Azusa Desert Stax

Commander / EDH Competitive Stax

Miryafa

Land (38)

• 1x Ancient Tomb
• 1x Buried Ruin
• 1x City of Traitors
• 1x Crystal Vein
• 1x Dust Bowl
• 1x Gemstone Caverns
• 1x Ghost Quarter
• 1x Grasping Dunes
• 1x Inventors' Fair
• 1x Mishra's Workshop
• 1x Misty Rainforest
• 1x Mouth of Ronom
• 1x Petrified Field
• 1x Scavenger Grounds
• 1x Scrying Sheets
• 16x Snow-Covered Forest
• 1x Strip Mine
• 1x Tectonic Edge
• 1x The Tabernacle at Pendrell Vale
• 1x Verdant Catacombs
• 1x Wasteland
• 1x Windswept Heath
• 1x Wooded Foothills

Instant (8)

• 1x Beast Within
• 1x Chord of Calling
• 1x Crop Rotation
• 1x Natural State
• 1x Nature's Claim
• 1x Realms Uncharted
• 1x Unravel the Aether
• 1x Worldly Tutor

Artifact (19)

• 1x Crucible of Worlds
• 1x Cursed Totem
• 1x Expedition Map
• 1x Grafdigger's Cage
• 1x Mana Crypt
• 1x Mana Vault
• 1x Mox Diamond
• 1x Null Rod
• 1x Pithing Needle
• 1x Sensei's Divining Top
• 1x Smokestack
• 1x Sol Ring
• 1x Sphere of Resistance
• 1x Sword of Fire and Ice
• 1x Tangle Wire
• 1x Thorn of Amethyst
• 1x Tormod's Crypt
• 1x Torpor Orb
• 1x Trinisphere

Enchantment (8)

• 1x Carpet of Flowers
• 1x Exploration
• 1x Ground Seal
• 1x Hall of Gemstone
• 1x Lignify
• 1x Song of the Dryads
• 1x Survival of the Fittest
• 1x Sylvan Library

Sorcery (7)

• 1x Eldritch Evolution
• 1x Green Sun's Zenith
• 1x Life from the Loam
• 1x Natural Order
• 1x Regrowth
• 1x Sylvan Scrying
• 1x Sylvan Tutor

Commander (1)

Creature (17)

• 1x Ancient Stirrings
• 1x Arbor Elf
• 1x Birds of Paradise
• 1x Boreal Druid
• 1x Elvish Mystic
• 1x Eternal Witness
• 1x Fyndhorn Elves
• 1x Llanowar Elves
• 1x Lodestone Golem
• 1x Manglehorn
• 1x Nissa, Vastwood Seer  ^Flip
• 1x Ohran Viper
• 1x Phyrexian Revoker
• 1x Ramunap Excavator
• 1x Tireless Tracker
• 1x Titania, Protector of Argoth
• 1x Woodland Bellower

Planeswalker (2)

• 1x Nissa, Vital Force
• 1x Ugin, the Spirit Dragon

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Introduction Show

"Polish comes from the cities; wisdom from the desert."

-Arrakeen villager saying

Azusa has gone to Amonkhet and come back stronger. This is a stax deck built around the interaction between Azusa, Lost but Seeking and traditionally-powerful artifacts like Trinisphere , Smokestack , and Crucible of Worlds . The main main premise of the deck is to play early disruption like sphere effects, then play Azusa to lock out your opponents, and end the game with creature beats.

If you're new to cEDH, one thing to keep in mind is that this, like many decklists, is a living document that I update when I improve the deck.

Why Azusa? Show

Azusa has always had good qualities:

• She provides ramp from 3 mana to 5 mana (and you can play a 2-drop on that same turn) in a way that dodges artifact hate (so that 2-drop could be Null Rod ).
• She accrues fast resource advantage with e.g. Tireless Tracker or Horn of Greed .
• She can drop a spell-land like The Tabernacle at Pendrell Vale and a mana-producing land in the same turn.
• She synergizes superbly with Crucible of Worlds , e.g. she can start locking opponents out of the game on turn 1 with Strip Mine , or load up a Smokestack to 3 soot counters and get by with sacking lands.

