Balancing Act is a stax/prison deck helmed by Zur the Enchanter which looks to lock down the table with some of the most destructive symmetrical hate cards in magic's existence and break parity on them through using Zur himself as an engine and generating extreme mana advantage via the enchantment As Foretold. Because the deck ultimately only needs Zur and/or As Foretold to win a game of magic, it is able to play powerful effects such as stony silence that disrupt many of its own cards and tutour them directly into play any time they also harm the opponents, as equally disrupting everybody at the table always favours the Zur deck more.
Many of the stax effects are rather self explanatory with regards to how they lock down the game, but there are several combinations of effects that are typically enough for us to end the game on the spot. I'll provide a brief rundown below:
Restore Balance: the sort of namesake of the deck and initial inspiration for this particular list, this 'combo' revolves around the enchantment As Foretold and the sorcery Restore Balance. We cast restore balance for free using as foretold and typically put each of our opponents into a spot where it is almost impossible for them to win. A typical balance resolution leaves each player with no creatures, 1-2 cards in hand, and only a few lands. It is easy for us to follow this with a zur swing to find necropotence and put ourselves vastly ahead of the rest of the board. Vanishing is a card often used in conjunction with this combo to ensure Zur is not around for the balancing check.
Contamination Lock: a relatively simple lock via Contamination and Bitterblossom to ensure lands never generate any mana other than black again. Can often be followed with a stony silence to shut prevent any body from casting a spell ever again - except us, of course, because we either have access to zur or as foretold or both.
The twister kill: effectively a two card combo that involves resolving a wheel effect such as Timetwister or Windfall with a Notion Thief or Chains of Mephistopheles on the board. The first version results in us having some 28 ish cards in hand while our opponents have nothing. The second results in nobody having cards. Either way, we typically win from that spot.
Counterbalance: this manifests itself in a couple of forms. The first is the infamous
Counterbalance
Sensei's Divining Top combo, which make it easy to exploit the rather uniformly low average cmcs of cedh decks to not let them ever resolve a spell. This combo can be enhanced by necropotence, in order to dig past the 3 cards you see from top if none of them are good enough. This combo can also be sort of imitated by necro, where whenever a counterbalance trigger fizzles you exile the top card and try again with the next one whenever the next spell is cast. I have some interest in testing Field of Dreams for this, but 3 cards for a soft lock might be too much.
Winning the game:
This deck has several paths to victory. Because we have so many slots dedicated to our hateslots, we don't have many super clean combo kills. Instead, most of our victories come from locking opponents out of the game and spending the next few turns cleaning up the game as a sort of formality. It is for this reason that we play several p/t enhancing enchantments to let us just kill via commander damage while the game is on lockdown. Daybreak Coronet is one of the most important of these as it allows us to continue abusing necropotence to generate immense card advantage and not worry about our lifetotal as we exploit necropotence and counterbalance synergies or w/e. Empyrial Armour and Ethereal Armour are the large p/t boosts that facilitate ending a game quickly via Zur beats, although it is quite possible that the list does not want to be running both.
The second kill in this deck is to assemble dramatic scepter and find blind obedience to generate a kill via infinite mana and extort activations.
The third kill in this deck is for opponents to just concede once we've crushed their hopes and dreams past a certain point. This typically happens when we've generated a gamestate where our opponents are basically helpless, and we're almost certain going to win, it's just going to take a while. Cards that facilitate this method of victory are typically any combo of mld + artifact hate. Armageddon + stony silence, or armageddon plus an overloaded cyclonic rift is usually enough for our opponents to concede in the face of an inevitable Zur victory. The 'Twister Kill' often falls under this category also.
That's all for now. I hope you were intrigued by this little introduction to 'Balancing Act' and I can certainly provide more info on the individual card choices, strategies, etc. if there's interest.
