It's Kaalia. You know what it does and how it does it.
The main strat is win fast and win hard in a classic battlecruiser style. Reducing Life totals to zero is how this deck wins. It's basic, it's straightforward, but it does it well. There are some combos, but the games ive played are sometimes ended before they're even out. Tutors are there for good stuff you might need for a boardstate. Now, you can play wargames with your battle-cruiser(casual) or you can just show up and broadside it, drop a salvo or something(competetive).
The more detailed description is Ideally winning with a few of the two card "you lose" combos, and barring those, multiple combats with double strike and double damage for the rare and special Kaalia commander damage kills.
My favorite is Heartless Hidestugu and Gisela, Blade of Goldnight. This makes Hidetsugu tap to win at the cost of a quarter of your life.
Aurelia, the Warleader is nice for a double combat, but with Aggravated Assault or Utvara Hellkite, you can get even more. If you have a creature dealing combat damage with Sword of Feast and Famine, you can have infinite combats in a turn. This is usually pretty easy since almost all of these creatures fly. Even absent the sword, if you have a doublestrike enabler you can close out the game very quickly. This is how kaalia can win with commander damage.
Kaalia of the Vast attacking someone with no blockers and dropping Master of Cruelties. Insta win.
Any land destruction card combos with Boros Charm. I think it's best used with obliterate. Sunforger is there to get it out at instant speed. It's a good choice for steelshaper's if you already have protection boots. At that point you can attach and un-attach it to deal with most anything you might need to exile. Sunforger is just too much. It can and does take over the game. It answers anything. I run Crackling Doom, a card I now refer to as kekling doom because it's so good, ill tell people "go ahead and run your emrakul. A progenitus? Oh no." kekling doom kekles at both of them, unless they have a generic 1/1 on the board which has been pumped to a 20/20 with emrakul. Then there is a problem.
Ideally we wouldn't use land destruction without having Avacyn out, but sometimes it might be a good idea to drop it the turn after you cast kaalia if you got a favorable early hand and she's not threatened by the board state, since you can keep dropping bombs with her while your opponents are stuck wthout a way to play cards in hand. Do this especially if she has swiftfoots or lightning greaves on and theres someone to attack without a flyer to defend, and you have at least 3 bomb creatures in hand to drop. Do not do this if you drew into a lot of ramp, artifacts and spells early. Do not drop armageddon without a plan. That's why people hate that card. Same with obliterate. Don't boardwipe to boardwipe in a casual game. Try to only do it when you know you're going to win fast. If you armageddon, and someone bounces kaalia to your hand or something that's on the guy removing kaalia, not you. They made the game last an hour longer, not you. You created a game state that was going to end the game shortly. That other guy then did something that made the game last an hour longer just because he didn't want you to run away with the game and win. With kaalia out and no one else having lands, the game will be over in a couple turn cycles. That was your plan. That makes land destruction ok, because you had a plan. It was a finisher. In a competetive game, i'd be more apt to say just go for it. Maybe do it even if you don't have swifties on kaalia. They can't cast removal without lands, so what's it matter, right?
Tutors are out there to get what you need. Avacyn is a very good choice, but being able to draw removal onto something that simply isn't as valuable before you play her is a good idea.
The main drawback to this is that you will be the most hated player at the table once they see your commander. This is the archenemy ahead of everything. Because of that, I have some more ramp than other decks would include to enable more casts of kaalia, since she is probably going to be bolted as soon as she hits the board. I also played back when Chaos Warp could shuffle your commander away, Iona, Shield of Emeria was legal, and I played in a pod with Marath, who could just bolt her as soon as she hit the board before i could equip anything, so I built a lot of this deck to function with kaalia absent. If you play wrong she can get taxed out of existence , and sometimes she's just hard to cast because of the board, so it becomes mardu goodstuff, which isn't a bad thing to be playing. That's the other reason for the ramp pieces: Enabling hardcasts of everything. Every non ramp piece in the deck is threatening on its own, as are some of the ramp pieces.
