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Commander / EDH Artifact Eldrazi Ramp Tron

Trolldier_of_Fortune


OHGODWHY

NOTE: This deck is friggin old. I've been out of the game for a while but I'm trying to play catch-up with years of cards that've flown by, and I figured the best way to do this was a total refresh of the deck. It's a work in progress, but here's the sequel everybody was afraid of.

Original description continues:

Hold onto your butts folks, this is gonna be one hell of a bumpy ride.

Do you like Eldrazi Titans? What about artifacts? Does a colorless deck sound like a cool thing to have? How about running opponents down with overwhelming force and speed? If you answered yes to one or more of those questions, then buckle up, because we're about to hop on board the pain train and trust me, there are no brakes on this bitch.

If ever there was a poster child for brute force, this deck would be it. Most people try to cheat Eldrazi into play, we say to hell with that, hardcast those monsters. Dark Depths? Who needs a Thespian's Stage when we can just pay 30 mana as casually as running through a drive-thru? I mean, it's still here, because why wouldn't it be, but I digress. My point here is that this deck goes hard and quickly trivializes large mana costs. "Gee," you may be wondering, "how exactly do you figure to do that?" Well, how about I quit hyping this thing up and break it down for you.

First thing's first, let's start with my choice of commander. Kozilek, Butcher of Truth is a damn strong creature. There are a fair few colorless commanders I could have picked to helm this beast, but I made this in 2015 before Zendikar 2: Electric Boogaloo happened, and I stuck with Butcher. Now, the question is, why Butcher? The Great Distortion seems to be the most popular pick for colorless turboramp, and absolutely not a bad one, but Butcher of Truth has one thing that The Great Distortion doesn't: Annihilator. It's one thing to swing for the fences with a colossus of a commander that hits hard, but when you're bringing in a beast that breaks board states with every swing, you're in a completely different league in my opinion. It's like trying to build train tracks under your opponent's feet and run a train over them before they even realize what's up.

Okay, on to the deck proper. You likely noticed the menagerie of mana rocks and such running the gamut from Mana Crypt to Sisay's Ring, enough to make any red player's Vandalblast finger twitch. The idea was to pack a critical mass of said mana rocks into the deck as to increase the chances to get an opening hand where I can explode out the gate and get as many of them on the board as quickly as possible. In my experience, Kozilek hits the board on average by turn 5. Some games the deck may stall out for a bit and delay until turn 6-7, others could see Kozilek on board as soon as turn 2-4, or with an absolute nut of a hand, even turn 1. Now that's terrifying. Unless it's you doing it, in which case it's HILARIOUS.

You might have noticed by now that this deck is basically tunnel vision incarnate. This deck takes a strategy game and turns it into a drag race. This strategy is not without certain downfalls. I mentioned Vandalblast earlier for a reason, and that reason should be painfully obvious. This deck also goes all in on ramp to the point where it basically forgoes any truly meaningful defense, meaning that unless Silent Arbiter is on the board, we're very much vulnerable to any deck that goes wide.

Now, those seem like pretty glaring weaknesses, so how do we fight them? This answer is going to be a lot simpler than you may think: We just end threats like that before they even have a chance to materialize. Your opponent can't Vandalblast or Merciless Eviction you if they've been bodied before they can cast it, can they? Like I said earlier, brute force is the name of the game here.

While we're at it, let's note another weakness: Kozilek has no real way to protect himself. And believe you me, if you're running this in a pod, people ARE going to be holding removal up specifically for Kozilek. This would be a severe disadvantage if not for one thing, and that's Kozilek's draw four trigger. Since the deck is stacked with mana rocks and other goodies, chances are good that once Kozilek gets cast for the first time in a game, he will immediately get you the extra two mana to re-cast him in the event of removal and then some, at which point you get even MORE goodies from his draw trigger. Your opponents will only have so many kill spells, while Kozilek tends to refuse to stay down for long. Eventually something will give, whether the opponent runs out of steam and Kozilek finds his opening, or your card advantage reaches what amounts to a singularity.

Let's talk about that card advantage singularity for a minute. I've found that, thanks to certain card choices I've made, once a game has gone long enough and I've managed to dig enough cards out, the infinite combos start to assemble. This is less by design and more a side effect, but I take advantage of it nonetheless because, well, why wouldn't I? Here's some fun bits of combo tech that I either pieced together or discovered on accident. Rings of Brighthearth and Sensei's Divining Top together basically read "2: Draw a card. Return Sensei's Divining Top to your hand." Add Basalt Monolith to the mix and it reads "Just draw and play as much as you want, I don't care anymore."

On the topic of wild combos and interactions, let's talk hardcore tech. First up I'll give you two cornerstones: Ugin, the Spirit Dragon, and All is Dust. In most decks these are powerful cards. Here, we take them to a whole new level, as Ugin's -X and All is Dust become asymmetrical board wipes. How about a card as simple as Strionic Resonator? With one activation Annihilator 4 can become Annihilator 8, or maybe Kozilek can draw me 8 cards instead of 4. Now let's add Voltaic Key, Clock of Omens, and/or Rings of Brighthearth to that and get right back to crazy combo land. We can now spam the hell out of that Strionic Resonator to bring the power of Annihilator to "one-sided Apocalypse" levels and straight up wipe out an entire established board state with one attack.

You want more tech? Here's something for you, not a big deal but a fun interaction I worked out back in 2015 when tuck got removed from the format: If Kozilek gets destroyed, you can get what amounts to a free Reminisce out of him. The trick is to wait on using the replacement effect that puts him back into the command zone, let his bottom trigger go off, then as your graveyard shuffles back into your library, use the replacement effect THEN. Colorless doesn't have a whole lot for recursion anyway, so take what you can get.

Thank you to the many people who have upvoted this deck and pretty much cemented it as my deck building magnum opus. I never thought this would be the second highest rated colorless EDH deck on TappedOut, so this is pretty sweet. This list was originally made back in 2015, before Battle for Zendikar launched, and after it did I feel like colorless decks came into their own in a big way, and judging by the make-up of a lot of them, I'd like to think this list inspired a fair few of those, because I never really saw decks like this before then.

Feedback is appreciated, but I'm really not around here a lot anymore, so this list doesn't get many updates these days.

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RIP my snazzy foil. Not too bothered by it though, I'm only surprised it wasn't banned sooner. Slotted Planar Bridge back in over top of it since it isn't just a boring slow play combo enabler anymore.

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Casual

93% Competitive

Revision 78 See all

(1 year ago)

-1 All is Dust main
+1 All is Dust main
Top Ranked
Date added 9 years
Last updated 1 year
Exclude colors WUBRG
Legality

This deck is not Commander / EDH legal.

Rarity (main - side)

17 - 0 Mythic Rares

48 - 0 Rares

30 - 0 Uncommons

2 - 0 Commons

Cards 100
Avg. CMC 3.86
Tokens Eldrazi Scion 1/1 C, Marit Lage, Spirit 2/2 C, The Monarch
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