Zada, The Unforeseeable Consequence
"A hedron holds magic for a thousand years—or less, if need be." -Zada of Slab Haven
Welcome to my Zada primer! This deck seeks to generate card advantage and have an explosive turn to try and win through Cloudstone Loops, Breach Lines, Dualcaster Mage, and other infinite combos. Join the Zada discord by using this link! Hedron Hideout
Why you should play Zada
1. You like to have explosive turns
2. You like being able to pivot your gameplan
3. You like to draw a ton of cards
4. You like to have several outlets that synergize well together
Why you should not play Zada
1. You don't like taking long turns
2. You don't want to rely heavily on your commander to win
3. You don't want to have limited interaction being mono red
4. You want to be playing top a tier cEDH list
Why Zada as the commander?
Zada, Hedron Grinder is a very unique card that turns all of our cantrip spells into a machine gun of spells that is very hard to interact with. Zada's ability is triggered on cast so she will copy your spells before she can be removed by an opponents kill spell. This is important so that we can gain card advantage on the stack. She is a ton of fun to play and she turns cheap spells into powerhouse cards. She is often the underdog at the table with makes her The Unforeseeable Consequence.
Gameplan
Bodies
Zada's ability is fully shown when she has a group to work with. We will want to get creatures and tokens down early so we can prepare for our Storm Turn. The cards that I am running consist of Goblin Instigator, Hanweir Garrison
, Krenko, Mob Boss, Krenko, Tin Street Kingpin, Young Pyromancer, Zurzoth, Chaos Rider, Dragon Fodder, and Krenko's Command. These cards are necessary for showing Zada's full potential and should be kept in opening hands.
Mana Advantage
In most cases, we will want to attempt to win the turn that we play Zada. We will need ways to generate mana early game to be able to storm off the turn that she enters the battlefield. We are running cards like Charming Scoundrel, Dockside Extortionist, Generous Plunderer, Magda, Brazen Outlaw, Professional Face-Breaker, and Ragavan, Nimble Pilferer to produce treasures that we can store or to pop Magda's ability to fetch for combo pieces but more on that later. There are other creatures in the deck that can produce us mana as we are storming off which will allow us to keep pushing our turn. These include Birgi, God of Storytelling
, Storm-Kiln Artist, Runaway Steam-Kin and Treasonous Ogre. These creatures will help your storm turns end in a victory and should also be what you look for when it comes to opening hands.
While we are storming off, having mana to keep going is imperative. Lucky for us, Zada makes spells which could be over looked into hidden gems. Cards like Ancestor's Aid, Sudden Breakthrough, and Flick a Coin create massive amounts of treasures off of Zada's ability. This mana can be used to feed into Reiterate combos or help Magda, Brazen Outlaw find win conditions.
Storm Turn
Once we slap down Zada and have creatures we can begin the Storm Turn. Our deck is is filled with cantrips that target a creature and draw a card. Zada turns these into massive card draw spells and we can chain these to draw our win conditions or to draw our entire deck. These include Ancestral Anger, Fiery Gambit, Renegade Tactics, Spark of Creativity, Witch's Mark, Academic Dispute, Accelerate, Blazing Crescendo, Crimson Wisps, Expedite, Fist of Flame, Flick a Coin, and Stun. These are cards are the body of the deck and should be heavily considered no matter what your win condition is while playing Zada.
After we have generated a ton of card advantage we will need to start looking to assemble a win. There are several win conditions in the deck and some are not as obvious as others. Make sure to try and play around counter magic as much as possible since we don't have many ways to get things back from the graveyard.
Win Conditions & Combos
Cloudstone Curio
The main win condition of this version of Zada is Cloudstone Curio. Your opponents must control a number of artifacts and/or enchantments equal to or greater than 3 + your cheapest other creature in play. This combo consists of having Cloudstone on the battlefield, casting Dockside Extortionist, creating a bunch of treasures, bouncing another low costing creature to your hand, recasting that creature, bounce dockside back to hand, recast dockside treasures. Repeat this process for infinite storm and infinite treasures. The outlets for this combo are either a creature that you are looping, an outlet for infinite treasures, or for infinite storm.
Creatures that you can loop to win are Charming Scoundrel, Goblin Investigator, and Imperial Recruiter. Charming Scoundrel can help create infinite treasures if Dockside doesn't produce enough. After being able to loop her, choose the Wicked Role option and attach it to herself. Once she leaves the battlefield, the Wicked Role Token will enter the graveyard and make your opponents lose 1 life. Repeat this process to drain the table. This will get around The One Ring protection effect since draining the table does not target. Goblin Investigator will create a goblin token when he enters the battlefield. After making an infinite number of tokens, you can cast Samut's Sprint to give everything haste and swing for lethal. Imperial Recruiter can fetch nearly every creature in the deck. This can help you find any combo pieces you need. You can grab charming scoundrel and continue to loop or fetch Professional Face-Breaker or Magda, Brazen Outlaw for infinite treasure outlets.
With infinite treasures, we can activate Professional Face-Breaker and exile our entire library to find an outlet and win from there. We can also activate Magda, Brazen Outlaw by sacrificing five treasure tokens and putting Aetherflux Reservoir into play. At this point we should have and "infinite" storm count and will need to cast one spell to trigger Aetherflux's life gain effect to gain "infinite" life. From there, we can shoot out opponents down for game.
With the main win condition focusing on artifacts, we are running several artifact fetches to help make the deck more consistent. These cards will put Cloudstone into play or into hand to help us get ready to combo off. Gamble, Reckless Handling, Magda, Brazen Outlaw, and Goblin Engineer are the best options in mono red to search for artifacts.
Reiterate
Reiterate lets us make copies of all of our spells and with buy back we can have our spells go infinite. If we cast Sudden Breakthrough and then reiterate it with buy back, we can continuously cast Sudden Breakthrough targeting Zada for infinite mana. Once we have infinite mana, we can infinitely copy a spell that deals damage like Lightning Bolt, Spawning Breath, Fiery Gambit, Witch's Mark, and Pyrokinesis.
We can also reiterate Twinflame and Heatshimmer to create infinite hasty creatures
Fist of Flame
If worse comes to worse, we can draw a ton of cards with Fist of Flame and swing for lethal to kill the board.
