Hello. Welcome to THE most definitive primer for all things Kaalia, ever written. I'm your host with the most, THEmtg3drinks aka Kaalia's Personal Liaison for the past decade. Kaalia decks cover the gamut across the internet from the wholly untuned piles of uncastable junk, to ruthlessly efficient streamlined decks that barely resemble what Kaalia once was. And so here, this Primer aims to create a central hub for all things Kaalia where the new and uninitiated players can come for help, and the more experienced can come to refocus. After all, we're all here for the same reasons, right? To make Kaalia be all she can be.
So let's start with the basics, what makes Kaalia become Kaalia, and why should you choose to play her over literally anything else? Why this decade plus old commander in an era that we finally have a saturation of viable commanders even within the Mardu wedge to-date.
Her Total Mana Value: At a cost of that puts her at a medium level cost. This means she can be aggressive if you're more all-in on ramp, but will play out better in a midrange shell with key protective pieces to enable this fragile four mana 2/2 flyer to do the thing she is trying to enable.
Her Ability: This is the "meat and potatoes" of our deck, and the primary reason for choosing her. She allows us to function like an Elvish Piper, but only for Angels, Demons, and Dragons – so keep those Praetors, Titans, and Primordials at home. If you were wondering why you'd ever pay four mana for a sneak attack effect without haste, this is the reason. It's worth jumping through hoops to circumvent big mana costs and, unlike the original, you get to keep the creature. Pretty great, right?
Her Strengths and Weaknesses: Of course no strategy is perfect. Sometimes despite your best attempts, your opponents will actually read your cards and Kaalia doesn't get to swing. This can leave you sad if you loaded up on tons of seven plus cost creatures with little ramp, a pitfall that so many new Kaalia players fall into. Over-reliance on one card is never a good thing, and this is especially true when the over-reliance comes from the card that is incredibly visible to all across the table in the command zone.
Her Power Level: Kaalia has lines of play from the bargain basement precon and less level, all the way to the upper echelons of cDH play, although cDH is not what I'll be touching on since I don't get the privilege of playing in such a dedicated group for that. I know enough of the theory behind the play, however.
Why Kaalia Over Anything Else: A lot has changed since Kaalia's initial inception in the summer of twenty-eleven. Since then we have gotten a few neat commanders to rival her popularity, though none that will ever truly eclipse her.
- (Note, we'll be looking at Kaalia, Zenith Seeker at a later point in this list.)
- Alesha, Who Smiles at Death - Perhaps the closest in functionality, right down to the attack step reliance even, though Alesha cares about the opposite end of the creature power spectrum and works out of the "other hand". On top of needing to attack to contribute to the game, Alesha also struggles against graveyard hate, especially targeted graveyard hate.
- Ghen, Arcanum Weaver - Like Alesha, Ghen also digs out of the graveyard, though he trades a requirement to attack for a requirement of mana expenditure. I'll note to be mindful of this choice, as it's really easy for Ghen to transform into a brutal prison style deck without an overwhelming amount of effort, which may or may not be acceptable with your playgroup.
- Edgar Markov - Finally, we get to something that is starkly different. Edgar is perhaps one of the easiest commanders we have access to, and his strategy is as simple as "cast one mana vampires" because as it turns out paying one mana for two bodies is a pretty good deal. Who knew? Furthermore, Edgar doesn't even need to be cast in order to work, which is an incredibly strong point in his favour. The bad? He shares very little in common with our commander or the rest of this list, and typically requires the most additional financial investment to go from one deck to the next because of that lack of similarity. Some people may not like the idea of such a heavy investment to play the same colors after all.
- Isshin, Two Heavens as One - The newest include, Isshin also bears some similarity here in a reliance on the combat step, and at first glance even appears to belong in the Kaalia deck (it doesn't, and we'll address why later on). Isshin instead doesn't care about the combat damage so much, he just cares about the declare attackers step. The best thing you can do here, to my recollection, is Eldrazi reanimator, because imagine getting to combat and "double dipping" with an early Ulamog's Crusher or Bane of Bala Ged. Powerful for sure, but not exactly conducive to making friends though.
