I openly welcome feedback of any kind on the primer you're about to read, and I am also more than happy to offer my help and guidance on the community's Arcum decklists.
If you're looking to solicit my help, ask me questions, or just comment on the primer overall, I encourage you to do it via replying to this thread instead of via sending me a Private Message. That way, any help or suggestions I offer you can be viewed by the entire community instead of by only you and me, and the whole community can benefit from our discussion.
Thanks very much, and I hope you find the primer informative.
Arcum Dagsson
"Artifice sundered the world. It shall not again wreak such sorrow...
unless you use me as your EDH commander, then maybe it will."
Arcum is a card from Magic's history. His story begins on the plane of Dominaria, in a continent called Terisiare, right after the Brothers' War, the great battle between two powerful artificers Urza and his brother Mishra (under the sway of Yawgmoth, lord of Phyrexia--the ORIGINAL Phyrexia, not the Scars of Mirrodin New Phyrexia). To end the war, Urza retrieved and activated the Golgothian Sylex, an immensely powerful artifact of unknown origins that long predated either of the Brothers. The ensuing explosion of power destroyed both Urza's and Mishra's entire armies and, moreover, altered the very landscape of the plane itself, beginning an Ice Age.
When most of the major civilizations of Terisiare were obliterated by the Sylex blast, there began a new struggle to rebuild the broken continent. The most powerful of new nations that arose was Kjeldor, and in Kjeldor was a city full of artificers called Soldev, and the most marvelous artificer in that city was none other than Arcum Dagsson. With memories of the War still fresh in their minds, however, a splinter faction of Soldevi (called Soldevi Adnates), led by aptly-named Sorine Relicbane, remained mistrustful of artifice. Despite Arcum's argument that artifacts could in fact be used for peace and goodness, the meddling of the Adnates caused Arcum's steam giants to go out of control. Arcum used his abilities to stop his creations' rampage, but not before they destroyed all of Soldev.
Following this disaster, Arcum spent the rest of his life in penance, trying to make amends for the damage his own artifice had caused. He died of a heart attack two years after the fall of Soldev at the approximate age of 66.
Arcum's ability, "T:Target artifact creature's controller sacrifices it..." is, lore-wise, representative of Arcum's ability as an artificer to dismantle powerful artifact creatures. The idea is that if your opponent is packing a Darksteel Colossus, Arcum can make your opponent sacrifice it and turn it into something harmless, like Darksteel Relic. Ironically, in EDH, we employ Arcum to the exact opposite of his lore effect: we turn harmless artifact creatures, like Manakin, into extremely powerful non-creature artifacts, like Darksteel Forge.
As with other tutor-on-a-stick commanders like Zur, Sisay, and so forth, the main reason Arcum excels in EDH is that he almost completely eliminates the randomness intrinsic to this 100-card singleton format. Your overall goals will generally be the same each match, and your set of wincons will generally be the same each match. If you're looking for a commander who will give you a unique experience each time, Arcum might not be your man. That said, Arcum is far from an "uninteractive" deck. As I will explain later, Arcum's ability allows you to devote a section of your deck to "silver bullet" (aka "toolbox") cards. Knowing how to customize your toolbox for each matchup and how to employ these silver bullets most effectively during the match itself demands a masterful understanding of your opponents' strategies and the overall metagame. I always like to say that in order to play Arcum most effectively you should be able to pilot your opponents' decks as if they were your very own!
Anyway, here's a short and sweet list to help you out...
You may enjoy Arcum if:
you like playing a top-tier commander (read: you like winning).
you like powerful artifact combos.
you like extremely consistent decks.
you know your metagame well. (This is very important.)
you like taking control of a match.
You may not enjoy Arcum if:
you like alpha striking for massive damage to win.
Without a doubt, there are innumerous ways to "correctly" build a competitive Arcum deck, particularly considering that the EDH metagame may vary drastically from one playgroup to another. I wholly respect other players' unique approaches, and moreover I encourage you to share your personal strategies and favorite singletons with me such that I may further tune my list to be as strong as possible not only in my personal metagame but in all metagames.
That said, if you're going to be following my personal advice on how to build Arcum, you should understand my personal philosophy on how to build Arcum. The material I wrote below was composed in the mindset that Arcum will always generate tremendous hate no matter how politically palatable you build him, and my solution to this is simply to ignore politics and my opponents' happiness altogether--or rather, to win the game before they even become relevant. My competitive decklist's singular goal is to win--and to do it more efficiently and consistently than any other deck around, regardless of the politics or fun-factor of the match (to me, winning is where the fun comes in).
I do not and never will prioritize politics or utilize more palatable wincons or card decisions if I feel personally that those decisions are suboptimal to victory, which is why you won't find any Blightsteel Colossus or Lifeline in my mainboard (Lifeline might make a good sideboard option in certain matchups and metas, but I wouldn't use it as a full-time substitute for Myr Turbine or any other combo piece). It's also the reason why you'll find a heavier stax element in my list than in other lists here on MTGS, including the utterly-backbreaking and widely-loathed stax card Possessed Portal. Personally I don't mind if my opponents are annoyed or upset when I take their resources away so they can't play; it might seem unfun or unpolitical, but I just call it winning securely.
Concisely, this is the core deck mindset or philosophy that distinguishes my list from others: if you're playing Arcum as your commander, A) you're clearly looking to play a strong deck and B) you're invariably going to be hated no matter what you do...so you mind as well go balls-out, throw politics and fun out the window, and hone in solely on victory. That's the mentality behind other top decks in this format like Hermit Druid combo and Azami, and that's the mentality you'll find here.
A few other basic notes on overall deck design to help you grasp my philosophy:
Those of you who are Legacy "Spiral Tide" players will already be familiar with the concept of a wishboard, a collection of "silver bullet" instants not in the maindeck that can be retrieved from outside the game by casting Cunning Wish. My deck does not employ a wishboard, and here's the main reason why. Wishboards and even sideboards are only legal on a group-by-group basis, and from the same thread it seems many playgroups, Local Game Stores, and tournaments do not permit them. As a result, I try to keep my 'board to a minimum, with the most widely-applicable metagame choices included directly in the mainboard, and no Cunning Wishboard. This design ensures that my deck will never be compromised by local variations in rules; all of my silver bullets are right where I need them.
Some players have chosen to eschew the typical forge/lattice/disk wincon under the premise that it's too slow because you have to resolve only one piece at a time. In my list, I still use forge/disk/lattice as the primary game-winning play. As you'll read in my primer below, in competitive play you should NEVER assemble our game-winning disk/forge/lattice combo one at a time unless you absolutely have to. The reality of the matter is that we instead endeavor to put all three pieces into play on the same turn (generally t5-8 after a softlock, or t3-4 if going all-in speed) for the win.
As hinted at above, I don't use Lifeline as a substitute for Myr Turbine in my decklist, because Turbine can be used in a very powerful combo with Clock of Omens, and additionally Lifeline defends my opponents against my backbreaking stax elements like Possessed Portal. I also don't use any big aggro wincons like Blightsteel Colossus, Darksteel Colossus, or Steel Hellkite, because A) these cards all make your deck vulnerable to the ubiquitous Bribery, B) they're dead draws in your hand, and C) our numerous other wincons are all faster and more consistent anyway. Again, if these big fatties are your definition of "fun," even when they're Bribery'd out and turned against you, then you might wish to consider a different Arcum build than mine.
But now we're getting ahead of ourselves--those of you new to Arcum might not have understood those last two bullets at all. And so without further ado...
From the time I started playing this deck until the present day, I think I've probably tried most every ridiculous thing you can do with an Arcum deck, except maybe artifact aggro. It didn't even begin as a combo list--it was more of a Mono-U Control list with Arcum as a wincon. That just goes to show you how offbeat I was when I started out.
Of course as I moved into more competitive circles, Arcum just didn't cut it as a MUC commander anymore. I still wanted to play MUC, so I ended up splitting that idea off into what is today my Azami, Lady of Scrolls list, and then I made Arcum my dedicated combo list. I yanked all the draw and countermagic except for the very best of the bunch. I concluded that monolith/top/rings (explained below) was the fastest route to victory, and I reworked the deck such that the only goal became resolving those three artifacts as soon as possible.
Subsequently, with my discovery of the largely-neglected card Possessed Portal and Magic's printing of toolbox artifacts like Torpor Orb and Grafdigger's Cage, I expanded my Arcum list from being strictly-linear in its performance to being much more metagame dependent. It's safe to say the addition of these and similar cards has increased the power of this deck dramatically.
Most recently of all, Kaladesh block brought us Paradox Engine, one of the most powerful artifacts printed in a very long time, adding an entirely new victory route (described below) that's faster than any this deck has ever known.
Step 1: Drop Arcum asap with haste (e.g. Hall of the Bandit Lord) or protection (e.g. Neurok Stealthsuit) or both (e.g. Lightning Greaves). Step 2: Create an engine--details below. (Optional Step 2.5: Obtain Olivia Wilde) Step 3: Cast Walking Ballista with infinite mana and ping everyone to death.
==How to play Arcum, exhaustively==
Arcum Dagsson is often likened to "Tinker on a stick." His power comes from the fact that he places fetched artifacts directly onto the battlefield instead of into the hand (which is why Tinker is so much better than Fabricate). Granted, he has the restriction that he can only target artifact creatures and can only fetch noncreature artifacts--but with all the cheap, mana-dork artifact creatures and powerful noncreature artifacts in the game, it's a restriction we can easily play around.
Arcum is considered by many to be kind of a dbag commander, so expect to catch a lot of hate right from the beginning of the game.
Dbag commander indeed! Anyone who's played against Arcum Dagsson before will recognize his power and his threat to the table as soon as you identify him as your commander and place him in the command zone. Unless the table is something like Arcum, Sharuum, Zur, and Prossh, you're going to be the one that people hate the most. Never play Arcum without something to back him up unless you got a crazy starting hand and are casting him on like T1 when your opponents are tapped out. Barring that, you have 3 options to keep the old geezer safe:
Cast Arcum with haste and an artifact creature already on the field and immediately tutor for Lightning Greaves.
Cast Arcum with neither haste nor shroud and defend him until your next turn with countermagic (avoid if possible, especially in games with 3+ opponents).
Ideally, you want to drop a manadork turn 2 to ramp into Arcum turn 3 and either give him shroud immediately or give him haste and use his ability (saccing the mana dork) to fetch him shroud. If, while you do all this, you still have some mana open and cards in hand to Counterspell your opponents' stuff, that's even better.
Step 2: Create an engine
By this time you will probably have exhausted most of your opening hand just to play Arcum and secure him on the battlefield. But the game's just begun--you still need to assemble your game-winning combo (see step 3) to win. In order to kick out your game-winning combo, you need an engine, a repeatable method of gaining resources. With any luck I will still have some cheap artifact dorks in my hand, but often I won't, and in those scenarios I will often use Arcum's first tap to fetch Myr Turbine.
The turbine and Arcum together form the simplest engine in the deck; as you go into goldfish mode, the Turbine ensures you can tutor for any noncreature artifact at least once on each of your turns, no matter what you topdeck. Additionally, as you'll soon read, the Turbine is a cornerstone of many of our strongest combos and interactions; as long as it's on the field, we can seamlessly transition between our main and secondary strategies as necessary.
With turbine + Arcum alone, you can successfully win the game in at most 3 more turns, which for many casual-oriented players might already might seem like a pretty short clock...but in competitive play, it's not quite short enough. Your opponents will still have plenty of time to come up with a solution--Return to Dust, perhaps, or Toxic Deluge to wipe your board...heavens forbid they play Null Rod!
Instead, the overarching goal is use Arcum and your dorks in addition to whatever tutors you draw in your hand (Transmute Artifact, Fabricate, and so forth) to assemble the following combo, which is much faster:
This combo only requires 2 Arcum activations to assemble, half as many turns needed as turbine + Arcum alone. Tutor for Rings first, then sacrificing two dorks at once you can tutor for the monolith and staff at the same time by copying Arcum's activation ability with the rings.
This combo effectually provides you with infinite (OK, "arbitrary") colorless mana and infinite card draw, allowing you to draw and play your entire deck--including your game-winning combo and the countermagic to protect it! An explanation is provided below of how Rings and Monolith work together to produce infinite colorless:
Copy untap ability of Monolith using Rings, paying 2.
In response to the first untap ability, tap Monolith, let second untap ability resolve, tap monolith again.
Thus, together these cards become "Pay 5: Add 6 to your mana pool," and this can be repeated infinitely.
Almost always, Rings + Monolith + Staff will be solely responsible for your many victories. They are the exemplar of a great combo: not only are the three pieces efficiently priced, each piece is powerful by itself such that you gain tempo and card advantage even as you assemble them; they are never dead draws. Also note that this entire combo can be deployed and executed at instant speed--not only can you combo off on your opponents' turn, but you can keep comboing off in response to a removal spell. For example, if, in response to one of your activated abilities during your combo, your opponent casts Naturalize targeting Rings of Brighthearth, you can simply keep on producing infinite mana and drawing your deck in response. By the time that Naturalize reaches the top of the stack, you'll have already won the game or else drawn into something to counter it. In summary, only effects which freeze the stack, such as Split Second cards like Krosan Grip and Wipe Away, can stop this combo once it gets started.
Worthy of note is that for several years prior to April 2013, Sheldon and the EDH rules committee had Staff of Domination on the EDH banlist. Any veteran EDH player will tell you, though, that Arcum had been a top-tier commander long before Staff's unbanning. Prior to April 2013 we used Sensei's Divining Top as the draw component in the engine, such that the combo looked like this:
The first Top activation will draw you a new card; the second activation will draw you the Top again.
Thus, together these cards become "Pay 3: Draw a card," and with infinite colorless mana this can be repeated infinitely.
Note that the Top engine suffers from one critical flaw: one of the steps in the combo to draw infinite cards is hardcasting and resolving Top for each card drawn, which can only be done at sorcery speed. So, building on the example I gave earlier, if in response to one of your Top hardcasts, one of your opponents casts Disenchant targeting Rings of Brighthearth, you cannot simply keep drawing cards in response: Disenchant resolves first, your Rings are destroyed, your engine is thwarted, all while Top is stuck on the stack. This is why Staff, which evades this pitfall, has supplanted Top as our go-to draw component for our primary engine.
Of course we still run Sensei's Divining Top in our Arcum decklists nowadays, because it's such a great card on its own for manipulating topdecks and we'd never cut it for anything, so this older combo is still wholly valid and usable today. Indeed, in some ways it's even easier to deploy than Rings/Monolith/Staff because Top is just 1 cmc and can therefore be tutored for and played more easily through non-Arcum methods. If you don't suspect instant-speed removal will be a problem, or you don't plan on comboing off on an opponent's turn, or perhaps your Staff of Domination simply gets removed, always remember that you can fall back to the classic Rings/Monolith/Top engine that Arcum decks have relied on for many years prior to April 2013.
So Rings + Monolith + Staff (or Rings + Monolith + Top) already has the deck down to a "two-tap clock," so to speak--two Arcum taps is game over. But most recently of all, a card was printed that almost single-handedly provides an even faster solution, a one-tap clock, and that is Paradox Engine, as part of the following combo:
Cast any spell. Paradox's trigger goes on the stack, untapping everything (including Arcum).
Tap Arcum again saccing the other dork. Fetch Citanul Flute, tap flute for X=0 fetching Memnite. Play Memnite, everything untaps due to Paradox.
Tap Arcum again saccing Memnite to fetch Basalt Monolith. Tap Monolith for 3; tap Flute for X=0 again to fetch Ornithopter. Play Ornithopter; everything untaps due to Paradox, and 3 remains in the pool.
Now you have Rings, Basalt Monolith untapped, and 3 in the pool. Proceed to generate infinite mana as described above; use Citanul Flute and Arcum to play whatever artifacts from the deck you want, or just fetch Staff and draw your deck.
Almost always it will be best to prioritize Paradox Engine into Rings/Monolith/Staff(or Top). Its speed, efficiency, and consistency places it head-and-shoulders above other engines--all you need is 1 Arcum tap to fetch Paradox, 1 dork on the board, and the mana to cast any spell, and you can win the game that same turn. However, we do have another option that, while usually somewhat slower to assemble and more challenging to activate, also works entirely at instant speed and can lead to some unique wincons that would normally be unreachable to us, like aggro. Here it is:
The good news, as with the previous engine, is that each card, on its own, is already exceedingly useful to us in a myriad of other ways (particularly Myr Turbine as I mentioned earlier), so you're never "wasting" a tutor or running into a dead draw as you assemble these artifacts. Unlike the Rings/Monolith/Staff combo, though, this engine requires some manipulation and foresight to work properly.
Firstly, Arcum Dagsson can't have Shroud. This is vitally important. If you're planning on using this engine, choose Swiftfoot Boots as your protective equip of choice, or be ready to leave Arcum vulnerable for the duration of the combo.
Then, you'll probably want to tutor out Myr Turbine after playing Clock of Omens and attempt to use them and your mana to create as many permanents on your side of the field as possible. Lastly, on your combo turn, you'll search out Mycosynth Lattice. With sufficient untapped permanents (all of which are now artifacts), you can use Clock of Omens's ability to repeatedly untap Arcum and tutor out a few cards at instant speed: Basalt Monolith and Rings of Brighthearth. Now you're ready to combo.
Rings + Basalt gives you infinite mana as described above. Go ahead and generate a bunch.
Tap Basalt and any other untapped permanent--we'll call it Permanent X; it could even be Clock itself--to activate Clock of Omens' ability. Copy Clock's ability with Rings by paying 2.
Use one copy of Clock's ability to untap a permanent of your choice (for example, Arcum) and the other copy to untap Permanent X.
Untap Basalt by paying 3. Now the engine is fully reloaded, and the cycle can begin anew.
You can now untap your entire board at will, repeatedly activating at instant speed any permanent of your choice, including Arcum himself for infinite tutors, Staff of Domination for infinite draw/infinite life, Myr Turbine for infinite tokens, Null Brooch for infinite countermagic, and so forth.
In the event that Rings of Brighthearth is exiled, you can still use a Clock-based engine to combo off, although it becomes slightly more difficult to do so as you'll require some more preparation. There are two possibilities to do so, each with different setups.
Possibility #1: The setup for this one is that you will need to create a source of infinite mana beforehand. As explained later in this primer, this will most likely end up being Power Artifact enchanted on a monolith. Instead of tutoring up Rings and Basalt to start the combo, instead tutor up both monoliths (or whichever one you don't have out already): Basalt Monolith and Grim Monolith.
Generate a bunch of mana from your pre-assembled infinite mana combo.
With Mycosynth Lattice, you can once again untap your entire board at will, most importantly Arcum for infinite tutors.
Possibility #2: This is by far the most fragile of the Clock combos as it requires the most pieces, but we already run all the cards for it anyway as part of our other combos so I feel it's worth a mention. The setup for this one is that you need two copies of Staff of Domination on your side of the field, and an artifact that taps for 3 or more. This means you'll first need to stick Staff of Domination and then copy it, preferably in the same exact turn so as to minimize your opponents' opportunity to react. There are three efficient copy effects available to Arcum; my list runs two mainboard and one sideboard: Copy Artifact, Phyrexian Metamorph, and Sculpting Steel. Remember that only Sculpting Steel, as a noncreature artifact, is tutorable by Arcum. You'll also need an artifact that taps for 3 or more, which include Grim Monolith and Basalt Monolith (both of which, again, are already in our deck for their overall utility). If you can manage to get all of that set up without your opponents interfering, then the combo is simple:
Use each staff's ability, "1: Untap Staff of Domination" to untap both staves by spending a total of 2.
Thus, together these cards become "Pay 2: Add 3 to your mana pool." This can be repeated infinitely for infinite mana, which can then be turned into infinite card draw, life, untaps, etc. through further use of Staff of Domination and Clock of Omens.
Now that your engine of choice is set up, all that's left to do is win.
Step 3: Win the game
In the past, the way we won was by using our engine of choice (usually Rings/Monolith/Staff, as Paradox didn't exist back then) to generate infinite mana, draw infinite cards, and assemble the following combo using the countermagic we drew along with the rest of our deck to ensure nothing goes wrong at this critical phase:
This combo effectively destroyed all permanents on the board except ours. It worked well because it didn't target anyone, so it couldn't be stopped by player shroud effects (like Grapeshot or Blue Sun's Zenith or Disciple of the Vault all could) and because it was indestructible.
