Tai Chi: The philosophy is that, if one uses hardness to resist violent force, then both sides are certainly to be injured at least to some degree. Such injury, according to tai chi theory, is a natural consequence of meeting brute force with brute force. Instead, one is taught not to directly fight or resist an incoming force, but to meet it in softness and follow its motion while remaining in physical contact until the incoming force of attack exhausts itself or can be safely redirected, meeting yang with yin.
This is my take on a modernization of Stax. It's not meant to be an exact duplicate, but its modern equivalent; I'm not using Descent into Madness to mimic Smokestack or Myr Welder to copy Goblin Welder. That just doesn't work from my experience. I use the urzatron lands to attempt to fix the lack of mana that a modern Stax deck would have.
The goal is to lock the opponent out by playing an early Chalice of the Void for 0, 1, or 2 depending on the deck you're playing against to block cheap threats. Toss up Ensnaring Bridge and Ghost Prison to form a soft lock. After that is in place, start destroying their permanents. Hopefully, it will be impossible for the opponent to recover and Bosh, Iron Golem or Ugin, the Spirit Dragon hits the table for the (eventual)win.
Bottled Cloister interacts nicely with Ensnaring Bridge so that you don't have to toss your entire hand away to make the bridge work. It's also there for card advantage and to stuff any hand disruption the opponent could cast on their turn.
Once a few bricks of our prison are laid, we follow up with permanent removal. Ugin, the Spirit Dragon is our board wipe and targeted creature removal. If his big ability comes into play, it puts the roof on our prison. If not, he is still well spent with his removal. Spine of Ish Sah is our recursive removal workhorse. Bosh, Iron Golem flings the spine at our enemies and puts a sizable dent in their life. Trading Post can also take advantage of the spine and net a card or allow us more time against burn and early aggro decks. Ideally, if their creatures are locked, the spine should be targetting lands starting with their important colors. Tectonic Edge and Crucible of Worlds help this strategy along with preventing the opponent from taking our urzatron down. Sundering Titan plays his part as well, doubly when they attempt to remove him. He, too, interacts with our sacrifice outlets and the recursive land mentioned below, albeit slowly and there are better interactions you could be taking advantage of. Land destruction is an unpopular/disliked strategy, but I'll take anything that puts another game in our W column.
Say, for example, they destroy our crucible and kill our Urza's Tower. Academy Ruins saves the day for any artifact that has hit our graveyard. Even it can be turned into one of our weapons alongside Mindslaver.
