Building a Budget Commander - Ep 1 - Cao Cao, Lord of Wei

Tuition

buildingadeck

29 June 2016

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After finding my introduction to the format with the Daretti pre-con, I found very quickly that I needed to build my own shell in order for it to be effective on a budget (part of this problem was that Daretti was a little above my play level at the time, and I didn't understand quite how to pilot the deck). I thus built Selvala, Explorer Returned mostly with some bulk rares I had lying around, and I began to love the format. As I'm trying to get into Legacy, though, I have had to dismantle my Jori En, Ruin Diver deck to try to trade up, but I couldn't leave the format entirely, and so I made my first budget deck in the format in a while: Cao Cao, Lord of Wei.

Cao Cao is a discard-based resource control deck. The deck revolves around emptying your opponents' hands with Cao Cao, Necrogen Mists, and an assortment of other discard effects while draining them with effects that coincide with such a strategy: Liliana's Caress, Wheel of Torture, and others.

Budget Commander Series 1: Cao Cao, Lord of Wei

Commander / EDH* buildingadeck

SCORE: 9 | 4 COMMENTS | 798 VIEWS | IN 1 FOLDER

Deck Strengths

Cao Cao in this form is a deck that has a lot of spot removal and sweepers, a decent amount of powerful creature threats—many of which have evasion, and artifacts, enchantments, and creatures that further its 8-Rack strategy by forcing its opponents to lose life due to hand size. The deck also contains many draw spells, some of which are tied to bodies or other effects: Bloodgift Demon, Decree of Pain, Dregs of Sorrow, Asylum Visitor, etc.

Cao Cao excels in matches against midrange decks that aim to win the game simply through outvaluing people with good creatures and ETB effects. The deck feels very powerful when it can dominate the boardstate with sweepers and defensive bodies that make attacking into us challenging or highly unfavorable (Visara the Dreadful and Dread, for instance). It is also quite effective against other prison decks because it allows them to do the control of board while it ruins the opponents' hands, winning via Paupers' Cage triggers, or some other such nonsense.

Deck Weaknesses

In its current form, the deck struggles against powerful artifacts and enchantments, things with protection from black, and decks with a large amount of draw spells (Niv-Mizzet, the Firemind, for example) that evade its taxation effects mostly because it has little or no answer for a lot of those types of spells. Strategically speaking, the deck tends to suffer when the commander is repeatedly targeted because the deck is fairly reliant upon the commander's ability.

Card Choices

With Cao Cao, Lord of Wei as the commander, I thought that effects like Magewright's Stone and Thousand-Year Elixir would be well-suited to speed up the process of ravaging the hands of my opponents. At a certain point in the game, however, untapping Cao Cao himself is quite useless because nobody has any cards left except for us. Thus, I found some creatures that performed other important functions that could also work well with these artifacts while also contributing to the control shell I'd constructed. The creatures that fit this bill were: Visara the Dreadfull, Shauku, Endbringer, Kiku, Night's Flower, and Nezumi Shortfang  ^Flip. All of these creatures save Nezumi are creature removal spells strapped to bodies, which helps the deck to survive creature-flooded boardstates, especially when one is paired with a Magewright's Stone or a Thousand-Year Elixir.

In EDH, hitting mana ramp in the early stages is key to having early success, and this deck is no stranger to ramp, containing 7 mana rocks and a cost reducer, all under 3 mana. These include Sol Ring, Charcoal Diamond, Coldsteel Heart, Mind Stone, Leaden Myr, Commander's Sphere, Worn Powerstone, and Jet Medallion. While I think that Worn Powerstone could be swapped for a Hedron Archive for the potential card draw, these mana rocks provide enough consistency in the deck to help ensure that Cao Cao is castable by turn 5 if not before then. One of the benefits of running mana rocks is their synergy with Voltaic Key, included to interact with mana sources as well as the Magewright's Stone-type effects.

The deck also runs a number of ways to deter attackers, or prevent attackers from being able to attack. Crawlspace and Silent Arbiter work well to preserve the life total against decks that tend to swarm (Elves, Tokens, etc). Mindslicer can prevent attacks from bigger threats when people have full hands (a rare occasion), and Dread is the number one agent for keeping threats from hitting home because no one wants their creatures to die.