But at the same time it had a major drawback: Darksteel Forge and Nevinyrral's Disk were almost always dead draws when they showed up in the hand. We never really cast them outside of the combo. And let's be honest--player shroud effects like Ivory Mask aren't all that common an issue to begin with. So, in the interest of streamlining, when Kaladesh came out, both of those cards were moved to the binder-board in place of:
Since we already had infinite mana by the time we got around to playing Forge/Disk/Lattice in the first place, we can now simply use infinite mana to cast Walking Ballista for x=1000 and ping everybody to death. Making that swap freed up 1 card slot, and it saves us from occasionally having to topdeck or mulligan into Darksteel Forge or Nevinyrral's Disk, which used to be one of the weakest and most frustrating things this deck could do.
Some scenarios may call for a change of plan. What if your Paradox Engine gets hit by Revoke Existence? What if your Walking Ballista gets Jester's Capped away before you have a chance to play it? Luckily, we have control options that can be deployed at one of two times:
Before assembling our game-winning combo, in order to soft-lock our opponents while we work on building a hard lock or combo. This is made even easier with our plethora of fast mana sources, including most notably Metalworker, unbanned as of September 2014.
Instead of our game-winning combo, in the event that our combo gets disrupted by any means and recovering it in time to win is infeasible, or if the game-state is such that formation of a hard lock is simply faster.
Easily the most powerful contingency plan available, and it's one of our signature weapons--no other EDH deck can deploy it and survive with it as quickly and smoothly as we can. Smokestack effects have always been powerful, and when you combine a stax effect with an Uba Mask-esque hand lock, the result is game-ending (thus the vintage deck, Uba Stax, was born).
Against nearly all decks, Possessed Portal puts a full halt to the game for as long as it remains in play: no cards can be drawn, and each player's board position slowly declines. It cripples shotgun decks like Yisan, Wanderer Bard who unload their hand and hit goldfish early; it cripples control/draw-go decks like Doomsday, forcing them to discard their hands and punishing them for playing so few permanents; it even cripples many combo decks, including Azami, Lady of Scrolls and the mirror match against other Arcum Dagsson players, whose game-winning combos involve drawing infinite cards.
The good news for us is that we come prepared! We have a tutoring general at our disposal and fodder-enablers like Crucible of Worlds, Myr Turbine, and Unwinding Clock already in our deck or sideboard as part of our main strategy. With proper setup, therefore, we can hold out indefinitely and even advance our position under Possessed Portal while your opponents wither away.
Just remember: the portal works on each end step, not just yours. Thus when the portal's out you need to produce one fodder for each turn to fully mitigate the reciprocal effect, and one more fodder than that to advance your game state by fueling Arcum. Unwinding Clock/Dross Scorpion + Myr Turbine by themselves net you one token per turn, so any additional untap effects (such as Voltaic Key) or fodder producers (such as Crucible of Worlds) will allow you to advance.
Because it works on each end step, Possessed Portal becomes more brutal as more players are at the table. Use it with caution and make sure you have a plan to generate enough fodder to not only feed the portal but also to feed Arcum. When you drop the portal, people will hate you, and they will do everything in their power to defeat you; you may need to tutor out additional protection, such as Ensnaring Bridge or Darksteel Forge, to convince your opponents to throw in the towel.
With the inclusion of Metalworker (more on him below) it's now possible to consistently power out Possessed Portal as early as T3 even if you don't have the tools to support it indefinitely, treating it like a sort of Tangle Wire on steroids--you play around it for 1-2 turns then sac it to itself, while your unprepared opponents degrade to nothing. Even if it means giving up your entire hand and wiping nearly your entire board position back to Turn 0, your opponents will have suffered the same fate by the end of it, and if you can use that coverage to safely secure a shrouded Arcum and a single artifact creature (which can then be sacrificed for Myr Turbine to power subsequent sacs), then for all practical purposes you've won the game.
As with any early stax play, this sort of blitzkrieg backbreaker requires premeditation and a skilled execution, even moreso than tutoring out the Portal with Arcum because you don't have the luxury of fetching whatever you need to help you stay afloat next turn. If you've played Mono-W Stax or similar decks in Legacy, or any form of vintage stax, you'll be well-acquainted with this process already. At the moment you drop Possessed Portal, you need to be fully aware of your gamestate, how many turns you plan on keeping the portal out (ideally 1-2), and how many sacrifices/discards you'll make along the way. Always remember you can sacrifice Portal to itself! That alone tips the card's reciprocity heavily in your favor in the same way Tangle Wire can tap itself.
Metalworker + Staff of Domination + 3 artifacts in hand
The September 2014 banlist changes, including the unbanning of Metalworker, have already sparked all sorts of controversy. Whether 'worker gets re-banned in the future, only time will tell, but for as long as it stays unbanned, it will stay in Arcum's arsenal.
Any creature that can generate 5 or more mana in a single tap combos infinitely with Staff of Domination, and Metalworker is no exception (ironically, it was this very mechanic that led to Staff's banning years ago). You pay 3 to untap the creature, 1 to untap the Staff, and have 1 or more left over, and this can be repeated infinitely. All you need is 3 artifacts in the hand so Metalworker can generate 6 per tap.
Put 'worker and Staff together and you've got infinite mana and card draw (and infinite life and creature taps, if those happen to be relevant somehow). Proceed to win the game as described above.
There are a few reasons I am not listing Metalworker+Staff as the main engine of this deck, even though it is an exceedingly powerful combo and well within our capability to assemble, and you should keep these in mind as you play. Strong though he may be, Metalworker does have his shortcomings compared to the main Rings/Basalt/Staff combo:
He is a creature; therefore, he cannot be tutored for with Arcum, though granted he is still easily within our reach thanks to our plethora of non-Arcum artifact tutors (and, on the flip side, Metalworker can be used as a sacrificial dork to power Arcum).
Again, he is a creature; therefore, he is vulnerable to a multitude of spells that would have no effect on our main combo, including most notably typical creature removal.
He stipulates that artifacts must be in your hand for him to generate mana, so he synergizes negatively with Null Brooch or a Possessed Portal lock.
His combo potential is limited to Staff, whereas other combo pieces in this deck all have multiple different assembly options.
These drawbacks do not in any way make Metalworker a bad card--he's still godlike--but they must be kept in mind during your play.
All in all, the unbanning of Metalworker has made Arcum much, much stronger, functioning as mana battery, combo piece, and Arcum fodder all at the same time, enabling nasty T2 Arcum drops or T3 portal softlocks. With Metalworker at his side, Arcum's place is secured even more solidly at the pinnacle of EDH power.
Power Artifact + one of the Monoliths = arguably the most straightforward 2-card infinite mana combo in the entire game, and unlike other combos that involve Rings of Brighthearth, this one isn't "telegraphed" is much--that is to say, your opponents can't see it coming quite as easily as they can see something's broken about to happen when you tutor out Rings or Metalworker. Grim Monolith looks like a simple one-shot mana rock like Mana Vault before BAM, tutor for Staff with Arcum, cast Power Artifact on Grim Monolith, draw your deck and good game. Similar to Metalworker, this one is a "contingency plan" because, as an enchantment, Power Artifact is harder to find; the only card we have to tutor for it is Muddle the Mixture via transmute. As a result, you won't be seeing this combo all that frequently, but when you do happen to topdeck Power Artifact or Muddle the Mixture, you should immediately realize that your combo victory is just a blink away.
Alpha strike to win (Tezzeret the Seeker/Myr Turbine)
Really? Aggro? We're playing blue, after all. Swinging in for combat damage is so below us, not to mention almost always infeasible in a multiplayer competitive setting. But we can win with aggro as a last resort if necessary--the option is certainly available, and it's important as a combo player to keep in mind all of your options. Tezzeret turns all artifacts into 5/5 beatsticks, and also as mentioned previously in the "Create an engine" section, Myr Turbine in combination with infinite mana and Clock of Omens can produce infinite 1/1 Myr tokens, as can a Hangarback Walker cast for 1000/1000 with infinite mana.
Core cards make the deck work and are mandatory in every list, budget permitting. While they are mostly self-explanatory, understanding how each one works is vital to your success, and I'll elaborate on some of the heaviest hitters that I run in my list above. With the sole exceptions of countermagic and planeswalkers, all of these cards are artifacts, so instead of grouping them by type, they are grouped here by function.
Primary Utility Artifacts
These artifacts facilitate our Plan A: drop and secure Arcum, fetch combo, win. Look for these in an opening hand!
Lightning Greaves
Most every commander-centric deck runs these anyway, but in Arcum they're especially important because they can be tutored for, and indeed, if Arcum isn't already protected by shroud, these will often be the very first thing you tutor for.
Thousand-Year Elixir
Gives Arcum and dorks pseudo-haste and lets you activate Arcum twice a turn--what's not to love?
Dross Scorpion/Unwinding Clock
While earlier I discussed these two cards' utility when working under Possessed Portal, they're still extremely powerful even when you're working on Plan A, as they grant a tremendous tempo advantage with the right tools. For example, you can untap Myr Turbine and Thousand-Year Elixir to pull off an Arcum activation on each player's turn, not just your turn.
Clock of Omens
Even when not functioning as part of the engine described above, Clock of Omens still packs tremendous utility. It turns artifacts that don't normally tap for anything useful, like those Lightning Greaves that Arcum is wearing or that Torpor Orb sitting off to the side, into half-Voltaic Keys, which can be used to untap mana rocks, Myr Turbine, anything you need. It's tremendous tempo advantage by itself.
Staff of Domination
Unbanned as of April 2013 and found its place immediately as an instant-speed replacement for Sensei's Divining Top in the Rings/Monolith/Top (now Rings/Monolith/Staff) engine and as a replacement for Planar Portal in the Clock/Lattice engine. Its uses, however, extend beyond simply functioning as part of an engine, because it single-handedly and instantly turns infinite mana from your other combos like Power Artifact + Grim Monolith into infinite cards and infinite life--and even on its own, the "3: Untap target creature" ability is dandy for achieving multiple Arcum activations per turn in a similar manner to Thousand-Year Elixir.
Contingency Utility Artifacts
When Plan A doesn't cut it and you're shifting to a contingency plan, or to support plan A en route to its finale, these artifacts are here to help.
Kuldotha Forgemaster
Arcum #2. Costs 5 instead of 3U and requires three artifacts to sac, but those artifacts don't have to be creatures, and the thing you fetch doesn't have to be a non-creature. In other words, Kuldotha can fetch Metalworker, and is one of the only tutors we have to do so. Prior to Metalworker's unbanning I didn't run Kuldotha, but for the time being I think it's worth it, even with his steep cost. Recently moved to the sideboard; use as you feel necessary.
Master Transmuter/Metalworker
Arcum Dagsson's biggest limitation is that he can only hit stuff in the library. To that end, we need a device that can serve as an Arcum for other game zones, most particularly our hand, as we alreadyhavenumerouscards at our disposal to recur our artifacts from the graveyard to our hand.
Before September 2014, this role was filled by Master Transmuter. She could cheat out a fat Possessed Portal or Darksteel Forge onto the field even if they were stuck in our hand where Arcum couldn't touch them. Her ability can even cheat out artifact creatures, which was nice, if not quite as useful in this deck as elsewhere. And, lastly, she was herself an artifact creature, so she could fuel Arcum's ability (or even her own ability) when her usefulness had expired.
With the unbanning of Metalworker in September 2014, though, poor M.T. is now relegated to the sideboard in my list. As the song goes, "anything you can do, I can do better," and this is certainly true with this swap. M.T. wins out in the sexy department, but Metalworker is faster, cheaper, more flexible, and more combo-riffic than M.T., and he's still Arcum fodder when he needs to be.
M.T.'s ability is still useful in the same matchups as I described before (for example, needle-heavy metas) and so she will remain in the sideboard to be switched in as necessary vs those matchups. And she's still a great option to fill this role for those of you who don't have a Metalworker in your collection or don't want to spend the money to get one.
Do not mourn the loss of Master Transmuter. It is the nature of artifice to constantly upgrade toward perfection. She understands this. It's what she would have wanted.
Trinisphere
Another page from the stax book. Legacy and Vintage stax ramp into Trinisphere to a) deny opponents their own mana rocks in the opening turns, b) control the early-game window T1-2 when the powerhouse 4cmc card (Arcum for us, Smokestack) is usually yet to see play, and c) to hamstring all tempo into the mid- and late-game by imposing a hard floor of 3cmc on every spell. We use it in exactly the same way: T1 dump rocks, play Trinisphere. Your rocks are on the field producing mana as normal, but your opponents' rocks become much weaker. Cards like Sol Ring and Mana Crypt aren't nearly as pretty when they cost 3, and cards like Lotus Petal and Mox Diamond are practically unplayable at that price. Control decks ache too: Counterspell becomes Cancel, for example, and "free spells" like Force of Will and Snuff Out are made trash as they cost an additional 3 even if the alternate cost is paid. Meanwhile our most important cards--Arcum, Rings, Staff, Metalworker, etc.--are happily unaffected, as they already cost 3-4 cmc to begin with. And finally, as an artifact, it synergizes with literally everything in this deck. Recently moved to the sideboard due to negative synergy with Paradox Engine combo, but one of these days I'd like to add it back in...
Tangle Wire
AKA miniature Possessed Portal. It functions the same way, denying everyone resources while giving you a slight advantage (you can tap Tangle Wire to its own ability to keep yourself one permanent ahead), but its effectiveness is limited to the first few turns (unlike Portal which freezes the game anytime) and it can't be sealed into a hard-lock. Still, it buys us a lot of time to get our hefty 4cmc commander on the field, and we'll usually have plenty of things that don't actually matter if they're tapped down (utility pieces like Torpor Orb and Pithing Needle, utility dorks like Dross Scorpion and Spellskite, tokens, Arcum's shoes, and so forth), while our opponents are tapping down more valuable items like lands or things with T abilities.
Chalice of the Void
As the competitive EDH meta becomes only faster with increased power creep, cards like Chalice which thwart low-CMC spells become only stronger (which is why nowadays a lot of competitive decks even run Mental Misstep). Occasionally set to 0 to hose all the best mana rocks and pacts (note that this also turns off Paradox Engine combo however); most often set to 1 to hose all the best mana rocks as well as powerful spells like Reanimate, Dark Ritual, and many of the best draw/tutors/countermagic; rarely set to 2 to hose many of the strongest spells in the entire format (think Survival of the Fittest, Demonic Tutor, etc.) as well as the best countermagic and removal. Can also be used like a mini-Trinisphere (dump rocks, play Chalice at 0 or 1). Remember Arcum's ability puts cards onto the battlefield and therefore circumvents Chalice (so a chalice at cmc=2 won't stop Arcum from fetching Lightning Greaves, for example).
Winter Orb/Static Orb/Thorn of Amethyst
Slowing down others makes hefty 4cmc Arcum much "quicker" by comparison. These are pretty self-explanatory I think. The fact that they're all artifacts and can interact with everything in this deck is gravy for us. Our untap effects like Paradox Engine and Unwinding Clock mitigate the reciprocal impact of the Orbs, and most of the spells we cast are creatures anyway (Arcum, dorks).
Spine of Ish Sah
Tap Arcum to Vindicate at instant speed. Very slow, and a dead draw when in the hand, but it's one of the only "destroy" effects available to us and is therefore practically our only tool to thwart Null Rod or other problematic permanents if they stick. A while back I moved Spine to the sideboard to cut down on dead draws and because it's only really useful in some niche scenarios.
Dorks
As a general rule, artifact dorks in this deck have to do something; they can't just be cheap fodder. Ideally they'll provide mana or some other utility. You might be tempted into running things like Ornithopter that you can drop really fast, but don't be fooled--this isn't an affinity deck. We're not trying to drop artifact creatures quickly, we're trying to drop our commander quickly, and we only care for enough artifact creatures to fuel him.
Manakin (+Silver Myr, Millikin, Plague Myr, Hedron Crawler)
The 2cmc "T: add 1" mana dorks in the deck are GREAT things to look for in an opening hand. More than one is the opening hand is even better. They can be dropped on turn 2 and allow you to ramp directly into Arcum on turn 3 while also providing a body to be sacrificed that turn or the very next, either to begin building a lock (read: Possessed Portal) or to fetch Myr Turbine if you've no more dorks to sac.
Etherium Sculptor
In this deck she's basically Helm of Awakening on legs, but unfortunately she's still a second-tier dork because she can't cheapen Arcum, and ultimately we're looking to tinker our artifacts, not hardcast them. Don't be fooled when you see her in your opening hand; she's good, but she's no Manakin.
Myr Sire
Formerly Epochrasite. The fact of the matter is that both Epochrasite and Myr Sire are good at what they do, which is effectively giving you two dorks, twice as much Arcum fuel, twice as much Portal fodder, in the space of one card for 2. They're pure card advantage. I originally ran Epochrasite, but after much playtesting of my own and convincing from posters in this thread I finally came to the conclusion that Myr Sire was just a little bit better in that he always works early, unlike Epochrasite who has some extra late-game utility but sometimes doesn't work early when it matters most.
Hangarback Walker
Formerly Myr Moonvessel (again, old blurb spoilered below). More than anything else, we needed a dork tutorable by Trinket Mage in order to maximize the mage's toolbox, since all our other dorks are 2cmc+. Out of the possible options, Moonvessel was by far the best choice, if only because he did something besides chump blocking, which was more than the others like Ornithopter could say. OK, he deserves a little more credit--that 1 mana really helped sometimes, and as I explained in the old description, I actually thought he was pretty nice. But Myr Sire's ability is even better than Moonvessel's, and with Origins' printing Hangarback Walker, which plays as basically a buffed Myr Sire for 0cmc, Moonvessel has become obsolete. Hangarback Walker is now the best 0-1cmc artifact dork in the game, hands down.
Myr Moonvessel
People give mixed reviews on this guy. The catch, of course, is that the mana you receive from sacrificing him must be spent on the same turn or it's wasted. Personally I like him; given that the usual winning turn of this deck generally demands 4 (2 to copy Arcum's ability and another 2 to activate the rings/top/monolith combo) and that we often try to attempt it on turn 3-5, having a "cushion" of 1 can be a big help sometimes. In addition, using him to tutor for Swiftfoot Boots pays the equip cost for you. Finally and perhaps most importantly, at 1 CMC he's a dork you can fetch with Trinket Mage if needed.
Junk Diver (+Myr Retriever)
Recursion dorks are another no-brainer. At worst, you sacrifice a dork to return another dork from your graveyard to your hand, which would potentially save you the turn you'd otherwise spend tutoring for Myr Turbine. At best, you sacrifice a dork to return a combo piece from the graveyard, from which you can't play them, to your hand, from which you can.
Spellskite
Possibly one of the greatest additions to this deck from Scars block besides Torpor Orb. He's a dork that doubles as countermagic! Just remember: according to the rulings, you can't change the target of a spell/ability to Spellskite and then sac it with Arcum and get the best of both worlds: "If Spellskite leaves the battlefield before its ability resolves, the targets remain unchanged." He can be either a lightning rod or sac fodder--but not both at once.
Countermagic and Draw
Null Brooch
In other Arcum lists you won't always find this card mainboard--and indeed, for a long time I didn't run it mainboard myself--but it's mandatory for any sideboard at very least. Best of all, it's budget, and it's one of our signature cards (you won't find this in other decks).
Discarding your hand is a steep cost--even if we have only 1 or 2 cards in hand, usually those few cards are still really helpful to our plan. Even just 2 dorks in the hand, for example, is enough to fuel a victory with Arcum without having to spend an activation fetching Myr Turbine, meaning we can win a whole turn sooner. Its tremendous power, however, stems from the fact that it is a reusable Negate that can be fetched at instant speed with Arcum if need be. When Ad Nauseam is on the stack, either you counter it or you lose--discarding your hand is well worth it at that point. It also "turns on" certain cards that require our hand size to be small, like Ensnaring Bridge. Lastly, under Possessed Portal its drawback becomes negligible, since our hand size will be 0 anyway.
For my meta personally, I run it mainboard. All in all it's not something to be underestimated, particularly in certain metas as I will discuss later.
Pact of Negation (+Force of Will)
Free countermagic is always good, especially in combo decks like ours. That said, even though we're mono-blue, between our lands and artifacts over 75% of this deck is colorless, so it's difficult for us to consistently pay for FoW.
Muddle the Mixture
On it's own, it's a solid counterspell; most of the ways in which your opponents will attempt to remove Arcum involve instant or sorcery spells, so this card can effectively be used to protect Arcum when he comes out. More importantly, it doubles as a transmute tutor for any 2cmc card in our deck, which, thanks to our low curve, happens to include some of our best cards: Power Artifact, Grim Monolith, Lightning Greaves, silver bullets like Defense Grid and Torpor Orb, and more.
