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A mild to moderately shitty Baral deck made entirely of cards from my collection. Main wincon is Mechanized Production and thopter generators, but theres enough control elements that some of the larger artifact beaters can chip away at opponents late in games if Mechanized gets shut down. You can also attempt to go wide with Skywise Teachings or mill opponents out with Psychic Corrosion but they're in here more as synergy pieces and shouldn't be relied on to close out games unless you're reeeeeeaally desperate.

The gameplan is pretty straightforward; counter about 1/4 of the things your opponents do, use the looting effect from Baral, Chief of Compliance to look for Mechanized Production, and use the counterspells you have on hand to keep Mechanized around. If things go wrong, you have 4 graveyard recycling effects like Perpetual Timepiece, and Psychic Spiral doubles as player removal if you end up playing a longer game, and you also have Emry, Lurker of the Loch to grab artifacts from the 'yard if you need them later. There's also about 7 pieces of non-counterspell removal included for cards that are uncounterable or otherwise slip through, and you have Aetherspouts as an aggro release valve if you get buried in creatures early, and as a tokens hoser.

Overall, it's not the best, and honestly I'd argue its not even very good, but the high card velocity from Baral draw/discards and the huge amount of counterspells to protect your gameplan make it a fairly consistent deck, even if it is a pain to play against. Play this deck at high-removal tables if you don't want to be hunted for sport, you tell other people "no, you can't play the game" a little too often for most players taste and if you're at low removal tables where nobody can really get through your counterspells and actually impact your boardstate, you're going to end up with a lot of cheesy wins and some very upset friends.

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I ran a couple of playtests and the gist was that this deck burns through cards waaaaayyy too fast. Since you're trying to counter something more or less every turn, you end up leaving your mana open and wasting turns doing nothing. To attempt to solve both of these, I'm adding draw engines. There's some other general tuning happening here too.

OUT: Staff of the Mind Magus, Gearsmith Guardian, Pact of Negation, Darksteel Citadel, Broken Concentration, Implement of Examination, Traveler's Amulet, Foundry Inspector, Efficient Construction, Anticognition, Tormod's Crypt,

IN: Universal Solvent, Mystic Archaeologist, Unwind, Umara Wizard  Flip, Confirm Suspicions, Arcane Encyclopedia, Trail of Evidence, Ghirapur Orrey, Archaeomancer, Trigon of Thought, Witching Well,

Most of these swaps are just straight up better versions of the same card. Witching Well and Trail of Evidence are just better Implement of Examination and Efficient Construction. Darksteel doesn't really give us any tangible benefit so I swapped it for an MDFC so i can have an extra body some of the time, and beyond that most of the changes were just taking out poor performers and replacing them with draw engines. The only other notable changes are a few counterspell swaps; mana isn't really a problem, to the point where I almost considered just cutting an island, so we can afford to run some slightly more expensive counterspells with some added benefits. The most eye-popping card out is Pact. I like pact, its a really good card, but I think it's too good, to the point that it's inclusion makes this deck no longer count as causal. To play more to the power-level it's probably going to end up playing with, I cut it for Unwind, which is also technically free but more acceptable for a casual game.

Comments

95% Casual

Competitive

Date added 4 months
Last updated 4 months
Exclude colors WBRG
Splash colors U
Legality

This deck is Commander / EDH legal.

Rarity (main - side)

2 - 0 Mythic Rares

16 - 1 Rares

32 - 6 Uncommons

21 - 8 Commons

Cards 100
Avg. CMC 3.00
Tokens Clue, Copy Clone, Djinn Monk 2/2 U, Eldrazi Scion 1/1 C, Manifest 2/2 C, Morph 2/2 C, Sphinx 4/4 U, Thopter 1/1 C
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