This is a voltron build with a focus on lifelink and draining life from other players. This decklist supports custom categories, which I will speak to below. Good EDH deck design maximizes the number of categories each card in the deck can be in. Categories are specific to the goals of the deck.
I use
Teysa, Envoy of Ghosts
as the commander because she can not be blocked by creatures and she provides a big disincentive for our opponents to attack us with her
No Mercy
++ ability. Protection from creatures means that she can not be blocked by, enchanted by, targeted by (or by abilities on) or dealt damage by creatures.
Voltron
The voltron category includes cards which add stats and abilities to the Commander. I'd like to add at least 3 power to Teysa so she can kill with 21 commander damage in three swings.
Batterskull
, and
Loxodon Warhammer
both do this explicitly.
Duelist's Heritage
and
True Conviction
give double strike, which effectively increases her power by 4 with no other buffs.
Necropolis Regent
works because it causes her to deal 4 + 8 + 16 damage = 28 over three turns. If I have three of the cards with exalted on them or
Sublime Archangel
, Teysa, and another creature; then that will also provide three power.
I'd also like to give her haste, since she is vigilant there is no downside to that, so that those three swings only take three turns instead of four.
Lightning Greaves
,
Swiftfoot Boots
, and
Hall of the Bandit Lord
are in the deck to give her haste. It is very rare that she ever has haste in practice.
Teysa's cmc of 9 is expensive. This deck runs a lot of ramp to be able to cast her early, and often, but if we could avoid some removal, so she is more survivable that would be good. Some of the voltron cards help with this.
Bastion Protector
gives indestructible which avoids most wraths.
Lightning Greaves
and
Swiftfoot Boots
help prevent target removal.
Ring of Xathrid
provides regeneration, which also avoids most modern removal.
Nim Deathmantle
can bring her back, following a wrath if we have mana open.
Sword of Feast and Famine
provides protection from black to
Thrashing Wumpus
and provides ramp when it is on Teysa.
Sword of Light and Shadow
might be a good addition or replacement as it is more on theme. This also gives our non-evasive creatures some evasion because of the protection.
Umezawa's Jitte
is too good not to include. It can at most cause teysa to deal 4+8+8=20 damage, but it can also kill our opponents x/1's and it can gain us life. It is flexible, and with one exalted trigger on one turn it is lethal in three turns.
Sword of the Animist
is more of ramp card than a voltron card, but it's +1/+1 can combine with other many +2/+x voltron cards to get the 21 damage job done while also drawing us cards. This is the best artifact in the deck to keep when casting
Cataclysm
.
Wraths
The goal of the wrath cards in this deck is to not kill Teysa. Teysa already dies enough to other people's wraths, we don't need to pile on or we'll never recast her. Therefore these are all conditional wraths.
Cataclysm
lets us choose a creature (and hopefully some other good cards to keep - like
Sword of the Animist
). This is the most punishing card in the deck. The ideal keeps are Teysa, Sword of the Animist, True Conviction, Cathedral of War. This deals 12 commander damage, gains that much life, and fetches a land on each attack! All while no one else has much of anything!
When you target Teysa with
Fell the Mighty
it will never kill her. It will kill anything bigger, which is most of the scary things in most games.
Merciless Eviction
can kill Teysa if we choose creatures, but it provides an out to indestructible creatures and strategies that amass other kinds of permanents.
Righteous Fury
and
Sunblast Angel
kill tapped creatures. Since we can cast them before our attack they can likely spare our entire board. However, if no one is attacking anyone they don't do much good.
Thrashing Wumpus
and
Wave of Reckoning
wrath by having a creature deal damage. Teysa can't be damaged by creatures because she has protection from creatures. That includes herself when
Wave of Reckoning
makes her deal damage to herself.
Thrashing Wumpus
can kill itself if it deals 3 damage in one turn, but we can stack the triggers so it deals more than 3 damage to everything else before it dies, or we can ping for 2 on each player's turn without killing it.