Memory Jar
Vintage-level card made even better because it's a valid tutor target for Arcum. Granted, powerful as it is, you'll have better things to tutor out more often than not--but if the need ever arises, you should know that you can tap Arcum to draw 7 cards on demand. A while ago this was moved to the sideboard as often enough it wasn't a worthwhile tutor.
Fact or Fiction/Thirst for Knowledge/Mystic Remora/etc.
Finding the right number of draw spells to include is a tricky and subjective process. I just spent the last two paragraphs pointing out that this deck's fast speed makes our hand size really important, especially in the opening three or four turns. Draw spells refill our hand with useful goodies, but too much draw dips into our pool of useful artifacts. Even so, I think it's worthwhile to include the best of the blue draw, with particular props to spells like Ponder and Mystic Remora that can single-handedly sculpt a winning hand out of an otherwise mediocre one.
Lands
Snow-Covered Island
With all the colorless stuff we run in this deck, you might think it would be optimal to run only a minimum of islands. There's only a handful of blue mana symbols that we'd ever need to pay for, after all. This is in fact the exact opposite of what you should be thinking: you still want the majority of your landbase to be islands. Arcum costs 3U, and since we're going to be rushing to play him very early, you pretty much absolutely need an island either in your opening hand or within the first two draws. Not to mention we need U for counterspells, tutors like Fabricate, and other extremely helpful support along the way. The lands that don't produce U in my decklist are all exceedingly useful in some other way; I do not run lands like Scrying Sheets that offer only a marginal benefit for the tremendous loss of not being able to produce U.
In a 100-card deck, the land-thinning these cards provide on their own is negligible. Their main benefit is repeatable land-thinning with Crucible of Worlds and deck-shuffling for better Sensei's Divining Top manipulation--they're minor benefits, but still worth it for the low cost of one life. If you're on a budget and can't afford them, you can easily get away with keeping them as Islands.
Also keep in mind that they're nonbasic lands before you pop them, so if your meta's full of Blood Moon or other nonbasic hate, you'll want to sideboard them out for basic lands anyway.
Mishra's Factory (+Inkmoth Nexus, Blinkmoth Nexus)
During turns 1 thru 3, our main concern is ramping up mana for Arcum and dropping dorks to sac once he comes out. Just like mana dorks, these artifact manlands fulfill both these roles at the same time, well worth giving up a U-producing land to fit them.
Seat of the Synod/Darksteel Citadel
I didn't previously run artifact lands as I considered the singular value of being an artifact not to justify being unable to produce blue mana (in the case of Darksteel Citadel); but more recently I've added Mox Opal, so the artifact lands can now help by being able to hit metalcraft.
Mishra's Workshop
More fast mana, but definitely not budget as it's a Vintage-level card. Proxy it or replace it with an island. Also note that the Workshop's mana can only be used to cast artifact spells, so while it's valid for almost everything in this deck you can't depend on it entirely--it can't be used to cast Arcum, for example, nor to pay for Rings' copy ability. But it does enable absolutely crazy and game-winning plays like T1 Metalworker, T1 Trinisphere, etc. that will really make you feel like a Vintage player with your ridiculous tempo.
City of Traitors
Again, more fast mana, and again, not budget. If you play Legacy at all chances are you'll have a copy or two, but if not, proxy it or replace it with an island. It seems like it has a steep drawback, but once you learn to time it right (tap it to float mana before you play another land) you'll see why it's priced around $30 a copy. Crucible lets you keep playing it.
Hall of the Bandit Lord
One of the two most frequent choices for tutoring with Tolaria West. It's one of the only ways we have to cast Arcum with haste but without Lightning Greaves or similar. Even with haste, though, usually your first tutor will be for the greaves anyway for the shroud.
Academy Ruins
The other most frequent tutor choice with Tolaria West. While in the early game you'd fetch Hall, mid-to-lategame you'd fetch Academy Ruins to recur combo pieces in the GY back to the library for Arcum to cheat out onto the field.
Minamo, School at Waters Edge
Along with Thousand-Year Elixir, it's one of the only ways the deck can untap Arcum directly; note that this targets Arcum, so if you know you'll have an opportunity to use Minamo's ability make sure you equip Arcum with hexproof and not shroud.
Planeswalker
Tezzeret the Seeker
Good ol' Tezzy 1.0. He's budget and he's mandatory. His CMC of 5 is fairly high, especially for a deck like Arcum that works to win in 5 turns or fewer, but he's totally, totally worth it. His first ability can untap mana rocks or critical artifacts like Myr Turbine, Thousand-Year Elixir, Nevinyrral's Disk, and more. His second ability complements Arcum's ability perfectly in the early-game (need mana? Tezzy can help. Need dorks? Tezzy can help), and in the mid/lategame his second ability with 6 loyalty counters even allows him to double as Arcum himself: -3 to search out Rings of Brighthearth, on the next turn -3 again and copy with rings to search out Basalt Monolith and Staff of Domination simultaneously. And as previously mentioned, while it's rarely ever needed in practice, his third ability is one of the only ways the deck can win via combat damage, Overrun alpha-strike style.
Like Zur the Enchanter, our commander is a tutor on legs, and therefore we can devote a portion of our deck to "silver bullet" artifacts--that is, those cards that only shine in specific scenarios or against specific decks, but when they work, they work GREAT, usually shutting down those decks on the whole or dealing massive damage (giant enemy crab style). For this reason it is exceedingly important, when playing Arcum Dagsson, that you know your metagame like the back of your hand. Ideally, you should possess sufficient mastery of your opponents' decks such that you could even pilot as if they were your own. I encourage you, if you can afford it, to own the cards discussed in this section in singleton and carry them around with your deck (or in your binder) to be sideboarded in depending on the decks you're up against. Take advantage of Arcum as a toolbox commander to engineer your deck specifically to beat your metagame.
Jester's Cap
EXTREMELY powerful card against just about every deck but especially toolbox/combo decks, including the mirror match against other Arcum Dagsson players. The flavor text (from Arcum himself!) is accurate: you will get the most mileage out of this card if you know your opponents' decks from the inside out. From reading this thread, for example, you'll realize quickly enough that if an enemy Arcum Jester's Caps us and exiles Rings of Brighthearth, Mycosynth Lattice, and Possessed Portal, we just lost a lot of options and a lot of power. Jester's Cap can be recurred from the graveyard and cast a second time; two cap effects is usually enough to completely dismantle any combo deck (if played against us, the second cap would probably be Power Artifact, Metalworker, and Tezzeret the Seeker--at that point I would fold).
Also great for getting rid of your opponents' answers to you. If you know an opponent has sideboarded in Stranglehold or Null Rod, and you know that the first thing they're going to try to do is tutor for and play one of those cards ASAP, you can cap 'em off before they have a chance.
In sum, if you know your opponents' decks from the inside out, you can make brutal use out of Jester's Cap every time.
Pithing Needle
Classic colorless silver bullet made even more powerful in Arcum by the fact that we can tutor it so easily. Usually the declared name will be one of your opponents' commanders. Against many commanders, including several other top-tier commanders and the mirror match against other Arcum players, Pithing Needle demands removal for the deck to function at all. Other times it'll be better to name a powerful singleton instead (such as Survival of the Fittest), and other times still Pithing Needle won't offer any benefit at all. See "Metagame Tuning for Dummies" for when and how to use the Needle to its greatest effect.
Torpor Orb
Hoser against any decks and bombs that rely on ETB effects. Animar, Soul of Elements and his friends, Norin the Wary, Hazezon Tamar, Riku of Two Reflections, all the titans, Aura Shards, the list goes on and on--all are rendered moot so long as Torpor Orb remains in play. Ensnaring Bridge
Any deck that likes swinging in for the victory, especially with fatties, absolutely hates Ensnaring Bridge--this includes almost all voltron or shotgun commanders (Uril, the Miststalker, Scion of the Ur-Dragon, Skittles, etc). Generally we will be emptying our hand fairly quickly in our initial push to secure Arcum and even more quickly if we take all sorts of discard hate along the way. Tutoring for a Bridge early can buy you lots of time as your opponent scrambles to get rid of it. Tutoring for a bridge when Possessed Portal is already out can often shut down the board entirely. Arcum never swings with anything, so the reciprocal effect does not faze us at all.
Witchbane Orb
Could be handy if you regularly go up against decks that target you with stuff to win or disrupt (be it discard, burn, Diabolic Edict effects, Disciple of the Vault + Sharuum combo, whatever). Definitely a metagame-dependent piece, and not all that hard for your opponent to get rid of, but the fact remains that it's a colorless artifact version of Leyline of Sanctity that you can tutor for with Arcum if the situation demands it.
Grafdigger's Cage
Absolute monster against the right decks; locks out both the grave (Karador, Ghost Chieftain; Chainer, Dementia Master; Loyal Retainers; Reanimate; and so much more) AND the library (Green Sun's Zenith, Bribery, whatever). Note that it only stops creature cards, so we can still get the full mileage out of Arcum, Crucible of Worlds, etc. with it out; as with Ensnaring Bridge, the cage's reciprocal effects do not faze us at all. Be mindful, however, that the cage cannot stop Tooth and Nail and similar cards, since TaN goes to the hand and then the battlefield; if you're playing in a TaN-heavy meta, use something else.
Mindslaver
Sort of like Jester's Cap, in the hands of a skilled player it is a VERY powerful card, although its usefulness is slightly more limited than the cap--sideboard in with discretion. Where the Slaver really excels is in those scenarios where you've failed to cap your opponent's important cards fast enough and their important pieces are already in their hand or on the battlefield. If a lot of people at your table are running Necropotence, Necrologia, Hatred, and so forth, taking control of their turn allows you to force them to commit suicide. Similarly, taking control of an opponent right after they've casted a Pact spell (Slaughter, Negation, etc.) allows you to force them to choose NOT to pay the cost and lose the game immediately. If you're up against an enemy combo player and they're all ready to combo off on the next turn, you can sometimes slave them and force them to combo off on themselves and your other opponents. Similarly, stax decks usually rely on generating token fodder to eat up the reciprocal damage of their own stax effects (like Smokestack); slaving them allows you to direct the reciprocal damage onto their more important permanents, like their lands or the stax effects themselves.
Sometimes, though, if your opponents already have the cards they need on the battlefield or in their hand, it's already too late to stop them, and as such it's very dangerous to actually bank on the 'slaver from the start. Oftentimes the best opportunities for slaver occur spontaneously, when no-one expects it (e.g. opponent drops Necropotence, not expecting that you'll slaver him right afterward). After they fall for this trick a few times, however, they'll wise up and adapt and less scenarios for 'slaver intervention will present themselves, so this technique is a little less effective against opponents with whom you play often. For the most part, therefore, it's better to deal with their threats proactively with cards like Jester's Cap--but don't forget that Mindslaver exists and is readily deployable in Arcum should you deem the situation fit for it.
Champion's Helm
Sometimes you really, really need Arcum to have slightly more than 2 toughness, for example if your opponents are packing damage-based sweepers like Volcanic Fallout (see the "Weaknesses" section below). 'Board in Champion's Helm for when you need your Swiftfoot Boots to also make Arcum a 4/4 instead of a 2/2.
Neurok Stealthsuit
At worst, it's a watered-down Lightning Greaves. In heavy removal metas, though, like vs. burn, MBC, etc. where your opponent will do everything in their power to destroy Arcum in response to your activation of Greaves' equip ability, the Stealthsuit emerges as even better than Greaves because it can be equipped at instant speed (in response to your opponents' removal spells) for UU, and so with enough mana you can evade spot removal/burn entirely.
Listed here are the pertinent cards that are NOT included in my decklist, neither mainboard nor sideboard. I've organized them in two categories: those cards that look viable but are actually pretty bad, and those cards that are actually good but simply don't work in my particular metagame (including budget options).
Cards You Shouldn't Run
Ornithopter, Memnite, etc. - As I explained earlier, free dorks might seem enticing, but they're actually the worst kind because they don't do anything helpful, as opposed to other dorks which grant tempo or card advantage. Arcum is NOT an affinity deck; simply loading up our board with cheap artifacts does not help us.
Alloy Myr - Because a 3-mana dork that taps for U fits nowhere in our curve
Scarecrone - cool utility, but we've got better nowadays.
Timetwister - ran for a long time, excellent T1 play but lackluster later; nowadays in a power-creeped format where fast mana is king I'm certain T1 Trinisphere is stronger than T1 'twister.
Hinder, Spell Crumple - slow counterspells redeemed only by being able to tuck commanders. When that rule was cut, so were these cards.
Palladium Myr - the best of the 3-drop dorks, but it still can't ramp into Arcum, and the more you play with it the more you find out how much that really sucks.
Cards I'm on the Fence About
None right now.
Good, but Not for Me
Lands
Scrying Sheets - a bit slow for competitive play, but almost always a good choice for slower metas
Creatures
Filigree Sages - strong card, usable in a few combos, too slow for my meta (and a bad dork without other combo pieces).
Sad Robot - at 4cmc, he's actually a pretty poor dork, especially in speed-maximized decks.
Commandeer, Foil, etc. - too slow/too much card disadvantage for my meta; budget options
Non-creature Artifacts
Thran Dynamo - suboptimal rock to Gilded Lotus imo as it is much more valuable for us to produce UUU in a deck that is almost all colorless mana sources.
Mind Over Matter - can be found in some Arcum decks with a larger control package and a higher overall curve, but my list is built to focus on speed and artifact synergy instead
Planeswalkers
Jace, the Mind Sculptor - as with MoM, can be found in some Arcum decks with a larger control package; powerful 'walker, but no synergy at all with the rest of the deck, and for that I choose Tezzeret
I was going to call this section "Strengths and Weaknesses," but from reading the thread you should already have a general idea of our strengths, and understanding our weaknesses is more important anyway--only upon understanding our own weaknesses can we properly prioritize our plays, fetch the right silver bullets, know what to counter and what not to, and so on. Perhaps, even, you came to this thread with the very intention of learning how to beat an Arcum deck--if so, you're reading the right section.
Null Rod
It's colorless, it's cheap, and oh does it hurt. If this card sticks, most of our potential combo options go out the window. No, seriously, do everything in your power to keep this card from resolving. Prime target for Jester's Cap. If it does manage to stick, the game isn't completely over; you can still assemble a Possessed Portal + Crucible of Worlds softlock if you haven't already and hope that your opponent will be forced to sacrifice the rod to free you up again. You can also tutor for Spine of Ish Sah and vindicate the Rod away. But really it's best if this card just never comes out in the first place.
With Innistrad came Stony Silence, sharing the same CMC and effect as Null Rod. Thankfully it's W, not colorless, so if there's no white decks in your meta then you don't have to worry about it. Still, keep an eye out for this guy, too.
We like searching our library, and these cards straight-up say "no" to our efforts. We can't even search for Spine of Ish Sah to get rid of them. Therefore, we don't like these cards. Also solid targets for Jester's Capping.
The good news is that generally the decks that will be running cards like these (and Null Rod too) will generally not be other combo decks, since other combo decks like Azami, Lady of Scrolls and Damia, Sage of Stone enjoy search and artifacts as much as we do. That is to say, when you target a deck with Jester's Cap you usually don't have to choose between removing combo cards or removing cards that will stop you from comboing, because these two types of cards are generally mutually exclusive. Phew!
In summary, mono-Blue doesn't have a lot of ways of "dealing" with resolved stuff besides bouncing it. This is why it's crucially important to hold onto those Counterspells for as long as possible, saving them for the stuff that absolutely cannot stick, and why it's so important to preemptively control your opponent with silver bullets so that you stop them from playing pesky cards in the first place rather than trying to unstick them later.
We can't counter cycling like we can just counter other forms of mass removal that would hit Arcum (e.g. Damnation, Mutilate), and the -2/-2 is just enough to kill him even if he's equipped with Lightning Greaves and even if Darksteel Forge/Mycosynth Lattice is in play.
If Decree of Pain or related cards like Volcanic Fallout are giving you trouble, consider running Champion's Helm as your protective artifact of choice. While in most scenarios Champion's Helm will be more expensive than its alternatives for an irrelevant benefit, there are those rare times when Arcum really just needs to be a 4/4 rather than a 2/2.
That's right--one of our greatest assets is, in the hands of our enemy, also one of our greatest weaknesses. We are, after all, a combo deck, and I outlined above how two resolved Jester's Cap effects against this deck is practically worth a concession. If your opponent's commander is playing U, it would not be too unwise of him to spend his early turns using blue's many artifact tutors and recursion spells to cap off your key combo pieces.
...That is, unless you manage to cap off his Jester's Cap before he gets to yours!
The newest addition to this list, printed in the recent Battle for Zendikar block. Very common choice for any and all reanimator strategies. Cutting out CMC 0, 2, and 4 locks us out of over 30% of our deck, including our commander, with no reciprocal effect for the reanimator. Although the Winnower has no protection, as mono-U we have almost nothing in the ways of spot removal to get rid of him once he hits. The good news is, if Arcum is already on the field and protected then we don't need to cast anything anyway so we're fine--but reanimators will usually try to slap down a Winnower on T1-2. Thus the best counter-strategy is to not get caught by surprise and make sure vs. reanimator that this meanie never hits the field before Arcum does by boarding in gravehate, and if he does stick, remember Rings/Basalt/Staff all cost 3 while Tezzy and Kuldotha cost 5.
I've been running Jester's Cap mainboard because it's such a good hoser against so many strategies that it's almost always useful at any table, but recently after some convincing I took to testing Clock of Omens again and found it too strong not to pass up for a mainboard slot since it enables so many other combos and utility. I can still switch in Jester's Cap as needed on game 2+.
Neurok Stealthsuit is more a meta-dependent choice for heavy removal metas, I'm finding. In my meta, which is more combo oriented, it usually just plays out as a worse variant of Lightning Greaves. Staff of Domination I dismissed at first as being utterly redundant, but that was just me being stubborn--after a more thorough investigation I concluded that in fact Planar Portal is now redundant with Staff's recent unbanning.
I also revised parts of the primer to reflect this new change of strategy.
-4x Snow-Covered Islands out, 4x fetchlands in
Just a quick little change swapping out some islands for fetchlands for the very minor added utility fetchlands provide.
Almost all of the "money cards" have been cut from this decklist, bringing its price down to ~$200 (significantly less than the main decklist's price of ~$2000). You can cut even more money cards if you really want to, like Sensei's Divining Top, but doing so will take big chunks out of the deck's power.
For the most part, this variant plays exactly the same as the one I detailed in the primer above. Notably, however, I eschew Forge and Disk (both of which are relatively expensive singletons) for Capsize and Hurkyl's Recall. With infinite mana and infinite draw from Rings/Monolith/Staff you can cast infinite Capsize or Hurkyl's Recall recurred a few times to return all opponents' permanents to their hands. It's a little weaker than the classic lattice/forge/disk imo but should still get the job done.
As previously mentioned, a helpful thing about Arcum EDH is that it is a modular deck. Our "core package" is much smaller than the traditional EDH deck, and so we have more slots than most other decks to devote to whatever we need to based on our specific metagame states. In fact, our ability to adapt to the metagame contributes to a large part of our power, since we are otherwise slightly slower than most combo decks in our tier (e.g. Sharuum the Hegemon, 5c Hermit Druid) with access to powerful black tutors and draw like Demonic Tutor, Demonic Consultation, and Necrologia.
Thus one of the most important take-aways from this entire discourse is this:
An in-depth understanding of the decks you're up against and the cards they play is essential to your success as Arcum.
I've said it before but it's worth repeating--ideally, you should know an opponent's deck so well that you could play it for them and know how to win with it.
There are two ways we tune our strategy to defeat the metagame:
We change the cards in our deck.
We re-prioritize the order in which we play those cards.
This section will eventually cover both the cards you should use and when you should use them in order to beat every high-tier deck or deck archetype currently in the format. Of course EDH has so many potential commanders who can all be competitive-tuned to some degree, so my list here will never be completely exhaustive. If you are disappointed that a commander you'll be playing against isn't on this list, try to identify that commander's deck archetype, and then read my suggestions for similar decks of that archetype. For example, observe that Kamahl, Fist of Krosa is not included in this list. He is, however, a big mana mono-G aggro deck, and below I have included some tips on how to thwart other popular big mana mono-G aggro decks. These decks all occupy the same archetype (also known as genre), and it is usually safe to assume that whatever tips and tricks work to beat one member of the archetype will work just as well for the rest.