However, until now she hasn't been competitive enough to make it to the top tier of cEDH. But with the release of Hour of Devastation, Azusa got several new cards to make use of:

• Ramunap Excavator caught everyone's attention as a creature version of Crucible of Worlds, allowing green decks to more easily tutor for it.
• Scavenger Grounds , although not as popular, is a Bojuka Bog we can play in green.

Having said that, you might ask: "why not Titania, Protector of Argoth , Nath of the Gilt-Leaf , or Tana, the Bloodsower and Tymna the Weaver ?"

The answer is: I don't think any other general can make as good use of the stax pieces we have available to us as Azusa can.

With a bit of help, Azusa breaks parity on Smokestack and Strip Mine . And our win cons work under Torpor Orb , Null Rod , and Cursed Totem , which most other competitive decks can't claim. So we get to play all 3, and never have to remove them before winning.

Game plan Show

I am not an expert Stax pilot, so for general gameplan advice I direct your attention to this stax primer: http://www.mtgsalvation.com/forums/the-game/commander-edh/204260-the-stax-primer

However, I can give a general outline.

Opening

It is vitally important to have a stax piece on turn 1-2 (depending on the decks at the table). The ideal opener has all of the following:

• stax piece
• tutor
• fast mana
• lands

If nothing else, a stax piece on turn 1-2 is acceptable.

You can play Azusa on turn 1-2, but it's only really beneficial if you can drop 2 more lands and play another card after her. She's more useful in the mid/late-game, when we have Ramunap/Crucible and Strip Mine or Smokestack.

Mid-game

At some point, we want to have all of the following on the board:

• Azusa, Lost but Seeking
• Ramunap Excavator or Crucible of Worlds
• Strip Mine / Wasteland / Ghost Quarter etc

The first two together allow us to super-ramp with any fetch-land, and trigger Titania in the end-game. With a Strip Mine effect, we can start locking down all 3 of our opponents.

End-game

Our primary win condition is to beat face with 5/3 tokens courtesy of Titania, Protector of Argoth . Failing that, we lock everyone else out of the game with Smokestack and attack them with 1/1s and 2/2s until they give up or die.

Card discussion Show

Most of the cards in the deck are standard stax/edh cards, so I'll provide comments for stand out.

Power players:

Strip Mine / Wasteland : The muscle of our deck. The interaction between Azusa, a Crucible effect, and these cards is one of the most powerful things we can do, because it quickly locks players out of the game.

Ghost Quarter : In addition to the normal times you'd use Ghost Quarter (Gaea's Cradle, Cabal Coffers, etc), there are a few situations where it becomes Strip Mine:

• Decks with Hermit Druid or Tainted Pact
• When the pod has another stax player, who has Aven Mindcensor or Leonin Arbiter out

• The following lists, at time of writing, have 0-1 basic lands:

• • Food Chain Tazri
• • Thrassios Buried Alive
• • Mimeoplasm Reanimator
• • Sidisi Food Chain
• • Sidisi Brood Tyrant Combo
• • Breya Doomsday, whose link wasn't working: http://www.mtgsalvation.com/forums/the-game/commander-edh/multiplayer-commander-decklists/761481-breya-doomsday-artificer

Crucible of Worlds / Ramunap Excavator : Synergizes with Azusa and Strip Mine, as well as a few other effects

Titania, Protector of Argoth : Recursion, plus our main win-con. If you play Titania before any land drops for the turn, with Azusa and a Crucible out, she is a 3-turn clock. Here's how the damage works per turn:

1. Play Titania, recur a sac land. Sacrifice a land 4 times (by replaying it 3 times), creating 4x 5/3 elementals.
2. Attack for 25. Replay and sac a land 3 times, creating 3x 5/3 elementals, total 7.
3. Attack for 40, total 65. Replay and sac a land 3 times, creating 3x 5/3 elementals, total 10.
4. Attack for 55, total 120.

