How competetive is a deck like this? And how do games usually play out? Love the idea of this deck but my LGS is really competetive so I wanna make sure it can hold it's own.

COL_Cashmoney I would say the list as currently built is not competitive at all. The deck is great for slower metas because it's dealing like 2-6 damage a turn pretty consistently so it puts a "clock" on the game. If the games only last 4-5 turns then it's not really doing much of anything. I guess it depends on what you mean by "competitive". If you're talking true cEDH like Prosh + Food Chain or Blood Pod; this deck won't ever really hold a candle up to those. If you mean more in lines of highly tuned 75% decks, I could see a chance of this deck being pretty decent.

Not sure how competitive this type of deck can be, but here are some suggestions if you wanted to make it more highly tuned:

Mana Crypt, Mana Vault, Grim Monolith, and Basalt Monolith - Fast mana is great at speeding up any deck. Basalt Monolith is definitely the weakest of the four, but I included it so that you can pair it with...

Rings of Brighthearth - Paired with Grim Monolith and Basalt Monolith lets you generate infinite colorless mana which you can use for Xantcha's activated ability. You can only take out one person this way before she comes back under your control and you have to sacrifice her, so cards like Ashnod's Altar, Phyrexian Altar, Phyrexian Tower, and Viscera Seer would be helpful inclusions if you want to go this route.

More draw & tutors to make the deck more consistent like Vampiric Tutor & Imperial Seal. I've never played with Ad Nauseam so I'm not sure how much I can recommend it; but after taking out all of the high CMC cards out of the deck I imagine it would be pretty great.

Also since this deck is pretty much an "aggro" deck, you can throw in cards like Phyresis or Tainted Strike to reduce the amount of damage you need to deal to take someone out. You could always try for one of those cards or a Grafted Exoskeleton onto Heartless Hidetsugu with a Glacial Chasm in play, but that's probably too slow.

Finally, cards that focus on resource denial like mass land destruction and discard can slow down the game so you have enough time to close it out like Blood Moon, Impending Disaster, Ruination, Stranglehold, Planar Void, Mindslicer, etc.

I think the best way to make this deck competitive is to throw in a bunch of stax elements that will disrupt your opponents' combos and slow the pace of the game down. This deck's current strategy wants to get some damaging permanents on the board and have them stick around for as long as possible. Kind of similar to a Brago lock, it doesn't matter how much damage you're doing a turn if your opponents can't respond to it. The difficult part of that though is finding enough stax cards to put in the deck (and drawing them consistently) and the sad fact that Xantcha's ability literally works to refill their hands. While Xantcha might be an interesting concept, you might have more luck making a more tuned version of Mogis, God of Slaughter since he helps with the resource denial plan too. I guess it just depends on whether you want an infinite mana sink or a card that actively helps keep your opponents' boards clear.

Let me know if this helps!

Whoops, guess I lost my time window to edit my last comment. The last things I wanted to mention were Pyroblast and Red Elemental Blast. Great cards for countering your opponents' counterspells.

If you were to choose a Rakdos commander, Vial Smasher the Fierce would be the most competitive simply because you have the option to pair it up with other partner cards to get access to more colors. As it stands, Xantcha isn't a bad commander; it's just hard to competitively build her when she refills your opponents' hands and is a mana sink for the entire table.

Dangit! you're making me want to throw Bloodchief Ascension in my deck. I really enjoy the change of pace for the incremental bleeding deck. This really shines, as I said earlier, if opponents spend alot of time controlling all the big bombs throughout the game. I really destroyed someone with Mogis, God of Slaughter recently doing that exact thing. Also, I found Enchanter's Bane was really fun, although I pinged myself for 8 dmg total... of course my opponents like to cheat either omniscience or overwhelming splendor, and I am more interested in the pain aspect than the actual removal.

Gleeock - Haha, I wish I could see it stick on the board longer so I could give some stories about how much damage its dealt but it's always taken care of once it reaches 3 quest counters.

That's awesome. I wish I could run Mogis in this deck but I hate giving my opponents easy ways to get rid of Xantcha!