Lastly, these are just tips. They might not always work, or you personally might approach certain situations differently. My goal with this section is simply to provide a newcomer to competitive EDH or to Arcum Dagsson an idea of what he might be up against and how he should begin to think about metagame tuning in the same way that a Legacy or Modern primer here on MTGS would address its deck's metagame.
I encourage you, whether you are an Arcum player yourself who's found success with different methods than I've listed here or an enemy of Arcum who's courageous enough to share your weaknesses, to comment about your thoughts on this section so that I can develop it more strongly and better help those who might not understand very much about metagames at all or how to adapt to them using Arcum.
So your meta's got a lot of...
Combos
Combo decks vary greatly and must be considered individually. That said, combo as an archetype dominates multiplayer EDH, so in a cutthroat metagame these are probably the decks you're going to be seeing most often if not almost always. Unfortunately, some of these decks can consistently combo out a turn faster than we can assemble Rings/Top/Monolith. Against these decks, strongly consider prioritizing Possessed Portal and silver bullets to stop them in their tracks before assembling our combo; if you try to race them head-on to see who combos off first, some of them will beat you too consistently.
Name:Animar How they win: Animar has bazillions of ways to go infinite using creature ETB effects...deal infinite damage to everyone, return infinite target permanents to opponents' hands, draw infinite cards, swing with infinitely pumped Animar, and so forth. Examples include Cloudstone Curio shenanigans, Palinchron mana, Tidespout Tyrant shenanigans, Psychosis Crawler + Glimpse of Nature effects, Purphoros, God of the Forge shenanigans, etc. How we beat them:Torpor Orb asap, Jester's Cap. All of Animar's combos are alike insofar that they all involve creature ETB combos, and so Torpor Orb is a real hoser and literally brings the deck to a full stop until it is dealt with; top priority to resolve and stick. Most Animar decks don't pack much artifact removal except in the form of creatures like Indrik Stomphowler and Acidic Slime (since creatures are what they can tutor for/get benefits out of), and Torpor Orb punishes them for that, too. Jester's Cap doesn't work nearly as well since the deck is so versatile, but it can still hurt a lot if you exile Cloudstone Curio and some creature enablers like Ancestral Statue and Shrieking Drake.
Name:Teferi How they win:Knowledge Pool and Teferi make for a hard lock on everyone. Their backup plan: Ye olde blue control deck, same shenanigans and combos as Azami. How we beat them: Same as Azami, just make sure you include Knowledge Pool as part of your Jester's Cap pull.
Aggro
There are two main types of aggro decks: big mana aggro and voltron/shotgun aggro.
Big mana is almost exclusively mono-G and ideally seeks to ramp up to 10+ mana (usually aided by the commander) within the first five turns and play a kicked Tooth and Nail (TaN) to fetch two fat things of their choice that win the game on the spot or shortly thereafter. Voltron/Shotgun aggro, on the other hand, usually tries instead to focus on using the commander as a weapon, playing him very early (t3-4) with the help of artifact accelerants, pumping him (t5) with the strongest enchantments/equipment, then (t6-8) wrathing all lands or even everything (since mana is no longer needed) while one-shotting for lethal general damage one opponent at a time starting with the biggest threat--thus the name "shotgun," one-hit one-kill.
Big mana aggro tends to be slightly slower than combo but still exceedingly fast when competitive tuned. As a combo deck yourself, you can usually race these decks and win. I usually find it safer, though, to still prioritize Possessed Portal and silver bullets to lock down the game before you combo off; it simply adds to the consistency in this matchup.
Name:Azusa How they win: Big-mana variant -- absurd ramp into kicked TaN or big Genesis Wave. Their backup plan: Goldfishing for fatties or otherwise dropping huge Hurricanes. How we beat them: Card advantage is where big mana generally fails, especially big mana green. Azusa tends to dump out her starting 7 within the first two turns and goldfish from there. Many Azusa lists often run otherwise subpar draw engines like Recycle, Mind's Eye, and Horn of Greed to try and remedy this. Possessed Portal early keeps their hand empty, thwarts their meager draw engines, and generally screws them over unless they happen to have artifact destruction/Genesis Wave/tutors in the hand before you drop the portal. Ensnaring Bridge is the second-most-important silver bullet, and it can be tutored for before or after the portal to seal the deal or to stop early aggressiveness from shenanigans like Defense of the Heart/Natural Order/etc. The best part about the Bridge is that creatures straight-up cannot be declared as attackers (as opposed to a damage prevention/protection effect) which is exceedingly useful against big mana's Eldrazi annihilators.
Shotgun aggro at its finest can actually be faster than combo when it comes to defeating one person. Ultimately they're slower in the long run, especially as the number of players at the table increases to 5+, because unlike combo they can't usually down more than one player per turn (since they rely on the combat step). Even if a shotgun aggro deck gets off to a running start and smashes a player t4, he still has a ways to go toward winning. That said, I plan for the worst: when I see a shotgun player, I assume that the one person at whom he is definitely going to swing is me, and I take precautions. In a 1v1 match, these tips become even more relevant.
Name:Skittles How they win: Rocks to ramp into Skittles (always with haste) as early as turn 3, pump him that same turn with stuff like Unspeakable Symbol and Nightmare Lash for no extra mana, swing for 10 infect. Their backup plan: Mono-B control, featuring heavy discard and removal. How we beat them: Tutoring out Ensnaring Bridge/Null Brooch is generally enough to muck him down, but if he's ready to pull off a t3 kill even those will be too slow, and so countermagic in the opening hand is a huge help. If you survive the initial explosion, the game shifts tremendously in your favor, as Possessed Portal punishes him for playing so few permanents.
Name:Uril How they win: Ramp into Uril, enchant him and give him doublestrike, then destroyeverything and swing for lethal. Their backup plan: Uh...Kor Spiritdancer? Usually none. How we beat them: Slower and fatter than Skittles so tutoring out Ensnaring Bridge/Null Brooch is more feasible, but of course countermagic in the opening hand is still a huge help. Again, if you survive his initial push, Possessed Portal punishes him hard for playing so few permanents and for having poor card advantage besides Enchantress effects. Main difference from Skittles is his emphasis on Cataclysm, 'geddon, Wildfire, and so forth--watch out for these.
Name:Sigarda How they win: Same as Uril. Not as beefy and no access to R so less mass destruction, but she comes packing a powerful ability to make up for it. Their backup plan: Usually none. How we beat them: Sigarda is unique among voltrons in that she intrinsically hoses stax and edict effects, which are usually among voltron's greatest weaknesses. The good news is that she's slower than the two previously mentioned and we can outrace her nearly every time. Usually you can go ahead and play Possessed Portal to screw over everyone else at the table besides Sigarda and still have enough time to combo off before she can do anything about it. Ensnaring Bridge still stops her, and if worse comes to worse and you absolutely need her dead, simply tutor for Phyrexian Metamorph. Her ability is a major problem for black control and especially stax decks, but for us it's only a minor nuisance because we don't need our stax to win and we have other solutions to stop her.
I have played a Dagsson deck for a long, long time (it's semi-retired now). It underwent tons of changes in that time and I have become aware of many random cards I would have otherwise never known about when searching for cards to add. I think you've done a really nice job so far, but I think there are a lot of important cards that you haven't really mentioned yet. So here's some cards that you might want to think about:
Those are a few cards that I would recommend to anyone with an interest in this general. Now, obviously there's not necessarily enough room for all of this stuff, but I think you could probably make some good cuts from your list to make room for a least a couple things. My recommendations:
I may come back a bit later and address specifics or concerns if you don't agree with this, but I genuinely believe this is some good stuff to think about when finishing up this primer.
Rings of Brighthearth + Basalt Monolith + Sensei's Divining Top
This combo only requires 2 mana dorks and 2 Arcum activations, half the resources as turbine + Arcum alone. Tutor for Rings first, then tutor for the monolith and top at the same time by copying Arcum's activation ability with the rings.
Hi there. I dabble a bit with Arcum myself, because that's just how I roll, and I'm pretty sure the combo you're describing requires three artifact creatures, not two. You need one artifact dork to sac when you grab the Rings. Then, when you copy Arcum's ability with 2 mana using the Rings, you'll have to sac two additional artifact creatures to fetch two more noncreature artifacts. I remember when I first found this out, I was a bit cheezed off. But, it's usually still manageable to get this done if you plan it out right.
Also, Millikin should be in your list. All of the 2 CMC artifact mana-producing dorks are a must. And I fully agree with the previous poster that the artifact man-lands are very, very useful, and worth running.
Good luck on the primer, and I'd be happy to post my personal deck list for comparison/critique if anyone wants to see it.
'Kay, thanks for mentioning this; I think the decklist I posted is actually an outdated one I had stored on my computer, because a few of these lands (particularly the ones that change into artifacts) I actually DO play in my current version of the deck. So with that brought to my attention I think the first thing I'm going to fix about the thread is to make the decklist my current version.
In addition, as you correctly pointed out, there are two Swiftfoot Boots in the deck, which is another reason why I think I must've copied and pasted the wrong thing.
Scuttlemutt and Solemn Simulacrum I'm just not seeing. The ideal dork is a 2 drop artifact creature that taps for 1; if it's going to be a 3 drop, it has to do something besides add one mana (it either has to produce more mana like Palladium Myr or do something else useful entirely like Junk Diver)--Scuttlemutt taps for 1 and that's it, his second ability is pretty useless. But wait! Now that I look again Scuttlemutt is a strictly better Alloy Myr, which I do run. So I suppose I'll eat my words on that one. But a dork for 4, like Solemn Simulacrum, doesn't even seem like it would fit in the curve at all. Yes, the simulacrum is one of the "EDH staple cards" that you'll find in almost every deck ever made, but most decks aren't operating on such a fast clock as we are.
I'll playtest the Simulacrum to see if I'm right about it not fitting in the curve.
Kuldoltha Forgemaster I used to play with but ultimately cut. He's VERY good, no doubt. That he can target all artifacts instead of just dorks is great. It's just that I've found that between his casting cost and activation cost he's only good when you're all set up, and by that time you've practically won the game anyway. In other words, in my personal experience I've found him to be win-more. But he's powerful enough that I'm always considering whether or not to re-add him.
Again, some of these (particularly Pithing Needle and Spine of Ish Sah, I distinctly remember trolling a Phelddagrif player a few weeks ago by tutoring a needle on his commander) are actually in my current decklist, but now that you mention it I see they're not in the decklist posted in the primer. Go figure. Thanks for bringing it to my attention, once again.
That said, some others of these cards I know I'm definitely not going to add, at least not to the main decklist, not because they're bad but because they're situational--like Mindslaver and Null Brooch. That's what the utility/silver bullets sections are for (as you can see, the Brooch is already covered in the utility section). I do think Mindslaver is a good addition for one of those two sections--against the right decks it's an instant win.
And others of these--like Mox Opal, Chronatog Totem, Everflowing Chalice and a few others--I probably won't be adding to anything (not without some serious convincing that they're worth it). The Opal I've actually playtested and the rest I will be making an educated guess when I say that I'm pretty confident that going overboard on the ramp is a bad idea. The way the deck is now, it never needs more than five mana. We want to get to 5 mana as fast as possible, but once we're there any additional mana is pretty useless (which is partly why Null Brooch actually works in this deck).
I think you came up with a good list of controversial cards, and so I will comment on each in order:
1. I'll probably elicit some eye rolls for saying this, but in my experience, the graveyard is not our friend. We have only 4 recursion effects: Junk Diver, Myr Retriever, Academy Ruins, and Buried Ruin (there is Scarecrone, but that only gets creatures). And except for Academy Ruins (which is the hardest to search for along with Buried Ruin since it's a land), the recursion is only to the hand, not to the battlefield, which means for anything big--forge, lattice, possessed portal)--even if we recur it from the grave, we still have to fetch and resolve Master Transmuter to get it into play. Elixir of Immortality shuffles the grave right into the library and puts those combo pieces where they're most accessible.
In short, in the event of "Crap, all my combo pieces are in the GY," instead of saying "now I have to spend a bunch of turns digging for a recursion dork and trying to locate and stick Master Transmuter" or saying "hopefully I will topdeck Academy Ruins or Tolaria West," you can say, "no big deal, activate Arcum, fetch and pop elixir, problem solved in 1 turn."
2. Bauble is a filler and can come out as necessary for something more important that also serves the purpose of ramp. If I had to replace it I'd do it with Millikin.
3. It's hard to explain without just providing a bunch of specific scenarios, but in my experience the moonvessel gets it done. If you play him and sac him on the same turn, he's basically a free dork; if you play him and sac him on a later turn, he nets you a free 1. In any scenario in which you plan on tutoring for an artifact and activating an artifact (the same one or a different one) on the same turn, his free 1 really helps.
4. Neurok Stealthsuit is, in my humble opinion, underrated. It is the only shroud-giving equipment in the game that can be equipped at instant speed barring Leonin Shikari. Even the ubiquitous Lightning Greaves can be defeated with a simple Lightning Bolt. The UU mind as well read "Counter target spell that targets a creature you control." I can't tell you how many multiplayer games I've stuck Arcum on turn 4 or 5 using this card alone, with no counters in the hand or anything. Most EDH decks don't use the stealthsuit because they either can't pull off the UU or don't care to give their commander shroud, but we can pay it, and we care a lot. Unless I'm just seeing this card completely the wrong way.
5. lol
6. Epochrasite is another one of those dorks that I find regularly gets it done whenever it comes into my hand. Drop it on turn 2, sac it on turn 4, it comes back turn 7 (or if it dies prematurely it'll be back on turn 6 or 5), allowing for a double arcum activation into a game-winning combo. Between Rings of Brighthearth and all the ways we have to untap Arcum, there will never be a time when we have "too much sac fodder."
7. Good question. I'll playtest Timetwister (proxxied for sure) and Windfall and see if they work better. This one isn't so easy to see without testing.
8. It's worked for me whenever I needed it to, so I haven't had any incentive to cut it yet. That said, with my extremely limited knowledge of statistics, I think your gut feeling is right. Quick headcount out of the decklist in my OP (which we already established is partially erroneous), I'm seeing 20 blue cards in the deck excluding FoW. A real statistician will probably show me who's the real boss here, but according to my handy dandy calculator, binompdf(9,20/99,1) yields about 30% chance of me having another blue card in hand besides a FoW on turn 4. I might replace it with something CMC1 like Turn Aside or Spell Pierce.
Hi there. I dabble a bit with Arcum myself, because that's just how I roll, and I'm pretty sure the combo you're describing requires three artifact creatures, not two. You need one artifact dork to sac when you grab the Rings. Then, when you copy Arcum's ability with 2 mana using the Rings, you'll have to sac two additional artifact creatures to fetch two more noncreature artifacts. I remember when I first found this out, I was a bit cheezed off. But, it's usually still manageable to get this done if you plan it out right.
Well don't that beat all.
Now that I look at it again, I think you're right, which is a bad thing because that means my playgroup has been doing it wrong this whole time. I'll dig around online to see if there's anything else about this, but for now it looks like you have it right and I'll change the thread soon so as not to mislead people.
Also, Millikin should be in your list. All of the 2 CMC artifact mana-producing dorks are a must.
Maaaaaaan, I knew someone would call me out on it. I did mention Millikin in the OP, you see? A handful of games I ended up losing because Millikin actually milled important stuff and with my opponents' meddling (exiled my elixir from the library, kept removing my recursion pieces and Master Transmuter) I actually wasn't able to fish it up from the GY fast enough, so one day I got so upset that I said, "I can make do without that stupid sneezing wicker dummy."
I know he's good and that he belongs her. I'll put him in the decklist in the OP so no one else comes up and says, "Gee whiz, where's Millikin?" I just have kind of a personal vendetta against it.
And I fully agree with the previous poster that the artifact man-lands are very, very useful, and worth running.
Me too. I do run them. The list above just doesn't seem to reflect that. I may or may not have been half asleep when I wrote it.
1. I'll probably elicit some eye rolls for saying this, but in my experience, the graveyard is not our friend. We have only 4 recursion effects: Junk Diver, Myr Retriever, Academy Ruins, and Buried Ruin (there is Scarecrone, but that only gets creatures).
I run all of the same 4 recursion effects (plus Scarecrone) you do, plus a Reito Lantern in my Arcum list. It's been pretty handy for when games go unexpectedly long (like turn 6 or 7 ;)) since I can fetch the lantern with Arcum if one of my combo pieces goes to the yard and I want it back in my library. It's also cheap enough to cast if I draw it, and it provides a pretty useful effect overall. In a pinch, Reito Lantern also functions as a bit of graveyard hate.
EDIT: I guess you're running Elixir of Immortality for this same effect, and it may be a better choice since it's cheaper mana-wise.
You could always replace Force of Will with Pact of Negation. It does have that pesky upkeep cost. But if you're using it to protect your combo turn then you probably have enough mana to pay for it and you're probably just winning on the spot anyway.
You could always replace Force of Will with Pact of Negation. It does have that pesky upkeep cost. But if you're using it to protect your combo turn then you probably have enough mana to pay for it and you're probably just winning on the spot anyway.
I hadn't considered the pact. That's probably a good replacement choice.
Turn 4 or 5 is not exactly a "combo turn" per se, it's not like we're playing legacy High Tide or ANT where we combo off and the next turn doesn't matter. Generally we try to win on turn 6 or 7 after disrupting everyone else at the table. Turn 4 is, however, an extremely important turn insofar that we make our most risky play--tapping out to cast Arcum. I know you probably recognized that already, I'm just clarifying it for posterity.
Also, I want to take a moment to reiterate the power of Jester's Cap. I beat my friend's girlfriend playing Sharuum (girls and their girly generals) 3 games in a row the other day just by pulling off a successful cap on her Sculpting Steel, Phyrexian Metamorph, and Sword of the Meek...one game I even managed to pull it off T3.
Well correct me if I'm wrong but the generic Arcum combo involves the other players with no permanents and you with whatever you have left. Assuming you have, and need, the Pact of Negation, you could easily spend a turn paying for the pact and doing whatever else is possible. I might be totally wrong as I've never played a deck of this nature...
Well correct me if I'm wrong but the generic Arcum combo involves the other players with no permanents and you with whatever you have left. Assuming you have, and need, the Pact of Negation, you could easily spend a turn paying for the pact and doing whatever else is possible. I might be totally wrong as I've never played a deck of this nature...
But we don't actually need counter backup for it. Arcum tutors the pieces directly onto the battlefield, or otherwise we hardcast them after drawing our entire deck with Basalt Monolith + Rings of Brighthearth + Sensei's Divining Top (at which point we'll have all our deck's counters in our hand anyway).
Where countermagic like Force of Will really comes in handy is during the crucial turn where we play our commander. Generally we will tap out to do it, and even if we equip him with Lightning Greaves or something similar on the same turn it still helps to have countermagic in hand to stop the numerous things that can still get around the greaves (Wrath of God, Lightning Bolt in response, whatever).
A large part of the reason Arcum Dagsson EDH is so powerful is that literally the only card we need to stick in order to win the game is Arcum himself. To that end, most opponents will do everything in their power to ensure Arcum never sticks.
Ohh well that might make Pact a little less viable. You need double blue and 5 mana in play to pay for it meaning you gotta wait until then if you want to protect him.
Ohh well that might make Pact a little less viable. You need double blue and 5 mana in play to pay for it meaning you gotta wait until then if you want to protect him.
I personally still run Pact of Negation. A free counter is a free counter, and getting double U is almost never an issue since we're mono blue. There is also a ton of mana acceleration in every (good) Arcum list. You can also sometimes work it so you get infinite mana during your upkeep with Arcum's activated ability, which makes the upkeep mana cost of the pact moot.
I wouldn't argue that you shouldn't play Force of Will, but if you were only playing either FoW OR Pact of Negation, I'd choose Pact, since I can more reliably come up with 3UU than I can come up with an extra U card I can pitch. That being said, playing both is not a bad idea.
But we don't actually need counter backup for it. Arcum tutors the pieces directly onto the battlefield, or otherwise we hardcast them after drawing our entire deck with Basalt Monolith + Rings of Brighthearth + Sensei's Divining Top (at which point we'll have all our deck's counters in our hand anyway).
That's if you've already won. In my experience piloting Arcum, sometimes I need that extra counter to get there. If there was some way I could tutor for Rings, Monolith, and the Top simultaneously at instant speed, I'd fully agree with you. But there are always times between fetching Rings and the other two pieces where a free counter can mean the difference between winning and losing.