Thrashing Wumpus
will gain us a ton of life if it has lifelink as it deals damage to everything, and if it has protection from black form
Sword of Feast and Famine
then it won't kill itself.
Drain Lifelink
The way everyone figures to kill this deck, when it has Teysa out (the goal is to always have Teysa out), is to build up enough power on the board to swing in and kill me with combat damage in one fell swoop. If I die from the combat damage, then Teysa's ability won't exist by the time it would trigger and they will be able to keep their board to attack the next player. This means that they don't have to save me for last. So, I need to make it as hard as possible for them to kill me in one attack. Therefore, I need to have a lot of life. These cards all provide it.
Lifelink
Batterskull
,
Battlegrace Angel
,
Loxodon Warhammer
,
True Conviction
, and
Vizkopa Guildmage
all give lifelink to my one attacking creature (provided it is wearing the equipment). This gives me a repetable source of life gain every turn, since I can usually attack without worrying about my evasive creatures dying.
Drain
Pontiff of Blight
provides extort to all of our creatures. Extort is an amazing way to drain life, because for 1 mana we gain life equal to number of players in the game minus 1, and each other player loses 1. Most ways to drain life, drain 1 from everyone else and give us only 1.
Crypt Ghast
aslo has extort, and provides mana to make it easier to pay for the triggers. I'd like to get more extort cards back into the deck to increase the frequency of this theme appearing.
Kambal, Consul of Allocation
can provide protection from storm like kills and also just provides good value as people play ramp and other non-creature spells. He can pick up our voltron equipment in a pinch.
Exquisite Blood
is like super lifelink. Not only do all my creatures give me life when they get through unblocked on an opponent, but all my opponents creatures give me life when they get through unblocked on another opponent! Furthermore, this card can be a win condition in combination with the second ability on
Vizkopa Guildmage
. When the second ability has been activated on a turn, and
Exquisite Blood
is on the battlefield, any change in any players life total creates a feedback loop that will result in all other players at 0 life, and win the game for me.
Sanguine Bond
could also serve in place of
Vizkopa Guildmage
, and most players are familiar with it, so only running
Vizkopa Guildmage
provides a bit of a misdirect, so players might not see this common combo coming from as far away. Also
Vizkopa Guildmage
is more flexible because it has another ability, and it can pick up our voltron equipment.
Evasion
I claimed above that we'd attack almost every turn and not worry about our creatures dying. That is because we have a bunch of evasive threats. When these threats wear our good equipment I can usually find a player who can't block profitably. Most of these cards also serve another purpose, but they were selected for, or happen to have a good evasion ability. The one that doesn't appear elsewhere is
Beloved Chaplain
. He has the same protection from creature text as our commander (who is also in the category). Because the deck is so built around that part of her text, having access to it on another card seems like a good fit, even if it is underwhelming as a card.
Mother of Runes
doesn't have evasion, but she gives protection to creatures I control, which gives them an evasion ability in a pinch. She is mostly held back to protect creatures instead.
Ramp
We want to get Teysa out as soon as possible, so we need ramp. The best ramp in EDH is to get lands into play faster than usual such as with
Exploration
. However, white black does not have much good access to this kind of ramp. So we use a lot of artifact and creature ramp.
Land Ramp
These are the best ramp cards available to us:
Cabal Coffers
combo with
Urborg, Tomb of Yawgmoth
. Urborg turns Coffers into a swamp, so Coffers will count itself. It also turns all of our other nonbasic lands and our plains into swamps. This includes
Thawing Glaciers
which can't normally tap for mana, and
Hall of the Bandit Lord
which usually requires us to pay life to get mana from it. This is also why we run more plains than swamps, when any player has Urborg out, our plains are all dual lands for us. When all our lands are counted by coffers, we get to double our mana (minus the 3 to activate coffers).
Magus of the Coffers
isn't as good as coffers because it is a creature that can die, but it provides redundancy.
Temple of the False God
is very simple land ramp. It works well for us since our commander costs enough that it is online by the time we try to cast her.