People come to Kaalia on all sorts of discretionary spending levels, and while that makes it difficult to present a simple one-size-fits-all approach to deckbuilding or Magic as a whole, I do however like to keep around what I refer to as the Baseline Kaalia deck. It's built with just commons and uncommons and including the commander, could be bought for just around $104 USD (or less, with clever bargain hunting), assuming a player has absolutely no cards and is jumping in totally fresh to the deck or even the game as a whole. The goal of this deck is just, simply stated, practice. To get your reps in and understand the commander before moving up to more complex mechanisms of the commander. Previously I would have pointed players to an unchanging full white border version of the deck, but after the rapid power creep of the past couple of years, that deck is no longer capable of keeping up with even the more casual of tables so I felt it prudent to offer a more recent iteration to help players learn. I keep it (the white border deck) linked within my Moxfield account as a historical point of reference only.
In this deck, there is a combo finish that we will be working towards finishing our matches with. That involves the on-type and critically under-rated Dreadhound as the primary outlet to the Leonin Relic-Warder + Animate Dead/Dance of the Dead interaction that creates an arbitraily high number of sacrifices. How's that work? Cast one of the auras targeting the LRW in the graveyard, then when LRW enters, let it's ability target the aura. This will remove it and trigger both LRW's leaves play ability which returns the aura and targets, you guessed it, LRW. Each iteration of this interaction will trigger Dreadhound's secondary line of text. As to why Dreadhound over, say, a Mayhem Devil or Zulaport Cutthroat? Simply because the hound has a relevant typeline, doesn't actually target, and causes life loss not damage so it can't be prevented. We also get some light tangible benefit out of its enters the battlefield ability too. When deck slots are tight, this is the kind of critical thinking you need to always put your best foot forward.
If I had one more deck slot, I'd love to place a Loxodon Warhammer|MRD in here. It's not really synergistic, it just helps to recover your life payments and win the race (lifelink on an evasive fattie creature is a reasonable plan B strategy). But alas, here we are.
Note: Recently, Dominaria United spoiled another set of typed duals at common. I can't really add these yet but know I saw them and I'm excited to add them into this deck when they're legal! Our mana fixing even at the base level has never looked so good!
Commander (1)
Creatures (22)
Sorceries (7)
Instants (14)
Artifacts (17)
Enchantments (5)
Lands (34)· 36 including mdfc
A lot has changed from the time Heavenly Inferno was first marketed to now, in fact eleven years of something has taken place since then.
Kaalia is a combo deck disguised as an aggro deck, which is a common misconception about the deck that many people make (many people assume this is an aggro deck, and then write it off because you can't aggro one-hundred twenty life). Our "combo" is to create a gamestate where we can attack safely and unopposed, repeatedly, with our 2/2 flyer. If we can do that, we will win (or rather, we're one tutor away from a win). As such, anything that doesn't help us to create such a gamestate is unnecessary to our gameplan.
That was the thesis statement I came up with at the start of this ten year journey, and it hasn't really changed, strictly speaking, only the manner with which we kill has changed. Of course, back then I only played one-on-one and a lot of the cards interacted much differently. In that era, we used Rakdos the Defiler and later on Master of Cruelties in tandem with Kaalia, as this allowed for an outright win or, in the case of Rakdos, an effective win because the opponent just lost half their board in a nine point swing.
These days, no one plays one-on-one commander because it's horrifically unbalanced, the entire format is just a race to assemble the most busted fast mana the quickest. And that means our primary finishers, both Rakdos and the MoC, are very inefficient since they only inhibit one player. Since commander is now exclusively a multiplayer format, we need a victory method capable of eliminating multiple players efficiently since you have the same one-hundred cards to deal with three times the opponents.
To this end, you might think that the best way to inhibit opponents is by attacking their mana, but this would be incorrect. As an owner of Null Rod and friends, these cards do work, but what happens is inconsistency as you don't have the critical dearth of the effect to ensure you see one. Sure, you have the rod, Stony Silence, and Karn, Great Creator, but these are three cards in 99…i.e. a 3% chance of seeing one. And tutoring early for these pieces sounds like the play in theory, but in actuality it just slows you a turn or more which can very easily be the difference in opponents landing their key setup spells which would render your hate wasted. What's worse, the rod might not even matter because you still have players fixing their three to five color decks with non-basics, mana dorks (of which you have just Cursed Totem and Linvala, Keeper of Silence to fight such strategies). The short of it is, WotC has made it clear that attacking player's mana development is taboo and that it won't be competitively viable any more, despite the truth that perfect mana is a privilege, not a right...and we need to find another way of attacking their resources that allows us to keep up.
