The first activation exiles your library so that the second activation has a lot more options to choose from. There are a few ways to get a second activation in the deck right now. To list them: Saheeli, Sublime Artificer, Replication Technique, The Mycosynth Gardens, Echo of Eons, Temporal Cascade, a clone with March of the Machines, and Cavalier of Dawn. Echo of Eons and Temporal Cascade are a bit more tricky to pull off: you don't have much of a library because you activated Mirror of Fate already, so with enough care, you can manage the number of cards being shuffled in with the sorceries so that you redraw Mirror of Fate immediately or in short order.

In a Doomsday deck, you generally set your 5 card library to draw into the win. Well, it's a good thing we get those 2 extra cards to work with, because if you're trying to stack a win condition in this deck, you're likely looking to the next section...
4-Card Combos!


4 cards minimum, that's basically a hard rule here. 2 or 3 card combos are efficient, and efficiency is lame-o. Feel free to ask any opponent ever, and they'll gladly tell you how lame your combo win was. But when it takes 4 or more pieces to create the infinite loop, at least you know you had to work for it! It's like assembling Blasting Station/Summoning Station/Salvaging Station/Grinding Station except my combos are better because they weren't designed by Wizards of the Coast they're extra double plus convoluted, and that's just the essence of style. I hope people reading understand the nonsense tone I'm going for, but in all seriousness, the greatest joy I've gotten out of posting my Zedruu online is that more than just appreciating the deck style, people have imitated my win conditions, and that's just such lunacy that I can only smile.

This first one is not in the deck at the time of writing, but it was the first 4-card combo I put in the deck, so it will always get first billing here for the sake of posterity.
Memnite/Zedruu, the Greathearted/Warstorm Surge/Dissipation Field = Infinite Damage
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Control Warstorm Surge, then use Zedruu to donate someone else Dissipation Field. Finally, play Memnite. Warstorm Surge triggers having Memnite deal 1 damage to that player, triggering Dissipation Field to return Memnite to your hand, and then Memnite costs zero so you can repeat this process for free until they die. If more than one opponent needs to die, the Dissipation Field will return to you when an opponent with it dies, just make sure not to kill with Memnite itself as the Dissipation Field trigger won't resolve to bounce it if the controler of that trigger dies.

But what if you don't have Memnite and you want to do the same trick? Luckily for you, there's a backup free creature. Crystalline Crawler makes as much mana as it costs if you happen to make 4 colors of mana to cast it. Which you can do once you cast it because it makes any color of mana. Sweet!

But what if you have the Memnite, but not the Warstorm Surge? In that case, you can strap Infinite Reflection onto an Inferno Titan, and your free Memnite is now an Inferno Titan that does 3 damage on etb! You can even do this without Zedruu involved if you're willing to ping yourself a bunch of times.
The remainder of the combos I will attempt to group by commonalities. Long ago, there were 3-4 combos in the deck that each required 4 cards with little redundancy, but these days there are only about 3 non-land cards in the deck that can't contribute to a 4-5 card infinite loop. To be an infinite loop, at some point recursion has to be established, so I'm going to attempt to untangle Zedruu's puzzlebox and organize based on what card or combination allows for the recursion, but there are certainly times where a payoff card comes up in multiple combo groups.

Opalescence/Detention Sphere/Sakashima the Impostor
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An infinite etb combo, and the one that forced me to acquire a Detention Sphere as I was already playing the other cards. Opalescence makes Detention Sphere a creature, then Sakashima can clone Detention Sphere. It enters the battlefield and exiles a permanent not named Detention Sphere. And its name isn't Detention Sphere, it's name is Sakashima the Impostor, so it can exile itself. Then the leave the battlefield trigger returns itself to play. Throw in a Pandemonium and suddenly all your opponents die from direct damage. Alternatively, add Relic of Legends, and generate infinite mana by tapping your legendary creature each time it flickers, which could be funneled into Cadric, Soul Kindler for infinite hasty creatures.
Mirror of Fate
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The classic infinite turn combo in here was with Rest in Peace, Temporal Mastery, and Font of Mythos. Cast Temporal Mastery. Activate Mirror of Fate, it's exiled immediately by Rest in Peace, then pick Mirror of Fate and Temporal Mastery as 2 of the 3 cards you want to draw on your extra turn. Pass to the next turn, draw them, then repeat the process. Each cycle you get another turn and another card of your choice. This combo can be done with any extra draw effect, but Font of Mythos is the simplest. Howling Mine seems simpler, but since you only go in an exact circle, it only wins if your board can kill people already, but any combination of 2 or more Howling Mine effects can do. In the time since, Temporal Mastery was removed to avoid a 3-card infinite turn combo with Rootha, Mercurial Artist and Narset's Reversal.

Nowadays, if you want to do infinite turns in here, it's slightly more effort as the extra turn spell is Chance for Glory which can kill you, which requires an Angel's Grace or Stifle to show up. The way to loop all of these with Mirror of Fate is Echo of Eons redrawing the others while exiling itself. The first step is activating Mirror of Fate in such a way as to have exactly 8 cards in graveyard + hand, with one of them being Echo of Eons. That way, Echo of Eons shuffles them all in and also redraws them. A flashback of Echo exiles itself, allowing a redrawn Mirror of Fate to put it back into the library. Mirror recurs Echo, Echo recurs Mirror, all we need to do is untap our mana and draw a card, Chance for Glory does both those things, and the fourth card in the puzzle is one of the two that make us not die to Chance for Glory. To do this loop requires 18 mana each cycle through, but only 12 with Mind Over Matter which can also generate mana, so that's functionally a necessary piece. You can also start the loop without an Angel's Grace or Stifle and use the second Mirror activation to tutor it if you like.

This next one is a doozy. A 4 card combo put together in so convoluted a way that I was playing all the necessary pieces for years before I noticed the full infinite. Eye of the Storm + Rest in Peace + Mirror of Fate + Mind's Desire. Have Eye of the Storm and Mirror of Fate and Rest in Peace in play. Cast Mind's Desire, no prior storm necessary. Eye of the Storm triggers, then resolves, exiling Mind's Desire, then casting a copy. The original casting of Mind's Desire counts toward storm, so when the copy is cast, it makes a storm copy. With those two copies on the stack, activate a Mirror of Fate. When the ability resolves, you choose up to 7 face up exiled cards you own, which in this case is up to 2 cards: Mirror of Fate and Mind's Desire. Those 2 cards become your library and everything else is exiled. Then the copies of Mind's Desire resolve, exiling 2 random cards from your library, which are the only 2 cards in your library. Cast Mirror of Fate and then Mind's Desire for free, except this time the storm count is higher, so you can put more cards into your deck with Mirror of Fate. This lets you cast every spell in the deck for free as many times as you want. Infinite turns with Chance for Glory, infinite mana with Turnabout, infinite damage with Pandemonium. My preferred win condition if I get this assembled is to flicker Knowledge Pool infinite times at instant speed to have exiling libraries on the stack, remove every other permanent in play (could be with Venser, Shaper Savant and Leave in tandom), shuffle hands and graveyards in with Temporal Cascade (which can be instant speed from Electrodominance), and then pass to an extra turn with Barren Glory in play and every other card at the table in exile or command zone.

There are a few alternatives to the options above. The Eye of the Storm combo can be done with Replication Technique instead of Rest in Peace (which is currently not in the deck), you just copy Mirror of Fate repeatedly instead of replaying it from the library. There are also 5-card versions featuring Saheeli, Sublime Artificer. You can do Eye of the Storm + Mind's Desire + Mirror of Fate + Saheeli, Sublime Artificer + Displacer Kitten. Each cast of Mind's Desire makes a servo with Saheeli, which can be made into a Mirror by Saheeli, who gets flickered by the kitten. Just remember to make a Mirror copy before the first Mind's Desire, as it needs to be activated at instant speed, and Saheeli is decidedly sorcery speed. The last alternative is to mash the infinite turns and Eye of the Storm together: Eye of the Storm + Mirror of Fate + Saheeli, Sublime Artificer + extra turn + Font of Mythos. Saheeli can make an extra Mirror each turn, the second activation of Mirror can tutor out either Stifle or Turnabout, and the third activation of Mirror can tutor out Venser, the Sojourner to flicker Saheeli and reset her loyalty every other turn while also eventually creating an emblem that will exile all permanents. (Venser's emblem is not a may, he can make you exile your own permanents, but Saheeli exactly feeds the emblem if you only cast non-creatures). It's also feasible to approach this combo from the other direction, and Saheeli with Mirror of Fate alone can slowly pull the other pieces out of the deck, just giving your opponents a turn or two to stop you.

Note: March of the Machines gives Mirror of Fate summoning sickness.
ArcbondX2
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The recursion in Arcbond combos is having 2 Arcbonds so that the damage bounces back and forth (taking everyone out in the process). First, you want indestructible creatures, which I currently do with Chance for Glory but have done with a variety of cards over the years. Second, you need 2 copies of Arcbond, which can be accomplished with Rootha, Narset's Reversal, Bonus Round, Eye of the Storm, Lore Drakkis, or my favorite Precursor Golem. The last step is to have lifelink (or be unable to lose the game) so that you don't die while everyone else does. Then any amount of damage done to an Arcbonded creature is dealt to the other Arcbonded creature which sends it back to the first, so on and so forth. Everyone else is damaged, you gain life from lifelink, and the creatures survive due to indestructibility.

As I've played, I have realized that full infinite isn't necessarily required. You can also clone Precursor to have 6 golems. Jeskai Charm gives golems lifelink. Arcbond makes it so when one is damaged, it deals that much damage to everything, but since it targetted one golem, it will radiate to the 5 other golems twice. Any damage dealt to a golem will trigger damage back and forth at each other until they all die, which is at least 4 damage because Jeskai Charm made them 4/4s. With 1 original Arcbond, and 2 made for the other 5 golems, you get 11 copies of Arcbond dealing minimum 4 damage each for a total of 44+ damage to each creature and planeswalker, which is victory a lot of the time in a 40 life format. Mirrorweave does a similar job to playing a clone of Precursor Golem, but doesn't quite work out with just the golems, as that can deal as little as 28 damage. A 4th creature jumps it to 52 damage. To put that into an equation, the damage dealt to each player (PD) = X * (Y^2 - Y + 1) where X is the damage dealt to the first golem and Y is the number of creatures on the battlefield.
Swans of Bryn Argoll
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Swans is a classic combo piece for its interaction with Seismic Assault, but in my case, I'm doing it with Golden Guardian. Swans of Bryn Argoll + Golden Guardian + Chance for Glory + Mind Over Matter. The Chance for Glory makes Golden Guardian indestructible so that it doesn't die fighting Swans, and every 2 mana draws 4 cards which more than pays for itself with Mind Over Matter.

The other loop you can do with Swans of Bryn Argoll + Mind Over Matter is with Electrodominance + Rootha, Mercurial Artist. Rootha activates to copy electrodominance (where X is 3 or more) and returns to hand, the copy resolves dealing 3+ to Swans to draw 3+ cards and lets you recast Rootha for free. Then Mind Over Matter can discard a card or 2 to pay for Rootha's activation.
Displacer Kitten
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The primary combo core here is Displacer Kitten + Venser, Shaper Savant, which makes it so any noncreature spell can flicker Venser to bounce the spell back to hand. If that spell is free, like Chrome Mox, you can do this loop as many times as you like, which accomplishes precisely nothing as a 3-card loop. There are, however, many options for the 4th piece of the puzzle:
- Jeskai Ascendancy: untap and pump creatures, loot for other finishers
- Mind's Desire: play with infinite storm to flip library over
- Relic of Legends: Venser is legendary and can tap for mana each loop
- Pandemonium: 2 directed damage each loop
- Possibility Storm: cast every artifact out of the deck, which includes Cursed Mirror to clone Kitten and Knowledge Pool to flicker to exile all libraries

There are multiple 5-card alternatives to the Chrome Mox method. A clone of the Kitten makes mana rocks into infinite mana or Inferno Titan into instant death. Jeskai Ascendancy + Noyan Dar, Roil Shaper + any instant or sorcery will eventually generate mana while looting and pumping as an alternative to the Mox. Eye of the Storm with Turnabout in it can trigger off of any instant or sorcery to get infinite mana while bouncing the instant or sorcery back to hand. Knowledge Pool with Gilded Lotus on the side can trigger Displacer Kitten twice per cast from hand, once from hand and the second coming out of the pool, using one to flicker the Lotus and the other to bounce the second spell to hand; that way, any two noncreatures with combined mana cost 5 or less makes infinite mana, which can be immediately spent bouncing and replaying Knowledge Pool to mill out the table. And with almost as many cheap noncreature spells as lands, that's not a hard requirement to meet.

There is also a non-Venser Displacer Kitten loop using Cavalier of Dawn as recursion. Cursed Mirror copying Cavalier can target itself for removal, which makes a golem and returns an artifact from graveyard which can be itself. Displacer Kitten makes this a 4-card combo by flickering Gilded Lotus to pay the 3 mana each time around, though this combo can be done without the Kitten entirely using Jeskai Ascendancy and March of the Machines with 3+ mana in rocks or Noyan Dar animating 3+ lands.
Narset's Reversal
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Much like with Displacer Kitten, there is a 3-card loop with Narset's Reversal that can't end the game without a 4th piece. Bonus Round + Turnabout + Narset's Reversal lets you cast Turnabout with Bonus Round active to get a copy, then cast Narset's Reversal targetting Turnabout and also copying. Use the copy of Reversal to target the original, bouncing it to hand and making another copy to target Turnabout, copying that and bouncing it to hand. Each loop makes 2 Turnabouts, which gets infinite mana and taps down everyone else, but notably only works for the one turn Bonus Round is active. For the most part, this same loop can be done with Rootha, Mercurial Artist instead of Bonus Round, it just requires many more lands for infinite mana (12 mana from lands alone instead of 9 total mana with at least 4 from lands). But with infinite mana, the same loop can be done with any instant or sorcery, such as:
Jeskai Charm: infinite damage
Firestorm: infinite damage
Electrodominance: infinite damage
Replication Technique: infinite clones
Temporal Cascade: infinite draw (in increments of 7)
OR
Jeskai Ascendancy: infinite loots and pumps
Saheeli, Sublime Artificer: infinite servos
Rootha, Mercurial Artist
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In addition to infinites with Narset's Reversal, Rootha can do her own infinite combos with Turnabout. The third piece to loop senselessly is either Leyline of Anticipation or Vedalken Orrery. With Turnabout on the stack, activate Rootha to copy Turnabout and untap all your lands. Then with the original Turnabout on the stack, cast Rootha and activate again. It takes 6 mana to pay the original Turnabout and copy with a Rootha in play, and then also 6 mana from lands to profit from instant speed Rootha copies, which makes infinite mana. That infinite mana can be used to copy any instant or sorcery infinite times, see the Narset's reversal section for more game ending details. Other finishers here can be Pandemonium or Cadric, Soul Kindler for infinite direct damage or infinite combat damage respectively. Alternatively, this can be done with flash + Rootha + Mind Over Matter + Temporal Cascade/Sea Gate Restoration, where the cards drawn by the draw spells discard to Mind Over Matter to reuse Rootha, while also digging through the deck for a finisher.

Another method to loop with Rootha and Turnabout is with Lore Drakkis. Rootha copies Turnabout, to double untap lands. Then replay Rootha, and mutate Drakkis onto her, returning Turnabout to hand to reset the full cycle. Starting with Rootha in play, this version also takes 6 mana to start the loop and 6 mana from lands specifically to profit from a full cycle and make infinite mana. And similar to previously mentioned combos, this doesn't end the game until a 4th card gets involved.

