I'll take "Forced Pop-Culture Photoshops Based on Deck Rallying Cries" for $400, Alex
The Brudiclad furrowed his brow, failed to find an out, winced and turned the Xantcha sideways at Mayael, hoping to not die. Mayael saw the benefit of having an ally around, and chose not to kill Brudiclad by letting the Xantcha in and taking seven damage. Brudiclad passed. Mayael untapped, added two more fistfuls of cards to the 20+ already sitting in hand, stared down my absolute lack of board (the biggest creature being a 3/3 token from a Pongify) and threw in the towel.
It doesn't get much greater as far as debut games go. Even if technically this was version two of Baby's First Consciously Wildly Suboptimal Deck.
Xantcha, Sleeper Agent is a commander I've had an affinity for since she was spoiled, but I had little interest in her conventional infinite mana and board control direction. I was far more interested in using her as a remote voltron, souping her up from afar with stuff like Sword of the Chosen and seeing if I can off people that way. My initial build from way back when also featured an attempt at Rakdos ETB, which is not a thing for a reason. The list felt like it was consistently two turns behind the rest of the table, and fell to the wayside once 2019 rolled out other attractive commander options. I only recalled how fun Xantcha was when I wandered into a Cockatrice room where a stranger was testing a budget deck, and I saw her in my old deck folder when looking for something appropriate to load up. Couple that with recent additions like Demonic Embrace and I was convinced to give her another spin. As such, I trimmed the non-functional ETB wannabe angle and jammed the deck full of further remote voltron support plus some cute pillow forty/political cards. That game from the top was carried by Brash Taunter (who "befriended" Impervious Greatwurm) and Treacherous Link.
The deck runs ample rocks as a way to game the system - it's a garbage tier deck, so it's gonna face other garbage tier decks more often than not, and you don't poop on someone's rocks when you're in the potato bracket. Something that I'm worried about is that like a lot of wannabe political decks, this thing is going to fall apart in the final 1v1 more often than not. The original iteration of the deck put a lot of faith in Heartstone (plus Sculpting Steel) to get there. The current take runs some shenanigans that should give the deck a bit more game in the final showdown, but this is still something that I can foresee myself struggling with. What do ya'll make of this, oh wise Nexus collective?