Liesa, who?
Out of the many Orzhov commanders out there, Liesa, Forgotten Archangel has to be one of the most fun commanders to play. Her first ability is her main draw: whenever a creature you control dies, return it to your hand at the beginning of the next end step. This is a powerful tool to have on your side. Cheap creatures become recurrable tools, stax pieces become more obnoxious to remove, and board wipes no longer hurt you.
Her second ability isn't as flashy, but it can still be devastating for many decks. If an opponent's creature dies, exile instead of putting it in the graveyard. Woe to any graveyard deck that sits opposite to you because Liesa is going to make their life miserable. It's important to note that this is a replacement effect, not a triggered ability. This means it happens in place of the creature dying so your opponents do not get any death triggers.
Why Play This Deck?
If you want a deck that has an answer to almost every problem or a deck that just enjoys limiting an opponent's options, then this is the deck for you. Liesa on her own is a great way to stall graveyard-centric decks, but once we start adding the usual suspects of locks (Drannith Magistrate, Grand Abolisher, Spirit of the Labyrinth, Linvala) the game will slow to a crawl for most players.
One of the best parts to these locks is how Liesa makes your locks obnoxious to remove for a long period of time. If it isn't exiled, it comes back to your hand at the next end step and, if they have flash, you're able to play them again immediately.
As for the locks and tools at our disposal, let's dive into our options and see what we've packed.
The Toolbox
Liesa wants to police and stall the board as hard as she possibly can. Thankfully, you don't have to wait until you hit 5 mana to make an impact since many of the creatures are valuable even without her. Of course, just like with any other prison/lock/stax deck, make sure you're tailoring your locks to the meta you're playing in. The ones featured here are what works when I bring this deck into a blind pod, but I would recommend experimenting with what troubles you the most.
Another important note is that the tutors in this deck fulfill two needs - getting the answers you need when you need them, and getting a combo when you need it. Unless I'm tutoring for a combo to end the game, what I tutor for changes from game to game.
On the note of tutors, here's a cheat sheet of locks and answers and when you'd want to use it.
Stax:
Specific answers that are better with Liesa:
Piloting the Deck
Ideally, you want to ramp into Liesa so you can get your game plan going as soon as possible. However, in lieu of early ramp cards, setting up locks and slowing down your competition is also not a bad idea. Once you've stalled the board, use spot removal like Solitude to remove specific problems.
Sacrifice engines are in this deck to help you ramp and make the most of how recurrable your creatures are. Leonin Relic-Warder and Fiend Hunter especially benefit here because of the O-ring Trick (explained at the end of the guide). If Liesa is around, then these are our tools to get repeated ETB and sacrifice triggers. Without her, these are useful one-offs to help us get set up for a bigger play. One of our best tools for this game plan is Ao, the Dawn Sky. Most of the cards in this deck are below CMC 4 so there's a good chance you'll hit somewhere between two to four cards each time.
Board wipes are also fantastic for us because everything we have will come back to our hands. In this deck, we're running two - Damn and Living Death. Damn is flexible and can be spot removal or a board wipe when we need it. Living Death is amazing if you've been denying everyone their creatures because of Liesa and you have a sacrifice engine on the board.
If at any time we lose a piece we needed, then Junji, the Midnight Sky, Karmic Guide, and Priest of Fell Rites will fish our tools back and return to our hands if Liesa sees them die.
While this deck can be extremely flexible, there is a small hurdle that comes with piloting Liesa.
The Timing Problem
Liesa's ability triggers at the beginning of the next end step. This means the latest something can die and have it come back to your hand is the second main phase. This makes breaking parity with your stax effects through Liesa a difficult task because you can't sacrifice the stax pieces on someone's end step and play it on your turn to dodge the effects. If you want a creature to come back to your hand in time to play it on your turn, you'll want to sacrifice it when your opponents pass priority on their second main phase, which sometimes means allowing your opponent to have a free main phase without a stax piece to hinder them.