The final way to loop Rootha with Turnabout is Cadric, Soul Kindler and Electrodominance. Cadric lets us make a second Rootha each loop, which can copy Turnabout while the original Rootha is copying Electrodominance, which recasts Rootha immediately while also dealing direct damage. As long as the Turnabout makes at least 5 mana and x is 3 or more on Electrodominance, you use 2 mana with the original Rootha to ping any target, one mana to clone Rootha with Cadric, and the last 2 to copy Turnabout with the copy Rootha.
Lore Drakkis
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In addition to the infinite with Rootha listed above, Lore Drakkis has its own unique Turnabout combo. The key to this one is that copies of mutated creatures retain their mutations. The loop is Replication Technique + Leave + Turnabout + Lore Drakkis. Replication technique copies Lore Drakkis, then Leave returns Drakkis to hand, and Drakkis mutated onto the copy triggers twice to return both spells from the graveyard. Turnabout untaps your lands. Replication Technique copies the double Drakkis, and Leave picks up the older copy, so that Drakkis can mutate to trigger 3 times to pick up all 3 spells. This loop requires 13 mana to loop infinitely, but if any opponent can't hurt you with Replication Technique, you can use the cast triggers from that to build up the mana base needed.

As an alternative to Turnabout in the combo above, Chance For Glory can be used to untap lands (by taking another turn) so long as Stifle is there to not lose the game, and Lore Drakkis can keep stacking mutates higher to pick up all 4 spells instead.

A second infinite turn option exists with Drakkis, this time a 5-card combo, but an exceptionally silly one. It requires Lore Drakkis, Noyan Dar, Roil Shaper, Magosi, the Waterveil, Thespians' Stage, and Chance for Glory. This combo requires a little setup ahead of time, and relies on the principle that Magosi can skip the extra turn from Chance for Glory and then give you a full extra turn later. Before the turn you want to start the combo, you Chance for Glory, making Magosi a creature with Noyan Dar. Then you skip that extra turn to put a counter on Magosi. You also need to make Thespians' Stage a copy of Magosi in advance. Luckily, all of those things can be done at instant speed, so you can do the full prep on the end step before your turn without showing the extra turn coming. On that next turn, you mutate Lore Drakkis onto Magosi to recur Chance For Glory, then activate Magosi to take a full extra turn, returning Magosi and the Drakkis to hand in the process. Replay Magosi, then recast Chance for Glory, so that your next turn is the one that loses the game, and activate Thespian's stage Magosi to skip that next turn. The cast of Chance for Glory also triggers Noyan Dar to animate Thespian's Magosi, which gives us a full loop. Not counting Magosi's, you need 9 mana untapping per turn to loop this way on the turns copying Thespian's Stage. This loop can also be done with Replication Technique in place of Thespians' Stage, but it requires a bunch more mana, and making a copy of Drakkis Magosi in the pre-combo turn setup, so it's exceptionally clunky in comparison.

Similarly to Magosi self-bouncing, Sakashima the Impostor also self bounces, and acts as a clone effect. It's still a 5-card process, as another clone effect is required (likely Replication Technique), but the process goes like this: Drakkis mutates over Sakashima (cloning a non-human), our other clone effect makes a cloned Drakkis, we activate Sakashima-Drakkis to bounce itself, then cast Chance for Glory to take an extra turn. On the extra turn, we Sakashima clone the remaining Drakkis, then mutate Drakkis recurring Chance for Glory. We cast Chance for Glory and Angel's Grace to take an extra turn and survive this one, and bounce Sakashima Drakkis again. Because the creature is two Drakkis deep, we can recur both Chance for Glory and Angel's Grace each loop, and take infinite turns.

One last method of Drakkis combo is with Noyan Dar, Roil Shaper + Jeskai Ascendancy + Leave to Chance. Leave triggers Noyan Dar to animate a land, Ascendancy untaps all the land creatures, Drakkis picks up Leave, and Leave picks up Drakkis. This is another one that takes an unreasonable mana investment to go from nothing to infinite, but if you already have a few animated lands and a cheaper creature to mutate onto than Noyan Dar, you can cut the needed startup investment down from 36 mana to like 10 pretty easily.
Cadric, Soul Kindler
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In addition to combos mentioned under Rootha, there's one more way to loop with Cadric using Venser, Shaper Savant. Cadric lets you pay 1 extra mana on Venser to bounce himself back to your hand after bouncing something else. Bonus Round + Turnabout + Venser, Shaper Savant + Cadric, Soul Kindler let's you cast Turnabout, double from Bonus Round, Venser to return the original Turnabout to hand, and then Cadric copies Venser to bounce Venser. It requires lands tapping for minimum 9 mana, but you get infinite hasty Venser and possibly infinite mana. If you do get infinite mana this way, it can be funneled into infinite bouncing anything with Venser, so your opponents permanents are gone in addition to infinite hasty attackers. This can also be done with Eye of the Storm instead of Bonus Round if you have another instant or sorcery to trigger it, or with Rootha/Lore Drakkis, but requires more mana to loop.

The Cadric-Venser loop can also run without Turnabout, as it can be used to repeatedly bounce and cast Unbender Tine, which can untap either Nykthos, Shrine to Nyx or flipped Azor's Gateway // Sanctum of the Sun to generate enough mana to recast both Tine and Venser. It can also be done with Jeskai Ascendancy and Noyan Dar in place of Bonus Round and Turnabout, so long as there is another instant or sorcery to cast repeatedly.
Barren Glory
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I guess winning with Barren Glory isn't really a 4-card infinite combo, but it definitely feels like a combo win, and there are a few ways to do it. The most ridiculous method, and consequently the easiest to pull off is the infinite Mind's Desire combo above. Otherwise, it's not easy to win with Barren Glory. It may not look like it, but there are 4 distinct requirements to triggering it and they're all difficult.

1) Control Barren Glory: seems easy enough, just play the card... but if someone can destroy it after you're out of cards and permanents, you're out of luck.
2) Control no other permanents: seems harder. The deck has 3 ways to get rid of all other permanents. First, you can make enough mana to donate everything with zedruu. There are 5 distinct infinite mana combos above, but even just a Gilded Lotus and Mind Over Matter can sometimes make enough mana. Second, you can cast Leave // Chance to just pick them all up. Third, you can exile everything with Venser, the Sojourner flickered a lot of times with Displacer Kitten.
3) Have no cards in hand: the hardest part. This deck spends all day drawing cards, and now they need to be gone. If you have infinite mana, you might be able to play everything and get rid of it, but lands get in the way. Otherwise, 3 cards of note are Firestorm, Mind Over Matter, and Temporal Cascade. All can clear out a hand, but Temporal Cascade is the ideal option, as it makes sure your opponent's can't surprise you after it resolves. Angel's Grace can be a helpful card here if you can draw through the whole library, as you can bounce everything with Leave and then discard them all to Chance while neither drawing a card nor dying.
4) Reach your upkeep: going for the Barren Glory win and passing the turn naturally means not just Barren Glory needs to survive, you do too. And that means surviving the combined power of every creature in play. To avoid this scenario, we have instant speed enablers and Chance for Glory or Sphinx of the Second Sun to keep our opponents from taking any pesky turns between setting up Barren Glory and winning with it.

At this time, I would say the simplest ways to win with Barren Glory are either:

Zedruu + Mind Over Matter + Gilded Lotus: make 3 mana for each card in hand, donate all permanents but Barren Glory on the end step before yours (if you have more cards in hand than permanents).

Sphinx of the Second Sun + Leave // Chance + Temporal Cascade: trigger the Sphinx on second main, bounce everything but Barren Glory with leave, shuffle in hands and graveyards with Temporal Cascade, then move to your Sphinx beginning phase.
The Card Selection


In previous iterations of this thread, I claimed that any number of things could happen and I couldn't cover them all, but that's not going to be true anymore. The following is a list of how all the cards in the deck function followed by how they synergize with one another. I don't imagine that I'll really hit every possibility, but if there is anything missing, feel free to mention it and I will gladly make additions.

The first card to address is, of course....

Zedruu the Greathearted
Zedruu is obviously the linchpin of the deck. I've thoroughly covered the importance of having a draw engine in the command zone for this deck, additionally the donation ability is relevant in many games of magic for both synergy purposes and political efforts. All of Zedruu's notable points of interaction are listed below.

-"Global" permanents: Most the things zedruu donates from this deck are things that don't particularly care who controls them. Howling Mine and friends, Opalescence/March of the Machines, Detention Sphere a Pentad Prism with no counters left... Anything that effects all players equally makes a fair candidate for donation.
-Role Reversal: the permanent swapping cards set up zedruu draws smoothly. The 3 mana spells curve into Zedruu nicely.
-creatures: generally, it's best not to donate creatures because sacrifice outlets (and board wipes) are common enough that you'll lose your donation quickly, but there is a handy little trick you can do in combat. If you block with a creature and then donate it after blocks, the change in controller removes the creature from combat, so you get a permanent over to an opponent and hold off an attacker (unless it has trample).
-Cadric, Soul Kindler: the trigger to sacrifice the token is tied to you, not the token, so a donated token gets to stick around to draw you cards.
-Sakashima the Impostor: Because Sakashima keeps his name, you can clone Zedruu to double up on the upkeep trigger.
-Swans of Bryn Argoll: The controller of a source of damage draws the cards, so you can sometimes do a fun trick where you donate a creature before it deals non-combat damage to Swans so that the target player draws instead, either as a friendly gesture or making them draw to death.
-Catch // Release: You can take a permanent away from one player permanently by Catching it and then donating to a 3rd player. Might sound like you're just making a different player a problem, but changing the table balance is better than nothing, and sometimes you get to give the Bant player a Crypt Ghast
-Lore Drakkis: I don't know this qualifies as a synergy, but it's worth mentioning. Mutate targets creatures you own, not control, so if you donate a non-human creature, you can mutate onto it. However, the player who controls the mutated target retains control of the creature and gets the mutate trigger, so this only makes sense if you want another player to get an instant or sorcery back from their graveyard.

The other 99 cards in the deck are detailed below in the same format as zedruu is above: a brief description followed by a list of the notable interactions in the deck.

Lands

A note about the lands in this deck, (much like the rest of the deck) the lands go slightly against conventional wisdom. Short of the extreme decks that plan on winning in the first 3 or 4 turns, playing a deck with 33 lands is probably a bit low. But here it works due to the vast card draw and the other means of generating and fixing mana. The first 3 or 4 mana are key to getting the engine running, but once everyone is drawing 4 cards a turn, this deck can consistently hit every land drop while everyone else gets frustrated by perceived mana flood. I don't run a maximized mana base with fetches/duals/shocks because min/maxing zedruu's mana base would be like greasing the wheels of a K'nex car, but the lands are picked to carry their weight.
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Basic Lands: 4 Islands, 2 Mountains, and 2 Plains. The cornerstone of magic: the gathering. Gotta have basics for a deck to function smoothly and resiliently.
-Political Trickery, etc: giving someone a basic is both non-threatening and inoffensive. I often trade basic for basic as a sign of good will early on.

Temple of Enlightenment and Temple of Epiphany: solid dual colored lands. They enter tapped, but they also give early scrys to smooth out the early game and get to the 3 or 4 mana needed to start the snowball.
-Bounce lands: picking a temple up on turn 2 to replay it turn 3 gets more scry. There are plenty of cards you don't care to draw in the first 3 turns, so spending the first 3 turns scrying 1 twice can honestly be a path to winning.
-Venser, the Sojourner: Venser's +2 can flicker the land to get another scry off of it.
-Possibility Storm: Scry 1 allows for a slightly informed decision when flipping cards off the top of the deck.

Celestial Colonnade and Wandering Fumarole: man lands are better than guildgates. They leave you with something to do after Planar Cleansing, but also have some fun tricks you can do.
-Mirrorweave: making all creatures a copy of an activated man land turns all creatures into unactivated man lands.
-Jeskai Ascendancy: manlands still make mana as creatures, so they work as mana dorks for Jeskai Ascendancy combos.
-Role Reversal: an activated manland can trade for a creature, leaving them with a land they likely can't attack with.

Deserted Beach and Stormcarved Coast: most games of Zedruu start with a tapped land. Once there are two other lands in play, these enter untapped. So basically any turn but 2 these are effectively untapped dual lands.

Azorius Chancery, Boros Garrison, and Izzet Boilerworks: The bounce lands are like two lands for the price of one! Seriously though, don't count these as multiple lands in your deck and don't be upset if you end up strip mined, but they do make a lot of early hands more attractive by ensuring the first few land drops.
-Temples: bouncing ETB lands for reuse is a way to take advantage of the downside
-Loot effects: keeping an extra card in hand while still making land drops is akin to drawing an extra card with these out.
-Catch // Release: You can steal an opponent's land and bounce that temporary land instead of your own. Only recommended in 1v1 (or if someone really deserves it).
-Mind Over Matter, Unbender Tine: untapping a land is better when they make more than 1 mana.
-Stifle: countering the etb trigger makes bounce lands into rampant growth.

Filter Lands: Cascade Bluffs, Mystic Gate, and Rugged Prairie are just excellent, excellent color fixing. Let you go from 0 mana of a color to 2 in one shot, and that's huge. Every card with 2 or 3 colored symbols could count as a synergy here, but Kami of the Crescent Moon is the card most notably helped by the filter lands, as this mana base otherwise can have trouble hitting UU on 2.

Command Tower and Mystic Monastery: make all 3 colors and that's pretty neato.

Raugrin Triome: makes all 3 colors, or can cycle. Added utility!

Path of Ancestry: but I'm not playing minotaurs or monks. The truth is that this is literally a Mystic Monastery that scrys 1 when I cast Zedruu herself, so it's silly to not play just because this isn't monk tribal.

Forbidden Orchard: makes all 5 colors and it gives someone a friend. In multiplayer, sometimes the spirit is even a good thing on its own, and even if it isn't, I've never foregone mana because I feared a 1/1. But remember the tokens are owned by whoever they entered under, so they don't feed zedruu. Boooo.
-Firestorm: the efficient removal in this deck requires a high number of creatures in play to work effectively against big creatures. Forbidden Orchard makes targets for Firestorm.
-Mirrorweave: depending on what is being Mirrorweaved, having more things turn into it can be a positive thing.
-Vedalken Plotter, etc: swapping Forbidden Orchard over to someone else makes them decide between making mana and giving away tokens.

Nykthos, Shrine to Nyx: normal scenario, this makes 1 colorless. By the end of the game, this nets this deck an extra mana or two because this is a 3 color deck with no specific devotion themes that also donates away permanents, but on rare occasion, this is big mana.
-Leyline of Anticipation: free 2 devotion at the start of the game.
-Catch // Release/Unbender Tine/Mind Over Matter: can untap target permanent, which can net mana if devotion to a color is high enough.
-Mirrorweave: when all creatures are the same, they have the same mana cost.
-Leave // Chance: bouncing and replaying Nykthos can be a ritual with enough devotion.
-Cadric, Soul Kindler: Cadric can both give you a second Nykthos for a turn and duplicate a bunch of blue pips to feed devotion.

Reliquary Tower: super valuable in a deck that draws 5 cards a turn. We want more cards and we want to keep them.
-Bounce lands: it's not uncommon to have too many card in hand early because of bounce lands.
-Flash enablers; not having to discard at end step makes holding mana up through other people's turns more profitable.

Mikokoro, Center of the Sea is like Howling Mine on a land and we like all the Howling Mines.
-Political Trickery: I often trade away Mikokoro because making colors of mana is more important, and if the new controller wants to activate it, that's just gravy.