Stax:

Stax cards help us stay alive until we can win. Mono-green has limited ability to play control, so we have to stop our opponents before they get started. Fortunately, some of the best stax pieces are colorless. 1-drop stax pieces are usually excellent, since we can always play them turn 1. 2-drop stax pieces are usually great for the same reason, with a little mana ramp. Above that, we can't count on it for a first-turn stax piece, but it can still be good for making the game go long.

Cursed Totem : Notably stops mana dorks, as well as win-cons like Thrasios, Triton Hero

Dust Bowl : Since games tend to go long, we end up with a lot of lands in play and little to do with them. This allows us to sacrifice forests to tax our opponents.

Grafdigger's Cage : Playable on turn 1, stops reanimator.

Ground Seal : Sometimes playable on turn 1, draws a card, stops reanimator.

Hall of Gemstone : Punishes greedy mana bases and makes gold cards (like most commanders) uncastable without mana rocks.

Lodestone Golem : The Vintage legend. His 5/3 body is less relevant in edh, but he taxes opponents and is tutorable with Chord of Calling / Inventors' Fair .

Null Rod : Stops mana rocks and some win-cons, like Staff of Domination .

Phyrexian Revoker : Can name mana rocks, as well as win-cons like Thrasios, Triton Hero or Grenzo, Dungeon Warden

Pithing Needle : Can name lands for some effect, but more importantly names those same win-cons and comes down on turn 1.

Smokestack : It's worth noting this card is not the first stax piece you want to play. Not only is it expensive, but it takes a turn to get going. If you spent 4 mana on this and can do nothing else, you might as well have skipped your turn if someone can win or remove it before your next end step. Its power comes after everyone else is already too taxed to deal with it, and it finishes them off. Don't be afraid to sacrifice lands over other stax pieces.

Sphere of Resistance : The OG tax effect that makes it harder for opponents to play spells for only 2 mana.

Tangle Wire : Not the best in terms of cost/effect, but great at tying opponents down for awhile while we setup a lock.

Tectonic Edge : Worth noting it says "an opponent", so you can use it freely on the other two. That said, it's still a level below Wasteland.

The Tabernacle at Pendrell Vale : Excellent in creature-heavy pods, e.g. against Tana, the Bloodsower . Also note this should be considered a spell in terms of deck construction, since it doesn't produce mana.

Thorn of Amethyst Stops fast-mana and taxes Doomsday while still allowing us to play creatures/lands. Plus we can get around it just by having a few more lands.

Torpor Orb : Stops win-cons, like Kiki-Jiki, Mirror Breaker + Pestermite

Trinisphere : The OP tax effect that not only taxes spells, but makes countermagic significantly harder to cast.

Removal:

Removal is necessary when we can't win, or someone else is about to. We're afforded more than the average amount of removal because some of it is lands.

Beast Within

Grasping Dunes : With a Crucible and Azusa, there's few creatures this can't kill.

Lignify : Creature-based removal is hard to come by in green, but this does a fine job

Manglehorn

Mouth of Ronom

Natural State

Nature's Claim

Scavenger Grounds

Song of the Dryads : More expensive than Lignify, but also hits more

Tormod's Crypt : For that T1 Protean Hulk

Unravel the Aether

Ugin, the Spirit Dragon : An expensive card, but he serves as mass-enchantment removal that also kills bears.

Ramp:

Ramp is how we play our 2-drop stax pieces on turn 1 and 3-drops on turn 2, how we play our mid-game cards with sphere effects on the field, and how we play Ugin, the Spirit Dragon at all.

Ancient Tomb : The best 2-mana land available, since paying 2 life means about nothing in edh.

Arbor Elf / Birds of Paradise / Boreal Druid / Elvish Mystic / Fyndhorn Elves / Llanowar Elves : Mana dorks help us stay ahead of our stax and sometimes deal damage. Yes, even the Birds, with a sword.

Carpet of Flowers : At any given table, someone will likely be playing blue. This turns that into an advantage.