My solution is to fight back against their draw sources. We all know one of the most infamous memes is that player™ that refuses to pay the one for rhystic study. You know the one, every table has them. They erroneously fail to identify the study/mystic remora player as a threat because "they're just drawing cards". Or the aggressive players that slam sylvan library on t2 every game and dump life into it to draw all the cards. Since I can't stop your mana well or consistently enough, I can at least stop your cards…at that point, your excess mana gluttony is ineffective at best since you no longer have an outlet for it. And while I do that, I can still benefit from my own mana production to rush my anti-draw out, since that can afford to be deployed later on than the null rods of the world. So what does this mean? Enter my little friends…
With this you don't deny people their cards strictly speaking, but you deny them the ability to hold cards, which is especially effective against counterspell decks (which is a tough matchup for Kaalia decks in general, or anything that relies on a specific card). It's also especially effective against brainstorm decks. Meanwhile, Kaalia doesn't specifically care, if we exile draw a tutor we'd just cast it to find what we need and move to combat, and if we exile drew a key card, we might just cast it anyway, unless it was one of the few eight drops we care about. Really, we can mitigate this even better by utilizing more "Bob" (pact weapon and similar) styled draw that completely sidesteps this artifact.
Now that we have our methods of hate drawn out, let's take a look at what we're looking to do in various stages of the game.
- Hand discussion - Generally speaking, if you have two lands and a hate piece, it's probably an alright keep. Or one land and a Tithe. I'm not as concerned about having a Kaalia piece as I can tutor it later when I'm ready to play her. I'd prefer having at least one removal spell as well since invariably there will be that one player that gets the dumb start, but I'd put higher preference to a functioning ramp piece.
- Sequencing priorities - Since we're in Knight of the White Orchid and the aforementioned Tithe are very powerful but have very right and very wrong ways to play. KoTWO needs to be played before your land drop (so ensure you can make on t3 with two lands, and Tithe is best when you can crack a fetchland/wasteland, retain priority, and respond with it to make sure you can get your two duals. There's a similar card, albeit at sorcery speed and two mana, but it can get three duals with the same condition of Tithe. It's called Gift of Estates and it has an absolutely gorgeous Japanese showcase print. It's definitely a bit worse as a two mv sorcery, but it's strong enough to be a good consideration if you want it. with no , it's worth noting that our sequencing to how we ramp becomes important.
- Searching priorities - You're looking for protection, or ways to setup the future draws. Cards like Grand Abolisher or Conqueror's Flail (as a second copy of this effect if you so desired it) are a reasonable choice, or the aforementioned Spirit of the Labrynith is a reasonable response to a rhystic study.
- Future planning - I'm loathe to provide guidance here, because every game is different. I don't want to tell you "always go for plan X in the early game" because that is highly, highly dependent on what it is you'll be facing down. We shouldn't ever become so complacent with our deck such that we develop "autopilot" tendencies. This leads to complacency and your eventual plateau as a player.
- Interaction priorities - Sure. Magic has tons of powerful cards and undoubtedly players will gravitate towards those cards. Gaea's Cradle is one such card that requires immediate response as you'll lose if it's not swiftly dealt with. Also, typically would you please just "bolt the damn bird" already? Be it a birds of paradise|4ED or esper sentinel, these cards are put in place for a reason. Don't be that guy™ that fails to recognize the threat these cards present.
- Commander deployment - While some would suggest slamming Kaalia on curve, if you don't have a haste outlet you're calculating a huge risk that usually won't pay off. Look, Kaalia is scary. Kaalia has been scary the past decade. Players are afraid of the scary unknown. Don't jam her out there without haste or at least some sort of protection.
- Tricks - Reanimate on Vilis, Broker of Blood to draw8 for . Congrats, you just cast a legal Contract From Below. Also, just Mishra's Workshop. Sometimes you can feel like you won the lottery when you open with this reusable black lotus...but if you're fortunate enough to own one of these, always pack Urborg, Tomb of Yawgmoth and Yavimaya, Cradle of Growth (both of which do not have a color identity) so your land can produce mana even when you don't have an artifact to cast. Also, if you t1 said Workshop into 3sphere, be prepared to dodge books hurled at your head. You know what you did, and you probably deserve it.
- Transition - Typically when you have a hate piece out and can see opponents struggling and you have some mechanism to draw extra cards. A haste outlet. A tutor on-hand or a key threat to steal the game (Vilis, Broker of Blood is a choice pick here since it prevents any kind of crack back).