Forsaken City: makes any color of mana, at the cost of not untapping unless you exile a card. But we have lots of cards, so no big deal.
-Vedalken Plotter, etc: we can use this as early color fixing and then trade it for a land that untaps naturally.
-Flash enablers: the way the card is templated, if it starts the turn untapped, you can float a mana in response to its trigger, untap it, then tap again to get a pseudo-ritual during your upkeep. With this and Leyline, you can theoretically flash in Howling Mine in time to draw 2 on the second turn.
-Mirror of Fate/Echo of Eons: this exiles cards, so you can have access to them with Mirror of Fate later. And when attempting to loop Mirror of Fate with Echo of Eons it can be hard to keep exactly 7 cards around to redraw, so this can manage you hand size a little.

Minamo, School at Water's Edge: an untapped blue land that can untap relevant legendary permanents, as well as any random thing Sakashima turns into.
-Nykthos, Shrine to Nyx: 2 mana to untap Nykthos can make more mana.
-Azor's Gateway: can help turbo flip the gateway, but also untaps Sanctum of the Sun for a lot of mana.
-Mikokoro, Center of the Sea: draw more cards.

Magosi, the Waterveil: in the fairest possible play, this can skip one turn to take another later on, but that is an uncommon play. That being said, the synergies justify a land being sometimes just a tapped island.
-Chance for Glory: Magosi can skip the turn from Chance for Glory, preventing the game loss part, and then recycle the turn later without the downside. All being at instant speed makes this doable as a surprise.
-Flash enablers: some games with leyline and a hand full of answers, you're happy to sit still for a bit. In these games, it can make sense to skip the turn at the end step before yours while still holding up interaction, and then down the line get to play on an endstep, take your regular turn, then take an extra for effectively 3 turns of action without passing to anyone else.

Thespian's Stage: this can copy a few utility lands effectively (not the legendary ones) to interesting effect, or just be an untapped land, or be slow color fixing, or sometimes do weird things with Magosi, but there's one major synergy of note.
-Bounce lands: having a bounce land in play makes Thespian's Stage a Rampant Growth

The Mycosynth Gardens: much like Thespian's Stage, this is always either an untapped land or slow color fixing, while also having the option to copy artifacts.
-Howling Mine/Font of Mythos: the Gardens are instant speed, so having Howling Mine lets the land double as a Dictate of Kruphix.
-Gilded Lotus: copying an artifact that makes more than one mana makes this ramp.
-Precursor Golem: multiples of Precursor makes math happen.
-Mirror of Fate: a second copy of Mirror lets you Doomsday.
-Knowledge Pool: controlling 2 Knowledge Pools already gives you a ton of control over the flow of the game, aiming which pool eats which spell, but the Mycosynth copy didn't enter as a Pool, so it starts with no cards imprinted. The first spell cast into the copy gets nothing, and it takes a few spells before players have reasonable options built up.
-Noyan Dar, Roil Shaper: Gardens can copy an artifact creature while keeping the counters from Noyan Dar.

Artifacts

Artifacts are prevalent in the deck as they do most of the heavy lifting in the mana-making and card-drawing engines that let the deck succeed, but there are some fun bits in here too.
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Chrome Mox: this is classically degenerate despite being much worse than the original moxen, but is mostly here for that sweet, sweet turn 1 Howling Mine. The deck has 3 1-drops (all answers) and 11 2-drops, so skipping straight to turn 2 is worth an extra card. Without Chrome Mox or Gemstone Caverns, this deck's 1-drops are tapped lands.
-Howling Mine: Turn 1, baby!
-Knowledge Pool/Possibility Storm: 0-mana spells are good when they're just going to be replaced anyway.
-Mind's Desire: Free storm count!
-Jeskai Ascendancy: Free loot and prowess!
-Displacer Kitten: Free flicker!
-Leave // Chance: bouncing moxen with Leave can pay for leave.

Azorius Signet, Arcane Signet, and Izzet Signet ramp by one and fix colors, basically ensuring the ability to play Zedruu on turn 3.

Pentad Prism: Color fixing, a one time mana source equal to Dark Ritual if you wait a turn, occasionally 1 free storm, and a dummy permanent to donate. With 3 lands, Pentad Prism ensures turn 3 Zedruu into turn 4 donate to get the draw engine going ASAP.
-Zedruu: it's a do nothing permanent that mostly pays for itself to be donated
-Mind's Desire: Free storm count!

Howling Mine and Font of Mythos: everybody draws cards! The soul of this deck is repeated card draw. We don't particularly care that everyone else is drawing cards because we need the draw more and we use it better.
-Zedruu: Howling Mine and Font of Mythos can be very safely donated for value.
-Flash!: Get to draw before everyone else
-Sphinx of the Second Sun: doubles up all the draws for the turn.

Azor's Gateway: it's not free, but it's fairly efficient card filtering, and if it happens to flip, you're in the money.
-Unbender Tine/Minamo, School at Water's Edge/Catch // Release/Turnabout/Mind Over Matter: untapping this card repeatedly get's very out of hand.
-Mirror of Fate: exiled cards can be recycled later.

Cursed Mirror: a clone with haste on one turn, a mana rock the next. In the world of etb the gathering, cloning for just the etb of other players' things is often good enough, and the haste is gravy.
-Venser, the Sojourner/Displacer Kitten: turn your mana rock back into a clone for a moment.
-Cavalier of Dawn: cloning Cavalier with an artifact lets it kill itself to make a mana and return itself to hand right away.
-Precursor Golem: multiple Precursors is great on its own, and even when Cursed Mirror reverts to a mana rock, you keep the tokens.

Relic of Legends: lets legendary creatures tap for mana. We have a few of those, so this Manalith early often pays for itself if played on later turns.
-Jeskai Ascendancy: Ascendancy untaps mana dorks which pay for more noncreature spells.
-Cadric, Soul Kindler: the original of each entering legend can pay the 1 for the hasty clone.

Unbender Tine: untapping another target permanent may not seem like it's worth 4 mana, but this card has a high floor and a high ceiling and great flavor text. Also, it's got the political opportunity to untap other players' things.
-bounce lands/Nykthos/Gilded Lotus: Tine is always a mana rock, but is upgraded by bigger mana makers
-Mikokoro, Center of the Sea: or it can transform into a Howling Mine.
-creatures: it can give a creature vigilance.
-Displacer Kitten: it can let the Kitten untap lands.
-Azor's Gateway: and of course, turbo gateway.

Vedalken Orrery: Gives everything flash, don't have to tap out and sit helplessly, and everything is better with flash. Don't believe me? Here's a list!
-All Howling Mine variants: get the extra draw before anyone else
-Knowledge Pool/Eye of the Storm: get access to the eye/pool first by flashing it in endstep and then untapping with free reign.
-Possibility Storm: respond to tutor effects with style, whatever they search for is that last thing they'll get.
-Catch // Release: threaten mid attack
-creatures: everything is an ambush viper
-Temporal Cascade: Surprise... graveyard / cards in hand decks!
-Mind's Desire: I don't need my own storm, I'll just use yours instead.

Gilded Lotus: black Lotus every turn. That's thousands of dollars worth of value every turn!

Mirror of Fate: exile your library and replace it with up to 7 cards you own that have been exiled. It's incredibly rare that this effect lets you win the game by activating it, but its strength appears when you activate it a second time and have access to all the cards it exiled on the first go.
-Replication Technique/Saheeli, Sublime Artificer/The Mycosynth Gardens: copy the Mirror, activate both, build your own Doomsday.
-Cavalier of Dawn, recur Mirror from the graveyard, build your own Doomsday.
-Echo of Eons or Temporal Cascade: activate Mirror of Fate, shuffle it back in, draw it again, play it, and then build your own Doomsday

Knowledge Pool: I love Knowledge Pool. For those unfamiliar, when it enters the battlefield it exiles the top 3 cards from each players library, and then whenever someone casts a spell from hand, it exiles that too and lets them instead cast something previously exiled by Knowledge Pool, including other players' cards and including things it ate upon casting. Knowledge Pool makes for some of the messiest stack shananigans in MTG, but it does so much more. From getting hefty discounts, to stealing people's stuff, to multiplying cast triggers, Knowledge Pool never fails to shake up a game of magic.
-Zedruu: people will probably have to take your cards at some point, and then you can start power drawing.
-Replication Technique: can make a second/third/fourth Knowledge Pool because it triggers on both casts
-Mind's Desire: each cast into and out of Knowledge Pool is distinct, doubling the storm count. Storm triggers on cast, so even though the card is exiled, the storm copies happen.
-Jeskai Ascendancy/Displacer Kitten/Noyan Dar, Roil Shaper: double cast triggers.
-Possibilty Storm/Eye of the Storm: allow you to take from the pool and from the storms. Also lets you cast your actual spells through Possibility Storm.
-Bonus Round: cast spells into the pool but keep the copies.
-Precursor Golem: golem triggers on cast, so the spells get copied for every other golem and then you get a spell from Knowledge Pool on top of that.
-Chrome Mox/Firestorm/Pentad Prism: take the good stuff out and fill the pool with cheap/free cards that don't do anything without people throwing more cards away.
-Venser, the Sojourner: +2 can flicker permanents of yours that people played and bring them back on your side of the field. +2 can also flicker the Knowledge Pool if the contents are unsavory.
-Saheeli, Sublime Artificer/The Mycosynth Gardens: can turn an artifact into an empty Knowledge Pool for your turn, which is sort of like a Defense Grid as it takes a lot of mana to get the spell you want through the pools when one is empty and I pick which pool you take from.
Enchantments

Zedruu's enchantments aren't always the cards people see the most of, but they are often the cards that opponents remember. Crazy enchantments are often the highlight of a zedruu victory as they offer the greatest impact and confusion to the board state.
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Detention Sphere: well known removal spell, it's an Oblivion Ring that also happens to hose token swarms (and if multiple opponents play Sol Ring, that's just awesome).
-Zedruu: Detention Sphere doesn't care who controls it, so donate away.
-Mirrorweave: exile all creatures.
-Leave // Chance/Venser, Shaper Savant: bounce in response to the trigger to exile something forever
-Venser, the Sojourner/Displacer Kitten: flicker to choose new targets for the Sphere.

Dictate of Kruphix: see Howling Mine. This one just has flash.

Jeskai Ascendancy: untaps creatures and loots. Both are very good effects, and the loot is a "may" ability if you're too close to drawing out.
-March of the Machines: casting a noncreature spell now untaps all your artifacts, many of which make mana to pay for more noncreature spells.
-Crystalline Crawler: doesn't even need March of the Machines, it's a mana producing creature to untap.
-Relic of Legends/Noyan Dar, Roil Shaper/manlands: all ways of making mana producing creatures
-Mirrorweave: casting Mirrorweave while someone is attacking you makes all creatures the same thing, except now your creatures all untap and get +1/+1, so if you have enough blockers and something has equal power and toughness, it's just a Comeuppance.
-Venser, the Sojourner/Turnabout: a big turn of casting spells leads to some major prowessing, and a -1 or a Turnabout can sneak by blockers for an alpha strike. Yes, Zedruu has commander damaged people to death in this deck.
-Knowledge Pool/Possibility Storm/Eye of the Storm: multiply those spell casting triggers with these behemoths.
-Saheeli, Sublime Artificer: noncreature spells make creatures and prowess them all, killing quickly.

Leyline of Anticipation: see Vedalken Orrery, except this one feels like cheating in your opening hand.

March of the Machines: go from no creatures to many by turning artifacts into creatures. Suddenly those Howling Mines and mana rocks are blockers or even offensive threats. Also, you can give opponent's artifacts summoning sickness and make equipment unattachable.
-Mirrorweave: turn your creatures into copies of an artifact or turn your artifacts into copies of a cool creature.
-Jeskai Ascendency: all noncreature spells you cast now untap all your mana rocks. Neat!
-Howling Mine: if you can attack someone unimpeded, you can tap Howling Mine to turn it off on other people's turns.
-Creature removal now works on artifacts.

Opalescence: the same thing as March of the Machines, but for enchantments, which can be even neater.
-Mirrorweave: turn all your enchantments into creatures or turn all your creatures into Pandemoniums. You decide. Also, Mirrorweaving Possibility Storm is choice.
-Pandemonium: enters as a creature so it triggers itself.
-Eye of the Storm: 7/7s are big enough to be noteworthy.
-Creature removal now works on enchantments.
-Sakashima the Impostor: can clone enchantments.

Pandemonium: typically just a game ender. Turns creatures entering play into direct damage.
-Opalescence/Pandemonium: trigger off of artifacts and enchantments and target them too, particularly if Mirrorweave is involved.
-Swans of Bryn Argoll: draw a card for each point of power you can make.
-Saheeli, Sublime Artificer: ping for each noncreature spell is quite often the most direct path to victory when you can cast infinite noncreature spells.
-Venser, Shaper Savant: turn infinite mana into infinite damage.

Possibility Storm: possibility storm takes the spells you cast and replaces them with something else. Neat! Possibility Storm is actually a powerful tool for chaos because it can be really, really hard to kill, as your opponent's can't resolve spells from their hands. Meanwhile you just slam the cheapest cards you can until something silly happens.
-Mind's Desire: every cast from hand is 2 storm, so storm builds up fast. But wait, there's more! If you cast Mind's Desire from your hand and have Possibility Storm resolve before the storm trigger, Possibility Storm will shove Mind's Desire back into your deck giving you the remote chance that the storm copies will shuffle Mind's Desire to the top and cast it a second time, truly making Mind's Desire the storm that storms.
-Knowledge Pool/Eye of the Storm: the other two permanents want to eat the spell, Possibility Storm doesn't care, and being in control of these things mean you can stack the triggers to get maximum benefit and give minimum benefit to others.
-Jeskai Ascendancy: double cast triggers for double loot and untaps
-Cheap crap!: mox/firestorm are ultra cheap and can swing into big plays. 3 mana sorceries aren't as cheap, but they likely upgrade to bombs.

Barren Glory: it says win the game on it. What's better than that? Seriously though, winning with Barren Glory is too complicated to explain with two card synergies, but that doesn't mean this can't do anything. It can be a useless donation, it can be a 6/6, and it can give you 2 extra devotion to white.

Mind Over Matter: 100% the most busted card this deck uses. Any single card from hand becomes a ritual, or taps down a threat before it attacks, or loots with an effect that draws on tap. This card is from the "cheat on mana everywhere" era of magic, and it shows.
-anything that makes mana: discard for mana.
-Azor's Gateway: both turbo flips into the land side and multiplies the mana output outrageously.
-Echo of Eons: discards Echo to make it cheaper, and uses the extra cards for mana, then refills hand for Mind Over Matter.

Eye of the Storm: whenever a player casts an instant or sorcery, Eye of the Storm exiles it, and then that player chooses to cast copies of any combination of cards exiled by Eye of the Storm. All spells in the storm are optional so you can choose not to cast them, and all the spells are cast at the same time. And then you end up with a giant nonsense stack and a 25 minute turn.
-Turnabout: every instant and sorcery can untap your lands or mana rocks to apy for itself and more.
-Catch // Release: repeatedly cast catch to steal mana from people to pay for more instants/sorceries, or pay 3 for catch to cast out release instead.
-Leave // Chance: can bounce Eye of the Storm if things get sketchy, even if cast as Chance from grave.
-Temporal Cascade/Echo of Eons: let you keep digging for more instants and sorceries to run the gravy train.
-Possibility Storm/Knowledge Pool: cast twice as many spells and be twice as happy. Possibility Storm in particular guarantees a second trigger of Eye of the Storm.
-Jeskai Ascendancy: every spell cast out of Eye of the Storm triggers the ascendancy, so the big pile of loots can likely find the next spell to trigger with.
-Mind's Desire: Eye of the Storm casting Mind's Desire is a cast so it does trigger storm, and then Eye of the Storm triggers on any instant or sorcery card, including ones cast from exile for free, so you can hit one with Mind's Desire to cast another Mind's Desire, and then the game likely just ends.
-Bonus Round: every spell cast becomes lots of spells.
Creatures

Where lands are the foundation of Magic: the Gathering, creatures are the face of it. Creatures aren't the face of this deck though because they mostly aim to do more of what the artifacts and enchantments are doing.
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Kami of the Crescent Moon: See Howling Mine.

