Extreme Jank Bad Santa Zedruu

Commander / EDH Casual Combo Jank RUW (Jeskai, America)

Zyterix

Creature (20)

• 1x Akroan Horse
• 1x Bazaar Trader
• 1x Cinder Giant
• 1x Dream Trawler
• 1x Eater of Days
• 1x Fatestitcher
• 1x Felidar Sovereign
• 1x Grid Monitor
• 1x Hanna, Ship's Navigator
• 1x Humble Defector
• 1x Laboratory Maniac
• 1x Leveler
• 1x Perplexing Chimera
• 1x Pramikon, Sky Rampart
• 1x Rust Elemental
• 1x Sky Swallower
• 1x Steel Golem
• 1x Summoner's Egg
• 1x Thought Devourer
• 1x Vedalken Plotter

Instant (11)

• 1x Abrade
• 1x Disallow
• 1x Generous Gift
• 1x Leave / Chance
• 1x Negate
• 1x Orim's Thunder
• 1x Stifle
• 1x Sudden Substitution
• 1x Tale's End
• 1x Trickbind
• 1x Wear / Tear

Enchantment (15)

• 1x Aggressive Mining
• 1x Alexi's Cloak
• 1x Clout of the Dominus
• 1x Embargo
• 1x Fires of Invention
• 1x Illusions of Grandeur
• 1x Lightmine Field
• 1x Mirrormade
• 1x Paradox Haze
• 1x Puca's Mischief
• 1x Rest in Peace
• 1x Statecraft
• 1x Thought Lash
• 1x Trove of Temptation
• 1x Zur's Weirding

Artifact (12)

• 1x Crown of Doom
• 1x Despotic Scepter
• 1x Howling Mine
• 1x Icy Manipulator
• 1x Jeskai Banner
• 1x Mindlock Orb
• 1x Pendant of Prosperity
• 1x Scepter of Dominance
• 1x Sol Ring
• 1x Swiftfoot Boots
• 1x Talisman of Creativity
• 1x Torpor Orb

Commander (1)

Land (35)

• 1x Command Tower
• 1x Exotic Orchard
• 1x Glacial Chasm
• 1x Halls of Mist
• 1x Homeward Path
• 10x Island
• 7x Mountain
• 1x Mystic Monastery
• 7x Plains
• 1x Rainbow Vale
• 1x Reliquary Tower
• 1x Shivan Reef
• 1x Sorrow's Path
• 1x Sulfur Falls

Sorcery (6)

• 1x Donate
• 1x Fractured Identity
• 1x Fragmentize
• 1x Harmless Offering
• 1x Role Reversal
• 1x Time Wipe

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It's time to see who has been naughty and who has been nice. Yes, this deck runs Sorrow's Path. Strap in.

Introduction

Welcome to Extreme Jank Bad Santa Zedruu, possibly the best and worst Zedruu the Greathearted commander deck ever made. This deck wins in the stupidest, jankiest and least consistent ways I could think of, but it still wins. Have you ever wanted to win a game with terrible old cards like Thought Lash and Illusions of Grandeur? Then this is the right deck for you!

Donating Stuff

So - first off, how do we donate our terrible, terrible cards to our opponents? Donate! Even when our commander isn't in play to use their donate ability, we have cards in the deck that can substitute for a Zedruu activation in a pinch, and can even do some spicy extra things! Bazaar Trader, Vedalken Plotter, Donate, Harmless Offering, Role Reversal and Puca's Mischief make up our main suite of non-Zedruu philanthropes. We even have cards that donate themselves! Pendant of Prosperity, Crown of Doom, Humble Defector, the salt-inducing Perplexing Chimera, and Akroan Horse, which leads us to...

Spy Creatures

Our spy creatures! These are our friends on the ground that we donate right into enemy territory to mess with the opponents we give them to. The aforementioned Akroan Horse, which gives everyone except its controller free creatures, Cinder Giant to kill any existing weenies, Rust Elemental to kill their artifacts and/or their life total, Thought Devourer to limit their hand size, and the classic double-edged swords of Steel Golem and Grid Monitor to stop them from playing creatures entirely.

Strategy Killers

But what if they aren't really running many creatures? That's okay! We have our strategy killers, so called for their ability to disrupt combo decks and other shenanigans we don't want happening. Mindlock Orb locks out opponents who love to tutor for combo pieces, Fires of Invention deals with spellslinger decks and control decks who love to counterspell all of your combo pieces, and Torpor Orb just makes everyone mad at you.

The strategy killers make up some of our most potent tools of suppression. We have Rest in Peace to neutralize graveyard-loving decks, as well as Statecraft and Lightmine Field to deal with aggro decks. Embargo helps keep tap-happy artifact decks in check (with some useful damage to boot), and Zur's Weirding just causes general chaos on the battlefield no matter who owns it.

