If you have come to this place in search of a powerful, consistent, all-around wintacular EDH deck, then turn back or abandon all hope.
If you must play to win, then your only path to victory with Toy Box lies in both maintaining a balanced board-state and the political manipulation of the rest of the players long enough such that they have exhausted themselves when you make your desperate, eleventh-hour bid to terminate a table full of players who have all but defeated each other for you already. The most common finishes are a very late Natural Affinity against tapped out opponents (Doing it wrong), removal of your own Abyssal Persecutor after all other players already exist in state of undeath (Achievement Unlocked; Career Politician), or sneaking in a 6/6 trampling Commander to finish off a bedraggled final opponent in heads-up play. (Legit victory)
The fewer players that remain, the less power Toy Box has. It has been said that other decks play creatures and combos, while this deck plays other players. If victory is your aim, then I encourage you to think of this deck as "Commander on Hard Mode", and not to attempt to play it if fewer than four players are participating. One of Toy Box's greatest liabilities is also it's most effective political wedge; it is NOT capable of explosive wins, effective lockdowns, or even adequate self-defense - so if a player is wounding you, they are wasting important resources destroying a nonthreatening "sometimes-ally".
That said, I would argue that the true spirit of the deck is actually a personal challenge to cleanse yourself of hyper-competitiveness, to be a gracious host and a good friend, and to endeavor - as best you can - to improve the experience of EDH as much as possible for everyone else. I've argued that if you're playing this deck to win while more than one opponent remains, you're doing it wrong. After all, the best games are those where multiple players gained and lost the momentum repeatedly, and everyone enjoyed themselves because they felt like they were relevant up until the very end.
Played as intended, there are so many nuances to using this deck that I am positive I've yet to discover them all. Who do you disrupt first with Scandalmonger? Probably the player to your left, unless they're the furthest from victory. Should you cast Lethal Vapors? Depends on how much it's going to hinder the player closest to victory relative to the impact it will have on everyone else. Who gets this turn one Rainbow Vale? All else being equal, it should probably go to whomever sits to the right of the player that took the first turn. Speaking of Rainbow Vale, this deck can provide an eye-opening crash course in psychology. I've seen Rainbow Vale function as a free, reusable Mindslaver that generates good will instead of animosity. I've gained control of a player by keeping him on life support with an Abyssal Persecutor while threatening to pull the plug with Proteus staff.
Be warned: Toy Box was designed for more mature playgroups, who have mastered a few difficult concepts that 'Spikier' players have either discarded, or never knew. Chief among those is that EDH was primarily intended to be a slower, multiplayer format which also provided a less consistent, more interactive, and - perhaps most importantly of all - more social experience than other formats offer. Most ultra-competitive players will not appreciate this deck and its intentions
--The following is a chronicle of Toy Box's roots, inception, and evolution. It is TL, so R at your own peril--
EDH brought me back into magic after a very long hiatus where I had previously burned out on the competitive standard tournament scene. Initially, I disregarded the commander format as a dull exercise in randomness management - indeed, I still feel that very much describes head-to-head EDH... but ALL my friends were playing it. They'd bring their decks to game night and sneak in games before the full party had assembled.
They, like many other commander playgroups I have since encountered, were in the process of (d)evolving their builds into the fastest, most combo-riffic, least interactive exercises in what I have come to describe as 'MTG Solitaire' as they possibly could. My friends would ignore each other entirely until someone combo'd out on turn 5 or 6, at which point everyone but that one person would scoop their 'almost-but-not-quite' board-state, look very dejected or bored, and agree to do something else. Even the glow of the "winner" would quickly fade as they realized subconsciously that something was wrong: They had gone to the considerable effort of gathering with their friends, each having assembled an incredible collection of cardboard that is a Commander deck, shuffled, rolled, then proceeded to play with themselves for 15-20 minutes until they had thoroughly disappointed everyone else at the table.
So it was that Toy Box was conceived. I knew that when they urged me to join their commander games, my friends were expecting me to construct some nightmare concoction designed to steal wins and shatter dreams; after all, they knew me as a competitive 'Johnny-Spike'-type MTG player. It seemed the only joy they garnered from the format anymore was the brief flashes of inspiration catalyzed by utter annihilation at the hands of a unique deck. They had become Spike-Zombies, and they wanted to infect me such that I might provide some much needed novelty to combat their flagging will to yet again watch someone realize the 'super awesome' Academy Rector
+
Omniscience
combo, prematurely ending what seemed like it might otherwise have been an engaging experience.
I decided to challenge myself and the format, instead. Indeed, I initially believed myself to be endeavoring to 'break' commander, and illustrate what a silly format I believed it to be. By dispensing with a single-minded pursuit of victory at all cost, I was free to set other goals. You might think of them as meta goals; goals beyond the game itself, aimed instead at affecting the players involved. In hindsight, I honestly think it is more accurate to say that I tried to heal the format, rather than break it.
I'm a bit ashamed to admit that my first 'super-original' idea was to assemble a heap of those wacky chaos cards, like Warp World, Gate to the AEther, Planar Chaos, and friends. Of course, a quick Google search disillusioned me of the notion that there was any novelty left in that idea at all. Worse still, with a little follow-up I soon discovered that those decks were considered 'fun' by the playgroups forced to suffer under their yoke exactly once. The reason was obvious; if people wanted random chance to determine their game, they'd sit down and roll dice. No need for expensive commander decks. It's boring and frustrating to watch everything that has happened across the WHOLE GAME descend into senselessness, and worse still to be subject to it repeatedly and consistently.