- Goals - Just keep Kaalia stable. Tighten up alternative avenues of opponent attack with Karn, Great Creator to shut off any extraneous rocks. Ob Nixilis, Unshackled (which I am lukewarm on, but it does exist if you want it) and Stranglehold to cut off their search.
- Priorities (sequencing/searching/interaction) updates - Is Kaalia online? Why/why not? If not, you need to understand what's happened, be it not having haste by now, or some means of protection, whatever the case may be, and rectify that. Why didn't you get that online by now, assess the game that's led to your under development. If you're low on cards in hand, find one of your engines be it Ruin Raider or the Pain Seer + Springleaf Drum interaction to get back into it.
- Disruption and backup - Effects that prevent you from attacking should be a high priority to remove. Powerstone Minefield, Lightmine Field, or Raking Canopy would deny you an attack (but not a trigger) notably, but no one plays these cards at least. The most powerful of these would just say "no, you can't attack" like Moat but we don't care about that specifically. Peacekeeper would inhibit us the most but as a fragile 1/1 it dies to a fart in the wind. Ghostly Prison effects are pretty low priority and more annoying than problematic since you can just pay the to get past it and you shouldn't have a swelled board in the first place with your tribes' innate power. Notably, planeswalkers are a PITA since our commander does not trigger when attacking walkers, only players.
- Aggression - This is a skill that you learn with time. Typically you don't need more than one Kaalia trigger to go off as that represents ~8 damage/turn because of the size of our creatures, and they're typically the most boss on the board due to their size. Sometimes you just go for broke when, say, you see the win/can knock a player out, or know they don't have the answer and you can heavily pressure a player/the table without losing to the crackback, The aforementioned Vilis, Broker of Blood is fantastic at this for obvious reasons, since they can't just crackback and feed you a full grip of cards…
- Threat prioritizing - Always attack the player with Islands first, especially untapped Islands. Blue players are tricky, and with superior stack manipulation will offer the greatest chance of interacting with and thus disrupting our strategy. Destroy them. I like utilizing instant speed blue hosers like Omen of Fire to force them to use their mana on their own end step (or just be taken out of the game if they don't have the answer), but cards like Scald are clinically unfair with how early they come down and amount to so much pressure on their life.
- Power Spikes & Perception - Any kind of large spike in the game will get you noticed. You chose to play Kaalia, this goes with the territory. Notably absurd shifts in the game come any time you turn your creatures into extra cards, say with a Life's Legacy style of effect + a large creature with an enters trigger (rune-scarred demon into disciple of bolas is one of my favourites), or uhh…again, anything with a Vilis, Broker of Blood trigger. Are you noticing a pattern here?
- Transition - You've got a board state setup with Kaalia ready to attack at a moment's notice right? You're one tutor away from ending the game at this point.
- Wins & Combos - There's a number of ways to win, one of which is the classic Worldgorger Dragon line, which this Primer did utilize in a previous iteration. This has its own weaknesses, such as completely losing to a single piece of removal in response to the first trigger, necessitating the need to run more Bolt Bend effects to help mitigate this. I used to run this because I have a sweet, old ass arena promo of Fireball|PARL I wanted to show off as my outlet for all the mana I'd generate. Most cDH decks would utilize Razaketh, the Foulblooded somehow to assemble some sort of loop involving Leonin Relic-Warder + Animate Dead and a Mayhem Devil effect. Previously, I always eschewed the Razaketh from this deck as I didn't believe I had enough bodies to be able to power it effectively, but with this increased creature support package, I think that's no longer the case. I really don't like using Mayhem Devil or iMPACT Tremors here though as they are extra pieces which bring an extra layer of vulnerability to the critical turn, despite their presence in the baseline version of the deck as a finisher facilitator.
Some players would prefer to use Underworld Breach in conjunction with Dockside Extortionist and Wheel of Fortune to generate an arbitrarily large amount of mana and storm count. I don't like this because 1) you're using a $400 reserve list card to power your combo that gets stopped pretty hard to targeted grave hate, and 2) can't combo off in the face of null rod/karn, great creator. While you can sorta squint at Grinding Station kinda replacing the wheel here, it still loses to the second condition. Oh, and since you're drawing everybody else cards, you still end up drawing someone into either a means to stop you, or just a way to win off you with, say, a Thassa's Oracle. I think that's a lot of extraneous strikes against it that you don't need to subject yourself to, despite this being the most-perceived "best" way to win - monkey see, monkey do, after all.