That's if you've already won. In my experience piloting Arcum, sometimes I need that extra counter to get there. If there was some way I could tutor for Rings, Monolith, and the Top simultaneously at instant speed, I'd fully agree with you. But there are always times between fetching Rings and the other two pieces where a free counter can mean the difference between winning and losing.
My point is just that sticking Arcum is 95% of the game and that's almost always where our counter backup will come most in handy.
Obviously anyone who's played Arcum knows this already. I'm just clarifying it for the people who are unfamiliar (like Xeroxed).
If your meta is removal heavy and you're the one everyone's targeting, that's when I'd board in Null Brooch (if they're targeting you with spells) or drop Torpor Orb (if they're targeting you with creature triggers like Uktabi Orangutan).
My point is just that sticking Arcum is 95% of the game and that's almost always where our counter backup will come most in handy.
My point, if I have one, is that we need to both "stick" Arcum, as well as keep him there for two turns to win you the game. It's not always the best move to fetch Swiftfoot Boots or Lightning Greaves first, depending on what you're facing. My meta's pretty Wrath-heavy, which is why my personal build of Arcum has more counters. Free counters, like Pact and FoW, are awesome for keeping him on the battlefield as well as for getting him on the battlefield.
I feel compelled to point out: possessed portal + myr turbine/crucible does not a win make (even ignoring the possibility of getting beaten to death before everyone else loses their field). possessed portal makes EACH player sac/discard EACH turn. so if you're in a 5 player game, myr turbine means you're only sacrificing 4 "real" cards each cycle of turns, but it's not really a major improvement unless it's a very small game, like 1v1. I guess you could use unwinding clock to remedy this for myr turbine, but there's really no way I can think of to turn crucible into a win with possessed portal. Or at least it's definitely not "indefinite" holding out.
I feel compelled to point out: possessed portal + myr turbine/crucible does not a win make (even ignoring the possibility of getting beaten to death before everyone else loses their field). possessed portal makes EACH player sac/discard EACH turn. so if you're in a 5 player game, myr turbine means you're only sacrificing 4 "real" cards each cycle of turns, but it's not really a major improvement unless it's a very small game, like 1v1. I guess you could use unwinding clock to remedy this for myr turbine, but there's really no way I can think of to turn crucible into a win with possessed portal. Or at least it's definitely not "indefinite" holding out.
Good catch. I think I overspoke a bit.
A usual match in my playgroup is generally 3 people, sometimes it's a duel (but even in duels we use multiplayer rules, not french rules). Less often but still with some frequency we will play 4-man FFA or 5-man FFA. When I wrote this primer I was writing from the mindset of someone playing in multiplayer but still with a relatively small handful of opponents, my "native setting" so to speak.
I corrected the section in question to explicitly state the fact that Possessed Portal is an extremely powerful card no matter how many people are at the table, but in games of 4+ people it demands more skill and caution to use properly.
From personal experience I have used Possessed Portal in a large multiplayer game (I think it was 5 people) on only 2 occasions I can remember. That said, both of those games I won largely because of the Portal. I don't think it would be right to say "If your playgroup >3, don't run Possessed Portal." I think instead how it should be phrased, which is what I reworded the primer to say, that if your playgroup >3, exercise caution in its use, or support it with Unwinding Clock/Nuisance Engine/etc.
As I continue expanding the post, please let me know of any other instances where I let the fact that I am used to playing in smaller multiplayer groups and duels with multiplayer rules preclude my explanation of Arcum in a larger group setting.
My point, if I have one, is that we need to both "stick" Arcum, as well as keep him there for two turns to win you the game. It's not always the best move to fetch Swiftfoot Boots or Lightning Greaves first, depending on what you're facing. My meta's pretty Wrath-heavy, which is why my personal build of Arcum has more counters. Free counters, like Pact and FoW, are awesome for keeping him on the battlefield as well as for getting him on the battlefield.
I think you're touching on something important, which is that with pretty much everything I'm saying in this primer, "Your Mileage May Vary" insofar that the list I run in my meta might not be best suited for your meta. My meta isn't full of Wrath of God, only Zur the Enchanter likes doing that (except he uses Cataclysm/Winds of Rath). The "YMMV, know your meta more than anything" sentiment is one I'll try to work into the OP as much as I can.
In your wrath-heavy meta, what do you tutor for first if not Lightning Greaves (or some similar card) or Myr Turbine? I would assume Null Brooch or something of the sort?
A usual match in my playgroup is generally 3 people, sometimes it's a duel (but even in duels we use multiplayer rules, not french rules). Less often but still with some frequency we will play 4-man FFA or 5-man FFA. When I wrote this primer I was writing from the mindset of someone playing in multiplayer but still with a relatively small handful of opponents, my "native setting" so to speak.
I corrected the section in question to explicitly state the fact that Possessed Portal is an extremely powerful card no matter how many people are at the table, but in games of 4+ people it demands more skill and caution to use properly.
From personal experience I have used Possessed Portal in a large multiplayer game (I think it was 5 people) on only 2 occasions I can remember. That said, both of those games I won largely because of the Portal. I don't think it would be right to say "If your playgroup >3, don't run Possessed Portal." I think instead how it should be phrased, which is what I reworded the primer to say, that if your playgroup >3, exercise caution in its use, or support it with Unwinding Clock/Nuisance Engine/etc.
As I continue expanding the post, please let me know of any other instances where I let the fact that I am used to playing in smaller multiplayer groups and duels with multiplayer rules preclude my explanation of Arcum in a larger group setting.
Have you considered running smokestack itself? It doesn't really lock down as hard as portal does, but it's easier to throw out earlier with a myr turbine or whathaveyou without the potential to backfire quite as badly.
Have you considered running smokestack itself? It doesn't really lock down as hard as portal does, but it's easier to throw out earlier with a myr turbine or whathaveyou without the potential to backfire quite as badly.
I used to run Smokestack itself. I even ran Tangle Wire, too, as a homage to the constructed stax deck as we know it.
The problem with Smokestack in EDH is the same problem it has in Legacy and Vintage: it is slow. It really only begins to hurt when you crank it up to 2+ counters, and that takes a whopping 3+ turns to accomplish, and in that time you should've won the game already. In Legacy and Vintage, there are cards like Chalice of the Void, Sphere of Resistance, Glowrider, Trinisphere, Lodestone Golem, and so on that serve as early denial while Smokestack itself is still coming online. Pretty much all of those neat toys are useless or impractical here in EDH.
The reason portal is so much better is that it comes online immediately, and it has an Uba Mask effect built right in. Like Smokestack, we still get the benefit of being able to sacrifice the portal to its own effect when we no longer need it for some healthy board advantage.
in my meta, if anyone ran white or black, it has its sets of wrath auto included, along with pinpoint removal. ive ran more of morzanth's build line. having more targets that arcum can sac to go fetch, like scuttlemutt/simulacrum, gave me that turn needed to fetch lattice/forge in that same turn. also, those extra mana accel did help out immensly to cast reshape and such so when acrum dropped and countered any wrath or stps to go active on turn 3 or 4. turn 5 begins lockout with portal and beats starting with karn or turbine tokens.
I noticed that you have Pithing Needle twice on your list.
Also, have you thought of running Magosi, the Waterveil? It takes the slot of a land (so you don't have to cut anything else), and has the potential to give you infinite turns with cards you are already running, namely, Rings of Brighthearth, Voltaic Key (or Clock of Omens, or Unwinding Clock) and Mycosynth Lattice. In case you haven't seen this, here's how it works: With Magosi out, before you play your land for the turn, you pay U and tap Magosi to add the eon counter and skip your next turn. Then you use Voltaic Key or another untapper and untap Magosi, with Mycosynth Lattice out making Magosi an artifact. Then you activate the last ability on Magosi to take an extra turn, paying 2 more and copying this ability with your Rings. You then get to take two extra turns, but skip the first of these, netting you an extra turn. Since you had to return Magosi to your hand, you play it as your land for the turn and it comes into play tapped. On your extra turn, Magosi untaps naturally, and you repeat the process for infinite turns. All it takes are the four cards, and 2U mana (3U mana with Voltaic Key) from other sources, and you can go infinite. It's a four-card combo, I know, but we are playing a general who fetches all of the pieces except Magosi, and most opponents won't see this line of play coming until it's too late (or unless they've seen it before). It makes a good contingency plan if one of your opponent's gets cheeky and nukes your Basalt Monolith or names your Sensei's Divining Top with their Pithing Needle.
I'm not advocating this as being a first line of attack, but I really enjoy building decks with lots of ways to win, and the drawback of including this combo is having a comes-into-play-tapped land that taps for U.
I noticed that you have Pithing Needle twice on your list.
What? I have no idea what you're talking about... *shifty eyes*
As to your blurb on Magosi, the Waterveil, no, I was not familiar with that combo, but it seems fairly straightforward (I don't think there's a single card with a Time Vault-esque effect that can't be broken with enough effort and the right tools.
While it's a neat party gimmick, I'm not convinced it's reliable enough of a wincon to merit removing an Island for it, given that its a CIPT nonbasic. True, we end up tutoring for some of the pieces (at very least Rings of Brighthearth, anyway) as part of our core gameplan, but tutoring the land itself is the most crucial part, and it's nigh impossible for us to do that without taking up a considerable amount of time.
We have two land tutors, one of which, Tolaria West, is a land itself. The other is Expedition Map, which is tutorable by arcum, but it would still take a lot of time to set up. And plus any player worth his salt will Wasteland/Strip Mine/whatever Magosi on the turn it comes into play tapped before I get a chance to activate it.
Personally, if my meta is loaded with Pithing Needle, I'd rather tune my deck to deal with the needles themselves than scrape the bottom of the barrel for additional, if slow and inconsistent, wincons.
All that said, it is a valid combo, and it is probably easier to accomplish in this deck than in most others, so I suppose I can throw 1x Magosi of the Waterveil in the SB.
I think you're touching on something important, which is that with pretty much everything I'm saying in this primer, "Your Mileage May Vary" insofar that the list I run in my meta might not be best suited for your meta...The "YMMV, know your meta more than anything" sentiment is one I'll try to work into the OP as much as I can.
Actually, I just devoted the second post in the thread entirely to metagame tuning.
Hopefully it will draw enough attention to the fact that Arcum is more about the metagame than...well, most other decks I can think of in the format.
If you're looking to solicit my help, ask me questions, or just comment on the primer overall, I encourage you to do it via replying to this thread instead of via sending me a Private Message. That way, any help or suggestions I offer you can be viewed by the entire community instead of by only you and me, and the whole community can benefit from our discussion.
Thanks very much, and I hope you find the primer informative.
unless you use me as your EDH commander, then maybe it will."
E) Metagame tuning for dummies
When most of the major civilizations of Terisiare were obliterated by the Sylex blast, there began a new struggle to rebuild the broken continent. The most powerful of new nations that arose was Kjeldor, and in Kjeldor was a city full of artificers called Soldev, and the most marvelous artificer in that city was none other than Arcum Dagsson. With memories of the War still fresh in their minds, however, a splinter faction of Soldevi (called Soldevi Adnates), led by aptly-named Sorine Relicbane, remained mistrustful of artifice. Despite Arcum's argument that artifacts could in fact be used for peace and goodness, the meddling of the Adnates caused Arcum's steam giants to go out of control. Arcum used his abilities to stop his creations' rampage, but not before they destroyed all of Soldev.
Following this disaster, Arcum spent the rest of his life in penance, trying to make amends for the damage his own artifice had caused. He died of a heart attack two years after the fall of Soldev at the approximate age of 66.
Arcum's ability, "T:Target artifact creature's controller sacrifices it..." is, lore-wise, representative of Arcum's ability as an artificer to dismantle powerful artifact creatures. The idea is that if your opponent is packing a Darksteel Colossus, Arcum can make your opponent sacrifice it and turn it into something harmless, like Darksteel Relic. Ironically, in EDH, we employ Arcum to the exact opposite of his lore effect: we turn harmless artifact creatures, like Manakin, into extremely powerful non-creature artifacts, like Darksteel Forge.
Anyway, here's a short and sweet list to help you out...
You may enjoy Arcum if:
You may not enjoy Arcum if:
==AKA: What's the mindset behind this deck?==
Without a doubt, there are innumerous ways to "correctly" build a competitive Arcum deck, particularly considering that the EDH metagame may vary drastically from one playgroup to another. I wholly respect other players' unique approaches, and moreover I encourage you to share your personal strategies and favorite singletons with me such that I may further tune my list to be as strong as possible not only in my personal metagame but in all metagames.
That said, if you're going to be following my personal advice on how to build Arcum, you should understand my personal philosophy on how to build Arcum. The material I wrote below was composed in the mindset that Arcum will always generate tremendous hate no matter how politically palatable you build him, and my solution to this is simply to ignore politics and my opponents' happiness altogether--or rather, to win the game before they even become relevant. My competitive decklist's singular goal is to win--and to do it more efficiently and consistently than any other deck around, regardless of the politics or fun-factor of the match (to me, winning is where the fun comes in).
I do not and never will prioritize politics or utilize more palatable wincons or card decisions if I feel personally that those decisions are suboptimal to victory, which is why you won't find any Blightsteel Colossus or Lifeline in my mainboard (Lifeline might make a good sideboard option in certain matchups and metas, but I wouldn't use it as a full-time substitute for Myr Turbine or any other combo piece). It's also the reason why you'll find a heavier stax element in my list than in other lists here on MTGS, including the utterly-backbreaking and widely-loathed stax card Possessed Portal. Personally I don't mind if my opponents are annoyed or upset when I take their resources away so they can't play; it might seem unfun or unpolitical, but I just call it winning securely.
Concisely, this is the core deck mindset or philosophy that distinguishes my list from others: if you're playing Arcum as your commander, A) you're clearly looking to play a strong deck and B) you're invariably going to be hated no matter what you do...so you mind as well go balls-out, throw politics and fun out the window, and hone in solely on victory. That's the mentality behind other top decks in this format like Hermit Druid combo and Azami, and that's the mentality you'll find here.
A few other basic notes on overall deck design to help you grasp my philosophy:
But now we're getting ahead of ourselves--those of you new to Arcum might not have understood those last two bullets at all. And so without further ado...
Of course as I moved into more competitive circles, Arcum just didn't cut it as a MUC commander anymore. I still wanted to play MUC, so I ended up splitting that idea off into what is today my Azami, Lady of Scrolls list, and then I made Arcum my dedicated combo list. I yanked all the draw and countermagic except for the very best of the bunch. I concluded that monolith/top/rings (explained below) was the fastest route to victory, and I reworked the deck such that the only goal became resolving those three artifacts as soon as possible.
Subsequently, with my discovery of the largely-neglected card Possessed Portal and Magic's printing of toolbox artifacts like Torpor Orb and Grafdigger's Cage, I expanded my Arcum list from being strictly-linear in its performance to being much more metagame dependent. It's safe to say the addition of these and similar cards has increased the power of this deck dramatically.
Most recently of all, Kaladesh block brought us Paradox Engine, one of the most powerful artifacts printed in a very long time, adding an entirely new victory route (described below) that's faster than any this deck has ever known.
Here is my list as it currently stands:
1x Academy Ruins
1x Ancient Tomb
1x Blinkmoth Nexus
1x Buried Ruin
1x Cavern of Souls
1x City of Traitors
1x Crystal Vein
1x Flooded Strand
1x Gemstone Caverns
1x Hall of the Bandit Lord
1x Inkmoth Nexus
1x Inventors' Fair
1x Minamo, School at Water's Edge
1x Mishra's Factory
1x Mishra's Workshop
1x Misty Rainforest
1x Polluted Delta
1x Saprazzan Skerry
1x Seat of the Synod
11x Snow-Covered Island
1x Strip Mine
1x Svyelunite Temple
Creature (17)
1x Etherium Sculptor
1x Hangarback Walker
1x Hedron Crawler
1x Junk Diver
1x Manakin
1x Memnite
1x Metalworker
1x Millikin
1x Myr Retriever
1x Myr Sire
1x Ornithopter
1x Phyrexian Metamorph
1x Plague Myr
1x Silver Myr
1x Spellskite
1x Trinket Mage
1x Walking Ballista
Planeswalkers (1)
1x Tezzeret the Seeker
Instants/Sorceries (14)
1x Brainstorm
1x Counterspell
1x Fact or Fiction
1x Fabricate
1x Mana Drain
1x Muddle the Mixture
1x Negate
1x Pact of Negation
1x Ponder
1x Reshape
1x Swan Song
1x Thirst for Knowledge
1x Transmute Artifact
1x Whir of Invention
1x Copy Artifact
1x Mystic Remora
1x Power Artifact
Artifact (32)
1x Basalt Monolith
1x Chalice of the Void
1x Citanul Flute
1x Clock of Omens
1x Defense Grid
1x Grim Monolith
1x Lightning Greaves
1x Lotus Petal
1x Mana Crypt
1x Mana Vault
1x Mox Diamond
1x Mox Opal
1x Mycosynth Lattice
1x Myr Turbine
1x Null Brooch
1x Paradox Engine
1x Pithing Needle
1x Possessed Portal
1x Rings of Brighthearth
1x Sensei's Divining Top
1x Skullclamp
1x Sol Ring
1x Staff of Domination
1x Static Orb
1x Swiftfoot Boots
1x Tangle Wire
1x Thorn of Amethyst
1x Thousand-Year Elixir
1x Torpor Orb
1x Unwinding Clock
1x Voltaic Key
1x Winter Orb
1x Crucible of Worlds
1x Ensnaring Bridge
1x Sculpting Steel
1x Spine of Ish Sah
1x Memory Jar
1x Jester's Cap
1x Witchbane Orb
1x Grafdigger's Cage
1x Mindslaver
1x Champion's Helm
1x Neurok Stealthsuit
1x Master Transmuter
1x Nevinyrral's Disk
1x Darksteel Forge
Step 2: Create an engine--details below.
(Optional Step 2.5: Obtain Olivia Wilde)
Step 3: Cast Walking Ballista with infinite mana and ping everyone to death.
Ideally, you want to drop a mana dork turn 2 to ramp into Arcum turn 3 and either give him shroud immediately or give him haste and use his ability (saccing the mana dork) to fetch him shroud. If, while you do all this, you still have some mana open and cards in hand to Counterspell your opponents' stuff, that's even better.
The turbine and Arcum together form the simplest engine in the deck; as you go into goldfish mode, the Turbine ensures you can tutor for any noncreature artifact at least once on each of your turns, no matter what you topdeck. Additionally, as you'll soon read, the Turbine is a cornerstone of many of our strongest combos and interactions; as long as it's on the field, we can seamlessly transition between our main and secondary strategies as necessary.
With turbine + Arcum alone, you can successfully win the game in at most 3 more turns, which for many casual-oriented players might already might seem like a pretty short clock...but in competitive play, it's not quite short enough. Your opponents will still have plenty of time to come up with a solution--Return to Dust, perhaps, or Toxic Deluge to wipe your board...heavens forbid they play Null Rod!
Instead, the overarching goal is use Arcum and your dorks in addition to whatever tutors you draw in your hand (Transmute Artifact, Fabricate, and so forth) to assemble the following combo, which is much faster:
Rings of Brighthearth + Basalt Monolith + Staff of Domination
This combo only requires 2 Arcum activations to assemble, half as many turns needed as turbine + Arcum alone. Tutor for Rings first, then sacrificing two dorks at once you can tutor for the monolith and staff at the same time by copying Arcum's activation ability with the rings.
This combo effectually provides you with infinite (OK, "arbitrary") colorless mana and infinite card draw, allowing you to draw and play your entire deck--including your game-winning combo and the countermagic to protect it! An explanation is provided below of how Rings and Monolith work together to produce infinite colorless:
Given: Rings of Brighthearth, Basalt Monolith, and 2 free mana of any color...
Worthy of note is that for several years prior to April 2013, Sheldon and the EDH rules committee had Staff of Domination on the EDH banlist. Any veteran EDH player will tell you, though, that Arcum had been a top-tier commander long before Staff's unbanning. Prior to April 2013 we used Sensei's Divining Top as the draw component in the engine, such that the combo looked like this:
Rings of Brighthearth + Basalt Monolith + Sensei's Divining Top
An explanation of Rings' interaction with Top is provided below:
Given: Rings of Brighthearth, Sensei's Divining Top, and infinite colorless mana...