Then come the life-draining effects, and man, are they sweet. These include Shrieking Affliction, Wheel of Torture, Paupers' Cage, Liliana's Caress, Megrim, Quest for Nihil Stone, Bloodchief Ascension, Painful Quandary, Indulgent Tormentor, and Ob Nixilis of the Black Oath. That's quite a lot of effects, but many of them operate in different ways. For instance, Indulgent Tormentor and Painful Quandary work to tax your opponent on different levels, or drain their life totals, while Paupers' Cage and Wheel of Torture always punish on condition of handsize; Megrim and Liliana's Caress further the variance by punishing players only when they perform the action of discard. However, all of them work toward a very synergistic goal: eliminate the hands and make them pay!

In order to perform optimally in a singleton format, a deck needs a number of card draw engines as well as tutor effects to help ensure consistency of performance. This deck list runs two tutors Rhystic Tutor and Demonic Tutor in order to help it find what it needs with greater reliability. Rhystic Tutor is a fun card to politic into play (“This is in order to stop x player from overwhelming us. Please let it resolve.”), or it requires your opponents to be tapped out. Aside from the two tutor effects, the deck runs a slew of different types of draw engines. Bloodgift Demon, Underworld Connections, and Druidic Satchel (generally) can draw a card once per turn cycle. Though Satchel doesn't always draw a card, it is a nice mana sink that can provide card advantage by drawing a land or putting a token into play while also gaining life, so it fits into this section of Engines. Indulgent Tormentor can provide card draw at times, depending on the feelings of target opponent. Asylum Visitor can draw a card per turn, depending on how effective the hand disruption has been. Decree of Pain and Dregs of Sorrow draw cards for killing things—how great is that?! Waste Not and Geth's Grimoire both reward the pilot for forcing its opponents to discard, which is simply amazing depending upon the point in the game. Lastly, Muse Vessel and Hedonist's Archive act a sort of card draw, netting card advantage of sorts.

The remainder of the decklist comprises removal and graveyard hate, mostly, both of which are fairly easy to read. Graveyard hate is an absolute necessity because reanimator loves to have its things thrown in the graveyard, and our discard effects only aid them in that process. Thus, Leyline of the Void, Relic of Progenitus, and others become necessity.

Three Non-Budget Improvements

At the end of each of these articles, I will add three cards to improve the deck that are non-budget but would be amazing in this style of list. In general, I think that this list would profit from having more Smokestack-type effects, preferably one-sided ones to control the boardstate continually, as well as more tutor effects to find exactly what it needs when it needs it.

Sheoldred, the Whispering One is one of the best black cards in commander, without a Shadow of Doubt. At nearly $20, she didn't make the budget cut, but having a recursion engine like Sheoldred with a one way stax effect would aid greatly in our deck's ability to combat creature generation on the opposing side of the battlefield.

Cabal Coffers is one of the best cards in mono-black decks in EDH. Usually accompanied by Urborg, Tomb of Yawgmoth, this card would help generate more mana in the mid and late game in order to produce more explosive plays. It would also mean that cards like Profane Command and other X spells become more viable in the shell. Overall, a near must have in any higher-level mono-black EDH.

Demonic Tutor is a fantastic tutor effect that only costs 2 mana. Unfortunately, it costs a minimum of $14, meaning it couldn't really make version of the deck list. There is not much explanation needed to describe why this would make for a great addition to the deck.

Honorable Mention:

Lightning Greaves: This was a card that seemed to slip through the cracks a bit when I was designing the deck. With a $4-5 price tag, it most likely could've made the cut, but it slipped my mind. I think this card could slot in nicely at the three drop slot.

The cards I would remove to add these would be Liliana's Specter, Muse Vessel, Hedonist's Trove, and (for our honorable mention) either Necrogen Mists or Oppression depending on preference.

Below is a link to the playlist that includes a deck tech and 3 matches I played with the deck against a number of different kinds of decks. Please vote in the comments of the third match on a commander you'd like to see me build next. Any commander is available as an option, but keep in mind that the overall cost of the deck minus basic lands must stay within $100. (Thus, commanders like Avacyn, Guardian of Hope seem like bad options.)

YouTube Link