Thawing Glaciers
combos with Urborg and cards that need us to have fewer lands in play in the early game. It is slow, but over a long game it will bleed most of the lands in our deck out into play without us having to draw them. This increases the quality of the cards that we draw. It can find swamps if we have coffers and not urborg or plains if we have urborg and need duals. Since it spends so much time in my hand, it is often not in play when I cast
Cataclysm
, but it and the one land I keep with it will get me all I could need.
Artifact Ramp
The issue with artifact ramp that makes it not as good as land ramp is that it is more easily destroyed than lands.
Darksteel Ingot
and
Commander's Sphere
avoid the usual issue with artifact ramp. Darksteel is not important enough to get blown up individually and most incidental death is prevented by indestructible. Sphere can turn into a card at any time.
Sol Ring
and
Thran Dynamo
are so efficient that they are included despite dying to normal artifact hate.
Orzhov Signet
is similar, but actually provides colored mana!
Sword of the Animist
provides a ton of land ramp, as long as we have a creature that can swing without dying!
Creature Ramp
Creature ramp is slow and vulnerable but we're limited in our choices in white black. Also, these creatures can all pick up our voltron equipment and get much better if we need them to.
Burnished Hart
is nice because it gets more lands into play, like land ramp, but it takes two turns in most cases. Its a flexible card because it doesn't have to sacrifice to get lands if we don't need lands.
Crypt Ghast
also doubles our mana with
Urborg, Tomb of Yawgmoth
out. It does a good job with our swamps when its not.
Knight of the White Orchid
gets us a plains, which means it can fetch typed duals to get us either color. It requires that we be behind on lands drops. This works best if we don't go first, otherwise we need to wait for someone else to land ramp. If we miss a land drop this will get us back on par, but its slow.
Oreskos Explorer
lets us keep 2 land hands with no other ramp as long as they include a white to cast him. We wait until our third or fourth turn to play him, and then we get number of players in the game minus 1 lands into hand. He fixes bad draws in a slow and awkward way since the lands go into hand. He can also fetch typed duals.
Pilgrim's Eye
is land search ramp, plus evasion. Its not quite land ramp since it goes into hand.
Solemn Simulacrum
is provides land ramp and he replaces himself when he dies.
Card Advantage
White black is is also not very good at card advantage outside of
Phyrexian Arena
which is amazing. We don't mind the life loss, because we get cards, and we have lifelink.
Syphon Mind
works like extort, except for cards instead of life, so it is very on theme and pretty good.
Yawgmoth's Will
is like drawing your whole graveyard! The other cards here are ramp cards which do draw lands from the deck.
Interaction
These cards all deal with things our opponents can throw at us in a proactive way. They go out and clear threats played by opponents. These cards are not very synergistic with the rest of the deck, but they are very flexible. We prefer artifacts and enchantments here because we have more tutors for those than spells.
Aura of Silence
does work before they even play something that we wouldn't like. It hurts opposing artifact ramp early.
Darksteel Mutation
takes care of commanders that we couldn't otherwise deal with. It keeps them from getting recast by keeping them on the board with not abilities.
Nihil Spellbomb
takes care of decks that want to use their graveyard as a resource. We run this varient becuase we prefer artifacts for their tutorablity in this deck, and it cantrips.
Oblivion Ring
takes care of any one problem permanent, and we can tutor for it. We run this variant because the separate clauses make it better in small edge cases than the more modern wordings.
Return to Dust
this isn't tutorable, but it lets us kill 2 bad things for one card. It removes them from the game, which is the best way to get rid of something.
Royal Assassin
can kill most any big creature attacking us, or someone else. It lets us play politics.
Utter End
and
Vindicate
aren't tutorable, but they kill any permanent dead. Being an instant and exiling,
Utter End
can stop most combos. It is not uncommon to leave up the mana for
Utter End
if we have it, and it looks like someone might combo off soon.
