Mairsil, Pageant

Commander / EDH*

Paul.The.Firewood.Salesman

Land (36)

• 1x Blood Crypt
• 1x Bloodstained Mire
• 1x Cascade Bluffs
• 1x Command Beacon
• 1x Command Tower
• 1x Crumbling Necropolis
• 1x Dragonskull Summit
• 1x Drowned Catacomb
• 1x Graven Cairns
• 6x Island
• 1x Mana Confluence
• 1x Minamo, School at Water's Edge
• 3x Mountain
• 1x Polluted Delta
• 1x Riptide Laboratory
• 1x Rogue's Passage
• 1x Scalding Tarn
• 1x Shivan Reef
• 1x Steam Vents
• 1x Sulfur Falls
• 1x Sulfurous Springs
• 1x Sunken Hollow
• 1x Sunken Ruins
• 3x Swamp
• 1x Temple of the False God
• 1x Underground River
• 1x Watery Grave

Sorcery (9)

• 1x Buried Alive
• 1x Cathartic Reunion
• 1x Damnation
• 1x Faithless Looting
• 1x Final Parting
• 1x Gamble
• 1x Reforge the Soul
• 1x Wheel of Fortune
• 1x Windfall

Creature (24)

• 1x AEtherling
• 1x Anger
• 1x Arcanis the Omnipotent
• 1x Avatar of Woe
• 1x Blighted Bat
• 1x Cavern Harpy
• 1x Cinderhaze Wretch
• 1x Deadeye Navigator
• 1x Doom Whisperer
• 1x Eater of the Dead
• 1x Hateflayer
• 1x Horseshoe Crab
• 1x Jace's Archivist
• 1x Jodah's Avenger
• 1x Knacksaw Clique
• 1x Morphling
• 1x Pestilent Souleater
• 1x Pili-Pala
• 1x Quicksilver Elemental
• 1x Shauku, Endbringer
• 1x Soul of New Phyrexia
• 1x Torchling
• 1x Tree of Perdition
• 1x Walking Ballista

Instant (11)

• 1x Chaos Warp
• 1x Counterspell
• 1x Cyclonic Rift
• 1x Disallow
• 1x Entomb
• 1x Fact or Fiction
• 1x Hero's Downfall
• 1x Intuition
• 1x Sinister Sabotage
• 1x Swan Song
• 1x Terminate

Commander (1)

Artifact (19)

• 1x Basalt Monolith
• 1x Cauldron of Souls
• 1x Chromatic Lantern
• 1x Conjurer's Closet
• 1x Crystal Shard
• 1x Dimir Signet
• 1x Gilded Lotus
• 1x Illusionist's Bracers
• 1x Izzet Signet
• 1x Lightning Greaves
• 1x Mirage Mirror
• 1x Nevinyrral's Disk
• 1x Rakdos Signet
• 1x Rings of Brighthearth
• 1x Sensei's Divining Top
• 1x Sol Ring
• 1x Staff of Domination
• 1x Thousand-Year Elixir
• 1x Thran Dynamo

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This is my take on one of the wackiest commanders to come out of a commander set, Mairsil, the Pretender.

Legendary Creature - Human Wizard

When Mairsil, the Pretender enters the battlefield, you may exile an artifact or creature card from your hand or graveyard and put a cage counter on it.

Mairsil, the Pretender has all activated abilities of all cards you own in exile with cage counters on them. You may activate each of those abilities only once each turn.

Why Mairsil, the Pretender?

If you have ever piloted Mairsil you know what kind of wacky and fun things you can do. It's tame enough that you can't simply go infinite at a whim but powerful enough that you can still set yourself up for an infinite combo or skip going infinite altogether and kill people through other means. You never know what kind of game you'll have (lots of people will say that's inconsistent and therefore isn't fun but I argue that means it's fair. Decks that constantly win get boring and decks that constantly lose definitely aren't fun and Mairsil is a happy medium).

What is Our Strategy?