Lore Drakkis: Our way of recurring an instant or sorcery. Drakkis is a variant of the classic Archaeomancer, but instead of an etb trigger, it's a mutate trigger, which is important first off because etb recur a spell is way too easy to infinite combo with, but also there are other benefits to mutate:
-Clones+bounce spells: a clone of a mutated creature is also mutated, so if you can clone Drakkis, bounce the original, and remutate, you get 2 mutate triggers. This can be stacked up to infinity if needed.
-Mirrorweave: a legendary creature with Drakkis mutated on top is no longer legendary, making it a Mirrorweave target (or even just regular cloning), while retaining its abilities. Drakkis over Kami of the Crescent Moon can let you Mirrorweave on upkeep to draw a card for every creature in play (not just yours).
-manlands: mutating on top of an activated manland allows it to stay a 2/3 creature after the turn ends.
-Golden Guardian: shrinking the Guardian makes it easier to flip.
-Rootha, Mercurial Artist/Sakashima the Impostor: these creatures return themselves to hand, which also returns a Drakkis mutated onto them.
Cards worth recurring:
-Arcbond: for double Arcbond combos.
-Turnabout: for mega mana.
-Any big draw spell, especially Sea Gate Restoration
-Mind's Desire: if you had lots of storm the first time, you should have even more the second.
-Bonus Round: resolving and recurring and recasting Bonus Round leaves you with 4 copies of Bonus Round active.
IMPORTANT PLAY NOTES!
Venser and non-cloned Sakashima are humans and cannot be mutated!
You cannot pay the mutate cost out of Knowledge Pool, Possibility Storm, or Mind's Desire, nor can you retrigger with planeswalker Venser or Displacer Kitten. Don't cheat by accident.

Rootha, Mercurial Artist: much like Lore Drakkis is a unique variant of Archaeomancer, Rootha is a unique variant of Dualcaster Mage. Being a return to hand effect instead of an etb both makes it safer for not accidentally comboing, but also opens up new synergies a simple etb wouldn't have.
-Lore Drakkis: the mutated combination of the two bounces both to hand, resetting the Drakkis.
-Cadric, Soul Kindler: the self bouncing nature of Rootha lets her trigger Cadric multiple times.
-Electrodominanace: copying for X at least 3 lets you target another thing for burn and then recast Rootha as many times as you want to spend 2 mana.
-Vedalken Orrery/Leyline of Anticipation: having flash lets Rootha copy things without warning. It also lets her copy the same spell multiple times, as she is an inherently repeatable effect, usually limited by timing restrictions of casting a creature.
-Knowledge Pool: Rootha can copy instants and sorceries before they are exiled to get a copy, and also bounce herself to get more casts into Knowledge Pool to pull things out.
-Sea Gate Restoration: returning to hand not only copies the spell, but also makes your hand bigger. Even if you were empty handed, before copying Restoration, having just Rootha and two copies draws 2 cards, then 4 cards, leaving you with a full 7 cards and no maximum hand size for the rest of the game. If you already had 7 cards in hand, well now you have 35. Have fun with that.
-Instants and sorceries: you can't copy Angel's Grace with Rootha, but otherwise everything can be a valid target. Even something like Mirrorweave that doesn't seem like a relevant target can matter, as Rootha acts as counter protection. Oh, you want to counter my Chance for Glory? I think I'll just have another then.

Walking Archive: like Howling Mine but deserves its own entry. The ability to scale up in the event of mana flood is a big deal, and the instant speed nature makes extra counters act like Dictate of Kruphix.
-Mirrorweave: this card has defender, so Mirrorweave becomes "creatures can't attack this turn.
-Precursor Golem: Walking Archive is a golem, believe it or not.
Note! this creature has defender. You can't pump it up to infinity and attack with it because it can't attack. You can however pump it to infinity and pass the turn and your opponents draw out, and that's lethal enough.

Vedalken Plotter: enters the battlefield and exchanges control of a land you control and a land an opponent controls. Even without synergies, this can be useful as a way to fix mana colors or defend against the powerful lands that get played in this format.
-Zedruu: even if you trade identical lands, the change in ownership means advantage for Zedruu.
-Venser, Shaper Savant: trade the lands and then return yours to your hand to Annex someone.
-Venser, the Sojourner: Big Venser does this trick even better. If you exchange lands, you can +2 to exile the land since it's a permanent you own and then it comes back under its owner's control, and that's just actually Annex. Even more, if you +2 again targetting the plotter, you can get the etb again to exchange lands and then +2 again to steal yours back. Chances are, nobody will let you do this for long, but while they answer Venser they're ignoring everything else you do.
-Leave // Chance: bounces permanents you own, so again you can steal the land back.
-Catch // Release: threaten a land, then exchange it for someone else's and keep the second one forever.

Cadric, Soul Kindler: Cadric copies some things that nothing else in the deck can; Sakashima can clone legends, and Replication Technique can clone permanents, but neither is very good at legendary non-creatures. Cadric copies any legendary permanent, so lands and planeswalkers are on the table here.
-Zedruu, the Greathearted: Cadric clones are sac'd at end of turn, but only if you still control them. Pass them off to someone else and you can draw off Zedruu for them.
-Stifle: the sacrifice trigger for a token only happens once, so if you Stifle the trigger, you can keep that token.
-Rootha, Mercurial Artist: copy a spell mutliple times
-Venser, Shaper Savant: the original can bounce itself while the copy bounces any permanent, doing an impersonation of Capsize with buyback that costs one less and hits spells.
-Sakashima the Impostor/Saheeli, Sublime Artificer: both these cards can copy Cadric and be copied by him, which can get out of hand quickly.
-Nykthos, Shrine to Nyx: with high devotion (which Cadric + Venser can help with), playing Nykthos can be a big mana ritual. Also works if you flip Azor's Gateway using the Golden Guardian method.
-Replication Technique: Cadric lets all token copies survive, not just the ones he makes, so Replicating legends is on the table.

Crystalline Crawler: Double the Pentad Prism, double the fun. There are 6 other mana sources in the deck that can make the 4th mana color for full value in addition to land trading tricks. And then it's an alloy Myr on top of that.
-Jeskai Ascendancy: Jeskai Ascendancy and mana dorks are a well-known synergy, and this is no exception. Make a mana for each noncreature spell.
-Mirrorweave: wait for attacks, make everything a crawler, block, tap your crawlers to have bigger crawlers that your opponent and win at combat. Or just make a mana for each creature you control.
-Pandemonium: free damage!
-Mind's Desire: free storm!

Golden Guardian: fights your own creatures, which is sometimes a good thing, and then flips into ramp spell / token engine.
-Swans of Bryn Argoll: 2 mana, flip guardian draw 4 cards.
-Arcbond: turn the fight into 4 damage to everything, and guarantee a flip.
-Catch // Release: steal a creature, make that fight the Guardian.
-land untappers: generate 2 mana from 1 land.
-Precursor Golem: Golden Guardian both is and makes golems.
-Zedruu: make tokens that can be donated to draw cards.
-Pandemonium: shoot things for 4 damage every turn.

Displacer Kitten: this card actually has a bit of a reputation as a combo machine, but like most cards with that reputation, you can just not play the other parts with it. It's no more offensive a combo piece than Mind Over Matter or Knowledge Pool. Anyway, every non-creature spell (we have 49, or 51 if you count casts from graveyard) lets us flicker a non-land, and we've got a few good targets:
-mana rocks: generate more mana by flickering them, as they enter untapped.
-Unbender Tine: let's Kitten untap lands anyway, or other players' permanents.
-Planeswalkers: resets any falling loyalty, but also allows for repeated activations. Saheeli in particular can multiply the kitten and then reset for more.
-Clones: resets Sakashima or Cursed Mirror, and retriggers Cadric
-Anything that says "Enters the battlefield" in general
-Venser, Shaper Savant: every noncreature cast is a boomerang.
-Knowledge Pool: flickering resets the pool (and slowly mills people to death)

Sakashima the Impostor: the clone that keeps its name so it can copy legendary creatures.
-legendary creatures!: Zedruu, Kami, Venser, Cadric, Noyan Dar, Rootha
-Lore Drakkis: so long as Sakashima isn't a human, it can be mutated onto and then bounce the Drakkis back to hand.

Swans of Bryn Argoll: usually paired with Seismic Assault, but a great draw engine with a great many cards, and also a resilient blocker.
-Firestorm: turns Firestorm into major card advantage.
-Golden Guardian: the fight flips Guardian over while drawing 4. May genuinely be the deck's cleanest synergy.
-Electrodominance/Shatterskull Smashing: build your own Blue Sun's Zenith, with upside! Electrodominance gets to cast a spell for free, which could be one you just drawed. Smashing draws double X cards if big enough.
-Pandemonium: every creature entering draws cards (WARNING: works for everyone!)
-Inferno Titan: draws 3 on etb or attack, or chains with clones or flickers.
-Arcbond: swans survives a big arcbond and can draw you cards.
-Mirrorweave: can replace complicated combat math with everyone drawing their whole deck.

Venser, Shaper Savant: counters even the uncounterable, a very unique magic card.
-Pandemonium: 4 mana per shock by bouncing himself.
-Venser, the Sojourner: I'll have my Venser venser my Venser, eot my Venser comes back to venser your land.
-Mind's Desire: hitting Venser off of Mind's Desire lets you bounce the original Mind's Desire back to hand where you can recast it with more storm. If you have a ton of mana, you can also dump it into repeated Venser casts to build up storm.
-Displacer Kitten: turns noncreature spells into Boomerang.
-Cadric, Soul Kindler: for an extra mana, get two boomerangs that can also hit spells. It's like Capsize with buyback, but extra. Can also be used to pick up both Venser and Cadric and then just letting a board wipe happen.
-Bonus Round/Eye of the Storm: casting an instant or sorcery with either of these going triggers to make copies, even if Venser bounces the original, allowing for another cast of the spell. (Doesn't work with Knowledge Pool which needs to eat the spell or Possibility Storm which eats Venser.)

Cavalier of Dawn: the big white creature of the deck, super versatile removal and relevant recursion with a fat body inbetween. If need be, this can play as a 3/3 golem that picks up an artifact or enchantment right away.
-Cursed Mirror: self recurring cavalier clone.
-Mirror of Fate: recur and recast Mirror to doomsday.
-Displacer Kitten/Venser, the Sojourner: oh, you wanted permanents? Nah, only lands and golems here!

Noyan Dar, Roil Shaper: to compliment Opalescence and March of the machines, Noyan Dar lets us turn lands into creatures.
-Jeskai Ascendancy: land-creatures still tap for mana, so each noncreature untaps your mana dorks. If that noncreature is an instant or sorcery, you can stack the triggers to resolve Noyan Dar first, making another land a creature to untap.
-Mirrorweave: can either be used aggressively to give your land creatures base power, or defensively to make everyone else's creatures lands that stop being creatures until end of turn, as Noyan Dar's effect isn't copied by Mirrorweave.
-Knowledge Pool/Possibility Storm/Eye of the Storm/Sakashima the Impostor/Cadric, Soul Kindler: one Noyan Dar isn't a big threat, but when a single instant can add 6 or 12 or even 30 power to your board, you can just straight murder people with lands as your win condition.
-Vanish Into Memory: a single land pumped up lets you draw a lot of cards, and discard zero when it reenters as a normal land.
-Mycosynth Garderns: counters can be piled on the Gardens before copying an artifact creature to great effect, in particular Walking Archive or Crystalline Crawler.

Precursor Golem: the crowned prince of stupid numbers, I've built entire edh decks around this dude. Here it stays fairly tame, but 9 power for 5 mana never hurt anybody.
-Walking Archive: is actually a golem. Sometimes that matters.
-Golden Guardian: also a golem.
-Mirrorweave: aim at a token and you can make everything a Precursor Golem. Aim at something else, and you've got 3 bodies to become that thing.
-Vanish Into Memory: 4 mana to draw 9 and discard 3 at a later time is pretty strong.
-Catch // Release: fusing the spell costs 9, but that seems fair to make every player sacrifice 3 of each type of permanent. It's like crueler ultimatum.
-Arcbond: multiple arcbonds bounce damage back and forth.
-either Venser or Displacer Kitten: flicker the original, leave the tokens, get more tokens.

Inferno Titan: the big red bomb creature here, a big threat on its own. Inferno Titan is my personal favorite of the titans, and there's plenty it can do here.
-Mirrorweave: have an army of titans
-Venser, the Sojourner: makes Inferno Titan unblockable or flickers it for etb value and pseudo-vigilance.
-Displacer Kitten: can't have too many Lightning Bolts
-Opalescence/March of the Machines: let you burn away enchantments and artifacts.
-Swans of Bryn Argoll: draw some cards.
-Vanish Into Memory: use the firebreathing as card draw, get another 3 damage for your time.
-Golden Guardian: an easy big body to kill the Guardian

Sphinx of the Second Sun: the final big creature, this time blue. Sphinx is not quite the same as taking an extra turn each turn, but it is cloneable, which is definitely a thing.
-Clones: multiply your multiple beginning phases.
-Mirrorweave: draw a ton of cards, make a ton of mana, other people having copies on your turn doesn't really matter.
-Barren Glory: if you've got a shot at Barren Glory, having an upkeep at the end of the turn is a huge help as far as not being stopped. The way the timing for Sphinx works, it triggers at the beginning of your second main phase to give you the beginning phase after second main phase, so you can trigger the Sphinx, then clear your hand and board in the second main phase even at sorcery speed, before moving to your second upkeep.
-flash enablers: having Sphinx, especially mutiple copies, gives lots of incentive to have things to do at instant speed.
-Chance for Glory: getting at minimum 4 beginning phases over two turns give a lot of opportunity to draw Stifle or Angel's Grace before losing the game.
Instants

Instants are usually instant for a reason, the instants in Zedruu offer the most immediate interaction with opponents that the deck has to offer.
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Angel's Grace: if ever you needed to stall on losing the game for a turn, this is your card. Split second is all but uninterruptible, and the inability to lose (for the turn) can't be overruled by any other game effect. It's a solid impersonation of a Fog, and a killer response to a Laboratory Maniac win, and allows for combo turns through hate effects like Nekusar. Outside of Ad Nauseum decks, one doesn't expect much internal synergy with this card, but we've got a few:
-Chance for Glory: take the extra turn without any fears of losing the game.
-Sea Gate Restoration: sometimes you have half your deck in hand, and want to draw the other half without dying instantly.
-Arcbond: it's surprisingly easy to draw a game with stack blocks and an Arcbond, Angel's Grace makes it no longer a draw.

Firestorm: the most mana efficient burn spell on the market, you can do 100 damage for 1 red mana and all it takes is 10 other cards from your hand. It's a difficult card to play though, because you need to have as many targets as the amount of damage you want to do, so killing big creatures often involves burning yourself.
-Forbidden Orchard: creates targets to let the damage rack up without needing to target anything important to you.
-March of the Machines/Opalescence: open up artifacts and enchantments to burn removal.
-Knowledge Pool/Eye of the Storm: trigger these permanents for the low cost of R, and if anyone wants to use them against you, they have to do the discarding to make it work.
-Swans of Bryn Argoll: replace every card you have to discard.
-Bonus Round/Rootha, Mercurial Artist: double the firestorm gives you double the damage with the same amount of discards.

