Thanks dubcomm! YOU are sick for checking out the deck! Yes exsanguinate is a bit of an anti-climax but seemed like the straight up most efficient way to do it, once you resolve songs of the damned for 30 mana you can do basically any finisher if you make slots for it. Now actually it's possible to do an entirely bug-based kill by looping the new Aatchik, Emerald Radian, which I'm almost certainly going to add just not sure what I'm swapping out yet. Maybe Exsanguinate is even cuttable now, lol. I'll have to think about this a bit :) Thanks for the +!

Oh, I'm just stupid lol I thought your commander was OG Elsha. Top IS great by itself plus you have the other combo pieces so maybe still worth consideration. I'd also say 22 lands is pretty low for a commander with 3 pips, though almost all your lands make colors which is good. Personally I've never been a fan of Mox Diamond in these land pinched decks, would rather just have another land drop. How about some aggro combat spells like Seize the Day or Waves of Aggression? These seem pretty good with prowess token spam, doesn't contribute to the combo plan but having different angles is nice and this seems like an advantage of your commander

If you're making a competitive Elsha deck you gotta put in the Top!! So you can cast it off the top of your deck with Elsha and draw unlimited cards, or something ^^

Hmmm... Amped Ramptor is banned in Modern, but Ragavan banned in legacy. So the natural solution is to play Vintage? lol, wait this is probably a Timeless deck right? Looks more interesting than the energy decks we see in Modern... That Enduring Innocence card is rough I'm glad more people don't run that!

If your pod is cool with thoracle combo backed up by force of will, fierce negation etc. and powered by rhystic then there's absolutely nothing wrong with that. With Hashaton it is a very powerful strat. You can even discard to Hash using LED with Angel's Grace on the stack and win completely un-interactable. I just think that at the average "4 bracket" table most players would be a little dismayed to see this. As I said before I think it's intended for more niche commanders but still allow them to run all the powerful cards for optimization. When you optimize the best commanders out there you end up with CEDH, naturally

Poly_raptor It turns out that when you run the strongest combos, free interaction, tutors, and card advantage in Esper with no limits and a top commander who has a hard to interact with reanimator ability that circumvents all traditional graveyard hate, you end up with CEDH lol. I for one would be pissed if this deck rolled up to a 'janky high power' or """bracket 4""" table, ugh I hate the brackets for this reason. Bracket 4 means no holds barred but sub-CEDH, so at that table I would expect to see decks utilizing high power cards to enable interesting strategies. As opposed to a big pile of the best staples trying to push out the most efficient combos in the whole format, this is more indicative of CEDH deckbuilding and gameplay.

Bracket 4 be lookin' a lot like CEDH from here

lol

Building a Roon deck in 2008 is wild considering he got printed in Commander 2013

I will tap my liver to drink target beer under my control

Beanarama lol that's because you just necrobumped this Return to Ravnica Standard deck from 11 years ago * cough * * blech * it is DUSTY in here

lol, this concept is great and Kadena makes perfect sense to actually get the beatdown value out cards like Tempting Wurm. You are already running pretty much everything I thought of recommending like Jokulmorder and Ovinomancer you got in the maybeboard. Ok I did a little digging and Inverter of Truth and Indentured Djinn may both be of interest, two efficiently costed flying beaters you could run. Sweet deck!

SlangNTrees13 Yup you need to hold up the mana. Usually by doing something like Fork + Jeska's WillGC or other rits, you can make 10+ mana somewhere around turn 5 and that's usually enough to cast 4 mana enchant + 4 mana polymorph. The most expensive line would be something like Collision of Realms into Worldfire needing 16 mana + a creature, this is still pretty attainable by copying/breaching rits in spellslinger fashion.

+1'd for Hero of Bladehold. God that card f'd my shit up so many times. This background makes my eyes hurt

This is freaking sweet. It's old school, and it's dragons. And you have the freaking Jokul/Worldgorger combo. I love it, pure oldschool EDH decks always have such a cool feel and I wish there was more of a community around playing them because I think then I'd be more incentivized to build one! This makes me want to build an all-Cephalid mono blue deck. Looks very clean and I love your use of staxy enchantments like Smoke and Mudslide to back up the dragon beats, though the latter does seem like a slight non-bo with Zirilan. AEther Flash is really cool too I don't think I've ever played with that one. Repercussion seems like it could be good in here especially in conjunction with cards like Earthquake. Maybe a backup MLD spell like Apocalypse could be nice considering you basically always have access to WGD and this is a very robust finisher. But understandable if you don't want tons of hard MLD in the deck, for social reasons :) +1

Thanks for the like on my Jaya deck, yo!

Neat idea and looks like a solid execution on a budget! To me this feels sort of like 60 card azorius control that you might see in standard But with a built in huge flying beater and card draw. Seems like it would work pretty well either in 1v1 where you are all tempo like a standard deck, or in multiplayer where you can sit back and accumulate cards, using interaction sparingly to stop key plays and eventually attritioning/beating players down, just like the 60 card deck would do with Hall of Storm Giants.

I was going to recommend more wrath but I suppose if you want to be attacked you don't want to wrath too much. Though wraths still seem really good to me in a deck with 43 instants, since you don't have much board commitment. Cards that can hard clear arts and enchants are generally very good, like Hour of Revelation, Planar Cleansing, and Urza's Ruinous Blast. But there's definitely tension between these and your mana rock acceleration. I think maybe a build is possible with more wrath and white catchup ramp that nets lands in place of the artifacts. Also Skyclave Relic is great for this. But the nonland wraths totally crush decks which over-commit to the board, such as the fast aggro or artifact based combo decks which could maybe out-speed and overwhelm you. Since you have a focus on protection for Isperia, wrathing then having her out on an empty board ready to chunk opponents seems pretty good. Finally on the topic of protection, it seems you have a lot of indestructible spells but not much hexproof for things like Plow. What about the classic Swiftfoot Boots? Haste makes a lot of sense too for a commander that wants to be attacking. Anyways that turned into a lot, lol. Cool deck!

Playing 1v1 vs a Marcheesa deck has got be one of the most annoying things possible in the game :)

"Most importantly, each piece of the combo can act independently, and is not a dead draw without the other pieces."

This is huge!! I totally agree and abide by this in my own deckbuilding. Especially in high power environments, staple combos that don't contribute or vibe with the rest of the deck are gonna be dead weight SO OFTEN. Anyways this list looks super strong! Cool stuff!

Cheers :) It's cool to see jank ally combos still getting some love in 2025