While I dodged a bullet there, I wasn't willing to give up on my mission to shake up the format just yet. Unfortunately, in the vacuum that avoiding pure chaos left behind, I also found myself unable to articulate just exactly what I hoped to achieve. I had a few guidelines to follow; No pure, senseless chaos, no hyper-aggressive cheesetastic Spike-builds... but what was my GOAL? It wasn't to crush the other players, and it wasn't to deprive players of the ability to have a meaningful impact on the game.
To this day, I have a difficult time summarizing exactly what the aim of the deck is; for awhile I claimed it was 'fun', which I - and most of the gamers I respect - feel it is. But many (usually singularly victory-oriented) MTG players were offended that I would join a game when my goal was not necessarily to outrace them to victory. It is what they expected when they sat down to play, and I found that failing to meet that expectation would sometimes result in frustration or resentment. I had to face a hard truth that the deck was not universally considered 'fun'. It DID, however, largely produce results that I was happy with, so if not ensuring 'fun' for all, just what was it doing that I was so proud of?
'Facilitating Interaction' is a much more accurate description of the function of Toy Box, though still incomplete. After abandoning chaos effects, I was looking for a new set of principles to underpin my card selections. After communicating this to the friend who was most interested into drawing me into the format, he brought my attention to the archetype of 'group-hug' decks. They're neither chaotic nor hellbent on victory; they are support (and political, when properly played) decks. This was much closer to what I was looking for, but further research revealed deep-seeded and, frankly, reasonable resentments about this archetype as well.
While the Chaos archetype would often result in a random player securing victory regardless of skill (and not completely random, either; the player to the left of the chaos player tends to have a serious edge, simply because they untap first after a reset), the Group-Hug archetype would often accelerate and support very 'winny' decks, counter intuitively exacerbating the lack-of-interaction issue creeping into the format. More troubling besides is that when the Hug deck was not being played objectively, and was instead being used as a political tool or to support a particular player for whatever reason, playgroups often felt the support deck's only "contribution" to the game was to sacrifice itself to artificially select a winner. Frankly, unless you're discussing team-play, that didn't sound very fun or fair to me, either, so I had to move past purely beneficial effects, as well, regardless of their symmetry.
Those of you familiar with tabletop war gaming will best understand what I mean when I say 'battlefield terrain' became one of the core design philosophies of Toy Box after I abandoned victory, chaos, and support. As best I can summarize the concept, this refers to variables that all players are aware of, and have some modicum of control over, even if that control is simply choosing to avoid the terrain all together. For a time, I was comparing the build to a sort of home-brew commander deck version of the Planeschase format, except instead of randomness determining the game state modifications, you had a manipulative (and manipulable) player doing it. I soon discovered, through playing early versions of the build, that cards like Oath of Scholars and Oath of Lieges had an ideal effect on the game; aiding players who were lagging for whatever reason, while providing no benefit for, or even penalizing, players who were doing well. There are also inverse versions of this effect that tend to place the greatest burden on players who are excelling, Eye of Doom being one of the best examples.
Despite successfully avoiding the mistake of making a chaos deck, I still had to learn the hard way that allowing the group to retain some level of control is very important. The very first iteration of the deck was choc full of many of magic's most decisive board sweepers. It only took me a handful of games where people obviously began wishing they were doing anything else after losing their board state for the fourth time to realize that I'd have to find less offensive means of balancing the playing field. This was a confusing lesson to learn, because - in theory - the only player who should not be excited to see a board wipe coming is the player who is currently dominating. This was not the case, and it's part of playing a meta-deck designed to influence people; people are not always rational. Many of them won't stop bemoaning the loss of their Sun Titan long enough to appreciate that you saved them from imminent death at the hands of another player YET AGAIN.
Still other cards came out because, while theoretically ideal given the intent of Toy Box, they extinguished the game's excitement. I only ever resolved Zur's Weirding once before taking it out, for example. Thieve's Auction came out after I resolved it in an 8 player game, accidentally ruining the whole night... but it went back in after Toy Box taught me yet another difficult lesson - namely, proper utilization of this deck requires discretion. Playing certain cards at the wrong time can result in terribly tedious game states, but that doesn't necessarily mean those cards don't belong in the deck. I've watched Storm Cauldron force players to think carefully about resource management, and accomplish one of Toy Box's core goals of allowing lagging players to catch up, or destabilizing players who were running away with the game. I've also seen it resolve on turn four with no way to get rid of it, and turn the game into a quagmire of horror and players checking their cellphones.
I write all this partly because few people seem to understand why I run some or all of the cards I do, and - more often - why I don't run many of the cards that I don't (Where's Sol Ring? Bribery? Scrambleverse? Etc.). I was hoping to convey that the deck list in its current state is not only intended to accomplish nonstandard goals, but also that it has been played extensively at this point and has been continuously evolved with the intent to maximize enjoyment for the broadest spectrum of players that I can manage to please.
The inclusions - and omissions - in Toy Box are largely intentional, so please consider this before making suggestions or critiques: Most of the cards in the deck were included because they provide one or more of the following; reset of lockdown/dangerously unbalanced game state (sweepers, Ixidron), difficult choices (Mage's Contest, Jinxed Choker), costly opportunities (Saproling Cluster, Excavation), extra time/resources with which to develop against more dangerous opponents (Crumbling Sanctuary, Oath of Lieges), or some sort of compensation for an incurred loss (Starke of Rath, Perplexing Chimera).
TL;DR - No, this is not an accidental assortment of random junk I found in a shoebox.