Stifle: a classic interactive card/combo piece. People have been stifling their own detrimental triggers since at least Phyrexian Dreadnought, but in this format of commanders with abilities, the interactive element of Stifle is on full display. You will always have valid targets for Stifle across the board. But also:
-bounce lands: Stifle the bounce trigger to build your own Rampant Growth.
-Chance for Glory: Stifle the lose the game trigger, keep the extra turn and indestructibility.
-Vanish Into Memory: Exile a creature (in this case probably someone else's, then counter the return trigger leaving it exiled forever and you don't have to discard.
-Cadric, Soul Kindler: keep a token copy forever.
-Eye of the Storm/Knowledge Pool: this starts a war of the instants, but if you have more instants, you can keep people out of a Pool or Eye that already has Stifle in it. This can lead to really weird results, as the spells they were casting now resolve as cast rather than being exiled, which I've seen lead to completely unintended board wipes.

Electrodominanace: an instant speed flash enabler, playing sorcery speed spells whenever without warning for an extra 2 mana, and getting to deal damage on top.
-Rootha, Mercurial Artist: can copy the spell, then be cast by the copy before the original resolves. With enough mana 2 at a time, this can let Electrodominance shoot down mutliple targets and still end with Rootha back in play.
-Swans of Bryn Argoll: target Swans with the damage, and you draw the cards as a replacement effect before having to decide what to cast for free.
-Howling Mine, etc: sneaking these things in at instant speed lets you benefit first.
-Anything like Knowledge Pool: Electrodominancing down someone else's commander at end step and then sneaking in Knowledge Pool or Eye of the storm to get first shot at abusing them is a huge swing.
-Arcbond: sometimes you just need a way to trigger Arcbond.

Leave // Chance: Leave lets you pick your permanents up, chance lets you cycle away your hand. Even before the internal synergy of the card, these effects are great to have around. Leave is a great response to board wipes, and chance is good for finding gas. Leave is great at clearing away your own permenents that are backfiring, and the specific phrasing of leave has interesting consequences with Zedruu, as you don't need to control something to bounce it
-Political Trickery, etc: trade a land, then bounce yours back to hand.
-Mox/Signets/Pentad Prism: bounce mana rocks for added storm/mana fixing.
-Detention Sphere: bounce in response to exile trigger and never give the target back.
-etb triggers and clones: reuse enter the battlefield effects.
-Bonus Round: gives you a copy of Leave that resolves through and before cast triggers, so you can pick up a Possibility Storm that's in your way.
-Mind's Desire: Leave on all your least expensive permaments can push a lot of storm.
-Planeswalkers: bounce planeswalkers at low loyalty and replay them.

Narset's Reversal: acts as a Counterspell on counterspells, or a Redirect on removal, or as a Fork on our own spells. Reversal is versatile, though I'm most often using it as either a combo piece or someone else's green ramp spell.
-Bonus Round: with an active Bonus Round, you can Narset's Reversal, copying Reversal, targetting the first Revesal to bounce and copy Reversal, then target the original target, leaving you with Narset's Reversal and the original spell back in their owners' hands and your final copy of the target spell on the stack ready to resolve.
-Mind's Desire: the ideal resolution of Mind's Desire hits a bunch of mana producers and Narset's Reversal to put Mind's Desire back in hand to cast with even more storm.

Arcbond: as long as there's some kind of damage happening, Arcbond can be an instant speed board wipe and might just kill people
-Precursor Golem/Eye of the Storm/Bonus Round/Rootha, Mercurial Artist/Lore Drakkis: multiple copies of Arcbond will make damage bounce back and forth between 2 creatures until 1 dies.
-Swans of Bryn Argoll: Swans not only always survives Arcbond, it also draws you cards (if your creature was the Arcbond target)
-Jeskai Charm: gives your creatures lifelink, and with Arcbond, the creature deals the damage.
-Golden Guardian: 4 damage to everything and a guaranteed Guardian flip.
-Angel's Grace: Arcbond without fear of dying.
-Electrodominance/Shatterskull Smashing: trigger Arcbond for as much or as little damage as you need.

Chance for Glory: extra turn, plus permanently indestructible creatures, all at instant speed, for 3-mana. Totally nuts, don't worry about the last part. Or maybe do, but we've got methods here:
-Magosi, the Waterveil: skips the turn you would lose the game, you keep the indestructibility, and have Magosi readied with the counter for later.
-Angel's Grace: if you can't lose the game, you won't lose the game!
-Stifle: counter the game loss trigger and keep the benefits.
-Sphinx of the Second Sun: over two turns, you get 4 (or more) beginning phases to draw one of the two cards above, and Sphinx is probably the best creature in the deck to make indestructible.

Jeskai Charm: top a creature, zap a player or planeswalker, or pump the team with lifelink.
-Knowledge Pool: after putting a creature on top, you can Knowledge Pool to steal it from their deck.
-Eye of the Storm: 4 damage isn't much, but if you start getting multiples, it adds up fast.
-Arcbond/Pandemonium: lifelink applies to direct damage too (doesn't effect creature not in play when charm is cast).
-etb creatures and clones: it's a slow way to go about it, but putting your creature on top can be a way to reuse an effect like Lore Drakkis in a pinch.
-Mirror of Fate: if you use Mirror and get disrupted, Jeskai Charm can be an emergency way to put a card back into you deck before drawing to death.

Mirrorweave: one of us... one of us... one of us... Mirrorweave makes everything the same thing. You can steal many wins by noticing when someone else has a big threat, or you can fog them by turning all their creatures into something much smaller. There are, of course, targets in the deck worth Mirrorweaving.
-Precursor Golem: to make it work, you have to target a token and let the trigger copy the spell to resolve at the original first, but once you have a pile of Precursor Golems in play, you can cast spells and have them copied an unreasonable amount of times.
-Sphinx of the Second Sun: taking 6 beginning phases in a row is actually even grosser than you think.
-Inferno Titan: all your creatures are deadly titans, and then for every two attackers you have, you can kill an enemy creature for free.
-Walking Archive: has defender, so it can stop attacks for a turn.
-Swans of Bryn Argoll: turns combat into a massive draw event.
-Crystalline Crawler: with enough creatures, Mirrorweave can be a mana ritual.
-Displacer Kitten: lets you flicker a ton of things, while also un-weave some of your creatures if you want just by flickering them
-man-lands: animating a land and then Mirrorweaving it turns every other creature into a non-animated land until end of turn, making it very hard to attack you or block your land-creature.
-March of the Machines/Opalescence: target artifacts and enchantments cause it's fun!
-Lore Drakkis: drakkis over another creature makes it non-legendary, so Drakkis lets you effectively Mirrorweave legendary creatures.
-Detention Sphere: exile all creatures.

Turnabout: tap or untap all of target players artifacts, creatures, or lands. Turnabout is effectively a modal spell with 6 options and I've definitely used them all. Tap all opposing creatures to prevent attacks, tap all their artifacts or lands to constrain their mana (particularly against decks with counterspells), untap all creatures for surprise blocks, untap all lands for the mana ritual, untap all artifacts to reuse tap abilities. Turnabout does it all.
-Eye of the Storm: untapping lands almost certainly makes every instant or sorcery pay for itself until somebody wins.
-Bonus Round/Rootha, Mercurial Artist/Lore Drakkis/Narset's Reversal: if Turnabout didn't generate enough mana, multiply it or cast it again.
-Mind's Desire/Jeskai AscendancyDisplacer Kitten: turnabout acts as a free spell to trigger these things or add to storm.

Vanish Into Memory: blank a creature for a turn, and get some sweet card draw out of it to boot. Most satisfying when aimed at hydras, but there are some internal tricks for this as well.
-Precursor Golem: 4 mana to draw 9 and discard 3.
-Inferno Titan: use the firebreathing ability to increase the draw power, and then get an etb trigger from the titan as well.
-Clones: draw cards for power, have them re-enter as a smaller creature to keep cards in hand.
-Jeskai Ascendancy: the pump trigger from Jeskai Ascendancy increases the draw without increasing the discard.
-Firestorm: if the discard is going to make you discard your hand, may as well use all those cards for something first.
-Cadric, Soul Kindler: the tokens are disappearing anyway, may as well turn them into cards first.
-Stifle: stifle the return trigger to keep your cards in hand and the target in exile.
Sorceries

Sorceries are usually the basic spells of a deck; ramp, cantrips, board wipes, and all those reliable staples a normal deck needs. But that's not how it works here! Zedruu's sorceries are mostly heavy hitters.
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Shatterskull Smashing: slightly less efficient than a Fireball, and can't target players, but it can pick two targets and deal double the damage. Oh, and it's also an untapped land drop when needed.
-bounce lands and Leave: if played as a land, you can return this to hand later to play as a sorcery when needed.
-Swans of Bryn Argoll: target to draw X cards, or draw double X cards.
-Arcbond: trigger Arcbond for precisely the right amount. If your opponent has all 3 toughness creatures except one big one, you can even deal 3 damage to the Arcbonded creature and all the rest to the big creature to wipe their board while keeping Zedruu alive.
-Possibility Storm/Knowledge Pool/Eye of the Storm: 2 mana for a sorcery to trigger any of these things is pretty much always gaining value. However, cast out of these permanents, X=0.
-Opalescence/March of the Machines: burn away problem permanents.

Bonus Round: for one turn, spells get doubled.
-Eye of the Storm: double the doubling to double the doubling.
-Temporal Cascade/Sea Gate restoration: draw so many cards.
-Turnabout: make so much mana.
-Narset's Reversal: see combo section.
-Knowledge Pool/Possibility Storm: spells cast in still get a resolved copy, and spells cast out also get doubled.

Catch // Release: catch threatens a permanent, release elimates a lot of permanents. But also, secret secret, Catch can give a permanent haste for you, and in a deck that prefers to win in one big turn, summoning sickness can cause a bunch of issues.
-Zedruu: a classic zedruu shenanigan in a multiplayer scenario. 3 mana steals a permanent, 3 mana gives that card to somebody else. Like a confiscate for a friend.
-flash enablers: steal a creature, block with it, save some damage and kill a dude.
-Gilded Lotus: 3 mana untaps and makes 3 mana, free storm!
-Eye of the Storm: you can start stealing lands to pay for more instants and sorceries to make more copies of Catch. Also, you can cast Catch in and pull Release out.
-Precursor Golem: a fused Catch // Release will still only target one golem, so it'll copy the release for each golem and drop a nuke on the board.
-bounce lands: you can borrow someone else's land to pay the land bouncing cost to ramp yourself.

Role Reversal: a political trickery that isn't limited to lands. Basically Confiscate that draws cards with Zedruu.
-Anything you would donate with Zedruu: duh
-Barren Glory: if they win with it, you'll have the best story.
-Venser, the Sojourner or bounce effects: if the thing you gave away is flickered or bounced, it comes back to you.

Replication Technique: makes multiple copies of an permanent, or just one copy if you can't block warriors.
-Knowledge Pool: get the cast trigger to copy knowledge pool before even getting your spell out. You can have 4 Knowledge Pools.
-Mirror of Fate: 2 Mirrors makes Doomsday, 3 makes a Doomsday with a safety valve.
-mana rocks or lands: ramp a couple mana.
-Unbender Tine: like copying lands, but also adds to devotion for Nykthos while untapping it.
-most of the creatures in the deck are worth copying.
-Possibility Storm: not only is multiple Possibility Storms powerful, as they each get to flip out a new spell, Replication Technique has the power to copy itself on cast and resolve the copy in spite of Possibility Storm eating the original copy.
-Cadric, Soul Kindler: Cadric lets token copies of legendary permanents coexist, so Technique can effectively duplicate things like Zedruu or Azor's Gateway.

Mind's Desire: the storm that storms.
-mox, Pentad Prism, Crystalline Crawler, Turnabout, Catch // Release/Unbender Tine/Replication Technique sometimes: so many cards are free storm.
-Knowledge Pool/Eye of the Storm: makes more storm and more storm triggers.
-Possibility Storm: makes more storm and if you Possibility Storm away Mind's Desire, there's a chance you shuffle back into Mind's Desire from the storm copies and then you storm from your storm so you can storm while you storm. Just make sure you stack Possibility Storm to resolve before the storm trigger.
-Venser, Shaper Savant/Narset's Reversal: bouncing Mind's Desire doesn't bounce the storm copies, so you can cast and storm twice.

Echo of Eons: everyone draws a fresh hand, half price if you cast from graveyard.
-Eye of the Storm: every spell eaten by Eye gets you more draw to find more instants and sorceries
-Mirror of Fate: Echo of Eons shuffles in the graveyard and exiles itself, Mirror of Fate sacrifices itself and returns things from exile. It's difficult to do perfectly by balancing total cards in hand/library/graveyard, but you can just go off this way.
-Firestorm: may as well dump hand before Echo of Eons reshuffles.
-Mind Over Matter: you can discard cards you won't use to make mana, and get a discount on Echo by discarding it, before drawing a full extra 7 cards.

Temporal Cascade: everyone draws 7, or everyone shuffles hands and graveyards in, or its a 9 mana Timetwister. The one situation I can think of where the entwined spell is actually worth less mana to me than the individual halves. "Draw 7" lets you keep your big hand, "shuffle in" is actually incredibly oppressive, axing people's hands and destroying graveyard strategies.
-Eye of the Storm/Bonus Round/Rootha, Mercurial Artist: draw way more than 7 cards.
-flash enablers: eliminate people's hands at instant speed.

Sea Gate Restoration: usually we've got a pretty thick grip of cards. Doubling the number of cards in hand is big, big draw. And if needed, you can play this as a land.
-bounce lands and Leave: if played as a land, you can return this to hand later to play as a sorcery when needed.
-Eye of the Storm/Bonus Round/Rootha, Mercurial Artist/Lore Drakkis: multiple copies of Sea Gate Restoration draw exponentially more. You actually deck pretty fast.
-Angel's Grace: in case you need to avoid decking.
-Mind Over Matter: drawing 20 cards and sticking MOM means you can afford to play whatever you need to from what you drew.
Planeswalkers

The last card type represented here, these planeswalkers round out the deck. This deck is not built to be able to protect planewalkers for very long, so they're mostly included for their immediate impact, but Venser's ultimate is pretty cool if you ever pull it off
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Saheeli, Sublime Artificer: army in a can, plus cloning artifacts and creatures.
-Mana rocks: the activated ability becomes a mana source.
-Howling Mine: turning Howling Mine into a creature lets it attack, or mana rock lets it tap, either way it turns off the symmetry of the card drawing while generating value.
-Knowledge Pool: makes an empty Knowledge Pool for your turn, sort like a build your own Decree of Silence.
-Mirror of Fate: Saheeli can get you Mirrors number 2 and 3.
-Knowledge Pool/Possibility Storm/Eye of the Storm: multiply those cast triggers to get double+ servos.
-Cadric, Soul Kindler: Cadric can copy Saheeli on entry, which doubles token production, but also each copy of Saheeli can make a Cadric. Any amount of bounce or flicker goes out of hand pretty fast.
-Displacer Kitten: each noncreature spell can make a servo and flicker Saheeli, who can make the servo into another kitten that can flicker other things instead. With a few mana rocks, this starts netting mana.