City of Traitors : Enables turn 1 stax piece.

Crystal Vein : Not as good as City of Traitors when you need 2 mana, but better when you don't, since you don't have to sacrifice it then. Produces a large amount of mana with Azusa and a Crucible out.

Exploration : Allows us to play a second land

Gemstone Caverns : Although it requires exiling a card from our hand and green isn't great at card draw, there are some hands that are keepable because you have a 2-mana stax piece and this land. That makes it a little better than a Snow-covered forest.

Mana Crypt : The best mana rock for us, even when it damages us. Allows us to play 3-drops on turn 1.

Mana Vault : It's like Dark Ritual , but colorless. Allows us to do things like turn 1 Azusa -> 2 more lands -> Trinisphere .

Mishra's Workshop : Enables turn 1 stax piece.

Mox Diamond : Discarding a land means approximately nothing to this deck.

Sol Ring : The second best after Mana Crypt. T1 this -> Null Rod is still a good play for us.

Draw:

Since we're not running blue or black, we need almost every card draw spell we can get. The way stax loses after getting its stax pieces on the board is by opponents playing lands, drawing cards, and not dying. They eventually draw enough lands to play around sphere effects, and removal for our stax pieces. We need to draw cards too to draw into our win-cons or our locks to prevent opponents from disrupting us.

Nissa, Vastwood Seer  : Once she flips, she becomes a green Phyrexian Arena . Still testing how quickly/often we get 7 lands.

Nissa, Vital Force : Up-tick, wait a turn. If she survives, we can draw lots of cards.

Ohran Viper : Like Phyrexian Arena , but green.

Scrying Sheets : Filters away the worst topdecks.

Sensei's Divining Top : Technically filtering, but you don't need me to explain why this card is good.

Sword of Fire and Ice : Draws cards and kills bears.

Sylvan Library : Pay 8 life, draw 2? Still a good deal for mono-green.

Tireless Tracker : We can play lands pretty fast with Azusa, and end up with a fair amount of mana late-game just looking for a sink. This creature is, in my opinion, the second best in the deck after Ramunap Excavator.

Tutors:

Tutors are the main way we get our lock pieces or win-cons. Fortunately, mono-green is very good at tutoring creatures, which is why Ramunap Excavator was such a big deal for this deck. And it's also very good at tutoring lands. Since those are the two things our deck depends on, our deck has some consistency.

Ancient Stirrings : Almost every card we want (stax, Crucible, Strip Mine) this card can get.

Chord of Calling

Crop Rotation

Eldritch Evolution : Note that sacrificing Azusa gets any creature we want.

Expedition Map

Green Sun's Zenith : No Dryad Arbor in the deck at the moment, because the main target for this is Ramunap Excavator

Inventors' Fair : Finds Crucible of Worlds . Although we only have 21 artifacts, this deck is designed to make the game go long, so we usually get metalcraft.

Natural Order : Sacrifice Azusa, grab Titania or Woodland Bellower

Realms Uncharted : Strip Mine , Wasteland , and Petrified Field are a good start. Once you get a Crucible in play this card actually gets good.

Survival of the Fittest

Sylvan Scrying

Sylvan Tutor

Woodland Bellower : Fetches card:Ramunap Elder, Tireless Tracker , Manglehorn , Eternal Witness ...

Worldly Tutor

Recursion:

Sometimes people kill our lock pieces, sometimes Life from the Loam puts them in the graveyard. Either way, recursion helps us get it back in our hands.

Buried Ruin : Recurs that Crucible someone destroyed

Eternal Witness : The most tutorable of our recursion

Life from the Loam : Recursion combined with card draw.

Petrified Field : The second-most tutorable of our recursion, along with Buried Ruin. Returns all our utility lands to our hand, which we can then re-play with Azusa.

Regrowth : Cheap way to recur a card we need.

Cards I left out

Storm Cauldron : 5 mana might not be too much a stax deck, especially Azusa, but Storm Cauldron has the unfortunate anti-synergy of both allowing opponents to play extra lands on their turns, and also save their lands from Strip Mine by tapping and bouncing them.

