That's it. That's the deck.
It's such a powerful interaction that cEDH lists have been made of it with cost reducers like Helm of Awakening, but that's boring. I want to run my opponents out of options and then beat them to death with my monk, like Garfield intended. To that end, I included an absurd removal and counterspell suite backed up by a density of card draw and tutor spells that keep everything flowing. The deck is ridiculously resource hungry, so I included 11 ramp spells.
Anyway, here's my second third pass at the list:
Top Control
Approximate Total Cost:
Concerns:
I think I'm running too many lands? 36 mana producers + Maze is a big throttle for Elsha, but the control player in me has a really difficult time playing with less. If this was a more combo-centric list that didn't anticipate games going longer than 4 turns, then yeah, fewer lands would be great, but like I said, this is a control deck. Hitting land drops is absolutely vital in order to keep up with the table and eventually run them out of options. Still, even with Top and lots of cantrips, I suspect there are times where you stall out and hit a glut of lands and can't progress your gameplan very effectively.
On the other hand, I've found that the best way to play the deck so far is to be judicious with your use of Elsha. Don't play her if you anticipate a board wipe, obviously, but you want to make sure she isn't the most threatening creature on the board or else she's going to walk face first into retirement. Similarly, since Top is ridiculously good here, you may want to avoid dropping it until absolutely necessary. While it's notoriously difficult to remove, and you have a couple of ways to recur it, it's just so threatening that you may draw unwanted attention.
Running a control deck with so few defensive resources and a reasonably threatening commander is sure to draw a lot of attention, so I included Heliod's Intervention as a way to buffer my life total in the late game without it being a completely dead card otherwise.
Again, I'm worried about running Elsha as my sole win condition, but here we are again with me building a dumb, commander-centric deck without creatures.