Venser, the Sojourner: +2 flicker, -1 unblockable creatures, -8 machine gun the board.
-Vedalken Plotter, etc: If you exchange lands, you can +2 to exile the land since it's a permanent you own and then it comes back under its owner's control, and that's just actually Annex. Even more, if you +2 again targetting the plotter, you can get the etb again to exchange lands and then +2 again to steal yours back. Chances are, nobody will let you do this for long, but while they answer Venser they're ignoring everything else you do.
-lands: sometimes flickering just to untap a land is the mana you need to protect Venser.
-Venser, Shaper Savant: Boomerang every turn is killer tempo. I don't get tired of the two Venser's being best friends.
-Inferno Titan/Pandemonium: etb damage goes well with flickering.
-Precursor Golem: make more golem tokens.
-Cavalier of Dawn: retriggering a powerful removal option.
-clones: reset clones
-permanents that backfire: exile something like Possibility Storm or March of the Machines giving you trouble til end of turn.
-Knowledge Pool: people take your permanants, Venser bounces them back to you.
-Knowledge Pool/Possibility Storm/Eye of the Storm: +2 can reset these things. -8 can make multiple cast triggers a deadly tool.

Building Your Own Zedruu

So what should you do if you want to build your own Zedruu deck like this one but you don't want to just copy this list? Or perhaps you want to try this deck but have ideas for changes and don't know what's important to keep? The following is a brief guide to the contents of my deck broken down into broad categories (though not listing every card that fits every category, I leave that for you to figure out). It's important to remember that cards more often than not fit into multiple categories, and the more you can manage to have cards pull double duty, the easier it will be to meet these quotas.

There are many more specific categories of effects you may want to consider beyond those listed below, some of which will be meta-dependent. For example, I have card draw as a broad category, but if you follow my lead, you'll also end up maintaining a sub-set of those as Howling Mine effects. If you, like most people, play against graveyard synergies a lot, you may specifically want graveyard interaction in your deck. As a very generalized guideline, if there is a style of effect I want to see reliably in games (like Howling Mine), I likely have 6-7 versions of it, if I want to see a style of effect once in most games, I have 3 versions of it (like Knowledge Pool), and if I prefer an effect being a rare treat, I just include one card like it (like extra turn spells).

Donations


Zedruu donations are the distinguishing aspect of any Zedruu deck. If you have nothing to give to people, you will never draw a card with Zedruu, and if that's the case then there is very little reason to play Zedruu in the first place. There are several ways to build donation options into your deck. You can play cards that donate themselves like Gilded Drake or cards that exchange control like Political Trickery. You can play global effects like Howling Mine which don't care who controls them. You can play cards that do their thing once and then sit and look pretty like Oblivion Ring or Pentad Prism. You can play aura's like Paradox Haze that effect the thing they enchant rather than the controller of the aura. You can play token producing cards and donate away just the tokens. There are plenty of ways to work donations seamlessly into your deck. My deck floats somewhere between 15 and 20 cards that can be useful for increasing the Zedruu count.

I advise against leaning on creatures as donations, as creatures are the easiest permanent type to sacrifice and deny you the card draw. I also largely advise against the "bad Christmas" strategy of Zedruu where you give people cards that actively hurt them. It can be cute, but it provides further incentive for players to kill Zedruu on sight, and it requires you to play bad cards. If a bad present somehow works into your deck well, for example if you have a life gain theme and want to play Illusions of Grandeur, that's an ok choice. But shoving Steel Golem into your deck because you think it would be funny to give to someone is not likely a successful strategy.

Card Draw


Since you're playing Zedruu, it's safe to say that you want to draw cards with her. Which means you want to draw cards. Don't just depend on your general for that. Never depend on your commander to fill a certain role entirely on its own. Having no redundancy once again encourages other players to kill Zedruu on sight, and then you're in trouble. Especially with something like card draw, play redundancy, it scales well in multiples. Just like possible donations, there are 15 to 20 cards in the deck that dig deeper into the deck. By turn 5 of every game, we're hoping to have found multiple options for donations and multiple options for drawing more cards besides with Zedruu. That is the engine this deck runs off of.

My card draw of choice is Howling Mine effects because they offer a lot of card draw at a very low mana cost for the output. But if you feel particularly miserly, you could certainly adjust the deck to use some of the more traditional blue draw spells available in commander. I really don't think you're going to beat the 5 cards for 2 mana you can get out of Howling Mine though.

Mana Base


I've made the point a couple times in this post that this deck runs low on lands, but that's just on lands, not on mana production. The average Commander deck intended for multiplayer games has like half the deck dedicated to making mana, and Zedruu is no exception. Between land trading's ability to color fix, all the mana rocks, other mana making effects, untap abilities, and cards that cheat on mana, there are easily 17 other mana related effects in this deck. The idea of running lower on lands is that you are limited in land drops and can't play them all if you draw a lot of cards, where spells aren't limited that way. But if you can't afford your spells, you're limited anyway. Make sure to have mana rocks, mana creatures, ritual effects, etc. so that you can afford your spells when it's time to go crazy.

Additionally, I recommend having as much of your ramp spells fall in the 2 cost slot as possible. This is for the simple reason that if you're hitting your land drops, 2 mana ramp curves naturally into a 4 mana spell on turn 3, which is exactly where Zedruu is. 3-cost mana rocks can be very good in certain decks, some Manalith variants are far more powerful than a signet, and can be strong inclusions if they synergize with with what your deck is doing. But for the purpose of a Zedruu deck, especially one with as many 4-drops as mine, 2 is the magic number.

Disruption


Following this natural progression of desires from the card Zedruu the Greathearted, we want to draw many cards including those drawn from Zedruu and use our many cards to play more spells. Another thing we need to make that happen is turns, and we don't get more turns if someone else won the game already. Zedruu requires disruption to have upkeeps to draw cards. In order to keep myself safe from death long enough to draw more cards with Zedruu, I have 10+ direct disruptive elements, as well as a half dozen chaotic elements involved in the deck. That's enough to generally have at least 1 method of interaction available if someone does something bad for me.

Having flash on everything is also a way to turn otherwise non-disruptive elements into disruption. Someone is bogged down by someone else's hate bear and has to kill it before going off? Flash in a clone to maintain the hate. Someone cast Mindslaver with mana open to activate? Flash in March of the Machines to give it summoning sickness and Catch // Release it for yourself later. And while you shouldn't count on this because some opponent's just aren't prepared with interaction, in a certain sense, helping 2 opponents at a 4 person table is working against the 4th player. Just be careful not to tap out at the same time as everyone else.

Multipliers


Once the deck is capable of smoothly developing mana and card draw, the next level of function is to start multiplying resources rather than just add to them. Magic's got doubling effects for everything: double draw, double mana,double damage, double creatures. On top of those, a lot of effects are subtly multiplication. Extra turns multiply your turn by turn resources. Turnabout doubles your mana for a turn. Clone effects, particularly of things with triggered abilities, double the power of what they clone.

The further you get into a game of magic, the more valuable multiplying becomes. Starting at 1 of a resource and adding 2 gives you 3 where multiplying by 2 gives you 2. Starting at 10 and adding 2 gives you 12, where starting at 10 and multiplying by 2 gives you 20. This change in development type at the right time switches from climbing a hill upwards to rocketing into the stratosphere. My prefered method of doubling things up (if you couldn't tell) is spell and cast doublers. Things like Eye of the Storm or Precursor Golem where you can take the resources made by a single spell and increase them several times over. It takes about a half dozen of these multiplier effects in the deck to be ready to deploy one or more by mid-game.

Unbinding Resources


"What are you trying to tell me? That I can make infinite mana?"
"No, Neo. I'm trying to tell you that when you're ready, you won't have to."


The final stage after your resources multiply is when resources become completely unbound and unlimited. When the actions you take generate more resources within a single turn than they cost you. It could be that you have 4 mana dorks and a Jeskai Ascendancy, it could be that you have a draw doubler and Mindmoil, it could be that you've gotten Mind's Desire to start casting itself. It could be a Swans of Bryn Argoll drawing into more direct damage than was used to damage it in the first place. The single card the most efficiently put this deck into turbo overdrive is Mind Over Matter, where drawing cards starts to make more mana than the mana spent drawing those cards. Whatever the situation may be, eventually a stack of multiplicative effects will come together and create an exponential growth chain that lets you draw as many cards as you want or cast as many spells as you want. Since you should have assembled ways to dig dozens of cards into the library before reaching the point where you're ready for this, it only takes 3 or 4 of this sort of effect to find one consistently.

Once you reach this point, you are ready to go infinite and end the game.

Finishing Combos


So this is the hard part for two reasons: the first, as those with keen eyes might have noticed, is that I've already recommended 100-120 cards for your 99 card deck. So some of the cards in the deck are going to have to fit into multiple categories above. But a lot of cards that are in combos are going to have to come from those in other categories. That's why I phrase as "finishing combos", because most of the combo pieces should already have another purpose to fill, and what you're trying to do is find which exact magic card takes the list you already want to play and makes it go infinite. Strionic Resonator is my example on the right, because I already want to play Jeskai Ascendancy for filtering and pumping, I already want to play March of the Machines as both threat and disruption, I already want to play mana rocks in my mana base, and this exact 4th card makes that a combo.

The other reason it's hard is because I never named a spot in the deck for pet cards and we're already out of space. If you're anything like me, some pet cards are likely global effects that can count as Zedruu donations or disruptive elements. But if you have a pet card like Precursor Golem that you really wanna play in a deck like this, the imperative becomes finding a way to combo with it using 3 cards that fit into other categories. This kind of tuning can take hours of pouring through card databases and considering various and obscure options. Which is admittedly something I love and part of why this deck continues to evolve year after year while I shove more nonsense into it. I hope if you follow my lead and build your own Zedruu, you get as much joy out of the building challenge as I do.

And as one final note on how I maintain this deck, if ever a card becomes stale to you because it's individually powerful enough to make other parts of the deck obsolete, I recommend cutting it. Your deckbuilding decisions are made for your own sense of fun, if anything feels like easy mode, nobody will be upset at you dropping it to challenge yourself.

Card Alternatives


Below is a list of alternative cards or strategies, most of which I've tried and enjoyed at some point, but you can't play everything at once. I'll start with the easiest strategies to slot into the current deck and leave the major overhauls further down.
SPOILER
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Mindmoil: any deck with lots of cards in hand will see their entire library in a turn or two with this card. One of my favorites, I always have it in at least one deck.

Paradox Haze: doubles the draw from Zedruu while also being donateable. It remains attached to you even if given away.

Oath of Lieges: ramps to keep pace with others even while giving lands away. Synergizes with bounce lands

Banishing Knack/Retraction Helix: combo with Jeskai Ascendancy and zero mana non-creature artifacts like Chrome Mox or Lotus Petal.

Dissipation Field: combos with Zedruu, Pandemonium, and Crystalline Crawler (or Memnite)

Rest In Peace: combos with Mirror of Fate and extra turn spells, if you are drawing enough each turn to keep the loop going

Chaos Warp: combos with Precursor Golem, Replication Technique, and Mirror of Fate, to make two mirrors, doomsday the deck, and then chaos warp 8 golems to flip the deck over entirely.

Humble Defector/Gilded Drake/Pendant of Prosperity: self-donating cards are common inclusions in Zedruu for good reason.

Warstorm Surge: safer Pandemonium.

Thousand-Year Storm: bigger Bonus Round.

Political Trickery/Shifting Borders: variations of Vedalken Plotter.

Infinite Reflection: Mirrorweave #2, not for decks with lots of tokens, does combo-y things with Cavalier of Dawn sometimes.

Starfield of Nyx: a one-sided maybe Opalescence, but also a way to cheat looted away enchantments into play. If you are very, very enchantment heavy, you could do much worse.

Strionic Resonator: combos with so, so many things, but can't coexist with Mind Over Matter. Great for doubling Zedruu.

Nin, the Pain Artist: Great for draw, makes Zedruu's big butt good for 3 cards a turn, but also not safe with Mind Over Matter.

Time Spiral: this card is busted, I played it for many years, and would continue to if it wasn't a 3 card combo with Rootha and Vedalken Orrery. Does fun things with Mirror of Fate.

Other extra turn spells: currently, I have Chance for Glory to avoid a 3 mana combo with Rootha and Narset's Reversal, but if you don't have both those cards, easier extra turns are safe. The ones that self-exile work well with Mirror of Fate.

Anchangel Avacyn: alternative method for both indestructible creatures and easier double-faced card flipping with Azor's Gateway and Saheeli

Ephemeral Shields: one of many other indestrutible creature options, this one noteworthy for being castable while tapped out of mana.

Thought Reflection/Alhammarret's Archive: drawing double is really, very good. If you haven't tried these, you should

Dack's Duplicate: among my favorite options for a clone, this one has haste and generates positive mana with Crystalline Crawler

Mirage Mirror: solid card for cloning things, particularly with the tricks that want it to not etb as the target.

Kiki-Jiki, Mirror Breaker: combos with Unbender Tine and March of the Machines (as well as a lot of other cards).

Temple Bell/Kwain, Itinerant Meddler: alternate Howling Mines, just don't mix them with Mind Over Matter.

Azami, Lady of Scrolls: has been in here just because of wizards incidentally showing up in this deck a lot. Also no good with Mind Over Matter

Thought Vessel: a 2-mana artifact Reliquary Tower

Throes of Chaos: just a neat card, good for storm count or for value with Knowledge Pool, Possibility Storm, or Eye of the Storm

Sudden Substitution: functions in a lot of the same ways as Political Trickery, but it takes spells or creatures and does it with split second.

Raff Capashen, Ship's MageTidal Barracuda: not unlike Vedalken Orrery on a creature

Psychosis Crawler: a pretty compact win condition for a deck with clones and draw spells.

Brash Taunter+Heliod, Sun-Crowned: combo with Crystalline Crawler and Golden Guardian to end the game.

Smothering Tithe: makes an intense amount of mana in a deck like this, especially with Timeswister effects around.

Fractured Identity: doesn't count as donations for Zedruu, but if you have things you want other players to own, this is a way.

Dream Halls: plays out a lot like Mind Over Matter.

Drogskol Reaver: pretty threatening, great Mirrorweave target, and triggers off Zedruu herself.

Archangel of Thune: another potential big finisher in a lifegain package.

Tidespout Tyrant/Hullbreaker Horror: these things are brutal control and combo machines, but also very dangerous when people can clone or steal things.

Myojin of Seeing Winds: non-token clones cast from hand to copy this come with the counter, so you can turbo draw a giant pile of cards. It's a neat option for big draw if you play with a lot of clones and/or bounce spells.

Forced Fruition: intended as a mill card, Zedruu can donate this away to draw 7 with every spell.

Kykar, Wind's Fury: the same genre of card as Jeskai Ascendancy or Displacer Kitten, but needs some build around to use the red mana effectively.

Cathars' Crusade: alternative general etb finisher that matches version of the deck that can go wide.

Land Tax/Seismic Assault: seismic swans is well known, but Land Tax really puts it over the top.

Sacred Ground/Price of Glory: the two cards together with Zedruu can give you infinite mana on any other player's turn, which is a neat Zedruu-centric combo, but the cards basically just look pretty otherwise.

Aminatou's Augury: I put this at the end even though it would be very easy to slot in because it's just so powerful, I don't like it. But if you and your friends want faster end games, this may be good for you.



