To quote the late and great Littlefinger, "Chaos is a ladder".
This is my Vaevictis Asmadi, the Dire "lands matter" deck. We use Vaevictis as our main source of removal. We get significant utility when we play lands. With Vaevictis we will sacrifice our own lands, and then find ways to play these lands again.
Vaevictis' Ability
For Vaevictis Asmadi, the Dire's triggered ability to be worth it, we must ensure the following:
We get maximum value from the removal of permanents that our opponents control.
- We get the flexibility to choose ANY permanent. The removal potential is fantastic. We won't have to worry about "indestructible", because you can still sacrifice an indestructible permanent. The only thing we'll have to make sure is that we can target the troublesome permanents. And you don't have to use it to exclusively screw people over. If you want to make nice, do someone a favor and have them sac a permanent of their choosing. Use this to score political points if you need to team up.
When we sacrifice our own permanent, we limit the damage as much as possible.
- We're going to want to sacrifice our own lands, or token creatures. We'll have many ways to get the lands back, and we'll get further utility from playing them a second time. Through land interaction, we can turn a weakness into a strength.
We drop more powerful permanents from our top deck, and we whiff as little as possible.
- We can't change the fact that there is randomness involved here. It's possible our opponent's could get an insane permanent from this ability. We need to set up our deck so that we still benefit more than our opponents. This deck is loaded with permanents to ensure we whiff the least out of anyone in the game (91/99 cards in our library are permanents). We also have many tools to manipulate the top of our library to ensure that we drop powerful permanents.
Politics
Some commanders immediately put a target on your back.
This isn't one.
- While you can control the board state by removing the most problematic permanents, your opponents still have the chance of getting a useful permanent. The mechanic is definitely fun, and this will give you some room when people are assessing the threats in the game.
Remember that you have the leverage.
- Sometimes it isn't the best move to be as punishing as possible. Need an ally? You can do another player a favor and make them sacrifice a permanent of their choosing. They might see this as a positive if they can drop a great permanent at the expense of a useless one.
Identify what your opponents value most, and hold those cards hostage.
- Make deals to not destroy these coveted permanents, contingent on some desired behavior/action from that permanent's owner.
Primary Strategies
Top Deck Manipulation
This is all about ensuring the consistency and power of Vaevictis' triggered ability.
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Sensei's Divining Top & Sylvan Library - The most effective cards in this category. Allows us to dig through three cards for the best option.
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Doom Whisperer - This card is an absolute beast. Surveil virtually as much as you want at any time. We can keep surveiling until we have the bomb that we need for whatever scenario. You can drop lands into your graveyard and reclaim them to benefit from land interactions.
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Lantern of Insight - Vaevictis' ability is pretty chaotic. This card helps mitigate some of that risk. We can anticipate which permanents our opponents will get, and force them to shuffle their deck if there are any problems.
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Oracle of Mul Daya & Courser of Kruphix - Allows us to see the top card and play it if it's a land. Not only does this help us ramp, but we can filter out lands from our top deck and increase the chances of dropping the permanent we need.
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Cream of the Crop - Can potentially allow us to dig through MANY cards to find the right permanent.
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Worldly Tutor & Vampiric Tutor - Ensure that you get the best possible card with Vaevictis' ability.
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Noxious Revival - Remember this can be used on your opponents too.
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Hua Tuo, Honored Physician - gets our best creatures back from the graveyard.
Land Interaction
We will mostly be sacrificing lands with Vaevictis. We will need effective ways to ramp and reclaim lands from the graveyard. The benefit will be huge once we establish some landfall triggers.
Ramp
Useful cards that fetch for basic lands for ramp and landfall triggers.
Accelerators
These cards let us play multiple lands per turn, allowing us to double or even triple our utility from landfall.
Utility
How we actually benefit from sacrifing/playing our lands.
Reclamation
How we get our lands back.
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Crucible of Worlds - This is the engine of the deck. Things accelerate massively once you can play cards from your graveyard. It enables us to completely abuse the land sac'ing and landfall triggers.
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Life from the Loam - This card is so filthy good. You can dredge to put additional lands into your graveyard to reclaim later. You can load up your hand with 3 lands. Fetches can be replayed turn after turn.
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World Shaper - fills our graveyard up with more land and ultimately gets them all back to our hand.
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The Mending of Dominaria - Ultimately gets all of our lands back. In the meantime it fills our graveyard with more lands and returns creatures we sacrificed/lost earlier.
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Ramunap Excavator
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Lord Windgrace & Nissa, Vital Force
Enabling Vaevictis
Bombs
Secondary Token Theme
Edits
Cards to cut
- Crystal Ball - Maybe there could be better artifacts in this slot. I already have a lot of top-deck fixing.
- Mwonvuli Beast Tracker - I don't think I have enough creatures with the relevant abilities for this to be worth it.
- Anger - This might be risky with only 2 Mountains in the deck. I could use other avenues for giving my commander haste.
- Reclamation Sage - Maybe I don't need even more removal... unsure.
- Phyrexian Arena - I could probably find more synergistic forms of card draw. This card doesn't really fit the theme all too well, despite being great draw in general.
- The Mending of Dominaria - If land reclamation is already over-allocated in this deck, then this should be the card that is cut.
- Vizier of the Menagerie
- Journey to Eternity
Cards to add
Thoughts
- It might be wise to add more card draw