My own Hazoret the Fervent EDH Multiplayer deck.
With an Article of strategies and lore, hope you like!!!
BASIC DATA
Construction date: 20/04/2017 - Dismantled in 2017 - Reconstructed 30/05/2022
Power level: 6,5
Format: Multiplayer EDH, non competitive
Budget: Medium.
Build restrictions: No mass land destruction.
When Amonkhet came out in 2017, it was an awesome moment for me: Finally an ancient egyptian plane!!!. I loved how the WotC team designed it. Of all gods revealed, Hazoret the Fervent became my favourite, in terms of artistic design and lore. She was a cunning reinterpretation of the famous egyptian god Anubis, with the twist that now he was a female war deity, still asociated with the afterlife, but with some elements of other violent deities like the desert god Seth. Sadly, her card, totally designed for shine in
fast play enviroments like Standar or Modern, seemed very unefficient in Commander.
Despite that, when I had the luck of finding a Hazoret the Fervent invocation, I wanted to give her a chance, and doing the challenge of constructing an unusual Hazoret EDH deck.
Even with it's limitations, the deck ended to be surprisingly fun, full of bizarre cards, and capable of gather some thrilling victories in casual tables. Although I dismantled it years ago, the deck was that fun and unique that in 2022 I decided to recover it and actualize it with all the new awesome red commander staples of these last years...
So here we are! :D
WAIT... WHY AN EDH HAZORET DECK?
You like Hazoret as character or as card? You like trying to play unusual strategies? If so, have fun and try!. Multiplayer EDH is an awesome format very diverse in terms of power and eficiency. You can have your own competitive commanders and then play in a table of crazy casual and jank decks. So if you start brewing a Hazoret deck, the first difficult part is trying to unravel what things Hazoret can really give us in this format despite her limitations. The key starts here:
- Don't get obssessed with Hazoret the Fervent clause ("Hazoret can't attack or block unless you have one or fewer cards in hand").
Yeah, that ability was clearly designed for classic MTG formats like limited, Standar and Modern, where playing red usually means burning your hand quickly to try to kill your opponent as fast as you can. Commander usually asks you to always have some kind of advantage even in red, and in a format with multiple opponents with 40 starting life points, going classic burn-no hand isn't the answer. Don't get me wrong, this deck can work with this few cards in hand clause in some original ways.... but the important part of Hazoret is much more than that limitation:
- For CMC4, Hazoret the Fervent is an indestructible commander capable of transforming any card in our hand in direct damage to all of our opponents!
Just think that Hazoret is some kind of (worse) Purphoros, God of the Forge less foccussed in creatures and with a way more... "controlly" playstyle. She can be treated like some kind of "non-creature" permanent in the command zone wich is a discard and burn engine, (and wich in some circunstances can became a resilient creature). We also can fill this deck with tons of cards that synergize with Hazoret abilities in weird ways... you'll see!
THIS DECK IS FOR YOU IF...
- You like Hazoret the Fervent character / art / lore.
- You look for a casual deck to have fun.
- You like games with unusual situations and strange synergies.
- You want deckbuilding challenges.
IT ISN'T IF...
- You want a trully efficient and/or powerful mono red EDH deck (Better search other red commanders, there are many powerful ones).
- You search for a more classic mono red deckbuilding.
STRATEGY
So... how this painful deck really is supposed to work?
The plan I show in my deck is to play a red control commander deck (You know, earthquakes, boradwipes some chaos and red disruption effects...) with the possibility that Hazoret brings us of start discarding unnecessary cards to slowly burn our opponents... AND... if we decide to lose our head and start discarding lots of cards, the deck is also designed to work with few cards in hand, thanks to impulse drawing effects (Exiling cards to play them in a limited time period), discarding triggers, some graveyard mechanics to recycle those discarded cards, and red chaos effects to make our opponents suffer with us our mad choices!!!.
1) - DESERT POWER
The first thing any deck must work is mana base and ramp.
Being a Mono-Red deck, Hazoret mana base can abuse of many basic mountains, but also some utility lands that can give us response to some problems and needs. I play 25 normal Mountain. You can use Snow-covered mountains if you want to use the Scrying sheets pack and other snow synergies, but being flavor accurate I just prefer to use normal mountains as the improve isn't that relevant in EDH. Next let's talk about the utility lands:
- Deserts: This deck runs some utility deserts that can give us some advantages in addition to being flavor fitting: Ramunap Ruins can sacrifice itself or other spare desert to damage our opponents in a hard need; Scavenger Grounds can transform itself or another desert into a heavy graveyard hate bomb, and Endless Sands can save our commander from bein exiled or stealed.