Changelog
SPOILER
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4/29/23
-Skycloud Expanse
-Temple of Triumph
-Needle Spires
-Exotic Orchard
-Plains
-Mountain
-Kwain, Itinerant Meddler
-Nin, the Pain Artist
-Birgi, God of Storytelling // Harnfel, Horn of Bounty
-Heliod, Sun-Crowned
-Brash Taunter
-Kiki-Jiki, Mirror Breaker
-Lotus Petal
-Boros Signet
-Strionic Resonator
-Temple Bell
-Rest in Peace
-Mirrormade
-Mindmoil
-Banishing Knack
-Chaos Warp
-Echo Storm
-Time Spiral
-Emeria's Call
-Temporal Mastery
-Nahiri, the Harbiger

+Stormcarved Coast
+Deserted Beach
+Path of Ancestry
+Magosi, the Waterveil
+The Mycosynth Gardens
+Island
+Lore Drakkis
+Rootha, Mercurial Artist
+Cadric, Soul Kindler
+Displacer Kitten
+Venser, Shaper Savant
+Noyan Dar, Roil Shaper
+Sphinx of the Second Sun
+Chrome Mox
+Arcane Signet
+Cursed Mirror
+Relic of Legends
+Vedalken Orrery
+Dictate of Kruphix
+Mind Over Matter
+Angel's Grace
+Stifle
+Chance for Glory
+Vanish Into Memory
+Replication Technique
+Echo of Eons


1/31/21
-Path of Ancestry
-Riptide Laboratory
-Gemstone Caverns
-Phyrexian Metamorph
-Raff Capashen, Ship's Mage
-Venser, Shaper Savant
-Archangel Avacyn // Avacyn, the Purifier
-Chrome Mox
-Thought Vessel
-Vedalken Orrery
-Dictate of Kruphix
-Infinite Reflection
-Sudden Substitution
-Vanish into Memory
-Political Trickery
-Throes of Chaos

+Raugrin Triome
+Thespians' Stage
+Kwain, Itinerant Meddler
+Birgi, God of Storytelling // Harnfel, Horn of Bounty
+Heliod, Sun-Crowned
+Brash Taunter
+Kiki-Jiki, Mirror Breaker
+Lotus Petal
+Rest in Peace
+Banishing Knack
+Electrodominance
+Narset's Reversal
+Chaos Warp
+Shatterskull Smashing // Shatterskull, the Hammer Pass
+Emeria's Call // Emeria, Shattered Skyclave
+Sea Gate Restoration // Sea Gate, Reborn


12/30/19
-Kykar, Wind's Fury
-Mirror Entity
-Azami, Lady of Scrolls
-Relic of Progenitus
-Nahiri's Wrath
-Razia, Boros Archangel
-Thousand-Year Storm

+Archangel Avacyn
+Sudden Substitution
+Phyrexian Metamorph
+Mirrormade
+Cavalier of Dawn
+Infinite Reflection
+Bonus Round

To see iterations prior to MTGNexus, click here.
Last edited by tstorm823 10 months ago, edited 19 times in total.
Zedruu: "This deck is not only able to go crazy - it also needs to do so."

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Post by tstorm823 » 4 years ago

Reserving this spot to talk about all the cards I have tested in the past, suggestions from others, and cards I've seen people play in similar builds.
Zedruu: "This deck is not only able to go crazy - it also needs to do so."

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Post by tstorm823 » 4 years ago

Some changes from what I have posted on MTGSalvation.

Kykar, Wind's Fury is just a shoe-in for this deck, and it's ability to sacrifice only spirits was another reason on top of Precursor Golem to want to make all my creatures different creature types. To that end, I added Mirror Entity which makes all my things changelings for a turn (and I guess some people use it to win the game with giant creatures or something). And in the same vein of tribal tribal, I tossed in Azami, Lady of Scrolls, a card I considered in the past because of Jeskai Ascendancy and the wizards I incidentally play, but never actually did until now in part because I was playing Mind Over Matter when it was first considered. Riptide Laboratory was actually something I was already playing with because it's a neat combo with Thousand-Year Storm and Venser, Shaper Savant. And I guess Path of Ancestry counts as part of the tribal tribal zedruu update, but it's really just a Mystic Monastery that scrys if it cast Zedruu, which is strictly better mechanically.

I know I just added Aminatou's Augury recently, but I swapped it out for Throes of Chaos. They both do very neat things, I was just having more fun with Throes. I'd been looking for both a cascade card I liked and a retrace card I liked for a while, and this being both made me test it. My original thoughts were that I wished it could hit 4 drops (as thats where the cool stuff is in Zedruu), but it turns out being able to turn extra cards in hand into ramp, card draw, and removal reliably is kind of excellent.

I also made a couple minor hot swaps: Warstorm Surge has gone back in time to Pandemonium. I rarely ever played Warstorm Surge before it was instant death to everyone, and for that purpose it may as well cost 2 less. Also, Pandemonium is more fun with Mirrorweave, as if you make all creatures Pandemoniums, you trigger all of them. Then Rest in Peace became Relic of Progenitus which does largely the same job. It isn't a donate target anymore, but it's a cantrip that can be Echo Stormed, and it doesn't screw up Throes of Chaos.

I took out the sometimes untapped duals for Riptide, Path of Ancestry, and Skycloud Expanse, which puts me down one red source in return for 2/3 untapped, a rare scry, and filtering for when I go off with Kykar, so I think that'll be fine.

And then to fit all the new nonsense I want to play, I cut out the old Memnite/Dissipation Field combo. It's sad to lose something that nostalgic, but this is probably the best chance I'll have to get unstuck from old ways and try new things (and also I can just change back later if I want. That Mirror Entity might not survive here long, but I'm at least playing it long enough to go infinite with Precursor Golem and an animated Strionic Resonator at least once.)
Zedruu: "This deck is not only able to go crazy - it also needs to do so."

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Post by benjameenbear » 4 years ago

Well designed Primer, sir! I don't think I'd ever play Zedruu personally, but I love the core idea of your list!

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Post by tstorm823 » 4 years ago

Thank you! Apparently they snuck a Primer tag on while I wasn't looking. Sweet.

I've learned a lot building and playing this deck. I hope that people reading find use from my experience even if Zedruu herself isn't their jam. If nothing else, I'm still planning on adding a section on how to counter my nonsense without letting someone else win, in case you run into a zedruu in the wild.
Zedruu: "This deck is not only able to go crazy - it also needs to do so."

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Post by Sefir » 4 years ago

At last, after many months in silence no thanks to mtg salvation, I can now comment!!!

First of all, a big thank you!!!! I learned about this Zeedru deck about 8 months ago and never looked back. It is by far the most entertaining EDH I have ever played. Every game is so unique and full of interaction that makes the need for making multiple decks nonexistant.
Secondly, amazing job in the primer. Looks even better than the old forums.
Thirdly, My list is almost similar to yours, -1 Temple Bell (there is enough card draw in the deck. I never missed it), -1 Relic/Rest in Peace (you were right. It is not needed for the doomsdays. It is also a "feels bad" card in the table against gy strategies. We don't want that), -1 Razia (I find Archangel of Thune miles superior), -1 Nahiri (I find 2 PW just fine), -1 Mirror Entity (this actually seems neat with the golems, though it can be seen as a wincon of its own and I don't want that), -1 Kykar (he seems neat, but I couldn't find synergies) .+1 Archangel of Thune, +1 Cowardice, +1 Alhamarret's Archive, +1 Dissipation Field, +1 Oath of Lieges, +1 Sol Ring. What I found was that the deck's greatest weakness is the slow hands. It usually needed at least t5-6 to stabilize and until then, either the more aggro decks in the table (not necessarily the most competetive, mind you) have dealt significant dmg or other control/combo decks are able to ramp much faster (with green spells, etc), leaving Zedruu far behind. As you can see I put some mana producing permanents more and I can tell there is a great difference. I need to find room for 1 more mana rock (most likely Sphere of the Suns, a great gift after 3 activations). I decided that the card that needs to leave must be a high mana cost card, with not that many synergies with the rest of the deck and that sometimes can really screw us at the point were we must be really careful when and how to play it. Probably Mindmoil. How often do you find Mindmoil stranded in your hand, not playing it because your entire hand is almost perfect with a single card missing from a combo?

That's all I wanted to say.
Thanks again, continue the good work and we are all behind you. The deck and its tones of interactions are amazing.


EDIT: Some time ago I altered my Zedruu based on my dog.
Image
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Zedruu the Greathearted 4-Card Combos Puzzlebox
Gluntch, the Bestower Controlled Hug
Sliver Queen Enchantress
Kynaios and Tiro of Meletis Saclands
Teneb, the Harvester AntiBlack Pestilence
Dakkon Blackblade Control
Riku of Two Reflections Dragon's Approach
Phelddagrif Hippo Factory Lifegain
Damia, Sage of Stone Casual Food Chain
Minsc, Beloved Ranger Win(nie)s
Thraximundar Zomblins
The Omenkeel Vehicles
Hogaak, Arisen Necropolis Dredge/Reanimator
Hans Eriksson Smash

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Post by lyonhaert » 4 years ago

The problem with Sphere of the Suns is that it enters tapped and then you can only use one counter per turn usually, so it takes at least 3 turns without outside interference to be able to donate it (if you want it to be useless when you do so). I really haven't needed more than 2-3 donations in a game, and I have cast Chrome Mox without imprinting before in order to donate it.
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Post by tstorm823 » 4 years ago

Sefir wrote:
4 years ago
At last, after many months in silence no thanks to mtg salvation, I can now comment!!!

First of all, a big thank you!!!! I learned about this Zedruu deck about 8 months ago and never looked back. It is by far the most entertaining EDH I have ever played. Every game is so unique and full of interaction that makes the need for making multiple decks nonexistant.
Secondly, amazing job in the primer. Looks even better than the old forums.
Thank you! Still a work in progress on the thread itself, but I'm taking my time on it.
Thirdly, My list is almost similar to yours, -1 Temple Bell (there is enough card draw in the deck. I never missed it), -1 Relic/Rest in Peace (you were right. It is not needed for the doomsdays. It is also a "feels bad" card in the table against gy strategies. We don't want that), -1 Razia (I find Archangel of Thune miles superior), -1 Nahiri (I find 2 PW just fine), -1 Mirror Entity (this actually seems neat with the golems, though it can be seen as a wincon of its own and I don't want that), -1 Kykar (he seems neat, but I couldn't find synergies) .+1 Archangel of Thune, +1 Cowardice, +1 Alhamarret's Archive, +1 Dissipation Field, +1 Oath of Lieges, +1 Sol Ring.
I've tried without a graveyard exiler, and I didn't like it. It can leave you stranded not having that effect available if you want to take infinite turns. I still wish Myr Welder had made me happier in that slot, so I may try that again at some point. It can loop Mirror of Fate just fine without feeling bad for anyone. I love Nahiri and that's all there is to it, it's really a personal preference card. Razia stays in my deck just for the sake of a boros legend. I like representing my 3 guilds. I may cut Kykar and Mirror Entity back out at some point. Kykar has been everything I wanted at times and nothing at others. The issue is that it's a card that doesn't scale to the things you've done before it. You need to stick Kykar before you go off or it's a dud, where something like Jeskai Ascendancy can come down after you don't need extra mana and still become a win condition through pumps. Archangel of Thune is also like that, you need it draw it alongside the lifegain things you want, but also have it before you gain the life. Synergy cards that require correctly ordered draws are questionable. But Kykar is crazy with Throes of Chaos, and I'm really having fun with that card.
As you can see I put some mana producing permanents more and I can tell there is a great difference. I need to find room for 1 more mana rock (most likely Sphere of the Suns, a great gift after 3 activations).
For the record, you may want to look into recent spoilers if another 2 mana rock is what you want.
I decided that the card that needs to leave must be a high mana cost card, with not that many synergies with the rest of the deck and that sometimes can really screw us at the point were we must be really careful when and how to play it. Probably Mindmoil. How often do you find Mindmoil stranded in your hand, not playing it because your entire hand is almost perfect with a single card missing from a combo?
If you think Mindmoil is stranded in your hand, I think that's a decision you're making, and I think it's not the right decision. Mindmoil is completely insane. Pretend you have 3/4 of a combo in hand and you're drawing 4 cards a turn. On average, you're still many turns away from drawing the 4th piece. I consider Mindmoil to be a 3 turn clock. You just see the entire deck in that amount of time. If you don't already have a winning line at the ready, casting Mindmoil and then casting the best card in hand is almost always right. It's just a leap of faith you have to take.
Zedruu: "This deck is not only able to go crazy - it also needs to do so."

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Post by MisterBrennock » 4 years ago

Hello! Quite a few years ago I used to play this deck but dropped out of mtg when I moved - I've now found a new LGS that actually plays EDH so I want to get back into the game with this deck, but there have been so many changes to it that I don't really know where to start. For reference, the last time that I played EDH was in 2015, just before BFZ was released.

In your opinion, would it be worth trying to update the deck from the old (more enchantment-heavy version) to the new? I like a lot of the new cards you play but I don't really know what to cut or what's essential (to your version or to my outdated one). I guess the basic question is: how do I go about updating my deck with the cards that have come out since I last stopped, and are there any cards that you now consider essential over anything I have in my version?

I hope you can help me out - I love this deck to bits and I really want to improve it however I can, but I have no idea how to begin doing that.

This is the version I currently have:

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tstorm823
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Post by tstorm823 » 4 years ago

It's actually quite nice of you to post an old build here. It's a neat point of reference. It's hard to say what isn't essential, as both lists feel like my children, but also it depends what you want to do. I'm fairly confident the old version you're playing is just stronger than the current deck, so if you find yourself a good power match for the people you play against you might not want to follow my updates too far. My list has trended towards more diverse win conditions and less shuffling, often at the cost of raw power, and that's generally a personal decision. But I can explain some cuts and adds and see if it helps. Forgive my lack of card tags, I'm mobile atm.

My lands have gotten upgrades. The ones I'd consider important are the temples and nykthos. Nykthos is really really powerful when tapping for blue if you believe it.

Raff is not a strict upgrade to shimmer myr, it's much harder to cast, but also far stronger. Crystalline crawler is a permanent fixture here since printing, I would play it in any iteration of this deck. Role Reversal is a recent card that basically every zedruu should play. And then I've had a stellar enough experience with leave // chance as a card on it's own that I recommend it to people regularly. I don't think I'd push any of my other changes into people as anything more than my preference.

Notable cuts: I dropped Tidespoyt Tyrant very deliberately, as it's a powerful liability should someone steal it from you. I cut Mind Over Matter when it became a stale win, started playing much smaller untap effects, and felt capable of cutting Dream Halls too. And Azors gateway is a psuedo replacement as 40 mana is an alright impersonation of Dream Halls. Other than those, I think all the other cuts were just to make space for more goofy things. There was a time when I thought things like paradox haze and Teferis puzzlebox were sacred cows I could never cut. But then I did, until pretty much every card was mana, card draw, or cards that fit into the web of interdependency..

Also, in case you are unaware, you could totally win with barren glory.
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Post by MisterBrennock » 4 years ago

Thank you so much for your reply! I haven't yet gotten a good idea of the LGS' power level so I'll probably play my version for a bit and see how it fares before making any major changes. Honestly I might just end up getting all the cards that are different between the decks and having a setup where I can switch between builds as desired.

Re: lands, my version is on a budget as the filters were all very expensive at the time - I see the enemy ones are pretty cheap now, so I might get those. The temples and Nykthos all seem like shoe-ins - I think overall I just need to tinker with the lands and see what I can come up with.

Raff, Crawler, Role Reversal, Leave//Chance and Azor's Gateway all seem great - other than Shimmer Myr are there any particular cards in my version that you'd recommend cutting for those additions? And, any suggestions on which cards from your version to replace Tyrant, MoM and Dream Halls?

Other than those you mentioned I'm also especially intrigued by Kykar, Nin, Thousand-Year Storm, Throes of Chaos, Relic of Progenitus, and Unbender Tine. A few questions regarding those:
  • Is Kykar worth including without the Wizard synergy? I like the tribal aspect of your new version but I'm not sure I can easily access all the cards that make that synergy functional.
  • Has Nin been good enough with Swans compared to Seismic Assault that you'd recommend switching to that? Alternatively, thoughts on keeping Assault as a discard outlet for Barren Glory?
  • What would you recommend cutting for Throes? I have no idea how to evaluate that card against anything already in the deck...
Again, thank you so much for your help, I'm really excited to play this deck again and it's very kind of you to offer advice on updating it.