Ulvenwald Hydra : Turns all our creature-tutors into land-tutors, but costs 6 mana and does nothing else.

Horn of Greed : I am very much on the fence about this card, because it is theoretically card disadvantage: even if you get the ideal draw of 3 cards per turn, your opponents should on average also be drawing 3 cards per turn (1 each). However, it does improve the ratio of your draws to theirs from 1:3 to 4:6. More importantly though, the card draw it gives opponents disrupts the stax plan of this deck. So for now, I'm leaving it in the board.

Scapeshift : At first I considered running Tempt with Discovery , Reap and Sow , or Hour of Promise , but I settled on Scapeshift as the only high-cost card I wanted to get the nonbasics we need to combo out.

Scavenging Ooze : Replaced with Ground Seal . Ground Seal is "cheaper" in that it doesn't require a 3rd mana to activate immediately, which is what I wanted to fight T1-3 Protean Hulk/Cephalid Breakfast.

Oracle of Mul Daya : Replaced with Woodland Bellower . Oracle filters and is another Azusa - very good. But only 37% of our deck is lands, so it's unlikely we ever get 2 in a row (to make her better than Courser of Kruphix ), and in the meantime, we need more powerful draw/tutoring for consistency.

Craterhoof Behemoth : I left this card out, despite its power, because it's a dead draw in the early turns of the game, we can't guarantee we can support him with only 16 creatures, and Titania does a fine job finishing the game on her own. And Craterhoof doesn't quite synergize with Torpor Orb .

Mindslaver : Creates a neat lock with Buried Ruin . But we really, really want to play Null Rod and keep it in play the whole game.

Choke : Cutting off mana is what this deck does, and most decks play blue. The only reason I'm not running it right now is because I don't think it's better than any of the stax pieces we already have.

Other cards worth considering/swapping in based on meta: Show

• Abundance
• Birthing Pod
• Caustic Caterpillar
• Cavern of Souls
• Chalice of the Void
• Courser of Kruphix
• Dark Depths
• Deglamer
• Dryad Arbor
• Garruk, Primal Hunter
• Elvish Visionary
• Elvish Spirit Guide
• Harmonize
• Horn of Greed
• Juntu Stakes
• Krosan Grip
• Lotus Petal
• Mana Web
• Mikokoro, Center of the Sea
• Mindslaver
• Oracle of Mul Daya
• Recycle
• Root Maze
• Scapeshift
• Scavenging Ooze
• Sea Gate Wreckage
• Seer's Sundial
• Static Orb
• Storage Matrix
• Thespian's Stage
• Throne of the High City
• Tooth and Nail
• Traverse the Ulvenwald
• Umezawa's Jitte
• Winter Orb

Possible upgrades:

• Steel Hellkite
• Garruk, Primal Hunter
• Dark Depths
• Emrakul, the Promised End
• Woodfall Primus
• Vorinclex, Voice of Hunger?
• Kamahl, Fist of Krosa?
• Regal Behemoth?
• Regal Behemoth?

Thanks Show

Although I developed the original list alone, I stood on the shoulders of giants. And since presenting it to the cEDH community, I've gotten a lot of help from the following:

• Kanye West On Acid, a stax champ on Discord and creator of the list available here.
• The other members of the cEDH community, both on and

Side note: I hate TappedOut's accordion blocks because each time you open a new one, the text straight up off the screen, which makes it a pain to read. That's why these are all in spoiler blocks, even though it doesn't look as nice.

Date added	7 years
Last updated	5 years
Legality	This deck is not Commander / EDH legal.
Rarity (main - side)	12 - 0 Mythic Rares 44 - 0 Rares 18 - 0 Uncommons 10 - 0 Commons
Cards	100
Avg. CMC	2.19
Tokens	Ashaya, the Awoken World, Beast 3/3 G, Clue, Elemental 5/3 G, Emblem Nissa, Vital Force