Updated with Fiery Confluence kill in the Bonus Round scenario. Bonus Round + Fiery Confluence is a lot of damage.

Love this deck and the use of a new commander, I'm absolutely going to build it.

A cards I had questions about including--

Is Claws of Gix good just as a way to get rid of Xantcha if the player she was given to dies and you haven't killed the whole table yet? Alternately, having a Phyrexian Tower in the deck for same purpose.

How about some artifact lands in order to turn on Mox Opal more reliably? With only 18 artifacts I'd be concerned that it isn't turned on early often enough.

@molok, I don't really find that the game works out that way. There's actually a lot of ways to kill Xantcha cause there's so much creature removal in the deck already - Toxic Deluge, Rolling Earthquake, Death Cloud, Fire Covenant, Chaos Warp, Damnation, and sometimes Engineered Explosives, or Bonus Round + Abrade. So usually if you have a ton of mana to spend on Xantcha then you end up drawing a bunch of cards, and you draw one of these or a tutor to get one. Typically if you've created that much mana you're basically winning anyway, so you can do pretty much what you want.

There's not really enough creatures to make Phyrexian Tower worth using. Also I don't typically like artifact lands - they're basically worse than basic lands since they don't function with a Blood Moon and get hosed by other people's Null Rod, Back to Basics, or Vandalblast or By Force or whatever. You can't fetch them, etc. There's just not enough benefit since it's just to help turn on Mox Opal, it doesn't outweight all the risks.

And if you build it, let me know how it goes! I'd love to hear about it. If you're gonna try it out, you could just start with the build I have; it'll work pretty ok for a CEDH meta with several green-based decks. :)

nice work mmcgeach, what are your thoughts on using Final Parting as one card combo? is kinda expensive on mana.

what are budget replacement for Chains of Mephistopheles Leyline of the Void Engineered Explosives Lion's Eye Diamond Damnation

I'm not thrilled about Final Parting cause of the mana cost; also it's only good for setting up the WGD combo, which, I think works better if you can do it cheaper when you think the coast is clear.

There's no replacement for Chains, but it's not critical, it's just good disruption. Maybe use some other disruption, like Stranglehold? EE is pretty unique, and I think it's been reprinted recently. But you can just run another board wipe / pyroclasm effect. Same for Damnation. I don't know about leyline replacements, it's pretty strong (and asymetrical) relative to other GY hate; but, it's just disruption. If it's not great in your meta, don't worry about adding bad anti-GY tech. LED is pretty medium. Basically it's only good if you're already resolving wheel of fortune or yawgmoth's will.

Thanks for the fast response, loving your build so far, my LGS meta is like this: Rashmi (all time winner), animar creature beatwdown, niv mizzet, esper artifact reanimator and baral /tarland mono Blue counters. What adjustment would you made for this condition?

@hthomas88 I'm not sure about that meta... it sounds like a many fewer green-elf-mana based decks. I'd try dropping a pyroclasm or two, and adding some anti-blue, like Red Elemental Blast and possibly Boil. If they're leaning on artifacts a lot you could try adding additional anti-artifact stuff.

Of course, Chains of Mephistopheles sounds like it'd be good against Rashmi, Niv Mizzet, and Baral. ;)

Thanks for the guide, man!

I'm trying to enter cEDH meta in my city, all those gitrogs/tymna&thrasios/sisay stuff. My yuriko deck does not stand a chance:( And I don't want to join those "i play only tier 1 decks" guys. But your build looks really awesome and I've not seen a single Xantcha deck there. Will give it a try next game night.

@lamocomp1, sweet, glad you like it! Let me know how it goes. I'd be really interested to hear what works for you and what doesn't. GOOD LUCK!

Love the deck mate, Have you thought about adding a Sunscorched Desert ? Makes the Worldgorger Dragon loop lethal even without Xantcha, Sleeper Agent .

@CommanderSausage I'm not super keen on that; it's rare that I don't have Xantcha and can get the WGD combo going. Also the mana base is actually a little fragile because we're trying to run Blood Moon and still make 1BR by turn 3 every game. So that means there isn't much room for colorless lands. I think the colorless lands I most want to run are Grier Reach Sanitarium and Inventors' Fair , and I'm not sure there's really room for both. :/ Also maybe Bazaar of Baghdad , lol, but that's not actually that good.

mmcgeach hey, i love the deck. curious about your opinion on Volcanic Fallout . thanks :)

Hey there, I am doing a bit of research on The more competitive decks out there for my Stax deck.

• So the first question is: what kind of "Stax" or "Hate cards" would shut this deck down or make it impossible for you to win under certain singular or combined Effects?

• And the second question is about Sanctum Prelate as I am trying to gather as much information about the stopping power of calling specific CMC with this card vs certain strategies, Would you consider CMC ,, or CMC to be more effective here to disrupt your gameplan?