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Post by lyonhaert » 4 years ago

[mention]tstorm823[/mention], I remember your post on Sally about packages being really insightful -- i.e., when you cut one particular card it was there mainly for integration with 2-3 others and because it was no longer in the deck the others from the package weren't as useful in the deck, either, and were also cut. That kind of thing might be handy to have in this thread, too.
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Post by KMA_Again » 4 years ago

Decks like this are one of the reasons to keep up with this community. The original thread was insightful on the various interactions that can make Magic fun, and it is rather unique in how it works compared to the usual build-around powerful legendaries that keep on being reprinted. Zedruu was a Commander-only product, but, it is far different than the numerous flavor-of-the-month cards that are pushed hard, with Chulane looking to be a continuation of that from WotC.

It's a 10/10 write-up and discussion on both old and new..

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Post by tstorm823 » 4 years ago

MisterBrennock wrote:
4 years ago
Raff, Crawler, Role Reversal, Leave//Chance and Azor's Gateway all seem great - other than Shimmer Myr are there any particular cards in my version that you'd recommend cutting for those additions? And, any suggestions on which cards from your version to replace Tyrant, MoM and Dream Halls?
The way I've been making cuts, as alluded to by [mention]lyonhaert[/mention] (man, that was harder to spell than I expected), is by sort of compartmentalizing spells into packages of interdependence. Easy example, if you take anything listed as a 4-card combo, cutting any 1 piece is likely to remove the entire combo. Sometimes that means I can't cut things because cards I really want depend on them, and sometimes it means that by making 1 cut I can make a few things cuttable. If you're desperate for cuts, the easiest options are the things that nothing else depends on. Teferi's Puzzle Box is something I've cut on the basis of nothing needing it. There aren't really draw triggers, so the only things it's working alongside are the draw doublers, which are justified fine by the million other things that say draw (though I also cut them eventually). Paradox Haze was in and out for space for a while, but ultimately left out as part of cascading cuts when I decided to shuffle less. Without Land Tax and Oath of Lieges, I only had Zedruu and Walking Archive to work with the Haze.

I add things the same way: very rarely can a card just slot into here and be fully supported already since this deck pulls a half-dozen directions (in contrast to decks with focused themes where anything on theme can slide in and out freely). So recently, I added in Kykar, Wind's Fury but also wanted more to go with it, which led to Mirror Entity that I already liked with Precursor Golem, and Mirror Entity made me try out Azami, Lady of Scrolls which also went well with Kykar. (I also tried out the card Floating-Dream Zubera for a couple games with Kykar and Mirror Entity, it's funny with Mirror Entity and Mirrorweave, but it turns out that was too hopeful even for me.) And in the end, I may soon cut a bunch of this back out, but it's a good example of building things in as a group.

So like, if you want to add Azor's Gateway in, you'll want to look at untap effects. Cutting Mind Over Matter while adding in Gateway and leaving only Turnabout to maybe untap the artifact side would leave it very weak. If you don't get more untapping in, I wouldn't recommend Gateway. But you could leave in Mind Over Matter if you like it, Unbender Tine has been very good to me, and there are plenty of untaps in Magic. And then, as mentioned, Gateway can sort of replace Dream Halls. But it's hard to say what to cut, because if there's a card in here you find ineffective or unfun, start on that and see what that opens. Like, I'll never ever stop playing Mirror of Fate, but if you decided to cut that, it would lead you down very different cascading cut options.
Other than those you mentioned I'm also especially intrigued by Kykar, Nin, Thousand-Year Storm, Throes of Chaos, Relic of Progenitus, and Unbender Tine. A few questions regarding those:
  • Is Kykar worth including without the Wizard synergy? I like the tribal aspect of your new version but I'm not sure I can easily access all the cards that make that synergy functional.
  • Has Nin been good enough with Swans compared to Seismic Assault that you'd recommend switching to that? Alternatively, thoughts on keeping Assault as a discard outlet for Barren Glory?
  • What would you recommend cutting for Throes? I have no idea how to evaluate that card against anything already in the deck...
Again, thank you so much for your help, I'm really excited to play this deck again and it's very kind of you to offer advice on updating it.
  • Honestly, I might be cutting Kykar and keeping the wizard synergies otherwise. My final verdict on Kykar is, I think, that for Kykar to make the cut, it would need to do more for me immediately upon resolution, which would mean building out the spirit aspect of the deck rather than the wizard part.
  • Nin has been better than Seismic Assault as a single card, and close to Seismic Assault with Swans around. The grossest thing you have going with Assault is actually Land Tax. Cutting that is really what made Seismic Assault fall off for me. As far as it being discard for Barren Glory, if you can get rid of everything in play and all the spells in your hand and just need to discard lands, you probably have either a ton of mana or infinite mana, which actually makes Throes of Chaos into a potential discard outlet.
  • Throes is pretty unique, it doesn't really compare to anything else (other than the incredibly niche situation above). You basically have to cut an unrelated card to find space for something like that.
lyonhaert wrote:
4 years ago
I remember your post on Sally about packages being really insightful -- i.e., when you cut one particular card it was there mainly for integration with 2-3 others and because it was no longer in the deck the others from the package weren't as useful in the deck, either, and were also cut. That kind of thing might be handy to have in this thread, too.
I like this suggestion. I think I'll add a piece to the first post titled something like "how to make cuts and additions", cause even if I just drone on about packages of things working together, that's the title that will draw people's attention.
KMA_Again wrote:
4 years ago
Decks like this are one of the reasons to keep up with this community. The original thread was insightful on the various interactions that can make Magic fun, and it is rather unique in how it works compared to the usual build-around powerful legendaries that keep on being reprinted. Zedruu was a Commander-only product, but, it is far different than the numerous flavor-of-the-month cards that are pushed hard, with Chulane looking to be a continuation of that from WotC.

It's a 10/10 write-up and discussion on both old and new..
Thank you very much for the kind words. I'm always glad to hear my nonsense is helpful or entertaining to others.
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Post by MisterBrennock » 4 years ago

That all makes a lot of sense. Thank you very much. I'm looking through the deck to find cards that could be replaced by something more effective. At this point Gateway is probably not a good fit for the deck since I'm still trying to figure out how to make changes and am not sure what to cut to add more untapping effects. I think I'm going to cut Phyrexian Metamorph, Clever Impersonator, Tidespout Tyrant, and Wall of Omens to add in some more Wizards and to make room for...something else. Haven't figured out what package to add in just yet. Maybe the Precursor Golem combo.

I think I'm going to cut Paradox Haze for Throes of Chaos as I don't see it doing very much as I make changes - Oath of Lieges is probably going next time I cut stuff.

So my current list of planned changes is: +Relic of Progenitus -Rest in Peace, +Temples and Nykthos -equivalent basic lands, +Raff Capashen, Ship's Mage -Shimmer Myr, +Crystalline Crawler -Teferi's Puzzle Box or -Mox Diamond, +Role Reversal -Shifting Borders, +Nin, The Pain Artist -Seismic Assault, +Thousand-Year Storm -Forced Fruition or -Infinite Reflection, +Throes of Chaos -Paradox Haze, +Pandemonium -Warstorm Surge, +Azami, Lady of Scrolls -Clever Impersonator, +Venser, Shaper Savant -Wall of Omens. Some of those changes I've already mentioned, some I've decided on based on the primer and other posts where you've explained your choices.

After those, next up on the chopping block are Tidespout Tyrant and Oath of Lieges - I might put in Inferno Titan and Strionic Resonator to replace those, as they're both fairly usable with what's already in the deck.

Since you're enjoying the Wizard synergy, have you ever considered Galecaster Colossus as the high-end creature (similar to Inferno Titan's role)? I just remembered it existed and it seems like it could be fun, though probably not particularly useful since it clashes with Azami's own ability.

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Post by tstorm823 » 4 years ago

I have considered Galecaster Colossus, but never tried it. If it could target my own things, I'd try it. Though to be fair, I do play Zedruu, so there is a world where it could bounce my things and enable a more convoluted variation of Jeskai Ascendancy combo.
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Post by Styrofoam » 4 years ago

tstorm823 wrote:
4 years ago
Sefir wrote:
4 years ago
At last, after many months in silence no thanks to mtg salvation, I can now comment!!!

First of all, a big thank you!!!! I learned about this Zedruu deck about 8 months ago and never looked back. It is by far the most entertaining EDH I have ever played. Every game is so unique and full of interaction that makes the need for making multiple decks nonexistant.
Secondly, amazing job in the primer. Looks even better than the old forums.
Thank you! Still a work in progress on the thread itself, but I'm taking my time on it.
Thirdly, My list is almost similar to yours, -1 Temple Bell (there is enough card draw in the deck. I never missed it), -1 Relic/Rest in Peace (you were right. It is not needed for the doomsdays. It is also a "feels bad" card in the table against gy strategies. We don't want that), -1 Razia (I find Archangel of Thune miles superior), -1 Nahiri (I find 2 PW just fine), -1 Mirror Entity (this actually seems neat with the golems, though it can be seen as a wincon of its own and I don't want that), -1 Kykar (he seems neat, but I couldn't find synergies) .+1 Archangel of Thune, +1 Cowardice, +1 Alhamarret's Archive, +1 Dissipation Field, +1 Oath of Lieges, +1 Sol Ring.
I've tried without a graveyard exiler, and I didn't like it. It can leave you stranded not having that effect available if you want to take infinite turns. I still wish Myr Welder had made me happier in that slot, so I may try that again at some point. It can loop Mirror of Fate just fine without feeling bad for anyone. I love Nahiri and that's all there is to it, it's really a personal preference card. Razia stays in my deck just for the sake of a boros legend. I like representing my 3 guilds. I may cut Kykar and Mirror Entity back out at some point. Kykar has been everything I wanted at times and nothing at others. The issue is that it's a card that doesn't scale to the things you've done before it. You need to stick Kykar before you go off or it's a dud, where something like Jeskai Ascendancy can come down after you don't need extra mana and still become a win condition through pumps. Archangel of Thune is also like that, you need it draw it alongside the lifegain things you want, but also have it before you gain the life. Synergy cards that require correctly ordered draws are questionable. But Kykar is crazy with Throes of Chaos, and I'm really having fun with that card.
As you can see I put some mana producing permanents more and I can tell there is a great difference. I need to find room for 1 more mana rock (most likely Sphere of the Suns, a great gift after 3 activations).
For the record, you may want to look into recent spoilers if another 2 mana rock is what you want.
I decided that the card that needs to leave must be a high mana cost card, with not that many synergies with the rest of the deck and that sometimes can really screw us at the point were we must be really careful when and how to play it. Probably Mindmoil. How often do you find Mindmoil stranded in your hand, not playing it because your entire hand is almost perfect with a single card missing from a combo?
If you think Mindmoil is stranded in your hand, I think that's a decision you're making, and I think it's not the right decision. Mindmoil is completely insane. Pretend you have 3/4 of a combo in hand and you're drawing 4 cards a turn. On average, you're still many turns away from drawing the 4th piece. I consider Mindmoil to be a 3 turn clock. You just see the entire deck in that amount of time. If you don't already have a winning line at the ready, casting Mindmoil and then casting the best card in hand is almost always right. It's just a leap of faith you have to take.

I have an older version of Tstorm's Deck. and I used to play mindmoil and then donate it to kinda disrupt opponents. Then one time, I played it and didn't donate it.

HOLY MOLY, i will never donate mindmoil again. This card is so bonkers.

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Post by MisterBrennock » 4 years ago

New card from Commander 2019:

Image

Could be neat in this deck, though I don't know what would be cut for it. But it seems to do a lot - synergises with Zedruu, plays politics, and if the controlling opponent dies you get it back and can either donate it again, or keep it to get double the benefits.

EDIT: I was incorrect about the last point. Thanks tstorm for pointing it out
Last edited by MisterBrennock 4 years ago, edited 1 time in total.

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Post by tstorm823 » 4 years ago

MisterBrennock wrote:
4 years ago
New card from Commander 2019:

Pendant of Prosperity

Could be neat in this deck, though I don't know what would be cut for it. But it seems to do a lot - synergises with Zedruu, plays politics, and if the controlling opponent dies you get it back and can either donate it again, or keep it to get double the benefits.
I will certainly be trying this out, but you are incorrect about what happens when they die. Things you donate come back if someone dies, but this doesn't donate. This enters on their side. So when they die, the game goes: 1) get rid of everything they own. 2) end any effects that gave them control of a permanent (this is where donated things come back to you), 3) erase anything they still control on the stack (namely abilities), and 4) exile anything they still control. The Pendant would be something left for step 4, and would be exiled by them dying.

But there are opportunities to take control of this in Role Reversal[card] and [card]Catch // Release that there's a non-zero amount of double explore opportunities. Also, it's a target for artifact cloning, which is something I could imagine myself doing to crank up my donation count.
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Post by MisterBrennock » 4 years ago

tstorm823 wrote:
4 years ago

I will certainly be trying this out, but you are incorrect about what happens when they die. Things you donate come back if someone dies, but this doesn't donate. This enters on their side. So when they die, the game goes: 1) get rid of everything they own. 2) end any effects that gave them control of a permanent (this is where donated things come back to you), 3) erase anything they still control on the stack (namely abilities), and 4) exile anything they still control. The Pendant would be something left for step 4, and would be exiled by them dying.

But there are opportunities to take control of this in Role Reversal and Catch // Release that there's a non-zero amount of double explore opportunities. Also, it's a target for artifact cloning, which is something I could imagine myself doing to crank up my donation count.
My mistake! I didn't read it correctly and thought of it as having the same donation effect as Sleeper Agent or Xantcha. I do enjoy the cloning ideas, though!

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Post by tstorm823 » 4 years ago

MisterBrennock wrote:
4 years ago
My mistake! I didn't read it correctly and thought of it as having the same donation effect as Sleeper Agent or Xantcha. I do enjoy the cloning ideas, though!
Also worth noting, there are multiple aspects of this design that suggest there might be a cycle. The art's focus on the two colors represented, the "something of something" naming convention, the total disconnect from the theme of the deck its in, and their history of printing "political" cards as cycles in commander (tempting offer/join forces) all lend credibility to the possibility of more of these pendants. Or it could just be a random design Wizards happened to think was fun. I give it a 50/50, but we'll find out tomorrow, so I'm not going to start planning deck change possibilities just yet.
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Post by lyonhaert » 4 years ago

I sure hope there's a cycle if the other 4 are anything like this one.

[mention]MisterBrennock[/mention], if you don't mind I feel like explaining the control-granting effect in a little more depth. If an object comes under, say, it's owners control and is then granted control by an effect, the game keeps track of all these effects as they stack up. Whichever control effect has the most recent timestamp is what determines who actually controls it at any moment. This can get really hairy if Confusion in the Ranks is at fault for having multiple changes in control -- I have heard stories of stacks of post-it notes on cards to keep it straight.
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Post by lyonhaert » 4 years ago


Hmmm. :hmm:
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Post by tstorm823 » 4 years ago

lyonhaert wrote:
4 years ago

Hmmm. :hmm:
Do you want to Saheeli it into a Pentad Prism or the opposite?
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Post by lyonhaert » 4 years ago

tstorm823 wrote:
4 years ago
lyonhaert wrote:
4 years ago
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Hmmm. :hmm:
Do you want to Saheeli it into a Pentad Prism or the opposite?
Of those choices, probably the opposite since it would get a bit more mana out of the Prism (tap to add a counter and add 3, then possibly remove 3 after it reverts), though I probably would have already run out Prism's counters and shipped it off to an opponent by the time the Autogenerator hits the field if it's early game. I was more thinking of things like Unbender Tine for simple cases. March of the Machines + Jeskai Ascendancy could get quite a bit of mana out of it compared to Crystalline Crawler.
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