So 3drinks™, you're asking, what's this mean? How do I plan to win, now that I've taken a public stance against the cDH so-called best way to win? An excellent question, I'm so glad you asked! As I alluded to earlier, we are still utilizing Razaketh now that we have more bodies to send to the demon as an offering of fodder, and we're still going for Leonin Relic-Warder + Animate Dead/Dance of the Dead/Necromancy. And we still have Sevinne's Reclamation to get one/both pieces back. Instead however, I'm introducing Bitter Ordeal as the kill condition of choice to go with our arbitrarily large number of sacrifices. This method not only prevents them from drawing into Thassa's Oracle on you, it also doesn't stock their graveyard, fights through Null Rod, and doesn't lose to any method of damage prevention. Of note you still can't combo into on-board grave hate a la Leyline of the Void|TSR, or through targeted grave hate a la Withered Wretch and you can't beat timed surprise Rakdos Charms - which the previous so-called "best" version of the combo couldn't do either, mind you. But now since we're not reliant on dealing damage, we also don't strictly care about Angel's Grace defenses either. In fact, the only thing that really hard stops our combo is Solitary Confinement. Not even a counterspell can stop us (please, no e-mails about Mindbreak Trap/Summary Dismissal) because gravestorm, like storm, is treated as individual spells. - Disruption and backup - Bob effects can hurt. They especially hurt when we play a lot of them, and hurt furthermore when you play some number of high cost tribes. If opponents can pressure our life it can make it risky to deploy our engines. Luckily however, this is commander where most people would rather draw cards and play with themselves, rather than actually win the game. So you've got that going for you. Additionally, sometimes players will actually read your cards and just never let Kaalia attack. That's probably the correct play given what she enables, but because of that it means we have to have more means of executing our goal than just our commander, such as reanimation or even a Through the Breach to get that key trigger off that you need to win. Additionally, this is why it's important that cards such as Baneslayer Angel and Lyra Dawnbringer exist; reasonably hard-castable bodies that help mitigate, at least partially, our over-expenditure of life.
I like to think this is a half typical Mardu list; you got fetchlands, cheap tutors, and two drop mana rocks that come in untapped. It's got Angels, Demons, and Dragons and reanimation spells like a typical Kaalia deck. It's even got the usual suspect creatures that Kaalia cares about. So let's look at some of the other cards that might not be immediately obvious.
Let's look at the mana, since I took extra care to ensure I can reliably fetch all my colors with ease despite not having access to . This means I easily fix colors early with arcum's astrolabe without losing a card, and I take advantage of cards that find plains duals like the aforementioned timeless dragon and angel of the ruins, which pull double duty by being a threat if I see them late instead of something boring like a rampant growth|mir.
Then we look at our draw style cards, which are different from the standard decks as we're locking other's draws under an uba mask, then using the reveal the top card and lose life for it's mana value, style spells to circumvent that restriction. So, naturally the aforementioned uba mask is an important part of this deck. And, it's cousin on legs, spirit of the labyrinth. Pact Weapon I'm especially fond of given it gives us a sort of lifeline, and at least allows us to Ad Naus without just dying, though you're vulnerable to any disenchant effect just taking you out on resolution if you dig too deep.
I suppose special mention belongs to thundermaw hellkite. This, in addition to being a reasonably easy to cast body with relevant type, it also ensures we have a safe, clear skies attack with its enters the battlefield trigger. That's really all it is, and it's those perks that make me consider it a corre card.
Okay, let's look at cards that seem obvious that I'm not playing, and we'll start with the elephant in the room;
Dockside Extortionist, because no matter all the stories I hear, this card is worth on average ~1.5 treasures. It's just a wily goblin, I just don't understand how this card can have such a wide range of effectiveness, but there it is. Worth noting I guess, is that this card is highly meta dependent. There's some environments - notably with heavy enchantress players and an abundance of fast mana decks a la Godo, Bandit Warlord decks - that this card gets a vast increase in power level such that you should probably play it. In my experience, I always seem to miss the mark with it, despite seeing tables on either side of me it would pop off in. It's much better against me, than with me, and isn't that just a little sad.