- Draw-card lands: Any red deck, and specially one with discard mechanics, can end without cards quickly. Having lands like Bonders' Enclave, War Room, Buried Ruin, Desert of the Fervent and Forgotten Cave that can give us cards is always helpful.
- Witch's Clinic is other interesting support land. Using it with Hazoret will grant us a nice amount of lifegain to keep going.
The deck also expands it's resources thanks to various artifacts and red mana generating cards.
- Mana rocks: Sol Ring, Arcane Signet, Fire Diamond, Mind Stone, Liquimetal Torque, (Liquimetal torque may seem off place, but is a way of destroy permanents when we have artifact removal)
- Ramp artifacts: Expedition Map, Wayfarer's Bauble
- Other mana artifacts: Gauntlet of Power, Caged Sun, Currency Converter, Ghirapur Orrery, Crucible of Worlds, (Currency Converter, Ghirapur orrery and crucible of worlds are specially good in any discard or loot deck).
- Red mana producing cards: Surly Badgersaur, Neheb, the Eternal *f-pre*, Mana Geyser, Jeska's Will.
2) - NO HANDS!
Hazoret doesn't need to be a creature all the time, as usually is better to have a hand with some resources and responses than an online creature. Despite that, this deck is designed to in some situations "Create the illusion that we actually have run out of cards" but, in reallity, we still can play things from exile, from the graveyard or from strange magic-holding tools thanks to some peculiar cards.
- Impulsive draw: One nice way of having card advantage without having a full hand is the classic red impulsive draw: Exile cards from the top of the library to have the chance of playing them in a small period of time. For example: Oracle's Vault *f-pre*, Tempered in Solitude, Furious Rise, Laelia, the Blade Reforged, Urabrask, Heretic Praetor or Ignite the Future among others.
- Holding gadgets: Some strange cards give us the possibility to "keep cards" without the need of having them in our hand! Nice examples of this are Gustha's Scepter, Bag of Holding, Containment Construct or Conspiracy Theorist. As you can see, usually this means the card has to be exiled or discarded, and not always you have the certainty you'll recover then 100% safely, but they are nice tricks to allow us play more with Hazoret without loosing card fuel.
- One fun trick: Ignorant Bliss can surprise our opponents making our hand dissapear temporarily.
- Discard synergies: In this deck we'll probably discard many cards, so having cards that give us advantage of doing it will help us a lot. Samples of this are: Currency Converter, Surly Badgersaur, Ghirapur Orrery, Glint-Horn Buccaneer among the other allready mentioned cards Bag of Holding, Conspiracy Theorist, Containment Construct. As you can see, this cards do many effects, from giving us some possibility of replay those cards, to giving us treasure or creature tokens, or even make damage.
- Recursion: Some cards of our deck can work with the graveyard or can be played from it: Crucible of Worlds, Past in Flames, Underworld Breach, Ignite the Future...
3) - HARSH ENVIRONMENT
Hazoret won't be a powerful deck, but thanks to red and some artifacts we'll have the chance to share with our opponents some of our carencies. That's why this deck has an some removal / red control / red chaos and disruption theme, to take advantage of our limitations to extend them to the rest of the table.
- Smoke will make suffer any token / heavy creature deck, but it's harmless to us.
- Pyrohemia can whipe the board and damage opponents without being sacrificed thanks to Hazoret indestructibility.
- Omen Machine and Urabrask, Heretic Praetor doesn't hurt us much as we have plenty of impulsive-"draw" rather than normal draw, but they can be destructive for "normal card draw" decks.
- Earthquake, Rolling Earthquake, Jaya's Immolating Inferno, Blasphemous Act, Chain Reaction, Anger of the Gods, Chandra's Ignition and Ugin, the Spirit Dragon as board wipes.
- Fiery Confluence, Incendiary Command and Chaos Warp are versatile removals.
- By Force and Vandalblast as artifact removals.
- Bolt Bend just a surprise.
4) - SLOW PUNISHMENT
Thanks to Hazoret the Fervent Ability and other cards, we'll be capable of slowly inflict bits of direct burn damage to our opponents, to weaken them until we have the chance of knock down them.
- Ankh of Mishra to punish anyone but specially ramp decks.
- Pyrohemia also to keep damaging bit by bit everybody.
- Torbran, Thane of Red Fell, Glint-Horn Buccaneer and other possible damage doublers to potenciate our damage.
