Nevinyrral, Urborg Tyrant - Primer
Archetype
Control deck that aims to be a non-threatening player in the early game, just focusing on hitting land drops. We have most of the best esper control tools from magic's history. But multi-player requires you to navigate the politics craftily, since becoming the archenemy early makes your likelihood of winning much less promising. But survive to the late game, and your victory is all but assured. The best approach in most pods is to sandbag your board wipes in order to avoid attention. You dont need to answer every threatening permanent; let the table decide how to address problems. You can leverage spot removal and fogs to avoid taking lethal swings, which is easy to justify as self defense. Take random hits freely, but be wary of voltron threats setting up too powerfully. The most worrisome card in the game for us is Robe of Stars. We want to destroy or counter it before it can be activated multiple times per turn.
The game should eventually reach a point where you can wrath away the board a few times and your opponents will be essentially out of resources. Even their commanders will become hard to redeploy once you tax them enough. We have a liberal amount of card draw and filtering, with half of our planeswalkers drawing cards, and spells like Memory Deluge and Silver Scrutiny refilling our hand, and filtering from castle vantress. We should have more gas than everyone else, and our commander's quirk of being a board wipe on a stick gives us a fallback option if we need to answer multiple threats. Our sweepers pave the way for our planeswalkers to land and regularly procure us emblems. From there, it should be a breeze to cross the finish line.
Your main combo and reason for running this commander:
Cast Nevinyrral, Urborg Tyrant, hold priority with the enter-the-battlefield trigger on the stack and sacrifice Nevinyrral to Phyrexian Tower, use the mana from Tower to pay for Nevinyrral's dying trigger; create zombies. This is a one-card combo that just needs your commander. You can also tutor Phyrexian Tower through Search for Glory, Tolaria West or Expedition Map. Lazotep Quarry also works the same way as Phyrexian Tower for this combo.
How do we win? ...
Win condition 4: Show
The table concedes because they can't stick a board.
Win condition 5: Show
If somebody doesn't want to concede even after you have one or more planeswalker emblems, keep tucking
Teferi, Hero of Dominaria back into your deck and win by your opponents running out of cards in their libraries.
Win condition 6: Show
Play your commander as a beatstick and kill people with commander damage. This might be a consideration if you have an opponent with infinite life or depending on some other corner case game states.
Note:
No path to Exile? Show
Path to Exile is an amazing card. One mana to deal with a creature forever is an phenomenal rate. Only it doesn't deal with commanders forever. It just puts them back in the command zone, and gets them another land to help cast the thing again. That doesn't work as well in a control strategy centered around resource denial.
No sol ring? Show
Yes, because our commander and planar cleansing effects destroy it. In my opinion, the acceleration isn't worth effectively stone raining yourself later in the game. But I wouldn't fault a player for playing sol ring. If you have to play a mana rock, this is the one to include.
45 Lands? Show
Yes, we can't afford to miss land drops in a deck with zero mana rocks. And this deck is very mana hungry. This deck also needs to double spell on turns to play around opponents' countermagic with our own.
Mulligans
I pretty much always keep a hand with 4 to 5 lands. I'll also keep three lands with a land tutor (Expedition Map, Search for Glory, Lorien Revealed, etc.). If I have all my color sources, I may also keep a 3 lander with a card draw spell, like a Memory Deluge or a Behold the Multiverse.
The easiest way to struggle with this deck is to miss land drops in early turns. We don't play mana rocks in the deck because we frequently mass disenchant, via our commander, Farewell, Hour of Revelation, and Devastating Mastery. This is how we can often gain a mana advantage in the long term. But missing land drops makes this strategy less effective. I cannot stress enough how important hitting land drops is with this list. Furthermore, we don't have much we have to do in the first 1 to 6 turns of the game, except occasionally disrupting a game winning combo or wrathing extremely threatening boards. So mulligan accordingly.
MH3 update
We got some new cards with MH3. A lot of considerations. If something wasn't added, it's because I couldn't fit it without cutting a card I valued more. For example, a card like Erebos's Intervention looks like an easy cut to add more of the powerful MH3 card pool, but the utility of being a flexible removal and rare graveyard hate give it the nod over something like even Cling To Dust.
Sink Into Stupor and Fell The Profane: if you value an extra piece of interaction over say a Spymaster's Vault helping us deal with late game flood, then you could add either of these. I think with our combo of making Nevinyrral zombies, followed by conniving like 10 onto a zombie token is too much upside though.
Lazotep Quarry: ridiculous that we just get another copy of Phyrexian Tower. Now we have more redundancy and consistently. Possibly the best card we've gotten in three years for this deck.
Waterlogged Teachings: extremely flexible instant. If it were just the card with flashback for 7 mana, we don't care as much. But being a dual land in addition is a deckbuilding dream. Especially when we like adding more mana sources when possible. Usually we'll want to grab Memory Deluge with this, to start the value train. But it can also target Final Showdown if we need a sweeper. You get the picture.
Consign To Memory: finally a clean answer to eldrazi cast triggers that doesn't cost 4 to 6 mana. Yes we have Summary Dismissal, but I like the efficiency of the new card as an addition to our list.
Unfathomable Truths: another draw 3 for 5 at instant speed. We like these effects because we don't have a card advantage engine outside of planeswalkers. So we need natural card draw spells to keep our gas coming. But once you get into the draw x spells, you sacrifice efficiency in the early game, an area where we're already slow. So on average the best balance is 5 mana draw 3.
Assassin's Creed
What Must Be Done: It doesn't hit enchantments, but artifacts are far more abundant. This card is a nice way to stymie our opponents' mana while also sweeping creatures off the board. And in the late game, the option to buy back a planeswalker is quite potent too.