Smothering Tithe, which should be semi-obvious in that I'm throttling people's draw already which makes it less effective than usual, but in addition at four mana value it's a bit slow to get going and directly competes with Kaalia on curve. These are enough reasons to omit it, at least in my book. There's a similar reasoning with the omission of Esper Sentinel and Archivist of Ohgma as well, at least in regards to drawing cards being throttled.
Omen Machine/Possessed Portal, at first glance we should probably be on these. They're on-strat with our draw denial mechanism, but they're so mana heavy and it wants to force me into a Goblin Welder package to cheat them out. Which, I suppose, isn't a bad place to be if I'm being honest. Omen Machine especially since it might just freecast a Razaketh off the top, and I can even go back to Sensei's Divining Top to help set it up and supplement Vampiric Tutor. The truth about these however, is that these are known prison cards and will draw player aggro and maybe even a propensity for other players to throw dice and rulebooks at your head in frustration. That's a joke, but no the heat they have is very real and they may not be suitable to your playgroup. Now, if it's me, I know Kaalia has the heat already so I might as well jam them, but in the scope of a Primer I don't think it's an acceptable take to make these types of cards front-and-centre cards for the deck. They should be a player-specific decision, IMHO.
Alternatively, as my deck list is incredibly tuned for what I expect to face at my personal LGS, you also might just take the Baseline deck and upgrade the creature base and add some tutors and faster lands. That's a viable deck too as long as you remember the tenets
Man. It's been over ten years. Let that sink in. I've been doing this for over a decade now. I can't even begin to remember everybody, so I'm going to, unfortunately, use the tired generalized cliche of "everyone that ever played Kaalia, interacted with me in this thread, on @mtgsally, Twitter, the Kaalia discord", you all that got crazy excited to see what I try to do next, this one is for all of you. Every single one of you. Here's to another decade.
Kaalia, Zenith Seeker
Last Deck Update: 5.31.22
Professional Analysis
Her Ability: The irony is not lost on me that Neo Kaalia's power pales in comparison to the original's. That's to be expected however, as the original's ability to circumvent mana costs is the single strongest trait a player can utilize in any given game of Magic. With that said, Neo Kaalia's ability is still one worth pursuing as she can generate an up to plus three in terms of card advantage. In comparison to the original which needed a steady stream of extra cards to maintain it's strategy, Neo Kaalia can get to the mid-game and even late just by virtue of it's own ability keeping it fueled. This ability is not such an easy ability to manipulate however;
"When Kaalia, Zenith Seeker enters the battlefield, look at the top six cards of your library. You may reveal an Angel card, a Demon card, and/or a Dragon card from among them and put them into your hand. Put the rest on the bottom of your library in a random order."
In the top six cards, we're looking to be able to pick up half of those while shipping the rest to the bottom. That's great, but the cards are specific – we need one angel, one demon, and one dragon specifically, we can't just grab three angels and call it good! We also must be able to cast the cards, drawing extra cards we can't utilize is an otherwise wasted resource. And since we don't have a cheat mechanism built into our commander, we must be wary of the mana curve of our deck. That's not to say we have to exclusively curve out at four, of course, but we know that the higher the cost, the more weight those cards need to be able to pull in order to be worth a deck slot.
Reasons you would enjoy this deck:
• You love playing with Miracles.
• You enjoy piloting a deck that can build longterm advantage from the beginning of the game.
• You love original Kaalia but are tired of your friends taking a ball bat to your knees.
Reasons you wouldn't enjoy playing this deck:
• You prefer a shotgun blast to the face approach rather than an intrinsic value-over-time engine.
• You would rather beat everybody all at once and at the same time.
• You like decks that actually play more than one six plus converted mana cost card.
Let's be honest, when someone sits down at the table with a Tymna-Thrasios deck, you instantly know the tryhard alert went off around everyone. When original Kaalia sits down, you know she draws legitimate vile and malice from opponents that are afraid of the unknown. Meanwhile, our deck here can make use of a lot of "under the hood" style of optimizations. What does that mean, "under the hood", right? What I mean by that is that this deck will be making use of a lot of basic card advantage theory to increase the average card quality you see in a given game. You know how you resolve a Brainstorm and then follow it up with a fetchland to create an Ancestral Recall? Yeah, those are the kinds of optimizations I'm talking about here. And here's where the name for this deck comes into play (err...enters the battlefield ).
