Kaalia, The Divine Dragonborn

Commander / EDH* LordShadowZ

SCORE: 8 | 10 COMMENTS | 2811 VIEWS | IN 3 FOLDERS

Theme: Aggro Beatdown / Free Creatures ft. Angels

Kaalia of the Vast is currently my oldest living and most carefully and lovingly constructed EDH deck. I believe I found a copy of her at my LGS one day and I bought her with little hesitation. With my already massive collection of angels, my Kaalia deck was born. I've never found a pure angel deck list I've been remotely happy with but Kaalia has by far been the best outlet for me to fulfill my desire for an angel tribal deck. This was my main deck for a long time but now she is second only to my Narset deck.

The deck was built to be extremely fast, extremely resilient, and very hard to stop, and while not specifically built to be at the level of cEDH it is probably the closest I will ever get to cEDH.

Transcendent of Time and Space

Commander / EDH LordShadowZ

SCORE: 2 | 4 COMMENTS | 1738 VIEWS | IN 1 FOLDER

Theme: Creatureless Superfriends / Control

I pulled a Narset, Enlightened Master in one of the prerelease booster packs for Khans of Tarkir and I fell in love with her immediately. She was everything I wanted in a commander: a hilariously powerful ability, great colors for control and shenanigans, and perfect for building a deck unique to me. She also gave me an outlet for all of my planeswalkers, and when Narset Transcendent was released in the following set, the deck became whole.

Narset has gone through more iteration than any of my other decks (besides Breya) because I love the deck and how it plays so much that I always want to improve it, to make it as good as I can. By the nature of planeswalkers it's a super casual deck but that's probably why it's my favorite deck, because I never know exactly how it will play out. I do not foresee any future where there is a commander I could possibly love to play more than Narset.

Breya, Infinity Shaper

Commander / EDH* LordShadowZ

184 VIEWS | IN 1 FOLDER

Theme: Infinite Combos ft. Artifacts

Breya, Etherium Shaper is an evolution of the second EDH deck I ever made/owned, the Commander 2013 Oloro pre-con. The deck started with very slight modifications to the pre-con list but I was never happy with it. At my school, I saw someone with a 60 card artifact combo deck using the classic Thopter Foundry + Sword of the Meek combo, and I was inspired. The deck was promptly dismantled and rebuilt from the ground up and became Enter the Thopters, an artifact-based combo deck, and I was finally happy with it.

After my hiatus from Magic I found the 4 color commanders and thought Breya was beautiful and awesome. I realized that she fit into a similar thematic role to how I used Oloro and she could replace him after some deck tweaking. It was a crazy thought at the time but two factors contributed to the decision. First, in my return to Magic and playing Oloro again I felt something was off and the deck needed something new. Second, I noticed that Oloro was my only non-female commander. Combined, these factors pushed the idea toward fruition. I drastically reworked the deck for the second time and in doing so, the deck became much more powerful, faster, refined, and explosive, with a commander that actually participates in the combos she creates. Breya taking command of the deck was definitely the right decision.

Atraxa, Plague Bringer

Commander / EDH* LordShadowZ

SCORE: 3 | 2 COMMENTS | 413 VIEWS | IN 1 FOLDER

Theme: -1/-1 & +1/+1 Counters, Proliferate

For a long time I was only running 3 EDH decks, though not for lack of trying. I came up with several new deck lists but none of which I was ever truly enthusiastic about. When I returned to Magic after a 2 year break I found the 4 color commanders, and when I saw Atraxa, Praetors' Voice I knew immediately that I'd found my next deck.

Since I already had a superfriends deck I needed to find a different, less conventional strategy to use with Atraxa. My first attempt was a stax deck but it didn't play like I wanted it to, so I reworked the deck to focus on -1/-1 counters, proliferate, and making big creatures, and finally taking full advantage of Atraxa's abilities. This will become my second deck to focus on the use of creatures but rely on them in an entirely different way, because I like experimenting with different types of strategies.

Queen of the Graveyard

Commander / EDH* LordShadowZ

SCORE: 4 | 612 VIEWS | IN 2 FOLDERS

Theme: Reanimator / Landfall

This story is quite simple. I went to the Dominaria prerelease, my first one since Kaladesh, and I happened to pull Muldrotha, the Gravetide as one of my promo foils. I had already been looking into building a reanimator deck with Meren of Clan Nel Toth at the helm, but fate handed me Muldrotha and she seemed like she would be far more powerful than Meren. Plus she gave me access to , the best color, so Muldrotha took over the build.

As I've never worked with using the graveyard as a resource before, this was the most difficult deck list I've ever had to put together. I spent a good two weeks to refine it down and get it to where I was overall quite happy with it, however after several play tests I found significant cracks in the armor and I had to spend even more time on it. The deck got a partial rework with a new sub-theme of lands which I believe makes Muldrotha far more lethal than she ever could be before.

This deck has definitely surprised me. I did not expect to enjoy playing it as much as I have and I look forward to the reanimation shenanigans being added into my deck rotation.

The Hidden Ones

Commander / EDH* LordShadowZ

SCORE: 2 | 185 VIEWS | IN 1 FOLDER

Theme: Ninjas / Rogues Tribal Trickery

Commander 2018 was a huge disappointment to me. I was looking forward to seeing cool new planeswalker led decks but the deck lists were lacking to say the least, and none of the planeswalkers really spoke to me. I was browsing random videos on YT discussing C18 and in one of them, Yuriko, the Tiger's Shadow caught my eye. For one, she was beautiful. Secondly, her abilities looked fun and interesting and the perfect level of shenanigans I like to utilize in my decks. Thirdly, ninjas. So, in the same YT session I found a budget Yuriko deck build which I used as a starting point and started adding some of my own ideas to it.

Honestly, I've been hesitant to build this deck physically because of my uncertainty of how it would actually play, but YT found me videos of other people playing Yuriko decks and as I hoped, the deck can be as crazy as I want it to be. As soon as I finish working on the major iterations and play tests of both Atraxa and Muldrotha I plan to build Yuriko as my 6th EDH deck, my first Ninja deck, and my 5th deck with blue in it. I really look forward to playing Yuriko and finding out just how insane she can get.

Zergling Rush

Commander / EDH* LordShadowZ

1 COMMENT | 62 VIEWS | IN 1 FOLDER

Theme: Slivers / Creature Steal

I have a long history with Slivers. I've been playing some version of a sliver deck pretty much since I started playing Magic, though for a long time I never thought making them into an EDH deck would be worthwhile. After my long hiatus from Magic I had an impulse to build as many decks as I felt inspired to do so, and in looking through what was left of my collection I happened to find Sliver Overlord, a card I don't ever remember owning. Since it's probably the best sliver commander, I wanted to quickly throw something together, to give my other commanders a pet.

I haven't put a lot of work into the deck list yet because of making revisions to other newly built decks and as soon as I'm completely happy with them I intend to go through this deck list and put together the final build.