Is it a bird? Yes. Yes it is.
Welcome, citizens of the multiverse. Are you bothered by the fact that people start the game with 40 life? Would you like to hit them in the face with an army of flying creatures while you annoy the living sh*t out of them? Well look no further, for I have the solution to all of your problems.
Beforehand I just want to sate something. No, this is not a good Kykar deck. Hell, it isn't even a good deck by EDH standards but it sure is a blast to play with. The deck is slow as shit and it has problems dealing with super fast combo decks so if your playgroup is prone to building those kinds of decks this isn't the Kykar build you are looking for. HOWEVER if you just want a somewhat reliable strategy with some sick ass plays and a lot of hitting the face, then this deck is for you.
Now, I will proceed to ramble for a while about how i came to the build as it stands. If you are not interested in reading it but yuou want to see a breakdown of the deck, then skip to the next section.
So, initially this jeskai build was a card:Sevvine, the Chronoclasm deck (the precon with a feew alterations. It was a nice combo deck that usually ended up closing the game with a Thousand-Year Storm play or something along those lines. It was a dumb deck but it got me thinking. I love storm but in commander it tends to be a like a game of solitaire. I wanted to build something a bit more reactive and a bit more value-centric. So I shifted the deck to a noncreature Elsha of the Infinite deck wich was really good but it was a bit clunky. I added kykar to the build and seeing it perform far better than any other card in the deck, I decided to switch commanders. And that was the moment i realised i was making tons of small flying creatures in a noncreature based deck and not hitting people.
And that had to change. I got a bit carried away and I ended up adding 200 cards to the decklist. Some were there just because I had them. Some were there because they were no-brainers. And a few of them I added just because I hate myself.
With that boring ass pile of text out of the way, we can get into the actual deck description.
Is it a plane? No. It's a bird.
First and foremost, just bask in the glorious art of our lovely commander. I'll leave you alone for a second.
Kykar is one of my personal favorite cards in recent memory. It's so flexible in the ways you can build around it that you can make some truly great decks with him. But that's not the goal of this deck. The objective is not to be great, but to have fun smashing the guy in the board playing only value creatures and no flyers while your spirits go brrr on his face. That's the idea, anyways.
So, the gameplan: a few mana rocks (Sol Ring, Arcane Signet, all three ravnica signets, a Commander's Sphere, Empowered Autogenerator and a Gilded Lotus). Nothing really fancy, they are here to get you ramped up for the big spells. Usually you want one of the signets/sol ring down in turns 1/2 so you can get kykar down on three and start flodding the board, but sometimes patience is the name of the game, since having kykar on the board tends to get him killed fast.
For those slower games, the big rocks are usually better since they allow for a more explosive turn. Those kinds of games are also the ones in which the multiple boardwipes (in the form of wraths like Fumigate or Cleansing Nova or in the form of area damage like Magmaquake or Deafening Clarion) will come in handy. Since the deck is mostly non-creatures, you can get away with playing slower to get a huge boardwipe down so you can re-start the board and start developing your army. There's also a few stax pieces (namely Kismet, Smothering Tithe, God-Pharaoh's Statue and Magus of the Moat) and some counterspells just to try to halt the game for a while and slow your opponents down enough so you can get the right tempo swing. I also added two mass land destruction pieces just because I'm that kind of person and my playgroup has sort-of developed a sick enjoyment of blowing up all of the lands every single game so I had to jump in the train too. This two pieces (Armageddon and Fall of the Thran) are here to close out the game. Once you have two or three mana rocks and kykar on the board, you will be the only one generating mana at a consistent rate and developing a board while your opponents struggle to come back. If you are not up for the mld, just add whatever you like on those spots, just make it a relevant spell.