Hey man I followed your building this deck on Reddit and took part in some of the discussion you had with other Xantcha brewers there, I wanted to ask how this deck has performed for you in games (and against what decks)?

Also what would you recommend for someone who doesn't have access to a Lion's Eye Diamond?

Ok! So many comments to address.

@dRopbEAR33, I don't think you want volcanic fallout. It's 3 CMC for 2 damage which isn't great, and requires 2 red. Usually nobody wants to counter my pyroclasms anyway (decks with counterspells aren't flooding the board with dorks), so I don't think you need the uncounterability.

@Kiyomei, Thanks for your interest in this Top Tier Deck(tm). :) Yeah, well, if you read the deck description, there's basically two (three?) winning lines, one (two?) is a GY combo and one is paradox engine storm. So.... in the first case, anti-GY stuff is really good. In the second, anti-artifact stuff.

@Heepsakills, Glad you've liked the deck! Yes, this deck is actually pretty good. Like, surprisingly. There's a lot of decks that can be slowed down with pyroclasms. And then there's a lot of strong early plays you can make (WGD combo, blood moon, chains, waste not + wheel / inquiry, reanimate sire of insanity, in addition to just having a lot of fast mana to start drawing cards and accruing value). So the deck does pretty good. Although typically you can't stop most combos, so you sort of have to play politics and get the table to stop each other from comboing. This deck has great late-game strength if you can get past people's early combo attempts (Xantcha commander damage starts to add up, and you're draining one opponent dead as you activate Xantcha), so you're favored more and more as the game drags on.

Re: Lion's Eye Diamond , LED isn't like a good card. It's a decent combo piece with Yawgmoth's Will. It's usually too dangerous to play with a wheel (like, wheel, crack LED - that's a super dangerous play). The best thing to do with it is to play it out early, and then someone (always) wastes removal on it because it's a pricy card. It's the best bait ever. However, it's not that bad in Xantcha because you can just cycle it if you're top decking, and the deck has all the other things that combo with LED. You can just play anything else instead of LED.

Is Bonus Round worth keeping without LED? seeing as you'd need a different line to combo off there. Also Immolation Shaman from RNA is a weaker Harsh Mentor effect that doesn't die to Pyroclasm (just to consider).

Yeah, you def keep Bonus Round. Card is bonkers. You just need 1 more mana to go off w/o LED. I'm pretty sure you can replace it with Rite of Flame in the main bonus round line and you just need a spare {r}. Same goes for Grim Tutor, which could be replaced by diabolic tutor, although I'm not sure that'd really be worth doing.

Since Xantcha is a 5/5, maybe go for Languish instead of Damnation. It basically eliminates most key creatures and keeps her around to keep attacking.

@ryanstreet, So Languish is actually a pretty OK idea. I sort of like Damnation cause I like something that deals with everything. It's also not bad to have ways of killing Xantcha, so when you start making a million mana, and you kill the person with Xantcha, then she reverts back to your control - then you really want to kill her and recast her under someone else's control. Although, I guess I gotta be honest, I frequently play against The Gitrog Monster and I just need more ways to deal with it.

Languish does seem justifiable, tho... please let me know if you try it out!

mmcgeach when Xantcha comes back under your control, if your WGD combo is running, it just flickers automatically anyway, so you can put it under someone else's control. I do see your point though.

How do you feel about Devastating Dreams? Are mana rocks just too prevelant

Can anyone actually make Xantcha viable without resorting to Worldgorger or rings/basalt monolith combos? Seems this is the only way to win for this Commander.

@ryanstreet: Correct.

@stillenacht288: Devastating Dreams looks sort of like a cheaper but worse Death Cloud ... and I'm not actually that happy with Death Cloud as it is. :/ Yeah, people have rocks, but, the places where you want to blow up all the lands aren't too common - you have to have pretty significant Mana Rock Superiority(tm) to make that worthwhile. Maybe Devastating Dreams is actually a bit better than Death Cloud since you can ensure Xantcha survives, but, also discarding your whole hand asymetrically seems worse than the Death Cloud 's ability to Mind Twist the whole table.

@Yawgmoth73: that's an interesting question. I mean, not to answer, of course, but to consider how it's posed. You wonder if anyone can make Xantcha "viable," which is pretty subjective. The point of this deck is to make xantcha as "competitive" as possible, which is a lot easier to define - just winning the most games against the best decks. That's what I'm interested in. I'm not sure what "viable" is. You'd have to be more specific. Also this is made more difficult to understand because it seems like you're using "resorting" to denigrate certain combos - and combos are (obviously) the most efficient way to make decks "competitive." This means we need to understand "viable" as distinct from "competitive," so you must mean something else. Then you say "worldgorger dragon or rings/basalt" is "the only way to win" with this commander, which means that you didn't read the write up on the deck anyway. So I can't offer much help beyond that. :/

How exactly do you go off with Bonus Round ? Every time I had it in my hand, it felt completely useless :(