Since our commander cares about our top deck, it's not exactly a huge leap of logic to take on a miracle approach. With cards like Sensei's Divining Top and Scroll Rack, in fact with the Rack especially you can generate immense card advantage with the commander by putting the angels, demons, and dragons from your hand back on top, drawing those new cards, and then blinking or otherwise resolving the commander again to draw those cards right back! And, as an added bonus there was probably some cards you didn't care about that could get shipped to the bottom clear and out of your way! Then as an added benefit to go with all these top deck matters strategies, we can go back to "outplaying our opponent with Vampiric Tutor for Terminus to put them on tilt for the rest of the night!" That last sentence is obviously sarcasm, but the strategy is genuine. A one mana tutor to hard wipe all creatures to the bottom for also one mana when the two cards also fit well into our deck's strategy anyway, is quite the potent game plan.
"Whenever a player cycles a card, you may exile target creature. If you do, return that card to the battlefield under its owner's control at the beginning of the next end step."
"But 3drinks," you ask, "How many cycling cards are actually relevant and not just over-costed niche effects? And how on Earth will we build around one card that doesn't even start in the command zone?" Well as it turns out, there's about sixty or so reasonably playable cards with cycling. Now, of course we're not going to be playing all of those because we have to make room for the actual meat and potatoes of the deck, Slide is just a mechanism to squeeze as much value from the commander as we can. To your other question, fellow reader, cycling is a powerful effect that allows us to both draw through our deck (seeing more cards than anticipated) without actually casting spells which maintains card parity through counterspells. In essence, we get to "cycle" through our deck to find what we need to keep up with any pace of game. To your last concern, how do we rely on one card that isn't our commander. It's simple, for starters we actually do have a functional reprint (though clearly not as good since it doesn't trigger off other player's cycles), but ultimately we are in the colors with the most tutor depth of all, nearing 15% of our deck if we were so inclined. In short, that gives us approximately a raw 17% of chance of the initial 100 to see one of the cards to fetch astral slide, and this chance improves as we cycle through the deck. This number further increases as we play the same "miracles suite" of cards that let us stack or otherwise reorganize our deck for peak efficiency.
That sounds like a lot of bookkeeping. How does it work?
Deck stats for those that don't want to calculate those on their own: http://tappedout.net/mtg-decks/miraculous-kaalia/
+1 Static Orb, Land Tax, Mortuary, Nameless Inversion, Crib Swap
Beta changes: -1 Lightning Greaves, Winter Orb, Static Orb, Bloodgift Demon, Angelic Field Marshal, Butcher of the Horde
+1 Haakon, Stromgald Scourge; Entomb, Anger, Anvil of Bogardan, Faithless Looting, Eternal Dragon
Mortuary: We can stack the triggers post wrath with Kaalia on top, draw her, cast for three and get three threats. Even just casting Kaalia from the CZ will ship the top six, meaning the chances of getting locked out of our top deck is nil with this commander.
More to come with real time field play experience.
• Miracles have some awkward play patterns that require you to alter the way you play to avoid giving away tells when you top deck a miracle or not.
• Slide decks require a large number of deck slots to function, but further deck experience shows that this deck requires a large number of creature slots to ensure we proc the commander frequently. This creates friction between the strategies.
So it turns out, blink is good. Reanimation is good. You have a commander that creates card advantage on ETB and always has another threat, so circumventing costs to get the chance to deploy our threats ahead of curve or even better, deploying multiple threats at once, this will let the deck work at keeping up with anything else on board. But here's the catch, I said this deck needs a high creature count to proc the commander, and these tribes don't do well with high counts. Further, if you jam any old creatures just to get your counts up, you miss out on the other utilitarian cards that make any deck work, like tutors. So you have to get clever by making your slots perform double duty - i.e. a dragon card that also ramps and fixes your colors, or a demon that also acts as a removal spell often in place of a more efficient generic card of the same function.
How do you (or I) know what the proper count is for these three traditionally high mana tribes?
You can run the numbers through a hypergeometric probability calculator, or, take the numbers I already came up with which is, optimally, 36 creatures but you can get by with 34 as a 90% chance to see at least one creature in the top six. Note that changelings are pretty decent here since they can fill in for any tribe that might otherwise be under-represented (like demons), but the only ones I really liked were the two champion a creature changelings, since they also can buy you a blink on the commander. Below I'm going to share a deck list from right around May 2022 as an example of what the typical deck should look like. Of course any questions can be fielded right here in my thread!