The way we get around this is through flash effects like Vedalken Orrery or Winding Canyons. We can sacrifice the creature-based stax piece on our opponent's end step, play how we normally would, then when it comes back on our end step, we immediately cast it after Liesa puts it back into our hands. The only problem here is that it's a very mana-hungry game plan and we won't always draw into those cards. Plus, if someone destroys the Orrery, we don't have any ways to bring it back.
How Does Liesa Win?
We've been talking about how to stall the games and answer problematic boards, but even with all those pieces in place, how do we win? We have a few combos that can close out the game, but our plan A is this:
The good ol Mono-White classic, Heliod and Ball are perfect here because they're independently great cards and we can tutor for both pieces in the right conditions. Since the combo is only two cards, it's pretty easy to assemble even if both cards are in the graveyard. Walking Ballista is especially great since it can work as a repeatable burn card with Liesa.
Here are the steps to use this combo:
- Get Ballista with two counters on it and Heliod onto the board.
- Use Heliod's activated ability to give Ball lifelink.
- Remove a counter from Ballista to deal one damage to an opponent.
- Heliod will now trigger and add a counter to Ballista because you gained a life from Ballista dealing one damage.
- Remove the new counter from Ballista to deal one damage to an opponent. Repeat until opponents are dead.
Be aware that if someone tries to stop you during this combo and you have the available mana, you can reactivate Heliod's ability or pre-emptively cast Walking Ballista with more counters so you can deal damage and gain life in response to the removal.
Failing this, we have two combos as our plan B.
Leonin Relic-Warder (or LRW) is already a fantastic removal piece with a sacrifice outlet. With Animate Dead, you'll have infinite death triggers or sacrifices. Here are the steps to follow:
- With a sac outlet like Blasting Station or Phyrexian Altar on the board, cast Leonin Relic Warder. If LRW is in the Graveyard, skip to step 3.
- When LRW's ETB trigger is on the stack, sacrifice LRW. Let the LTB trigger resolve, then let the ETB trigger resolve to permanently exile something (this is the O-ring Trick).
- Cast Animate Dead, targetting LRW in your graveyard.
- Let it resolve. When LRW ETBs, target your Animate Dead.
- Let the trigger resolve, exiling Animate Dead. Now that Animate Dead is gone, there will be a sacrifice trigger on LRW.
- With the trigger still on the stack, sacrifice LRW to your outlet. This will create an LTB trigger from Leonin which will bring back Animate Dead.
- When Animate Dead returns, target LRW, and go back to step 4 to loop the process. This gives you infinite deaths or infinite activations of your outlet.
Our final back up combo is this:
This combo copies the old Reveillark combo, but we use Junji here instead because it has more flexibility. Outside of the combo, Junji is able to strip our opponent's hands of answers or recur something that made it to our opponent's graveyard. Here are the steps to follow:
- Cast Junji or get Junji into your graveyard.
- Cast Karmic Guide and have her ETB target Junji.
- Let the ETB resolve and bring Junji back. Then, sacrifice Karmic Guide.
- Sacrifice Junji next to use their death trigger and target Karmic Guide.
- Bring back Karmic Guide. When she enters the battlefield, target Junji, and loop for infinite activations of your sacrifice outlet.
While this is a useful combo, be aware that you are still losing 2 life each time you bring back Karmic Guide. An Aristocrat will slow this effect down, but it takes two aristocrats to offset the life loss. Otherwise, only use this combo if you're ahead on life totals.
Notable Exclusions/Swaps
Blind Obedience
This card is amazing. It's an outlet when we need it for infinite casts, it gives us life and steadily drains our opponents. The only reason it isn't in this deck is cause this deck is mana hungry as all hell. I'm currently still experimenting with how to fit it in because it's so useful to us.
