Yeah, its ANOTHER Xanathar deck, I know, but this one actually has win cons!
Of course, your main goal with this deck is to ramp up fast with all the mana rocks and play your opponents decks. Ideally, you get to win with their cards and not yours.
To set this up we'll be trying to get access to everyone's decks at the same time through cloning effects like Sakashima of a Thousand Faces and by giving ourselves extra upkeeps through Sphinx of the Second Sun and Paradox Haze. These tools should let us target all players with Xanathar's ability, meaning that everyone's deck gets to have the time to shine! In your hands!
The decks at the table really get to shine if you're lucky (or you draw enough), because then you'll hit Dramatic Reversal + Isochron Scepter
, get infinite mana, and literally play all the cards you want, no mana-filtering required.
If things aren't going your way though, this deck can either control the game's tempo until you can muster out a win, or just mill everyone, including yourself.
For grabbing hold of the game's tempo, this deck runs some nasty little cards, like Ashiok, Dream Render, Narset, Parter of Veils, Notion Thief and Windfall to either use with Narset or Notion Theif (if you're really evil) or to help mill. It also uses lantern control methods that combo with Xanathar, like Lantern of Insight, Codex Shredder and Circu, Dimir Lobotomist to let you see and manipulate people's decks even if you haven't managed to go off yet. With these tools, even if you can't play all the cards you want, you can at least make sure your opponents only get to draw lands.
All that said, we haven't actually gotten to any win conditions yet, of which there are two built into the deck: Mill and Self-Mill, because I'm a twisted bastard or something.
For our mill suite, because we're going to be playing a lot of cards, Altar of the Brood will do a surprising amount of work. That's won't do much on its own, but when combined with Jace's Erasure and Psychic Corrosion causing people to mill three every time we draw, things'll get going rather fast... Especially if this deck has card draw, OH WAIT!
That's right, this deck has a LOT of card draw. Potentially too much in fact. For starters we have classic, reliable card draw in the forms of Thought Reflection and Teferi's Ageless Insight, allowing us to greatly accelerate our draw. Then we have draw that ramps up fast in the form of Mind Unbound. That said Mind Unbound is something you need to be careful with as if you're drawing extra cards and taking extra upkeeps, things will get out of control quickly. Feel free to skip to the next block of text if you don't want an example, but in the most extreme case if you have three upkeeps and both draw accelerators in play on the first turn of Mind Unbound you will draw 4 from its first trigger 8 from its second, and 12 from its third... A total of 24 card, which only accelerates... Now, if you actually have infinite mana in that situation, or have your mill engines in play, great, you've got no problems. If not though, things can get a bit awkward.
If you're going to be drawing a lot of cards to ramp as fast as possible and to maybe even mill your opponents, you'll be wanting a way to hold on to your tools and have a guaranteed win off your card draw, even if things go screwy. So, for when you actually draw 20 cards in a turn, we have methods of holding on to all of those cards. Some of the tools for this are Reliquary Tower and Nezahl, Primal Tide. There are also methods of weaponizing both your card draw and you massive hand that also take care of your card-limit problem. Those are Body of Knowledge and Wizard Class. Big draw = big monsters. If for some reason the big monsters don't kill everyone, or you fail to mill everyone because someone at the table has a card that shuffles itself (or their entire deck) back into their library continuously (looking at YOU Ulamog, the Infinite Gyre), you can still mill yourself!
I just threw in Jace, Wielder of Mysteries and Laboratory Maniac in there. Jace is good here regardless, so you might as well, right? At this point you should be able to cover most scenarios, as you people can't counter spell you on your turn! Hurray for Xanathar!
Finally, I'll go over some of the more misc things in the deck that might not have obvious purpose (unlike Opt and Ponder).
First there's Clockspinning. This card is actually nuts here as we have more counters than you think. This card can help us accelerate or slow down Mind Unbound and improve the mana generation of Everflowing Chalice after its hit the field. It also plays nicely with Pyramid of the Pantheon and Empowered Autogenerator. With the amount of mana generation this deck deals with, playing it more than once a turn isn't out of the question, let alone just paying the buyback cost. Additionally, once you manage to get Sphinx of the Second Sun into play, it becomes much more valuable, as it lets you generate more mana with the extra untap phase. It becomes incredible if you manage to copy the Sphinx, as between untap phases you can increase your mana generation.
The Rogue Class is here both because its thematically appropriate, and because odds are you're going to be hitting people, which just means doing more of what your deck already does.
Finally, Clever Impersonator is chosen over other clone effects because it lets you either copy mana rocks if need be, or copy another player's commander, which is one of the few cards in other people's decks that we don't get to play. This maximizes the level of comboing off using someone else's deck and is thus funny.
If anyone has questions, comments, or advice, please let me know!
This is my first time building a commander deck after years of being a standard/modern player, so I'd love to get some feedback!