Strip Mine
and
Wasteland
deal with
Maze of Ith
and similar lands, which are real bad for voltron decks like this one. They also allow us to reduce our land count, if needed, for the cards that care about how man lands we have. We do this either by destroying someone else land who is already lower than us, leaving the person with the most (tied with us) at the same level, or better, yet, we respond to the activation (sacrifice is part of the cost) with an instant speed search, and then when after that resolves, we bring the opponent with the most lands back to parity. So we only had less lands, when we needed to have less lands.
Survival
We have lifelink and lifedrain because it allows to survive to the late game, where this deck thrives. To survive to the late game, intact, requires some resilience to mid game board wipes. Teysa makes people not want to attack us, which is good. But that means we need to always have her on board. We need to keep her around to survive.
Bastion Protector
and
Ring of Xathrid
help her avoid wraths.
Mother of Runes
, and the boot equipment provide protection from target removal.
When she does get killed,
Volrath's Stronghold
,
Nim Deathmantle
,
Command Beacon
allow us to get Teysa back without paying her additional commander tax.
Volrath's Stronghold
allows to to recover other creatures from a wrath over many turns. It does not provide card advantage, which its only downside.
Yawgmoth's Will
allows to do similarly, over one turn, and doesn't deny us cards.
Yawgmoth's Will
allows to to get back as much as we can from our graveyard in one turn. If we have a lot of ramp on board, we can really reload on most of the cards in our yard. If our ramp was destroyed, we should be able to chain all of it back on the battlefield with this card. If we used our one way to remove something tough, we can use that card again with Will. It lets us play our deck a second time!
Creature swarms are the number on way to get enough damage to kill us in one attack.
Windborn Muse
makes it really hard to attack with a ton of creatures. It is not good against opposing voltron decks, but against swarm decks, it helps a lot. We don't run
Ghostly Prison
because we want the creature so it can wear our voltron stuff. We could run
Ghostly Prison
if we need more reliable access to this effect, because
Enlightened Tutor
can fetch it. Only any card tutors in this deck can fetch the muse. This provides a different kind of survival.
Similarly,
Academy Rector
can hold of a whole army. We don't even really have anything that devastating to tutor up. Another way to not get attacked, is having an untapped
Royal Assassin
, no one wants to swing into that, but it is not as good as Rector.
Tutor
Tutors make the deck more consistent. Consistency is hard to achieve in highlander formats. By allowing me to search for a wide variety of cards I can make sure that I have what I need to survive and thrive in any game state. What do I usually tutor for?
Cabal Coffers
or
Urborg, Tomb of Yawgmoth
, whichever ones we don't have. We want these in play every game.
Expedition Map
and
Weathered Wayfarer
specifically allow us to look for these two cards. We do also run some other utility lands they can get.
Stoneforge Mystic
and
Stonehewer Giant
make sure we always have access to our best voltron equipment. Usually this is
Batterskull
. Situationally we'll get
Sword of the Animist
if we need ramp (mystic can wear the sword!) or
Sword of Feast and Famine
if we have
Thrashing Wumpus
. I tend to not tutor for the boots, haste and hexproof just aren't that important.
Academy Rector
usually gets
True Conviction
but it can also get the interaction enchantments if they are needed. If I have
Vizkopa Guildmage
I always get
Exquisite Blood
.
Enlightened Tutor
gets either of the above sets, it almost never gets non-equiement artifacts.
Liliana Vess
is usually used as an expensive and slow
Vampiric Tutor
. But she can tutor more than once, so she makes the cut.
Demonic Tutor
and
Vampiric Tutor
just get whatever is missing from the game plan, or they get a wrath so we can reset and try to not die. If I'm tutoring for a wrath, things are bad, so I usually get the best one,
Merciless Eviction
. Unless, I've got everything I need setup for
Cataclysm
.
Recent Changes:
-Champion's Helm
-Increasing Ambition
-Kingpin's Pet
-Kor Haven
-Sigiled Paladin
-Swamp
-Tithe Drinker
-Treasury Thrull
+Windborn Muse
+Pilgrim's Eye
+Knight of the White Orchid
+Windswept Heath
+Hall of the Bandit Lord
+Ring of Xathrid
+Kambal, Consul of Allocation
+Duelist's Heritage