5) - FINAL FIRE RAIN
Any red deck based on noncreatures has a way of making huge explosions. Hazoret isn't and exception, so we have classiC X-Cost burn spells to doing tons of direct damage in late game and close it against weakened opponents (Earthquake, Rolling Earthquake, Crackle with Power, Jaya's Immolating Inferno...).
////LORE SECTION////
A MONO RED ANUBIS?:
HAZORET'S RELATIONSHIP WITH EGYPTIAN MYTHOLOGY
I have to admit it first suprised me when Amonkhet spoilers came out and I saw the egyptian god Anubis being represented as a Mono-Red card!!!... Why use Red to represent him, rather than Black or maybe White, more suitable colors with death, afterlife and protection?
Hazoret the Fervent, as many other characters from the plane of Amonkhet, took clear inspiration from ancient egyptian culture and it's myths. The main inspiration for Hazoret was Anubis (also known as "Inpu" in ancient egyptian, "Anub" in copt, and "Anubis" in ancient greek), the egyptian god of emblaming, mummyfication and others aspects of death and the transition to the afterlife. Despite that, Hazoret seems to have many twists and other fonts of inspiration than Anubis... lets study them:
A culture of death...
WotC main objetive was probably create their own fantasy interpretation of the egyptian myths, making some references but without falling into plagiarism. Making Hazoret a "classic fictional Anubis" (usually depicted with the classic black-magic necromantic abilities) could have been so easy, so they found new ways to make the proper reference but being original at the same time.
In Amonkhet everything revolves around death: It's people want to be worthy of raising as eternals, a nice reference of how ancient egyptians interpret death as some transition stage before -if worthy- reaching an eternal afterlife of joy. Everything in Amonkhet design, despite it's color, subtly ended related to death:
- White took the mummies as a new kind of friendly undead (For example Sparring Mummy).
- Green took illness and poisons, and the strengh of overcome them (For example Exemplar of Strength).
- Blue took the mission of unraveling the secrets of death and past (For example New Perspectives).
- Black took a more psychologic role of ambition to reach the afterlife (For example Cruel Reality).
- But Red, what association with death received?: The answer is Zeal. Red is the color of emotions, and in a plane with a instense religious beliefs in the afterlife, fanatism is a nice emotion to give to Red. In Amonkhet, the Red Trial of Zeal was the last one until reaching afterlife, a dangerous combat in wich only the most fervent ones could succeed. Once overcome this last trial, the goddess Hazoret the Fervent was the responsible of executing the worthy warrior with his spear (Deem Worthy), so he/she could be eternalized later.
The red deserts of Seth...
Second, In Ancient Egypt, the colors "Black" and "Red" represented different things than in our current occidental culture. In Egypt, the fertile and wet soil of the river Nile where people lived is dark, so Black ("Khem") represented life and fertility rather than death. On the other hand, the barren and harsh desert sands where deads where buired were represented by Red ("Desher"), so this color was more associated with peril, sterility and death. In fact, the chaotic and violent god of the desert, Seth, was usually depicted in red color. I also have the theory that Hazoret the Fervent could be also associated with Seth, as both represent violence and war, and are associated with the desert and the Red color. In fact, despite Hazoret being clearly a jackal, her golden mask ears have a more rectangular shape ressembling more the typhonid ears of Seth rather than the canid ears of Anubis. So Hazoreth could be in fact a combination of these two deities, in the same way Bontu the Glorified seems to be a mix of the river god Sobek and the monster Ammyt.
The mountain dweller...
Third, Anubis being a guardian god of the necropolis, usually received the epithet "Tepy-dju-ef", "He who is upon his mountain", (being the Mountain the Red basic land in MTG). Besides the famous pyramids (That could also be interpreted as artificial mountains) usually ancient Egyptians buired their deaths in subterranean tombs in desert mountain valleys (Specially during the New Kingdom), being the most famous ones in The Valley of Kings, in Luxor, being those valleys situated in the Red ("Desher") part of Egypt. In fact, the inspiration of Anubis being a jackal or some other kind of canid could be associated of how different species of canids dwelled desert places, and when acting as scavengers, they were finally associated with death.
Reaching the end of this analysis, my synthesized theory is that WotC decided to work with all those references of Anubis as a desert and mountain dweller, giving him the red color identity associated in ancient Egypt with desert, peril, death and tombs, and combinating it with the desert and war god Seth, to finally creating the new and original deity that is Hazoret. A great work of the design team!
THAT'S ALL, HOPE YOU LIKE THE DECK & ARTICLE AND NOW YOU HAVE MANY IDEAS FOR STRANGE MONO-RED DECKS!!!
*This decklist and article is still under construction and oppened to improves. Suggestions and questions are welcome! :)