Enchanter's Bane is a really neat idea too! That's one thing that I really like about this style of deck, there are a lot of specific damage cards that you can tech in according to your meta. Enchanter's Bane against high CMC enchantment decks, Pyrostatic Pillar against storm decks, Rain of Gore for lifegain decks, Rampaging Ferocidon against token decks, etc. It's kind of like a mini-game while deckbuilding. I'll consider enchanter's bane for this deck too, thanks again :)

It just hit me: Lich's Mastery so you don’t lose despite hurting yourself! Maybe also Platinum Emperion and Platinum Angel for that matter...maybe that would help make the build more competitive

Yeah, that easy provision of sac. outlet is a problem when you really want that Xantcha hanging out. What the game really needs to do for this deck is give you color appropriate Overabundance that spell is a BEAST of a pace-pusher. Haha could you imagine how much a player would get pinged if you had access to a dmg dealing mana doubler? Oh the pain!

I was genuinely surprised to not see Basalt Monolith and Rings of Brighthearth on the list. It makes for a very easy drain of an opponent. Generate infinite mana, drain that opponent and then repeat.

Jimmy_Chinchila - I like where your mind is at! Those cards never even crossed my mind when building this deck! Given that I don't have many ways of gaining life and I actively have ways to not gain life in this deck, I don't feel like I would be able to make full usage of Lich's Mastery and in many cases I could see it hurting me more than helping me. Platinum Emperion and Platinum Angel on the other hand I really like. I'm a little scared that they'll be like Kaervek the Merciless was in this deck and be a high CMC card that gets immediately removed before it has any impact due to my lack of protection in this deck. But since it's not actively damaging anyone else, maybe they'll draw less hate. Once I find the next underperformer in this deck I'll swap it out with one of those to give it a test run!

Gleeock - That card is hilarious! I almost want to build a deck solely based around it. Whereas this deck is pretty much purely "group-slug" I could see a deck built around that card being some weird hybrid of group hug and group slug with cards from this deck like Zo-Zu the Punisher, Manabarbs, & Ankh of Mishra while also having cards like Mana Flare, Ghost Quarter, Old-Growth Dryads, or Tempt with Discovery to have players ramp and hit those "punishing landfall" triggers like Ankh of Mishra. Not quite sure how the stack works in this case, but you could even potentially also try and get lucky with Warp World and see if you can Ankh or Zo-zu from your library to have players take damage from the lands they put into play from it. Either way, that's a really fun card!

acscreamholy - I've considered it and reconsidered it over and over. I'm still considering it! Unfortunately it only takes out one player at a time before you need to sacrifice Xantcha to do it again and you don't want to leave Xantcha under your control for an extended period of time. So it essentially takes a 2 card combo and turns it into a 3 card combo once you include a sacrifice outlet. I also don't have a lot of colorless mana sinks aside from Xantcha or Exsanguinate; so generating infinite colorless mana in this deck is much less useful than in most other decks. All that being said, it still is a way to take a player out of the game and it still is infinite colorless mana so it's definitely worth considering. I just would need to find approximately 5 slots for it (rings, monolith, and probably a minimum of 3 sacrifice outlets) and that's the hard part to do. Thanks for the suggestion and I didn't realize it wasn't in my "maybeboard" until you suggested it! Throwing it in right now.

• Yeah, I saw you mention Enchanter's Bane, alot of people dumping on this card without alot of playtesting. There are definitely pros & cons, but I am mostly seeing the cons mentioned on public sites (which are significant); However...
• Pros:
• 2 cmc, pretty good to cast 1 turn prior to Xantcha
• Repetitive dmg, people say 3 dmg average, even repeated is tiddlywinks... not true when your deck has multiple sources of incremental dmg. Also, there isn't a vast array of 2 cmc enchantments that will repetitively deal 3 dmg average without sinking additional mana into it.
• If you play a bit of slug without HEAVY control focus you don't care about your opponent choosing the "lesser of 2 evils" for themselves. The fact of the matter is that they are taking a different form of punishment either way. They take some damage, I'm happy, they sac an enchantment I'm happy. They realize too late in the game they should have sacced, I'm happy.
• Rattlesnake: unusual effect of potentially forcing opponents to hold their enchantments rather than play them, or become political with their Overwhelming Splendor usage.
• God-Enchantments, pretty fun vs. indestructible god commanders. Gods average 4 cmc, average 4 dmg/turn. Or the sac. effect actually applies to them at least.