Note that the Top engine suffers from one critical flaw: one of the steps in the combo to draw infinite cards is hardcasting and resolving Top for each card drawn, which can only be done at sorcery speed. So, building on the example I gave earlier, if in response to one of your Top hardcasts, one of your opponents casts Disenchant targeting Rings of Brighthearth, you cannot simply keep drawing cards in response: Disenchant resolves first, your Rings are destroyed, your engine is thwarted, all while Top is stuck on the stack. This is why Staff, which evades this pitfall, has supplanted Top as our go-to draw component for our primary engine.
Of course we still run Sensei's Divining Top in our Arcum decklists nowadays, because it's such a great card on its own for manipulating topdecks and we'd never cut it for anything, so this older combo is still wholly valid and usable today. Indeed, in some ways it's even easier to deploy than Rings/Monolith/Staff because Top is just 1 cmc and can therefore be tutored for and played more easily through non-Arcum methods. If you don't suspect instant-speed removal will be a problem, or you don't plan on comboing off on an opponent's turn, or perhaps your Staff of Domination simply gets removed, always remember that you can fall back to the classic Rings/Monolith/Top engine that Arcum decks have relied on for many years prior to April 2013.
So Rings + Monolith + Staff (or Rings + Monolith + Top) already has the deck down to a "two-tap clock," so to speak--two Arcum taps is game over. But most recently of all, a card was printed that almost single-handedly provides an even faster solution, a one-tap clock, and that is Paradox Engine, as part of the following combo:
Paradox Engine + Citanul Flute + Memnite + Myr Moonvessel
Here's the plan:
Given: Arcum Dagsson, 2 saccable dorks on the field, any castable spell in hand.
Almost always it will be best to prioritize Paradox Engine into Rings/Monolith/Staff(or Top). Its speed, efficiency, and consistency places it head-and-shoulders above other engines--all you need is 1 Arcum tap to fetch Paradox, 1 dork on the board, and the mana to cast any spell, and you can win the game that same turn. However, we do have another option that, while usually somewhat slower to assemble and more challenging to activate, also works entirely at instant speed and can lead to some unique wincons that would normally be unreachable to us, like aggro. Here it is:
Myr Turbine + Clock of Omens + Mycosynth Lattice
The good news, as with the previous engine, is that each card, on its own, is already exceedingly useful to us in a myriad of other ways (particularly Myr Turbine as I mentioned earlier), so you're never "wasting" a tutor or running into a dead draw as you assemble these artifacts. Unlike the Rings/Monolith/Staff combo, though, this engine requires some manipulation and foresight to work properly.
Firstly, Arcum Dagsson can't have Shroud. This is vitally important. If you're planning on using this engine, choose Swiftfoot Boots as your protective equip of choice, or be ready to leave Arcum vulnerable for the duration of the combo.
Then, you'll probably want to tutor out Myr Turbine after playing Clock of Omens and attempt to use them and your mana to create as many permanents on your side of the field as possible. Lastly, on your combo turn, you'll search out Mycosynth Lattice. With sufficient untapped permanents (all of which are now artifacts), you can use Clock of Omens's ability to repeatedly untap Arcum and tutor out a few cards at instant speed: Basalt Monolith and Rings of Brighthearth. Now you're ready to combo.
In the event that Rings of Brighthearth is exiled, you can still use a Clock-based engine to combo off, although it becomes slightly more difficult to do so as you'll require some more preparation. There are two possibilities to do so, each with different setups.
Possibility #1: The setup for this one is that you will need to create a source of infinite mana beforehand. As explained later in this primer, this will most likely end up being Power Artifact enchanted on a monolith. Instead of tutoring up Rings and Basalt to start the combo, instead tutor up both monoliths (or whichever one you don't have out already): Basalt Monolith and Grim Monolith.
Possibility #2: This is by far the most fragile of the Clock combos as it requires the most pieces, but we already run all the cards for it anyway as part of our other combos so I feel it's worth a mention. The setup for this one is that you need two copies of Staff of Domination on your side of the field, and an artifact that taps for 3 or more. This means you'll first need to stick Staff of Domination and then copy it, preferably in the same exact turn so as to minimize your opponents' opportunity to react. There are three efficient copy effects available to Arcum; my list runs two mainboard and one sideboard: Copy Artifact, Phyrexian Metamorph, and Sculpting Steel. Remember that only Sculpting Steel, as a noncreature artifact, is tutorable by Arcum. You'll also need an artifact that taps for 3 or more, which include Grim Monolith and Basalt Monolith (both of which, again, are already in our deck for their overall utility). If you can manage to get all of that set up without your opponents interfering, then the combo is simple:
Now that your engine of choice is set up, all that's left to do is win.
Darksteel Forge + Mycosynth Lattice + Nevinyrral's Disk
This combo effectively destroyed all permanents on the board except ours. It worked well because it didn't target anyone, so it couldn't be stopped by player shroud effects (like Grapeshot or Blue Sun's Zenith or Disciple of the Vault all could) and because it was indestructible.
But at the same time it had a major drawback: Darksteel Forge and Nevinyrral's Disk were almost always dead draws when they showed up in the hand. We never really cast them outside of the combo. And let's be honest--player shroud effects like Ivory Mask aren't all that common an issue to begin with. So, in the interest of streamlining, when Kaladesh came out, both of those cards were moved to the binder-board in place of:
Walking Ballista
Since we already had infinite mana by the time we got around to playing Forge/Disk/Lattice in the first place, we can now simply use infinite mana to cast Walking Ballista for x=1000 and ping everybody to death. Making that swap freed up 1 card slot, and it saves us from occasionally having to topdeck or mulligan into Darksteel Forge or Nevinyrral's Disk, which used to be one of the weakest and most frustrating things this deck could do.
Speaking of frustrating...
Some scenarios may call for a change of plan. What if your Paradox Engine gets hit by Revoke Existence? What if your Walking Ballista gets Jester's Capped away before you have a chance to play it? Luckily, we have control options that can be deployed at one of two times:
Possessed Portal + Myr Turbine + Unwinding Clock/Dross Scorpion
Easily the most powerful contingency plan available, and it's one of our signature weapons--no other EDH deck can deploy it and survive with it as quickly and smoothly as we can. Smokestack effects have always been powerful, and when you combine a stax effect with an Uba Mask-esque hand lock, the result is game-ending (thus the vintage deck, Uba Stax, was born).
Against nearly all decks, Possessed Portal puts a full halt to the game for as long as it remains in play: no cards can be drawn, and each player's board position slowly declines. It cripples shotgun decks like Yisan, Wanderer Bard who unload their hand and hit goldfish early; it cripples control/draw-go decks like Doomsday, forcing them to discard their hands and punishing them for playing so few permanents; it even cripples many combo decks, including Azami, Lady of Scrolls and the mirror match against other Arcum Dagsson players, whose game-winning combos involve drawing infinite cards.
The good news for us is that we come prepared! We have a tutoring general at our disposal and fodder-enablers like Crucible of Worlds, Myr Turbine, and Unwinding Clock already in our deck or sideboard as part of our main strategy. With proper setup, therefore, we can hold out indefinitely and even advance our position under Possessed Portal while your opponents wither away.
Just remember: the portal works on each end step, not just yours. Thus when the portal's out you need to produce one fodder for each turn to fully mitigate the reciprocal effect, and one more fodder than that to advance your game state by fueling Arcum. Unwinding Clock/Dross Scorpion + Myr Turbine by themselves net you one token per turn, so any additional untap effects (such as Voltaic Key) or fodder producers (such as Crucible of Worlds) will allow you to advance.
Because it works on each end step, Possessed Portal becomes more brutal as more players are at the table. Use it with caution and make sure you have a plan to generate enough fodder to not only feed the portal but also to feed Arcum. When you drop the portal, people will hate you, and they will do everything in their power to defeat you; you may need to tutor out additional protection, such as Ensnaring Bridge or Darksteel Forge, to convince your opponents to throw in the towel.
With the inclusion of Metalworker (more on him below) it's now possible to consistently power out Possessed Portal as early as T3 even if you don't have the tools to support it indefinitely, treating it like a sort of Tangle Wire on steroids--you play around it for 1-2 turns then sac it to itself, while your unprepared opponents degrade to nothing. Even if it means giving up your entire hand and wiping nearly your entire board position back to Turn 0, your opponents will have suffered the same fate by the end of it, and if you can use that coverage to safely secure a shrouded Arcum and a single artifact creature (which can then be sacrificed for Myr Turbine to power subsequent sacs), then for all practical purposes you've won the game.
As with any early stax play, this sort of blitzkrieg backbreaker requires premeditation and a skilled execution, even moreso than tutoring out the Portal with Arcum because you don't have the luxury of fetching whatever you need to help you stay afloat next turn. If you've played Mono-W Stax or similar decks in Legacy, or any form of vintage stax, you'll be well-acquainted with this process already. At the moment you drop Possessed Portal, you need to be fully aware of your gamestate, how many turns you plan on keeping the portal out (ideally 1-2), and how many sacrifices/discards you'll make along the way. Always remember you can sacrifice Portal to itself! That alone tips the card's reciprocity heavily in your favor in the same way Tangle Wire can tap itself.
Metalworker + Staff of Domination + 3 artifacts in hand
The September 2014 banlist changes, including the unbanning of Metalworker, have already sparked all sorts of controversy. Whether 'worker gets re-banned in the future, only time will tell, but for as long as it stays unbanned, it will stay in Arcum's arsenal.
Any creature that can generate 5 or more mana in a single tap combos infinitely with Staff of Domination, and Metalworker is no exception (ironically, it was this very mechanic that led to Staff's banning years ago). You pay 3 to untap the creature, 1 to untap the Staff, and have 1 or more left over, and this can be repeated infinitely. All you need is 3 artifacts in the hand so Metalworker can generate 6 per tap.
Put 'worker and Staff together and you've got infinite mana and card draw (and infinite life and creature taps, if those happen to be relevant somehow). Proceed to win the game as described above.
There are a few reasons I am not listing Metalworker+Staff as the main engine of this deck, even though it is an exceedingly powerful combo and well within our capability to assemble, and you should keep these in mind as you play. Strong though he may be, Metalworker does have his shortcomings compared to the main Rings/Basalt/Staff combo:
All in all, the unbanning of Metalworker has made Arcum much, much stronger, functioning as mana battery, combo piece, and Arcum fodder all at the same time, enabling nasty T2 Arcum drops or T3 portal softlocks. With Metalworker at his side, Arcum's place is secured even more solidly at the pinnacle of EDH power.
Power Artifact + Basalt Monolith/Grim Monolith + Staff of Domination
Power Artifact + one of the Monoliths = arguably the most straightforward 2-card infinite mana combo in the entire game, and unlike other combos that involve Rings of Brighthearth, this one isn't "telegraphed" is much--that is to say, your opponents can't see it coming quite as easily as they can see something's broken about to happen when you tutor out Rings or Metalworker. Grim Monolith looks like a simple one-shot mana rock like Mana Vault before BAM, tutor for Staff with Arcum, cast Power Artifact on Grim Monolith, draw your deck and good game. Similar to Metalworker, this one is a "contingency plan" because, as an enchantment, Power Artifact is harder to find; the only card we have to tutor for it is Muddle the Mixture via transmute. As a result, you won't be seeing this combo all that frequently, but when you do happen to topdeck Power Artifact or Muddle the Mixture, you should immediately realize that your combo victory is just a blink away.
Alpha strike to win (Tezzeret the Seeker/Myr Turbine)
Really? Aggro? We're playing blue, after all. Swinging in for combat damage is so below us, not to mention almost always infeasible in a multiplayer competitive setting. But we can win with aggro as a last resort if necessary--the option is certainly available, and it's important as a combo player to keep in mind all of your options. Tezzeret turns all artifacts into 5/5 beatsticks, and also as mentioned previously in the "Create an engine" section, Myr Turbine in combination with infinite mana and Clock of Omens can produce infinite 1/1 Myr tokens, as can a Hangarback Walker cast for 1000/1000 with infinite mana.
Core cards make the deck work and are mandatory in every list, budget permitting. While they are mostly self-explanatory, understanding how each one works is vital to your success, and I'll elaborate on some of the heaviest hitters that I run in my list above. With the sole exceptions of countermagic and planeswalkers, all of these cards are artifacts, so instead of grouping them by type, they are grouped here by function.
These artifacts facilitate our Plan A: drop and secure Arcum, fetch combo, win. Look for these in an opening hand!
Lightning Greaves
Most every commander-centric deck runs these anyway, but in Arcum they're especially important because they can be tutored for, and indeed, if Arcum isn't already protected by shroud, these will often be the very first thing you tutor for.
Swiftfoot Boots
Tutor for these instead if you already have effects like Thousand-Year Elixir and Minamo, School at Water's Edge at your disposal, or if you're going for Clock of Omen shenanigans. The one-time 1 you pay to equip is well worth being able to activate Arcum 2+ times a turn.
Thousand-Year Elixir
Gives Arcum and dorks pseudo-haste and lets you activate Arcum twice a turn--what's not to love?
Dross Scorpion/Unwinding Clock
While earlier I discussed these two cards' utility when working under Possessed Portal, they're still extremely powerful even when you're working on Plan A, as they grant a tremendous tempo advantage with the right tools. For example, you can untap Myr Turbine and Thousand-Year Elixir to pull off an Arcum activation on each player's turn, not just your turn.
Clock of Omens
Even when not functioning as part of the engine described above, Clock of Omens still packs tremendous utility. It turns artifacts that don't normally tap for anything useful, like those Lightning Greaves that Arcum is wearing or that Torpor Orb sitting off to the side, into half-Voltaic Keys, which can be used to untap mana rocks, Myr Turbine, anything you need. It's tremendous tempo advantage by itself.
Staff of Domination
Unbanned as of April 2013 and found its place immediately as an instant-speed replacement for Sensei's Divining Top in the Rings/Monolith/Top (now Rings/Monolith/Staff) engine and as a replacement for Planar Portal in the Clock/Lattice engine. Its uses, however, extend beyond simply functioning as part of an engine, because it single-handedly and instantly turns infinite mana from your other combos like Power Artifact + Grim Monolith into infinite cards and infinite life--and even on its own, the "3: Untap target creature" ability is dandy for achieving multiple Arcum activations per turn in a similar manner to Thousand-Year Elixir.
When Plan A doesn't cut it and you're shifting to a contingency plan, or to support plan A en route to its finale, these artifacts are here to help.
Kuldotha Forgemaster
Arcum #2. Costs 5 instead of 3U and requires three artifacts to sac, but those artifacts don't have to be creatures, and the thing you fetch doesn't have to be a non-creature. In other words, Kuldotha can fetch Metalworker, and is one of the only tutors we have to do so. Prior to Metalworker's unbanning I didn't run Kuldotha, but for the time being I think it's worth it, even with his steep cost. Recently moved to the sideboard; use as you feel necessary.
Master Transmuter/Metalworker
Arcum Dagsson's biggest limitation is that he can only hit stuff in the library. To that end, we need a device that can serve as an Arcum for other game zones, most particularly our hand, as we already have numerous cards at our disposal to recur our artifacts from the graveyard to our hand.
Before September 2014, this role was filled by Master Transmuter. She could cheat out a fat Possessed Portal or Darksteel Forge onto the field even if they were stuck in our hand where Arcum couldn't touch them. Her ability can even cheat out artifact creatures, which was nice, if not quite as useful in this deck as elsewhere. And, lastly, she was herself an artifact creature, so she could fuel Arcum's ability (or even her own ability) when her usefulness had expired.
With the unbanning of Metalworker in September 2014, though, poor M.T. is now relegated to the sideboard in my list. As the song goes, "anything you can do, I can do better," and this is certainly true with this swap. M.T. wins out in the sexy department, but Metalworker is faster, cheaper, more flexible, and more combo-riffic than M.T., and he's still Arcum fodder when he needs to be.
M.T.'s ability is still useful in the same matchups as I described before (for example, needle-heavy metas) and so she will remain in the sideboard to be switched in as necessary vs those matchups. And she's still a great option to fill this role for those of you who don't have a Metalworker in your collection or don't want to spend the money to get one.
Do not mourn the loss of Master Transmuter. It is the nature of artifice to constantly upgrade toward perfection. She understands this. It's what she would have wanted.
Trinisphere
Another page from the stax book. Legacy and Vintage stax ramp into Trinisphere to a) deny opponents their own mana rocks in the opening turns, b) control the early-game window T1-2 when the powerhouse 4cmc card (Arcum for us, Smokestack) is usually yet to see play, and c) to hamstring all tempo into the mid- and late-game by imposing a hard floor of 3cmc on every spell. We use it in exactly the same way: T1 dump rocks, play Trinisphere. Your rocks are on the field producing mana as normal, but your opponents' rocks become much weaker. Cards like Sol Ring and Mana Crypt aren't nearly as pretty when they cost 3, and cards like Lotus Petal and Mox Diamond are practically unplayable at that price. Control decks ache too: Counterspell becomes Cancel, for example, and "free spells" like Force of Will and Snuff Out are made trash as they cost an additional 3 even if the alternate cost is paid. Meanwhile our most important cards--Arcum, Rings, Staff, Metalworker, etc.--are happily unaffected, as they already cost 3-4 cmc to begin with. And finally, as an artifact, it synergizes with literally everything in this deck. Recently moved to the sideboard due to negative synergy with Paradox Engine combo, but one of these days I'd like to add it back in...
Tangle Wire
AKA miniature Possessed Portal. It functions the same way, denying everyone resources while giving you a slight advantage (you can tap Tangle Wire to its own ability to keep yourself one permanent ahead), but its effectiveness is limited to the first few turns (unlike Portal which freezes the game anytime) and it can't be sealed into a hard-lock. Still, it buys us a lot of time to get our hefty 4cmc commander on the field, and we'll usually have plenty of things that don't actually matter if they're tapped down (utility pieces like Torpor Orb and Pithing Needle, utility dorks like Dross Scorpion and Spellskite, tokens, Arcum's shoes, and so forth), while our opponents are tapping down more valuable items like lands or things with T abilities.
Chalice of the Void
As the competitive EDH meta becomes only faster with increased power creep, cards like Chalice which thwart low-CMC spells become only stronger (which is why nowadays a lot of competitive decks even run Mental Misstep). Occasionally set to 0 to hose all the best mana rocks and pacts (note that this also turns off Paradox Engine combo however); most often set to 1 to hose all the best mana rocks as well as powerful spells like Reanimate, Dark Ritual, and many of the best draw/tutors/countermagic; rarely set to 2 to hose many of the strongest spells in the entire format (think Survival of the Fittest, Demonic Tutor, etc.) as well as the best countermagic and removal. Can also be used like a mini-Trinisphere (dump rocks, play Chalice at 0 or 1). Remember Arcum's ability puts cards onto the battlefield and therefore circumvents Chalice (so a chalice at cmc=2 won't stop Arcum from fetching Lightning Greaves, for example).
Winter Orb/Static Orb/Thorn of Amethyst
Slowing down others makes hefty 4cmc Arcum much "quicker" by comparison. These are pretty self-explanatory I think. The fact that they're all artifacts and can interact with everything in this deck is gravy for us. Our untap effects like Paradox Engine and Unwinding Clock mitigate the reciprocal impact of the Orbs, and most of the spells we cast are creatures anyway (Arcum, dorks).
Spine of Ish Sah
Tap Arcum to Vindicate at instant speed. Very slow, and a dead draw when in the hand, but it's one of the only "destroy" effects available to us and is therefore practically our only tool to thwart Null Rod or other problematic permanents if they stick. A while back I moved Spine to the sideboard to cut down on dead draws and because it's only really useful in some niche scenarios.
As a general rule, artifact dorks in this deck have to do something; they can't just be cheap fodder. Ideally they'll provide mana or some other utility. You might be tempted into running things like Ornithopter that you can drop really fast, but don't be fooled--this isn't an affinity deck. We're not trying to drop artifact creatures quickly, we're trying to drop our commander quickly, and we only care for enough artifact creatures to fuel him.
Manakin (+Silver Myr, Millikin, Plague Myr, Hedron Crawler)
The 2cmc "T: add 1" mana dorks in the deck are GREAT things to look for in an opening hand. More than one is the opening hand is even better. They can be dropped on turn 2 and allow you to ramp directly into Arcum on turn 3 while also providing a body to be sacrificed that turn or the very next, either to begin building a lock (read: Possessed Portal) or to fetch Myr Turbine if you've no more dorks to sac.
Etherium Sculptor
In this deck she's basically Helm of Awakening on legs, but unfortunately she's still a second-tier dork because she can't cheapen Arcum, and ultimately we're looking to tinker our artifacts, not hardcast them. Don't be fooled when you see her in your opening hand; she's good, but she's no Manakin.