Mairsil. Long story short you need to abuse Mairsil. The entire deck is based around him. The idea is to get Mairsil out as quickly as possible and start exiling some artifacts and creatures and comboing off with him. We can freely put stuff in our graveyard and use Mairsil to exile them. Need to be careful with that though, if we can't reliably bounce or recast Mairsil to exile the cards from our graveyard then we risk something like Rest in Peace or Bojuka Bog. And even if we are careful, cards that target individual cards in our graveyard like Scavenging Ooze and Deathrite Shaman will really ruin our day. For the most part though if we already have something like Avatar of Woe exiled and caged then we can deal with those pesky creatures before they become too troublesome.

Art credit to MCLT on Deviant Art

How Do We Win?

We combo. There's a number of ways to do this. Despite being able to use Mairsil's ability only once per turn there are work arounds. I consider these 'friendly' combos because they take setup and they can be interrupted. If it wasn't for the once per turn part of Mairsil the card would be broken and can combo off from two cards rather easily. Regardless of the combo, we'll definitely need Deadeye Navigator in play or Quicksilver Elemental caged. When bounced with Deadeye Mairsil becomes a new instance of himself and can use an ability that he already used that turn. An easy example is Deadeye, Mairsil, and Gilded Lotus will get you infinite mana of any color. Mind you need a haste enabler such as Anger in the Graveyard. Same thing can be achieved with Quicksilver Elemental, though I'll explain that one a bit more since it's less obvious.

Simply puy, Quicksilver Elemental provides a reset for Mairsil for one blue. You can use the abilities available to Mairsil once, then use the Quicksilver ability, then he can use them all over again including Quicksilver's ability. As in the Gilded Lotus example you can replace Deadeye with Quicksilver and add a caged creature like Horseshoe Crab and get infinite mana. With that infinite you can simply Hateflayer or Walking Ballista everyone to death or mill everyone with Knacksaw Clique.

If combo isn't an option somehow, making opponents life total 4 with the Tree of Perdition ability is rather amusing. Then just swinging in after (assuming you have a means to untap, which is not hard in this deck) for the kill is easy or even just use Hateflayer's ability.

The Land and Ramp

All the mana rocks can be exiled with Mairsil, but shouldn't. Having the Gilded Lotus on Mairsil is great and abusable but there is no point in exiling the signets and Sol Ring. Keep those out so you can use them all freely as opposed to committing them to Mairsil who may only be able to tap once.

There's nothing too fancy about the lands and ramp. Most notable are the Rogue's Passage since in my Tree scenario the opponent may be able to simply block. Other lands of note are Riptide Laboratory and Minamo, School at Water's Edge. Riptide can return Mairsil to our hand for added protection or simply allows us to recast him to cage another thing. And Minamo is just an additional untap if needed.

The Rest

One of the best cards in the deck is going to be Rings of Brighthearth. Can be a little tricky to use though. Many people know Rings with Basalt Monolith is infinite colorless mana. Two things worth mentioning with that potential combo in this deck is that the color mana doesn't actually do too much for us (though infinite mana is infinite mana regardless) and it doesn't work if Basalt Monolith is caged with Mairsil. Lots of the time you will end up caging the Monolith but it may be worth it some games to not to due to the combo.

This decks needs wheel effects. With us being able to utilize our graveyard and us likely caging a lot of things in our hand we need to be able to put things in the graveyard but also refilling our hand. So running big wheels like Wheel of Fortune and Reforge the Soul is pretty key. We also run a good amount of card draw that also forces us to discard for the same reason.

Art credit to Steamhat on Deviant Art

The Conclusion

Mairsil is wacky and is very hard to polite for new players. The combos can be odd and tough to understand. But if you're an experienced magic play and love nonsense decks then this may be a deck worth trying. There's so much you can do with it and my version here is simply my take on it. Lots of Mairsil players run Skithiryx, the Blight Dragon over Blighted Bat because of the addition of regeneration. You can find means to pump Mairsil and then blast people with a caged Spikeshot Elder. You can take people's stuff with Empress Galina or Olivia Voldaren. There's a lot of fun stuff you can do and it's really up to you to see how creative you can be.

Date added	6 years
Last updated	6 years
Legality	This deck is Commander / EDH legal.
Rarity (main - side)	6 - 0 Mythic Rares 51 - 0 Rares 21 - 0 Uncommons 10 - 0 Commons
Cards	100
Avg. CMC	3.53
Tokens	Bird 2/2 U