Soulless Jailer
ONE brought us a new stax card in Soulless Jailor, and it slots in extremely well into our deck. It's low-cost, has a durable body, and it's perfect for stalling out cast-from-exile decks that center on noncreature storm and other recursion decks.
The only problem this card has is how narrow it is. It only stops noncreatures from being cast from the graveyard (or exile) and stops permanents from entering the battlefield from the graveyard. This means, while it's useful to stop Breach or Flashback decks, it's only situationally useful against cast-from-exile decks like Prosper, Tome-Bound or food chain decks. It's also harder to take advantage of this card because it doesn't work well with fun tempo cards like Aerial Extortionist unless you really need to hate on noncreature permanents.
In addition, stopping graveyard-to-battlefield for permanents can also hurt our backup combos. This is a small point since we'll realistically have a sacrifice outlet to get rid of Jailor before we go off, but it stops any incidental value we can accrue from playing Karmic or Junji outside of the combo. I might add this card later, but for now it's not as broadly useful as I'd want it to be.
Containment Priest
If you want to stop creatures from being cheated onto the battlefield, Containment Priest is where you want to be. It stops almost every form of sneaking a creature into the battlefield besides casting it like a normal human being, stops any Worldgorger Dragon-esque loops, and shuts down blink decks. Containment Priest is a powerful card that I want to find room for at some point. Hell, she even has Flash! She's a perfect fit for our deck!
Her biggest drawback is how she, like Jailor, murders our backup combos. We can work around it by sacrificing her, but it still requires us to find the sac outlet first. I definitely want to find room for her and Jailor since Containment Priest covers all of the holes Jailer misses, and she stalls a good number of other deck archetypes.
Aven Mindcensor
Another incredible card that stops tutors in its tracks. Between this, Archivist of Oghma and Opposition Agent, there's plenty of anti-search cards to be had. I opted to go with the latter two because I'd rather control my opponent's tutors and Archivist is a cheap, flashable body that also gets me incidental value with a sac engine. If I wanted to learn harder into prison or knew I was going against more search-heavy metas (like high-powered or competitive tables) then I'd probably cut Karmic Guide for Aven Mindcensor in a heartbeat.
Weird Inclusions
Vexilus Praetor might seem a bit weird and expensive for a deck like this, but with how useful our commander is the longer she's on the board, I think he earns his spot every time he sticks. The only weakness this plan has is a board wipe since the Praetor doesn't protect against that and he shuts off our creature-based protection for Liesa (like Benevolent Bodyguard and Selfless Savior). However, that isn't too bad since Liesa will still pop our side of the table back into our hands and we just have to find a way to recast Liesa for a full recovery.
Reidane, God of the Worthy
is another odd inclusion and, I'm gonna be honest, she was added because I was sick of getting shot in the face with burn spells. After dying to Ball/Heliod or a damage-oriented Kikki-Jikki combo for the fifth time, you have to eventually sit down, put on your best Samuel L. Jackson voice, and say 'enough is enough' and bring something to stop the madness. Thankfully, Valkmira does exactly that.
Testing
I'm currently testing out cutting Cruel Celebrant, Archivist of Oghma, and Karmic Guide for Blind Obedience, Priest, and Jailer. One less aristocrat isn't too bad when we have three in our deck (two creatures, one enchantment) and Blind Obedience can work as an aristocrat if we use an Altar to win the game.
Archivist isn't a bad card, but it doesn't stop tutors and it's an okay creature if no one tutors. Liesa has an argument to use Archivist just cause you can recast it repeatedly for extra sacrifices.
Karmic Guide is nice, but with two main combos to rely on first, I've been left with plenty of times where she's sitting in my hand as a dead card cause all of my locks and LIesa are still on the board. Plus, she doesn't play well with Soulless Jailer. Karmic is still useful in case Liesa gets removed and we put her in the graveyard, but Priest of Fell Rites is cheaper and cutting Karmic helps Ao piles and drops our average CMC.