In terms of card advantage, well... let's say you can get a lot of drawing done but it takes some setup and some attacking to get it most of the time. I added every single 4 cmc enchantment that draws on combat damage Bident of Thassa, Coastal Piracy, Reconnaissance Mission and also added Windreader Sphinx which, for a 7cmc creature, at least it has some decent payoff if you can manage to get it down in time before your board gets deleted. Then there's Whirlwind of Thought as an added engine which will usually get killed on sight since it's a draw on cast for most of the cards in the deck. Then there's the Jeskai Ascendancy which lets you loot to get to the good stuff, and Emergency Powers to reshuffle and redraw.
Then you have the part that actually makes you win the game: The Winged Army of a bunch of shitty 1/1s. Most of the bodys will come down from Kykar's static ability, but there are two other very relevant cards to take in consideration that will change your boardstate and damage output dramatically if they stick in the board for more than 1 turn. First, there's Shark Typhoon a card i absolutely LOVE and plan to get some proxy tokens with stills from the Sharknado saga just because I love those dumb movies. There is also Akim, the Soaring Wind that also creates 1/1s but the activated ability can close the game in a single combat phase with the right amount of setup.
In order to make your critters relevant, there's a few cards to look at.
First, the most eficient one is Favorable Winds. A +1/+1 to every flyer you control in a 2 cmc enchantment is just what you are looking for.
At 5 cmc you have the beatiful Gravitational Shift, a card that, while being symetrical, will end up benefitting you the most since every creature in the deck except 2 of them have flying.
At 6 cmc you get this stupid 3WWW enchantment called True Conviction that makes yor winged friends turn into chad flyers that attack and net you dumb amounts of life in the process while your opponents just wonder what have they done to deserve that.
To top it off, at 7 cmc you get the lovely Sephara, Sky's Blade which can come down in turn 4 for a single white mana and will be a huge threat if left unchecked, because she makes your boardwipes asymetrical and that's just sweet.
Those are the static buffs. Then you have cards like Valor in Akros which can make you go from 0 to a million thanks to Anointed Procession, Kykar, Shark Typhoon. Jeskai Ascendancy also works in the same fashion, buffing your entire army for the duration of the turn. A few combat tricks are added (Rally of Wings, Phalanx Tactics, Unbreakable Formation) to either close out the game or to surprise block the most tilted of your opponents and laugh like a maniac.
It's a Bird with arms!
And now to the actual important part: the wincons
Since your main goal is to hit people till they are dead, and you are going to be proactively draining your opponents, usually you'll just need a bit of a push to close out those pesky life-gaining players. That's where cards like Impact Tremors and Vicious Shadows will come in handy. Impact tremors is a low cmc enchantment that can end up being your most relevant card in the matchup to splash damage across all of your opponents, while Vicious Shadows will be your best friend with a few spirits and kykar on the board when the combo player decides to draw half their deck. It's a 7cmc enchantment but it's well worth the slot since the damage output can be absurd. There's an argument to be made to change it to an Angrath's Marauders-like card, but I like this one better for the possibility of punishing greedy plays.
Then I added two very useful clones, which are probably the most versatile cards in the deck (Clever Impersonator and Mirrormade) allowing you to copy either a mana-rock for ramp or any of the really strong enchantments (Sharknado, Valor in Akros, Vicious Shadows, Annointed Procession... you name it). They have performed amazingly well and I'm honestly surprised with them. Adding more may be overkill.
Lastly, I want to talk about Dance of the Manse and give a special mention to one of my favorite combos in commander Emergency Powers + Smothering Tithe
. Dance is a great way to get some of your threats back. It hits only 28 cards in the deck but it's usually enough to get you back in the game (and it let's you replay Fall of the Thran which will make you lose all your friends). And the Smothering Tithe Emergency powers play is not a wincon in itself, but it will net you somewhere around 21 treasures AND will refill your hand and deck while giving you the chance to drop any permanent in the hand if played in your mainphase, which should be enough to just close the game for good or, at least, to disrupt some of the graveyard-centric decks.
STOP HITTING MY FACE
Thanks for reading. Happy flight.
