Oh, Sharuum. Many odes have been offered up to her, and riddles besides. Here's a fun one for you all to consider.
My beautiful baby, this deck has been gradually toyed and fiddled with for well over a year. My first EDH deck, and still my favourite.
This deck is meant to be a 75% approximation of a non-combo Sharuum deck, and I believe it fulfills that goal admirably. This deck is meant to use the Esper wedge's various tricks of the trade to cheat its way to the top and create various engines which are meant to create absolutely crushing board superiority without paying the standard price.
For those unaware, 75% means this deck isn't meant to be super competitive; naturally, with access to more fast mana, tutors and more threatening creatures like Blightsteel Colossus this deck could quickly become an altogether more dangerous beast, but this isn't meant to be like that. Rather, it's meant to scratch that elusive Timmy-Johnny/Melvin itch of "I want to do awesome things by being clever", and making big, angry, continually expanding armies of murderous artifact monsters to overrun your enemies seems very much on-theme therein. This is a fun deck meant to be played with friends of comparable skill and power level. Even if you don't win, you'll have fun losing with this beauty!
MAJOR CARDS:
Conjurer's Closet
+
Mirrorworks
Your secret commanders. Abusing the ETB effects of your various creatures is already a fairly major part of this deck. Being able to then make clones of your creatures for more ETB effects or fat bodies is simply back-breaking in a large number of cases. Your copies are saccable to Kuldotha Forgemaster, Krark-Clan Ironworks and whatever else. It's safe to say fun things happen when these two cards work together.
Darksteel Forge
Admittedly static and uninteresting, the ability to make your board indestructible is still incredibly useful for reasons that should be fairly obvious. Once you've got this on the field with a few other pieces of your engines, your enemies' days are numbered.
Altar of the Brood
This is a sneaky little piece of tech I've grown more and more enamoured with the more I've used it. Already a fairly effective ability for its very minor cost, it's a highly cost-effective artifact that can quickly get out of control if your opponents under-estimate it. It starts as a simple rock that mills for a card or two per turn that you can sacrifice to other pieces like Kuldotha Forgemaster or bounce with Master Transmuter but if you successfully manage to make a few clones of it, it quickly becomes a very real win-condition. Get a quartet or so of Altars onto the field, then play Myr Battlesphere and tell me your opponents don't start tearing up a little bit. Its certainly not plan A, but it's fun and deceptively effective for what it is.
Whip of Erebos
So here's a fun fact: Whip of Erebos and Conjurer's Closet interact very, very well together. By stacking the exile triggers, Whip of Erebos's exile trigger can be ignored in favour of Closet's thus netting you a hasty, lifelink reanimated fatty for the low, low price of four mana.
Thopter Foundry
Believe me when I say Sword of the Meek isn't the only way to make this card relevant. It's a very useful toolbox that lets you do all sorts of things. Netting you life, giving you a sac outlet and generally just pulling its weight make this card a sweetheart to have whenever it's available.
All Of Your Clones
It can't be overstated how valuable your clones are in this list. Your clones, particularly artifact-capable ones like Phyrexian Metamorph and Sculpting Steel are vital to victory, allowing you to not only make hard-and-dirty copies of your fatties when you need a body or whatever else, but they also, more importantly, allow you to create more exile-able copies available for your Conjurer's Closet or Venser, the Sojourner.
Living Death
+
Open the Vaults
These cards will quite often end up as your win-conditions. You will do scary things, and it will be in the interest of your opponents to wipe the board of your creatures whenever possible. This is why having cards which allow you to instantly resurrect your board are quite important. In the face of something dangerous, sacrificing your board to ensure your graveyard's nice and full is quite valuable.
THE GAME PLAN
This deck's game plan is relatively simple, in the early-game. Sit quietly in your corner, ramp, and start searching out the artifacts that you want. Cards like Tezzeret, Agent of Bolas and Muzzio, Visionary Architect are important in this phase of the game as you search through your library for your ramp pieces as well as your vital cards like Conjurer's Closet.
Your mid game will revolve around keeping a solid board-to-hand ratio while you continue to ramp and search through your deck for the cards you want. By this point you should have enough mana to keep yourself in fighting shape at least, with cards like Duplicant and Spine of Ish Sah earning their keep here, as your board gradually gets bigger. It's a bit of a balancing act, keep in mind. You can't get too wild, or else you'll risk the board getting Wrath'd, or worse, Cyclonic Rift ed.
Your end game ends up being characterized by fabulous, glorious murder though. By this point even if you're lacking a few pieces, you've ideally managed to generate enough value, and sent enough things to your grave that Sharuum herself can jump-start any parts of your engines that need running, and you can grind everyone into the floor thanks to your squadrons of Darksteel Colossi and Sphinxes of the Steel Wind.
With all this being said, though, this deck does have notable weaknesses, which are somewhat intentionally allowed in the deck.
Its mana intensive, for one. Lacking true ramp spells, you will find yourself spending large hunks of mana for relatively little value early on as you are trying to get your clone engines online. This means that its pretty susceptible to boardwipes and spot removal early on, and missing land drops, or worse, having lands be destroyed is pretty back breaking and is liable to keep you dragging your feet unless you manage to luck out and get something good going.
Its lack of counterspells also makes it fairly fragile, but generally this isn't too major an issue by virtue of your actually-vital pieces being relatively innocuous. That being said, always having Sharuum available means that even if someone so rudely decides to counter something important, you can always just dredge it out of the pits. Be careful not to abuse this privilege though, a 12-mana Sharuum isn't a good thing to have when you're on the cusp of actually getting everything online.
And this probably goes without saying, but having your graveyard get nuked is a very bad time. Not game-ending on its own, but it throws a big ugly wrench in a good number of contingencies and leaves you much more fragile than you would be otherwise.
And thats basically the long and short of it. This deck is fun because it's always a bit of a puzzle, a riddle if you will. You'll always be searching for more things to add to your engines, trying to dig for more cards, making more bodies, and generally embodying Esper every time you play it. You'll never stop improving yourself as you play it, and win or lose, you're bound to have a good time.
I hope you enjoyed this list! All suggestions are eagerly solicited.
