My favorite and most featured deck in my collection, my Iroas God of Victory EDH deck is my proudest creation. This deck aims to create value over time by using token generators to their full effect. The best part about Iroas is that he protects your creatures when they attack. The play is simple, before turn four, ramp and play as many creatures as you can before getting iroas out, then when you hit the creatures you need for token generation, i.e. Leonin Warleader or Hanweir Garrison, begin to beat your opponents in the face with your token army. Cards like Hero of Oxid Ridge and Honored Crop-Captain give us battlecry effects to buff our going wide strategy to do a lot more damage that will go unblocked because of Iroas and the sheer amount of tokens we create. Hero of Bladehold is perfect because she generates two tokens and battlecries them at the same time!
Being in Boros, we have the ever present issue of running out of cards to play. Wizards has tailored Boros to be weak in the card advantage department, but there are a few ways we can work around this issue. Cards like Mind's Eye can help us use our mana that goes unspent to draw cards during each of our opponent's turns. If we can get Smothering Tithe out with it, we can sometimes even get totally free cards. Cards like Experimental Frenzy are best used when we are totally empty of hand and have no other cards to use our mana on. At it is a little clunky when working with the rest of the deck, but once it gets going it can help the deck move along in destroying our enemies. Usually I destroy it when I have seven cards back in my hand and I can start playing normally again. Otherwise, cards like Arch of Orazca and Dawn of Hope are good ways to put our mana to use when we have no ways of getting additional cards. These are used so we can always make the most of our mana whenever possible. It is for this reason that we also run Legion's Landing
to help us ramp and sink our mana into when we need to. Finally, exile effects like Commune with Lava and Outpost Siege are great exile effects to help us rummage through our deck to get more powerful effects to use.
There are a few extra combat spells in the deck that help us finish off our opponents when the time comes. The weakest of these is Combat Celebrant which works in tandem with Brave the Sands to help us get more fighting in each turn. Being a 4/1 would usually make him a shaky include in the deck, but because of Iroas we don't need to worry about him dying during combat. Aurelia, the Warleader was one of my first ever mythic rare cards, and she still amazes me with her power level today. Aurelia is hard to block on top of the menace granted from Iroas, and allows use to scare our opponents with more tokens and more triggers off those tokens. The final and most potent extra combat spell in the deck is Waves of Aggression a card I am proud to have finally acquired. Waves lets us retrace to abuse it, meaning that if there are no graveyard hate decks at the table, we can abuse this ability ad nauseam to beat our opponents to death with red/white glory
There are a few removal spells in the deck that are best held back to deal with bigger threats in the game that seriously threaten our life total if retaliated against us. Stasis Snare and Chained to the Rocks are probably the best among these because they add to our devotion to Iroas. Being able to exile an opponents threat almost indefinitely is an immensely powerful effect that helps us smack and scare our opponents with Iroas later. Since it is a scarce resource, it is best to keep back these removal cards, using them as a last resort and rely on our army of creatures to deal with our opponents threats. With this deck our opponent's life totals drain fast, so they will be hard pressed to block our onslaught
The number two is immensely threatening in Magic the Gathering, and that is exemplified in cards like card: Purphuros, God of the Forge, Ogre Battledriver, Glory of Warfare and Nobilis of War as with as many tokens we create, these cards effectively make our tokens lightning bolts with legs. These cards are good payoffs for a good amount of tokens, and a slower way to build damage for our creatures is found in Divine Visitation which swiftly closes out games when left unchecked.
The odds and ends of the deck closes out with cards like Bomat Courier and Legion's Initiative as well as our slew of mana rocks and boardwipes. Bomat courier is an interesting card from Kaladesh. In Iroas, it lets us build up an eventual second hand to use to rock our opponents out of the game. Usually we would worry about it dying, but in this case, it is a valuable source of card draw. Legion's initiative is a strange card from Gatecrash, but a very useful one in this deck. It buffs our entire team and allows us to exile our creatures and return them to the battlefield in response to a boardwipe. This would get rid of our established tokens, but it would leave our generators around to continue building pressure on our opponents at least. Finally, being a deck that's low to the ground, it might seem strange that there are as many Mana Rocks as there are in this deck, but in the random haze of Commander, it is best to afford some mana fixing insurance with rocks, so they stay in and help us ramp/fix whenever we need it. Lastly, our boardwipe package is a stereotypical bunch, with Citywide Bust being the most exemplary one. Essentially leave the little guy alone and destroy all the big ones. Keep making tokens and keep attacking.
There are a few weaknesses in the deck that aren't super pronounced. One is its heavy reliance on Iroas, God of Victory himself. If our opponents have consistent exile removal, the deck can fall apart really quick. It may be important to keep an eye on our devotion so we can avoid creature removal from Orzhov decks or other decks that hate on enchantments. Another problem with the deck is the lack of artifact/enchantment destruction removal. Sometimes our opponents can get cheeky, and with how much this deck leans in on its strategy of creating an entire army of creatures, a lot of removal has been forsaken for more token generation and consistency. We often hope that our opponents are too busy building their own strategy to kill us so that we can kill them faster. Otherwise, the deck stays pretty tidy in terms of its killing power.
Of all the steps in the game of Magic, the combat phase is the most important to take advantage of in this deck. Be sure to consistently choose an opponent and attack them. This keeps the deck going. You should always be attacking and building resources. Iroas is an immensely powerful card, and as the commander of this deck, he serves as a mighty force to be worshipped by all on Theros.