+1 for any deck running discard-politics with Xantcha and Oppression ;)

BTW, along those lines Bottomless Pit and Necrogen Mists can work as well, why don't you run them?

SynergyBuild I actually love the idea of both of those cards! I've never even seen Bottomless Pit before and Necrogen Mists was on my radar when I first started building this deck but ended up falling off somehow.

Any suggestions on cuts? Leaning towards Dismember, Fraying Omnipotence, Pox, and Decree of Pain

Decree&Omipotence can be dropped.

I found a good thing to attach to Xantcha is Treacherous Link .

pokepower116 - had the opportunity to pilot this deck a few times this past weekend, had an absolute blast.

Question with the strategy though - how do you keep people from attacking out of retribution for the groupslug damage going around? I was able to get No Mercy up for one game, and Crawlspace for another, but it reached a point in the game where all of my opponents allied to just attack me and take me out of the game over the course of one round. Does more politics-ing help with this? Getting more pillowfort up faster?

speedykoala Glad you're enjoying it! Always makes me happy to hear comments like that.

Honestly that's been something I've been struggling with too. The two biggest issues I've been having are getting the deck online quick enough and dealing with the table hate.

Since a lot of the major cards in this deck are 5 CMC or higher, it can take a bit to actually start dealing the damage I want to do with this deck. I tried adding in more ramp to deal with this, but maybe even more is needed.

But getting back to your question; I think a mixture of both suggestions would be best.

Politics never hurts unless you really abuse it and overdo it. Any sort of actions you can take to throw the heat off of you are going to be valuable in any deck you play. Even if it means sandbagging a couple of cards back in your hand so that you don't seem like a threat until you have an explosive turn then it might be worth it. Given that this deck deals a lot of its damage in small increments it might not be possible to realistically take this route often, but it might be worth considering trying to combo Manabarbs with a damage doubler instead of throwing it down on turn 4. Or maybe instead just hold your pieces until someone else at the table becomes an established threat so that their eyes aren't on you.

As far as pillowfort goes, there are definitely some pieces that you could run that aren't currently in this deck just because I couldn't find the space for them. Smoke , Glacial Chasm , and Dread are all perfectly good options to be running in this deck to discourage attackers. With the addition of Urborg, Tomb of Yawgmoth , Cabal Coffers , and Crypt Ghast I think Pestilence could be a decent option to run alongside Pyrohemia to help keep the board clean. Plus there are plenty of other boardwipes like Damnation , Life's Finale , and Chain Reaction that this deck isn't currently running but wouldn't be bad options since the deck is pretty creature-lite.

I don't know how you're feeling about the discard package in the deck but I think I might tone it down a bit. It brings a lot of hate and doesn't accomplish what I hoped it would. I thought it would reduce the amount of options people had to deal with Xantcha and incentivize them to use her activated ability more. In my experience it just causes people to want to attack me more instead. So I'm considering removing Sire Of Insanity , Necrogen Mists , and maybe either Pox or Fraying Omnipotence .

Hope this helped a bit! Sorry I couldn't give a better answer, still ironing out the kinks myself.

Made a quick update for the deck addressing the comments I said above! Still considering adding in Smoke and more boardwipes, but for now I've removed Necrogen Mists , Sire Of Insanity , and Pain Magnification to add in Pestilence , Glacial Chasm , and Expedition Map .

Glacial Chasm should help us stay alive, Pestilence should help keep the board clean of creatures with <4 toughness, and Expedition Map should help us find Cabal Coffers or Urborg, Tomb of Yawgmoth to help our mana out.

I'm going to see how these changes go and then maybe change the deck a bit more after some testing.

Love the idea for the deck, it's pretty darn awesome and something I haven't seen before. I would say you might want to think about Curse of Wizardry as another way to punish your opponents.

Thought you'd like to know. Had a great Xantcha game recently. Parallel mana doublers. Bant/Selesnya & early Xantcha with Corrupting Licid -- a pet card, but it was freaken hilarious that game :)

Nice deck!! I have been using it for quite a while when building my own deck. Not sure this changes anything, but they changed Xantcha to where now she exiles upon death rather than returning to your control.

https://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?multiverseid=450651