Killian, Ink Duelist - Auras & Instants
General Overview
With the number of lifegain elements, this deck is surprisingly resilient in the face of other fast paced decks. The commander's built in Lifelink combined with the stat boosts prevalent in the deck can give you a nice cushion early on. One swing that connects by a creature enchanted with Celestial Mantle can often put you nearly out of reach for many aggro based decks and big X spell decks that don't go infinite; multiple swings gets silly.
This deck runs a healthy suite of creature removal spells, most of which exile. Killian makes all of these much cheaper, and opponents will get used to the possibility of you potentially exiling multiple creatures with little mana available.
Creatures in this deck, as with most voltron decks, have been chosen mainly for how the complement the aura based voltron strategy. Nearly every creature synergizes with the commander in some way with only a few exceptions.
I've run other creatures for a backup plan previously but honestly commander tax is almost never a big issue for this deck so it is rare to be locked out of the commander damage route for long.
I have chosen to exclude unconditional tutors like Demonic Tutor and Vampiric Tutor by choice. I'm not opposed to these in general, I run them in other decks, and they definitely would make the deck stronger but I want to reduce the urge to just grab Hatred every game and I know that's pretty much what I would do every time. Hatred kills should be special.
If the stars align and you drop Killian on Turn 1, there is potential for a Turn 2 commander damage kill if you have Hatred in hand. I have not yet had the fortune of it happening but it's going to be brutal when it happens some day (it has happened on Turn 3 once).