Even Firemane Avenger. A free lightning helix every round of combat can be pretty nice. Tyrant's Familiar is better, but both are even better than that. Targeted removal is great. They're like the machine gun and cannons on your battlecruiser. Then you got Balefire Dragon, for much the same reason. Just a massive carpet bombing from the cruiser. And if nothing else, Master of Cruelties isn't a bad blocker, even if they find a way to flash in a blocker or something. First strike death touch can make some of the scariest green stuff not much of an issue. But, firemane actually has some unobvious synergy. With Villis, Broker of Blood, we can helix ourselves, take the damage, gain it back, and draw more. This is jank, but in a casual setting it's more fun because then you're not slowly burning someone out. With Archangel of Thune it gives us another +1/+1 counter, and we can do it to ourselves again if there's nothing else to hit and still get the villis trigger, or we can just start sending it at the enemy. Staff of Nin is the one guy on your cruiser who's job is to put fuel in stuff, but he also stops when he's on deck to take a pot-shot at something with his sidearm.
To this point, haste enablers are very good, since they let kaalia do her kaalia things faster. Now, since we have all this Stuff enabling casting and dropping creatures, we need to keep our hand full. So we have Phyrexian Arena, Staff of Nin, some black and red card draw, and demons which let us draw cards. This is the fuel to keep the cruiser going.
I just used the default printing that came up for each card. I do not own this entire list. Hopefully can acquire some of the higher price pieces soon. I'm not a big fan of removing my removal, but, I'll take it into consideration. Suggestions are welcome. I'll upgrade the creatures. I know some are a little lacking but they're all not bad. This deck was designed to hang in a tough group, but, if you show a little restraint, there's no reason it can't be played at a more casual table. The amount of tutors give us a lot of flexibility to play back. Done correctly, you can let someone new win and they won't even realize that you did. When i want to go this route, i search my staff of nin or other draw. A ping effect is nice too, because sometimes being able to blow up a 1/1 is nice. Like, vs krenko, or another token spammer. You can half the effectiveness of leonin warleader. You might not have a blocker for Goblin Rabblemaster, but you get to kill its token every turn, so he doesn't flood the board. For a new player, this can be kind of nice. They're not losing their rabblemaster. They're getting to play with their cards. Rabblemaster is like their little captain, like firemane avenger is our little petty officer. Then we got our lieutenants, the Tyrant's Familiar and Steel Hellkite. More removal is always good. Steel hellkite is nutty. If you didn't know, you can activate his x ability with x being zero and blow up their tokens. He can get rid of anything but a problematic land or something with indestructible. This is really important, because there's this thing out there. I forget what it's called, or how it works, but it doesn't let stuff be cheated out. That's anathema to kaalia. Thats why i have so much exile removal. When the lieutenant can't handle it, they tell the Commander in chief Kaalia of the Vast to break out the big Sunforger gun and find an answer for it. Kaalia's captains(it's a battle cruiser, so we need navy terms. Also, a navy captain outranks an army captain, so when i said rabblemaster is a captain before, the analogy holds) are like Villis, ob nixilis, and our archangels and arch-fiends. Kaalia's admirals are the super angels avacyn, gisela, and Aurelia. Aurelia is honestly my favorite.
When I'm playing to win, I'm grabbing avacyn, aurellia, gisela, hidetsugu, master of cruelties, or something that is going to end the game. Vs search heavy stuff, ob nixilis. Search hate used to be a little rare. I'm thinking about taking some searches out of my deck for that reason. Vs someone you know is running a lot of creatures or good permanents, Lord of the Void is a good choice. If they're a graveyard cheater, Tariel, Reckoner of Souls is amazing. If i understand the interaction properly, you can actually use him to take the eldrazi titans and blightsteel colossus. You need to tap him in response to it hitting the graveyard and triggering the shuffle effect. If it's the only creature in their yard, you get it. If not, at least you have a chance for it, but his effect is random so it's not a guarantee if they have more than one creature in it.
I recently learned about the new indestructible dual lands that enter tapped. This deck runs land destruction, so those are an auto include. I feel like any indestructible land is "auto include" in a commander deck. The fetchlands are notably absent. I understand people really like them and theyre really good. I'd just rather not have a landbase disruptable by search hate. Since this runs red, bloodmoon doesn't mess with us too hard, but it is a problem since we're tricolored. Also, i don't have or run Crucible of Worlds
I wouldn't say this is top tier competetive. It's a little under that, being limited primarily by the costs of some of the things i'd need to take it to competetive. Necropotence would be a nice upgrade. I have hand hate, graveyard hate, and the amazing Brass Squire, who can equip our cleric at instant speed in the sideboard to deal with problems. On a 1-10 scale, assuming a "countryside crusher" deck for commander (Mono red, a commander that enables draw or searches, 95 mountains, A countryside crusher, and 3 other cards) is a 1 and sen triplets with all the bells and whistles is a 10, and a precon with nothing added is like a 4, this is probably about a 7.5.