Myr Sire
Formerly Epochrasite. The fact of the matter is that both Epochrasite and Myr Sire are good at what they do, which is effectively giving you two dorks, twice as much Arcum fuel, twice as much Portal fodder, in the space of one card for 2. They're pure card advantage. I originally ran Epochrasite, but after much playtesting of my own and convincing from posters in this thread I finally came to the conclusion that Myr Sire was just a little bit better in that he always works early, unlike Epochrasite who has some extra late-game utility but sometimes doesn't work early when it matters most.
Hangarback Walker
Formerly Myr Moonvessel (again, old blurb spoilered below). More than anything else, we needed a dork tutorable by Trinket Mage in order to maximize the mage's toolbox, since all our other dorks are 2cmc+. Out of the possible options, Moonvessel was by far the best choice, if only because he did something besides chump blocking, which was more than the others like Ornithopter could say. OK, he deserves a little more credit--that 1 mana really helped sometimes, and as I explained in the old description, I actually thought he was pretty nice. But Myr Sire's ability is even better than Moonvessel's, and with Origins' printing Hangarback Walker, which plays as basically a buffed Myr Sire for 0cmc, Moonvessel has become obsolete. Hangarback Walker is now the best 0-1cmc artifact dork in the game, hands down.
People give mixed reviews on this guy. The catch, of course, is that the mana you receive from sacrificing him must be spent on the same turn or it's wasted. Personally I like him; given that the usual winning turn of this deck generally demands 4 (2 to copy Arcum's ability and another 2 to activate the rings/top/monolith combo) and that we often try to attempt it on turn 3-5, having a "cushion" of 1 can be a big help sometimes. In addition, using him to tutor for Swiftfoot Boots pays the equip cost for you. Finally and perhaps most importantly, at 1 CMC he's a dork you can fetch with Trinket Mage if needed.
Junk Diver (+Myr Retriever)
Recursion dorks are another no-brainer. At worst, you sacrifice a dork to return another dork from your graveyard to your hand, which would potentially save you the turn you'd otherwise spend tutoring for Myr Turbine. At best, you sacrifice a dork to return a combo piece from the graveyard, from which you can't play them, to your hand, from which you can.
Spellskite
Possibly one of the greatest additions to this deck from Scars block besides Torpor Orb. He's a dork that doubles as countermagic! Just remember: according to the rulings, you can't change the target of a spell/ability to Spellskite and then sac it with Arcum and get the best of both worlds: "If Spellskite leaves the battlefield before its ability resolves, the targets remain unchanged." He can be either a lightning rod or sac fodder--but not both at once.
Null Brooch
In other Arcum lists you won't always find this card mainboard--and indeed, for a long time I didn't run it mainboard myself--but it's mandatory for any sideboard at very least. Best of all, it's budget, and it's one of our signature cards (you won't find this in other decks).
Discarding your hand is a steep cost--even if we have only 1 or 2 cards in hand, usually those few cards are still really helpful to our plan. Even just 2 dorks in the hand, for example, is enough to fuel a victory with Arcum without having to spend an activation fetching Myr Turbine, meaning we can win a whole turn sooner. Its tremendous power, however, stems from the fact that it is a reusable Negate that can be fetched at instant speed with Arcum if need be. When Ad Nauseam is on the stack, either you counter it or you lose--discarding your hand is well worth it at that point. It also "turns on" certain cards that require our hand size to be small, like Ensnaring Bridge. Lastly, under Possessed Portal its drawback becomes negligible, since our hand size will be 0 anyway.
For my meta personally, I run it mainboard. All in all it's not something to be underestimated, particularly in certain metas as I will discuss later.
Pact of Negation (+Force of Will)
Free countermagic is always good, especially in combo decks like ours. That said, even though we're mono-blue, between our lands and artifacts over 75% of this deck is colorless, so it's difficult for us to consistently pay for FoW.
Muddle the Mixture
On it's own, it's a solid counterspell; most of the ways in which your opponents will attempt to remove Arcum involve instant or sorcery spells, so this card can effectively be used to protect Arcum when he comes out. More importantly, it doubles as a transmute tutor for any 2cmc card in our deck, which, thanks to our low curve, happens to include some of our best cards: Power Artifact, Grim Monolith, Lightning Greaves, silver bullets like Defense Grid and Torpor Orb, and more.
Memory Jar
Vintage-level card made even better because it's a valid tutor target for Arcum. Granted, powerful as it is, you'll have better things to tutor out more often than not--but if the need ever arises, you should know that you can tap Arcum to draw 7 cards on demand. A while ago this was moved to the sideboard as often enough it wasn't a worthwhile tutor.
Fact or Fiction/Thirst for Knowledge/Mystic Remora/etc.
Finding the right number of draw spells to include is a tricky and subjective process. I just spent the last two paragraphs pointing out that this deck's fast speed makes our hand size really important, especially in the opening three or four turns. Draw spells refill our hand with useful goodies, but too much draw dips into our pool of useful artifacts. Even so, I think it's worthwhile to include the best of the blue draw, with particular props to spells like Ponder and Mystic Remora that can single-handedly sculpt a winning hand out of an otherwise mediocre one.
Snow-Covered Island
With all the colorless stuff we run in this deck, you might think it would be optimal to run only a minimum of islands. There's only a handful of blue mana symbols that we'd ever need to pay for, after all. This is in fact the exact opposite of what you should be thinking: you still want the majority of your landbase to be islands. Arcum costs 3U, and since we're going to be rushing to play him very early, you pretty much absolutely need an island either in your opening hand or within the first two draws. Not to mention we need U for counterspells, tutors like Fabricate, and other extremely helpful support along the way. The lands that don't produce U in my decklist are all exceedingly useful in some other way; I do not run lands like Scrying Sheets that offer only a marginal benefit for the tremendous loss of not being able to produce U.
Scalding Tarn (+other fetchlands)
In a 100-card deck, the land-thinning these cards provide on their own is negligible. Their main benefit is repeatable land-thinning with Crucible of Worlds and deck-shuffling for better Sensei's Divining Top manipulation--they're minor benefits, but still worth it for the low cost of one life. If you're on a budget and can't afford them, you can easily get away with keeping them as Islands.
Also keep in mind that they're nonbasic lands before you pop them, so if your meta's full of Blood Moon or other nonbasic hate, you'll want to sideboard them out for basic lands anyway.
Mishra's Factory (+Inkmoth Nexus, Blinkmoth Nexus)
During turns 1 thru 3, our main concern is ramping up mana for Arcum and dropping dorks to sac once he comes out. Just like mana dorks, these artifact manlands fulfill both these roles at the same time, well worth giving up a U-producing land to fit them.
Seat of the Synod/Darksteel Citadel
I didn't previously run artifact lands as I considered the singular value of being an artifact not to justify being unable to produce blue mana (in the case of Darksteel Citadel); but more recently I've added Mox Opal, so the artifact lands can now help by being able to hit metalcraft.
Ancient Tomb (+Crystal Vein, Svelunite Temple)
Fast mana = fast Arcum = fast wins. Crystal Vein and Svelunite Temple need to be sacrificed to do their job, but that's OK--once we stick Arcum, we don't need our lands nearly as much anymore (and besides, there's always Crucible of Worlds).
Mishra's Workshop
More fast mana, but definitely not budget as it's a Vintage-level card. Proxy it or replace it with an island. Also note that the Workshop's mana can only be used to cast artifact spells, so while it's valid for almost everything in this deck you can't depend on it entirely--it can't be used to cast Arcum, for example, nor to pay for Rings' copy ability. But it does enable absolutely crazy and game-winning plays like T1 Metalworker, T1 Trinisphere, etc. that will really make you feel like a Vintage player with your ridiculous tempo.
City of Traitors
Again, more fast mana, and again, not budget. If you play Legacy at all chances are you'll have a copy or two, but if not, proxy it or replace it with an island. It seems like it has a steep drawback, but once you learn to time it right (tap it to float mana before you play another land) you'll see why it's priced around $30 a copy. Crucible lets you keep playing it.
Hall of the Bandit Lord
One of the two most frequent choices for tutoring with Tolaria West. It's one of the only ways we have to cast Arcum with haste but without Lightning Greaves or similar. Even with haste, though, usually your first tutor will be for the greaves anyway for the shroud.
Academy Ruins
The other most frequent tutor choice with Tolaria West. While in the early game you'd fetch Hall, mid-to-lategame you'd fetch Academy Ruins to recur combo pieces in the GY back to the library for Arcum to cheat out onto the field.
Minamo, School at Waters Edge
Along with Thousand-Year Elixir, it's one of the only ways the deck can untap Arcum directly; note that this targets Arcum, so if you know you'll have an opportunity to use Minamo's ability make sure you equip Arcum with hexproof and not shroud.
Tezzeret the Seeker
Good ol' Tezzy 1.0. He's budget and he's mandatory. His CMC of 5 is fairly high, especially for a deck like Arcum that works to win in 5 turns or fewer, but he's totally, totally worth it. His first ability can untap mana rocks or critical artifacts like Myr Turbine, Thousand-Year Elixir, Nevinyrral's Disk, and more. His second ability complements Arcum's ability perfectly in the early-game (need mana? Tezzy can help. Need dorks? Tezzy can help), and in the mid/lategame his second ability with 6 loyalty counters even allows him to double as Arcum himself: -3 to search out Rings of Brighthearth, on the next turn -3 again and copy with rings to search out Basalt Monolith and Staff of Domination simultaneously. And as previously mentioned, while it's rarely ever needed in practice, his third ability is one of the only ways the deck can win via combat damage, Overrun alpha-strike style.
Like Zur the Enchanter, our commander is a tutor on legs, and therefore we can devote a portion of our deck to "silver bullet" artifacts--that is, those cards that only shine in specific scenarios or against specific decks, but when they work, they work GREAT, usually shutting down those decks on the whole or dealing massive damage (giant enemy crab style). For this reason it is exceedingly important, when playing Arcum Dagsson, that you know your metagame like the back of your hand. Ideally, you should possess sufficient mastery of your opponents' decks such that you could even pilot as if they were your own. I encourage you, if you can afford it, to own the cards discussed in this section in singleton and carry them around with your deck (or in your binder) to be sideboarded in depending on the decks you're up against. Take advantage of Arcum as a toolbox commander to engineer your deck specifically to beat your metagame.
Jester's Cap
EXTREMELY powerful card against just about every deck but especially toolbox/combo decks, including the mirror match against other Arcum Dagsson players. The flavor text (from Arcum himself!) is accurate: you will get the most mileage out of this card if you know your opponents' decks from the inside out. From reading this thread, for example, you'll realize quickly enough that if an enemy Arcum Jester's Caps us and exiles Rings of Brighthearth, Mycosynth Lattice, and Possessed Portal, we just lost a lot of options and a lot of power. Jester's Cap can be recurred from the graveyard and cast a second time; two cap effects is usually enough to completely dismantle any combo deck (if played against us, the second cap would probably be Power Artifact, Metalworker, and Tezzeret the Seeker--at that point I would fold).
Zur really doesn't like his Doomsday and Necropotence taken away from him. Hermit Druid isn't even a deck without Hermit Druid in it. Sharuum the Hegemon is just a 5/5 flyer without her Sculpting Steel and Phyrexian Metamorph. Almost all of the top-tier decks in EDH are combo decks and this is one of your strongest answers to them.
Also great for getting rid of your opponents' answers to you. If you know an opponent has sideboarded in Stranglehold or Null Rod, and you know that the first thing they're going to try to do is tutor for and play one of those cards ASAP, you can cap 'em off before they have a chance.
In sum, if you know your opponents' decks from the inside out, you can make brutal use out of Jester's Cap every time.
Pithing Needle
Classic colorless silver bullet made even more powerful in Arcum by the fact that we can tutor it so easily. Usually the declared name will be one of your opponents' commanders. Against many commanders, including several other top-tier commanders and the mirror match against other Arcum players, Pithing Needle demands removal for the deck to function at all. Other times it'll be better to name a powerful singleton instead (such as Survival of the Fittest), and other times still Pithing Needle won't offer any benefit at all. See "Metagame Tuning for Dummies" for when and how to use the Needle to its greatest effect.
Torpor Orb
Hoser against any decks and bombs that rely on ETB effects. Animar, Soul of Elements and his friends, Norin the Wary, Hazezon Tamar, Riku of Two Reflections, all the titans, Aura Shards, the list goes on and on--all are rendered moot so long as Torpor Orb remains in play.
Ensnaring Bridge
Any deck that likes swinging in for the victory, especially with fatties, absolutely hates Ensnaring Bridge--this includes almost all voltron or shotgun commanders (Uril, the Miststalker, Scion of the Ur-Dragon, Skittles, etc). Generally we will be emptying our hand fairly quickly in our initial push to secure Arcum and even more quickly if we take all sorts of discard hate along the way. Tutoring for a Bridge early can buy you lots of time as your opponent scrambles to get rid of it. Tutoring for a bridge when Possessed Portal is already out can often shut down the board entirely. Arcum never swings with anything, so the reciprocal effect does not faze us at all.
Witchbane Orb
Could be handy if you regularly go up against decks that target you with stuff to win or disrupt (be it discard, burn, Diabolic Edict effects, Disciple of the Vault + Sharuum combo, whatever). Definitely a metagame-dependent piece, and not all that hard for your opponent to get rid of, but the fact remains that it's a colorless artifact version of Leyline of Sanctity that you can tutor for with Arcum if the situation demands it.
Grafdigger's Cage
Absolute monster against the right decks; locks out both the grave (Karador, Ghost Chieftain; Chainer, Dementia Master; Loyal Retainers; Reanimate; and so much more) AND the library (Green Sun's Zenith, Bribery, whatever). Note that it only stops creature cards, so we can still get the full mileage out of Arcum, Crucible of Worlds, etc. with it out; as with Ensnaring Bridge, the cage's reciprocal effects do not faze us at all. Be mindful, however, that the cage cannot stop Tooth and Nail and similar cards, since TaN goes to the hand and then the battlefield; if you're playing in a TaN-heavy meta, use something else.
Mindslaver
Sort of like Jester's Cap, in the hands of a skilled player it is a VERY powerful card, although its usefulness is slightly more limited than the cap--sideboard in with discretion. Where the Slaver really excels is in those scenarios where you've failed to cap your opponent's important cards fast enough and their important pieces are already in their hand or on the battlefield. If a lot of people at your table are running Necropotence, Necrologia, Hatred, and so forth, taking control of their turn allows you to force them to commit suicide. Similarly, taking control of an opponent right after they've casted a Pact spell (Slaughter, Negation, etc.) allows you to force them to choose NOT to pay the cost and lose the game immediately. If you're up against an enemy combo player and they're all ready to combo off on the next turn, you can sometimes slave them and force them to combo off on themselves and your other opponents. Similarly, stax decks usually rely on generating token fodder to eat up the reciprocal damage of their own stax effects (like Smokestack); slaving them allows you to direct the reciprocal damage onto their more important permanents, like their lands or the stax effects themselves.
Sometimes, though, if your opponents already have the cards they need on the battlefield or in their hand, it's already too late to stop them, and as such it's very dangerous to actually bank on the 'slaver from the start. Oftentimes the best opportunities for slaver occur spontaneously, when no-one expects it (e.g. opponent drops Necropotence, not expecting that you'll slaver him right afterward). After they fall for this trick a few times, however, they'll wise up and adapt and less scenarios for 'slaver intervention will present themselves, so this technique is a little less effective against opponents with whom you play often. For the most part, therefore, it's better to deal with their threats proactively with cards like Jester's Cap--but don't forget that Mindslaver exists and is readily deployable in Arcum should you deem the situation fit for it.
Champion's Helm
Sometimes you really, really need Arcum to have slightly more than 2 toughness, for example if your opponents are packing damage-based sweepers like Volcanic Fallout (see the "Weaknesses" section below). 'Board in Champion's Helm for when you need your Swiftfoot Boots to also make Arcum a 4/4 instead of a 2/2.
Neurok Stealthsuit
At worst, it's a watered-down Lightning Greaves. In heavy removal metas, though, like vs. burn, MBC, etc. where your opponent will do everything in their power to destroy Arcum in response to your activation of Greaves' equip ability, the Stealthsuit emerges as even better than Greaves because it can be equipped at instant speed (in response to your opponents' removal spells) for UU, and so with enough mana you can evade spot removal/burn entirely.
Listed here are the pertinent cards that are NOT included in my decklist, neither mainboard nor sideboard. I've organized them in two categories: those cards that look viable but are actually pretty bad, and those cards that are actually good but simply don't work in my particular metagame (including budget options).
Lands
I was going to call this section "Strengths and Weaknesses," but from reading the thread you should already have a general idea of our strengths, and understanding our weaknesses is more important anyway--only upon understanding our own weaknesses can we properly prioritize our plays, fetch the right silver bullets, know what to counter and what not to, and so on. Perhaps, even, you came to this thread with the very intention of learning how to beat an Arcum deck--if so, you're reading the right section.
Null Rod
It's colorless, it's cheap, and oh does it hurt. If this card sticks, most of our potential combo options go out the window. No, seriously, do everything in your power to keep this card from resolving. Prime target for Jester's Cap. If it does manage to stick, the game isn't completely over; you can still assemble a Possessed Portal + Crucible of Worlds softlock if you haven't already and hope that your opponent will be forced to sacrifice the rod to free you up again. You can also tutor for Spine of Ish Sah and vindicate the Rod away. But really it's best if this card just never comes out in the first place.
With Innistrad came Stony Silence, sharing the same CMC and effect as Null Rod. Thankfully it's W, not colorless, so if there's no white decks in your meta then you don't have to worry about it. Still, keep an eye out for this guy, too.
Stranglehold/Mindlock Orb/Aven Mindcensor
We like searching our library, and these cards straight-up say "no" to our efforts. We can't even search for Spine of Ish Sah to get rid of them. Therefore, we don't like these cards. Also solid targets for Jester's Capping.
The good news is that generally the decks that will be running cards like these (and Null Rod too) will generally not be other combo decks, since other combo decks like Azami, Lady of Scrolls and Damia, Sage of Stone enjoy search and artifacts as much as we do. That is to say, when you target a deck with Jester's Cap you usually don't have to choose between removing combo cards or removing cards that will stop you from comboing, because these two types of cards are generally mutually exclusive. Phew!
In summary, mono-Blue doesn't have a lot of ways of "dealing" with resolved stuff besides bouncing it. This is why it's crucially important to hold onto those Counterspells for as long as possible, saving them for the stuff that absolutely cannot stick, and why it's so important to preemptively control your opponent with silver bullets so that you stop them from playing pesky cards in the first place rather than trying to unstick them later.
Decree of Pain (and similar sweepers)
We can't counter cycling like we can just counter other forms of mass removal that would hit Arcum (e.g. Damnation, Mutilate), and the -2/-2 is just enough to kill him even if he's equipped with Lightning Greaves and even if Darksteel Forge/Mycosynth Lattice is in play.
If Decree of Pain or related cards like Volcanic Fallout are giving you trouble, consider running Champion's Helm as your protective artifact of choice. While in most scenarios Champion's Helm will be more expensive than its alternatives for an irrelevant benefit, there are those rare times when Arcum really just needs to be a 4/4 rather than a 2/2.
Jester's Cap
That's right--one of our greatest assets is, in the hands of our enemy, also one of our greatest weaknesses. We are, after all, a combo deck, and I outlined above how two resolved Jester's Cap effects against this deck is practically worth a concession. If your opponent's commander is playing U, it would not be too unwise of him to spend his early turns using blue's many artifact tutors and recursion spells to cap off your key combo pieces.
...That is, unless you manage to cap off his Jester's Cap before he gets to yours!
Void Winnower
The newest addition to this list, printed in the recent Battle for Zendikar block. Very common choice for any and all reanimator strategies. Cutting out CMC 0, 2, and 4 locks us out of over 30% of our deck, including our commander, with no reciprocal effect for the reanimator. Although the Winnower has no protection, as mono-U we have almost nothing in the ways of spot removal to get rid of him once he hits. The good news is, if Arcum is already on the field and protected then we don't need to cast anything anyway so we're fine--but reanimators will usually try to slap down a Winnower on T1-2. Thus the best counter-strategy is to not get caught by surprise and make sure vs. reanimator that this meanie never hits the field before Arcum does by boarding in grave hate, and if he does stick, remember Rings/Basalt/Staff all cost 3 while Tezzy and Kuldotha cost 5.