Neutral Donations

What if we don't want to mess with our opponents? We might even want to help them! But we still need those juicy, juicy Zedruu upkeep triggers. That's why we also have our neutral donations. These cards don't care who owns them, because they do something for everyone. The gifts that keep on giving. This includes Zur's Weirding but also some actual useful tools like Howling Mine and Pramikon, Sky Rampart. The potent Paradox Haze packs a particular punch as a present, as once it's already enchanting you for those juicy extra upkeeps, switching control of the enchantment doesn't change where it's attached.

Insurance

We obviously have to protect our commander and life total from other threats while we get the mana to do this stuff. We run a small control package - our bodyguards to keep people messing with us. Alexi's Cloak and Clout of the Dominus just directly give our commander shroud, Time Wipe nukes the board and puts one of our creatures back into hand, and the classic Swiftfoot Boots does what it always does - protects our commander no questions asked. Glacial Chasm and Halls of Mist trade our valuable life and mana to protect us from huge attackers. What if one of our donated cards is coming back to bite us in the hands of our opponent? Leave / Chance, Homeward Path and Despotic Scepter can get our cards out of enemy hands in a pinch.

Inflicting Pain

Now how do we really punish those being naughty instead of nice? We have some painful enchantments and combos that will leave your opponents scratching their heads. Aggressive Mining makes your friends hate you. Thought Lash often goes out of control and obliterates decks in the blink of an eye. Illusions of Grandeur can nuke a single person out of the game if their life is low enough. But those are just the tip of the jank-covered iceberg.

Why Sorrow's Path of all things?

Time to address the elephant in the room. Remember how I briefly mentioned this deck has Sorrow's Path at the start? There's a reason for that. I thought to myself, "what's the stupidest, worst, most awful card in Magic I could possibly give to a potential opponent?", and the answer was the Path. So how do we make it do anything at all? Simple...ish. We first have to get it the hell off our field and onto our opponent's. Then, we use any of the following three cards to keep tapping it down every turn: Fatestitcher, Icy Manipulator and Scepter of Dominance. Repeat ad infinitum for many lulz.

"""Presents"""

That's not the only stupid, janky combo we have. Enter our """presents""". Summoner's Egg pulls heavy duty in this deck as a potential way to flip a whole game on its head for someone. The strategy is hiding an absolutely dreadful card we'd almost never play on our field underneath the Egg, donating it, and using one of many removal spells in the deck to destroy it - dropping the bad creature directly onto their field. Eater of Days is insanely powerful late-game to stop a potential win. Leveler can eat an entire deck in one fell swoop, and on your turn no less. Sky Swallower, if executed right, can pretty much completely take a player out of the game while making another the prime kill target at the same time - do they give you all their permanents, or give them to someone else who will be targeted immediately for having those permanents? The Summoner's Egg combo is quite frail and needs a fair amount of mana to pull off however, and cards like Fragmentize being one mana doesn't really make it any less janky...right?

Stifling and Confusing

Not to fret! Even without the Summoner's Egg or a way to kill it when in the hands of our enemies, we have ways to make our """presents""" worth it for us too! They're all large creatures, and once we have a way around their downsides we can use their cheap mana costs as an upside instead. The way we do this is with Stifle effects. The titular Stifle, Trickbind, Tale's End, and Disallow all allow us to counter our own enters-the-battlefield abilities, a sneaky tactic which lets us drop our massive dudes with none of the massive downsides. We can also accomplish this by simply having Torpor Orb in play.

Other Hilarious Combos

Our Leveler can even pull extra weight with this cheeky strategy: simply play it normally with Laboratory Maniac in hand and Dream Trawler on field ready to attack. This exiles our own deck, and playing the Lab Man™ for the most brain-dead win possible we attack with the Trawler to draw from our empty deck. We don't even need to draw from the empty deck to win! Just cast Fractured Identity on your own Leveler to give a copy to every other player, eviscerating all their decks in one move. This also works with Eater of Days - just Stifle its enters-the-battlefield trigger as you play it, then use Fractured Identity to essentially Time Stretch without actually casting Time Stretch. If nothing else, your opponents have to appreciate the effort you put into turning a Time Stretch into like, six Time Stops.

And if all this fails, with all the extra life Zedruu gives us, having a Felidar Sovereign win us the game can't hurt either.

So that's the majority of the deck's strategies! It isn't at all optimised for competitive play whatsoever, but the faces I've seen from people when I win by giving them a Thought Lash are so priceless it doesn't even matter.

Date added	2 years
Last updated	2 years
Legality	This deck is Commander / EDH legal.
Rarity (main - side)	3 - 0 Mythic Rares 47 - 0 Rares 19 - 0 Uncommons 7 - 0 Commons
Cards	100
Avg. CMC	3.29
Tokens	Copy Clone, Elephant 3-3 G, Soldier 1/1 W, Treasure