Legacy: GWR Enchantress <--That's my banner! (lol tinypic removed it)
Casual: WB [[Primer]]Clerics Tribal; BU Affinity
EDH: ...U [[Primer]]Arcum Dagsson; BG Legal Stax; B Illegal Stax
Proxy: .WX TriniStax
Other stuff: [[Official]]Shuffling, Truth + Maths
- Jester's Cap to sideboard
- Clock of Omens to mainboard
I've been running Jester's Cap mainboard because it's such a good hoser against so many strategies that it's almost always useful at any table, but recently after some convincing I took to testing Clock of Omens again and found it too strong not to pass up for a mainboard slot since it enables so many other combos and utility. I can still switch in Jester's Cap as needed on game 2+.
- Planar Portal out, Staff of Domination in
- Null Brooch to mainboard
- Neurok Stealthsuit to sideboard
Neurok Stealthsuit is more a meta-dependent choice for heavy removal metas, I'm finding. In my meta, which is more combo oriented, it usually just plays out as a worse variant of Lightning Greaves. Staff of Domination I dismissed at first as being utterly redundant, but that was just me being stubborn--after a more thorough investigation I concluded that in fact Planar Portal is now redundant with Staff's recent unbanning.
I also revised parts of the primer to reflect this new change of strategy.
-4x Snow-Covered Islands out, 4x fetchlands in
Just a quick little change swapping out some islands for fetchlands for the very minor added utility fetchlands provide.
Metalworker has risen.
- Master Transmuter out (to sideboard)
- Metalworker in
Commander tuck is no longer a thing. Also been rolling with Myr Sire lately.
- Hinder out, Swan Song in
- Spell Crumple out, Negate in
- Epochrasite out, Myr Sire in
Hangarback Walker renders Moonvessel obsolete
- Myr Moonvessel out
- Hangarback Walker in
Cut a thing for Hedron Crawler, the new 2cmc-tap-for-1 dork from Zendikar 2.0. Also found room for Kuldotha Forgemaster.
No new printings; added more draw, fast mana, and stax.
- Jar, Spine, Crucible, Sculpting Steel to SB; Karn, Palladium Myr, 4x Islands out
- Ponder, Brainstorm, Impulse, Skullclamp, Mystic Remora, Mox Diamond, Mox Opal, Darksteel Citadel, Winter Orb, Chalice of the Void in
Almost all of the "money cards" have been cut from this decklist, bringing its price down to ~$200 (significantly less than the main decklist's price of ~$2000). You can cut even more money cards if you really want to, like Sensei's Divining Top, but doing so will take big chunks out of the deck's power.
For the most part, this variant plays exactly the same as the one I detailed in the primer above. Notably, however, I eschew Forge and Disk (both of which are relatively expensive singletons) for Capsize and Hurkyl's Recall. With infinite mana and infinite draw from Rings/Monolith/Staff you can cast infinite Capsize or Hurkyl's Recall recurred a few times to return all opponents' permanents to their hands. It's a little weaker than the classic lattice/forge/disk imo but should still get the job done.
1x Academy Ruins
1x Ancient Tomb
1x Blinkmoth Nexus
1x Crystal Vein
1x Hall of the Bandit Lord
1x Inkmoth Nexus
1x Minamo, School at Water's Edge
1x Mishra's Factory
1x Saprazzan Skerry
1x Seat of the Synod
25x Snow-Covered Island
1x Strip Mine
1x Svyelunite Temple
1x Tolaria West
Creatures (18)
1x Alloy Myr
1x Dross Scorpion
1x Epochrasite
1x Etherium Sculptor
1x Junk Diver
1x Karn, Silver Golem
1x Manakin
1x Millikin
1x Myr Moonvessel
1x Myr Retriever
1x Myr Sire
1x Palladium Myr
1x Phyrexian Metamorph
1x Plague Myr
1x Scarecrone
1x Scuttlemutt
1x Silver Myr
1x Trinket Mage
Planeswalkers (1)
1x Tezzeret the Seeker
Instants/Sorceries (11)
1x Dispel
1x Counterspell
1x Fact or Fiction
1x Fabricate
1x Turn Aside
1x Muddle the Mixture
1x Negate
1x Reshape
1x Swan Song
1x Thirst for Knowledge
1x Windfall
1x Copy Artifact
Artifacts (30)
1x Basalt Monolith
1x Capsize
1x Clock of Omens
1x Elixir of Immortality
1x Fellwar Stone
1x Gilded Lotus
1x Hurkyl's Recall
1x Lightning Greaves
1x Lotus Petal
1x Mind Stone
1x Memory Jar
1x Mycosynth Lattice
1x Myr Turbine
1x Neurok Stealthsuit
1x Null Brooch
1x Pithing Needle
1x Ensnaring Bridge
1x Possessed Portal
1x Rings of Brighthearth
1x Sculpting Steel
1x Sensei's Divining Top
1x Sol Ring
1x Spine of Ish Sah
1x Staff of Domination
1x Swiftfoot Boots
1x Thousand-Year Elixir
1x Thran Dynamo
1x Torpor Orb
1x Unwinding Clock
1x Voltaic Key
1x Jester's Cap
1x Witchbane Orb
1x Grafdigger's Cage
1x Mindslaver
1x Champion's Helm
1x Neurok Stealthsuit
1x Winter Orb
1x Defense Grid
As previously mentioned, a helpful thing about Arcum EDH is that it is a modular deck. Our "core package" is much smaller than the traditional EDH deck, and so we have more slots than most other decks to devote to whatever we need to based on our specific metagame states. In fact, our ability to adapt to the metagame contributes to a large part of our power, since we are otherwise slightly slower than most combo decks in our tier (e.g. Sharuum the Hegemon, 5c Hermit Druid) with access to powerful black tutors and draw like Demonic Tutor, Demonic Consultation, and Necrologia.
Thus one of the most important take-aways from this entire discourse is this:
I've said it before but it's worth repeating--ideally, you should know an opponent's deck so well that you could play it for them and know how to win with it.
There are two ways we tune our strategy to defeat the metagame:
This section will eventually cover both the cards you should use and when you should use them in order to beat every high-tier deck or deck archetype currently in the format. Of course EDH has so many potential commanders who can all be competitive-tuned to some degree, so my list here will never be completely exhaustive. If you are disappointed that a commander you'll be playing against isn't on this list, try to identify that commander's deck archetype, and then read my suggestions for similar decks of that archetype. For example, observe that Kamahl, Fist of Krosa is not included in this list. He is, however, a big mana mono-G aggro deck, and below I have included some tips on how to thwart other popular big mana mono-G aggro decks. These decks all occupy the same archetype (also known as genre), and it is usually safe to assume that whatever tips and tricks work to beat one member of the archetype will work just as well for the rest.
Lastly, these are just tips. They might not always work, or you personally might approach certain situations differently. My goal with this section is simply to provide a newcomer to competitive EDH or to Arcum Dagsson an idea of what he might be up against and how he should begin to think about metagame tuning in the same way that a Legacy or Modern primer here on MTGS would address its deck's metagame.
I encourage you, whether you are an Arcum player yourself who's found success with different methods than I've listed here or an enemy of Arcum who's courageous enough to share your weaknesses, to comment about your thoughts on this section so that I can develop it more strongly and better help those who might not understand very much about metagames at all or how to adapt to them using Arcum.
So your meta's got a lot of...
Combos
Combo decks vary greatly and must be considered individually. That said, combo as an archetype dominates multiplayer EDH, so in a cutthroat metagame these are probably the decks you're going to be seeing most often if not almost always. Unfortunately, some of these decks can consistently combo out a turn faster than we can assemble Rings/Top/Monolith. Against these decks, strongly consider prioritizing Possessed Portal and silver bullets to stop them in their tracks before assembling our combo; if you try to race them head-on to see who combos off first, some of them will beat you too consistently.
Name: Sharuum
How they win: Puts 2 sharuums on the battlefield (through the use of Phyrexian Metamorph or Sculpting Steel) and then abuses the fact that Sharuum can both kill herself (since she is legendary) and recur herself (with her ability) to kill everyone at once with Disciple of the Vault or Bitter Ordeal.
Their backup plan: Thopter Foundry + Sword of the Meek for infinite tokens, add Time Sieve for infinite turns.
How we beat them: Jester's Cap, Null Brooch, Torpor Orb, Grafdigger's Cage. Sharuum is extremely fast and not to be underestimated; in some cases it may even be better to rush to resolve Jester's Cap even before dropping Arcum (e.g. if your opening hand has Fabricate or Transmute Artifact). Cap off Phyrexian Metamorph, Sculpting Steel, Sword of the Meek. This dismantles both combos. Torpor Orb and Grafdigger's Cage prevent both combos from working for as long as they stick, which generally won't be too long so don't bank on them. Null Brooch to counter any of their draw engines like Necrologia, Ad Nauseam, etc hurts. As a last resort and for massive style points, Mindslaver him on his combo turn and force him to combo off on everyone except you (it's crazy enough that it just might work).
Name: Hermit Druid
How they win: Play and activate Hermit Druid ASAP, dump entire library in graveyard, recur a creature or creatures that win the game immediately (eg Necrotic Ooze with Morselhoarder, Devoted Druid, and Spikeshot Elder in GY).
Their backup plan: Sometimes resource denial. Cheat into play Elesh Norn and Living Plane or ramp up and drop Death Cloud (works esp. well if general is Karador, Ghost Chieftain). Other times no backup plan besides attempting to flashback Memory's Journey and hoping it doesn't get countered.
How we beat them: Jester's Cap, Null Brooch, Torpor Orb, Grafdigger's Cage. Again, usually it will be best to prioritize Jester's Cap. Cap off Hermit Druid, Necrotic Ooze, Pull from Eternity. Torpor Orb and Grafdigger's Cage stop the deck from working for as long as either sticks. Null Brooch on flashed-back spells like Dread Return and Memory's Journey is gg. 'Slaver on the combo turn as a last resort.
Name: Animar
How they win: Animar has bazillions of ways to go infinite using creature ETB effects...deal infinite damage to everyone, return infinite target permanents to opponents' hands, draw infinite cards, swing with infinitely pumped Animar, and so forth. Examples include Cloudstone Curio shenanigans, Palinchron mana, Tidespout Tyrant shenanigans, Psychosis Crawler + Glimpse of Nature effects, Purphoros, God of the Forge shenanigans, etc.
How we beat them: Torpor Orb asap, Jester's Cap. All of Animar's combos are alike insofar that they all involve creature ETB combos, and so Torpor Orb is a real hoser and literally brings the deck to a full stop until it is dealt with; top priority to resolve and stick. Most Animar decks don't pack much artifact removal except in the form of creatures like Indrik Stomphowler and Acidic Slime (since creatures are what they can tutor for/get benefits out of), and Torpor Orb punishes them for that, too. Jester's Cap doesn't work nearly as well since the deck is so versatile, but it can still hurt a lot if you exile Cloudstone Curio and some creature enablers like Ancestral Statue and Shrieking Drake.
Name: Azami
How they win: Generate infinite mana and/or draw infinite cards, occasionally using the same top/basalt/rings combo that we use; infinite filter for combo pieces with Azami + Mind Over Matter; draw the whole table out with Temple Bell + Mind Over Matter or repeated casting of Blue Sun's Zenith or huge Brain Freeze.
Their backup plan: Generic mono-blue control wincons, including Treachery on a game-winning creature, Commandeer on a game-winning spell (e.g. Exsanguinate), etc.
How we beat them: Jester's Cap, Null Brooch, Pithing Needle. Cap off Brain Freeze (or rings, if they run it), Mind Over Matter Power Artifact. Counter with Null Brooch whatever slips the net; watch especially for Hurkyl's Recall, which she might sideboard in just to deal with us. Pithing Needle on Azami herself negates her ability; so does Possessed Portal, though.
Name: Teferi
How they win: Knowledge Pool and Teferi make for a hard lock on everyone.
Their backup plan: Ye olde blue control deck, same shenanigans and combos as Azami.
How we beat them: Same as Azami, just make sure you include Knowledge Pool as part of your Jester's Cap pull.
Aggro
There are two main types of aggro decks: big mana aggro and voltron/shotgun aggro.
Big mana is almost exclusively mono-G and ideally seeks to ramp up to 10+ mana (usually aided by the commander) within the first five turns and play a kicked Tooth and Nail (TaN) to fetch two fat things of their choice that win the game on the spot or shortly thereafter. Voltron/Shotgun aggro, on the other hand, usually tries instead to focus on using the commander as a weapon, playing him very early (t3-4) with the help of artifact accelerants, pumping him (t5) with the strongest enchantments/equipment, then (t6-8) wrathing all lands or even everything (since mana is no longer needed) while one-shotting for lethal general damage one opponent at a time starting with the biggest threat--thus the name "shotgun," one-hit one-kill.
Big mana aggro tends to be slightly slower than combo but still exceedingly fast when competitive tuned. As a combo deck yourself, you can usually race these decks and win. I usually find it safer, though, to still prioritize Possessed Portal and silver bullets to lock down the game before you combo off; it simply adds to the consistency in this matchup.
Name: Azusa
How they win: Big-mana variant -- absurd ramp into kicked TaN or big Genesis Wave.
Their backup plan: Goldfishing for fatties or otherwise dropping huge Hurricanes.
How we beat them: Card advantage is where big mana generally fails, especially big mana green. Azusa tends to dump out her starting 7 within the first two turns and goldfish from there. Many Azusa lists often run otherwise subpar draw engines like Recycle, Mind's Eye, and Horn of Greed to try and remedy this. Possessed Portal early keeps their hand empty, thwarts their meager draw engines, and generally screws them over unless they happen to have artifact destruction/Genesis Wave/tutors in the hand before you drop the portal. Ensnaring Bridge is the second-most-important silver bullet, and it can be tutored for before or after the portal to seal the deal or to stop early aggressiveness from shenanigans like Defense of the Heart/Natural Order/etc. The best part about the Bridge is that creatures straight-up cannot be declared as attackers (as opposed to a damage prevention/protection effect) which is exceedingly useful against big mana's Eldrazi annihilators.
Shotgun aggro at its finest can actually be faster than combo when it comes to defeating one person. Ultimately they're slower in the long run, especially as the number of players at the table increases to 5+, because unlike combo they can't usually down more than one player per turn (since they rely on the combat step). Even if a shotgun aggro deck gets off to a running start and smashes a player t4, he still has a ways to go toward winning. That said, I plan for the worst: when I see a shotgun player, I assume that the one person at whom he is definitely going to swing is me, and I take precautions. In a 1v1 match, these tips become even more relevant.
Name: Skittles
How they win: Rocks to ramp into Skittles (always with haste) as early as turn 3, pump him that same turn with stuff like Unspeakable Symbol and Nightmare Lash for no extra mana, swing for 10 infect.
Their backup plan: Mono-B control, featuring heavy discard and removal.
How we beat them: Tutoring out Ensnaring Bridge/Null Brooch is generally enough to muck him down, but if he's ready to pull off a t3 kill even those will be too slow, and so countermagic in the opening hand is a huge help. If you survive the initial explosion, the game shifts tremendously in your favor, as Possessed Portal punishes him for playing so few permanents.
Name: Uril
How they win: Ramp into Uril, enchant him and give him doublestrike, then destroy everything and swing for lethal.
Their backup plan: Uh...Kor Spiritdancer? Usually none.
How we beat them: Slower and fatter than Skittles so tutoring out Ensnaring Bridge/Null Brooch is more feasible, but of course countermagic in the opening hand is still a huge help. Again, if you survive his initial push, Possessed Portal punishes him hard for playing so few permanents and for having poor card advantage besides Enchantress effects. Main difference from Skittles is his emphasis on Cataclysm, 'geddon, Wildfire, and so forth--watch out for these.
Name: Sigarda
How they win: Same as Uril. Not as beefy and no access to R so less mass destruction, but she comes packing a powerful ability to make up for it.
Their backup plan: Usually none.
How we beat them: Sigarda is unique among voltrons in that she intrinsically hoses stax and edict effects, which are usually among voltron's greatest weaknesses. The good news is that she's slower than the two previously mentioned and we can outrace her nearly every time. Usually you can go ahead and play Possessed Portal to screw over everyone else at the table besides Sigarda and still have enough time to combo off before she can do anything about it. Ensnaring Bridge still stops her, and if worse comes to worse and you absolutely need her dead, simply tutor for Phyrexian Metamorph. Her ability is a major problem for black control and especially stax decks, but for us it's only a minor nuisance because we don't need our stax to win and we have other solutions to stop her.
Legacy: GWR Enchantress <--That's my banner! (lol tinypic removed it)
Casual: WB [[Primer]]Clerics Tribal; BU Affinity
EDH: ...U [[Primer]]Arcum Dagsson; BG Legal Stax; B Illegal Stax
Proxy: .WX TriniStax
Other stuff: [[Official]]Shuffling, Truth + Maths
Legacy: GWR Enchantress <--That's my banner! (lol tinypic removed it)
Casual: WB [[Primer]]Clerics Tribal; BU Affinity
EDH: ...U [[Primer]]Arcum Dagsson; BG Legal Stax; B Illegal Stax
Proxy: .WX TriniStax
Other stuff: [[Official]]Shuffling, Truth + Maths
Lands:
1. Blinkmoth Nexus
2. Inkmoth Nexus
3. Mishra's Factory
4. Buried Ruin
5. Dread Statuary
6. Darksteel Citadel
Artifact Creatures:
1. Scuttlemutt
2. Solemn Simulacrum
3. Kuldotha Forgemaster
Artifacts:
1. Mox Opal
2. Mox Diamond
3. Everflowing Chalice
4. Pithing Needle
5. Guardian Idol
6. Chronatog Totem
7. Oblivion Stone
8. Semblance Anvil
9. Cloud Key
10. Trading Post
11. Thran Dynamo
12. Clock of Omens
13. Null Brooch
14. Mindslaver
15. Spine of Ish Sah
Planeswalkers:
1. Karn Liberated
Enchantments:
1. Artificer's Intuition
Spells:
1. Reshape
2. Intuition
3. Windfall
4. Timetwister
Those are a few cards that I would recommend to anyone with an interest in this general. Now, obviously there's not necessarily enough room for all of this stuff, but I think you could probably make some good cuts from your list to make room for a least a couple things. My recommendations:
Cut:
1. Elixir of Immortality
2. Wayfarer's Bauble
3. Myr Moonvessel
4. Neurok Stealthsuit
5. The extra Swiftfoot Boots
6. Epochrasite
7. Compulsive Research (I think Windfall would be better in this deck, or Timetwister if you can afford it)
8. Force of Will (The deck is just not heavy enough on blue spells, at least in my experience)
I may come back a bit later and address specifics or concerns if you don't agree with this, but I genuinely believe this is some good stuff to think about when finishing up this primer.
Good job so far, and good luck!
Also, Millikin should be in your list. All of the 2 CMC artifact mana-producing dorks are a must. And I fully agree with the previous poster that the artifact man-lands are very, very useful, and worth running.
Good luck on the primer, and I'd be happy to post my personal deck list for comparison/critique if anyone wants to see it.
This "love" intrigues me. Teach me to fake it.
UR Nin, the Pain Artist
WUB Zur the Enchanter (Retired)
UB Oona, Queen of the Fae (Pseudo-Retired)
'Kay, thanks for mentioning this; I think the decklist I posted is actually an outdated one I had stored on my computer, because a few of these lands (particularly the ones that change into artifacts) I actually DO play in my current version of the deck. So with that brought to my attention I think the first thing I'm going to fix about the thread is to make the decklist my current version.
In addition, as you correctly pointed out, there are two Swiftfoot Boots in the deck, which is another reason why I think I must've copied and pasted the wrong thing.
I will touch on each of these...
Scuttlemutt and Solemn Simulacrum I'm just not seeing. The ideal dork is a 2 drop artifact creature that taps for 1; if it's going to be a 3 drop, it has to do something besides add one mana (it either has to produce more mana like Palladium Myr or do something else useful entirely like Junk Diver)--Scuttlemutt taps for 1 and that's it, his second ability is pretty useless. But wait! Now that I look again Scuttlemutt is a strictly better Alloy Myr, which I do run. So I suppose I'll eat my words on that one. But a dork for 4, like Solemn Simulacrum, doesn't even seem like it would fit in the curve at all. Yes, the simulacrum is one of the "EDH staple cards" that you'll find in almost every deck ever made, but most decks aren't operating on such a fast clock as we are.
I'll playtest the Simulacrum to see if I'm right about it not fitting in the curve.
Kuldoltha Forgemaster I used to play with but ultimately cut. He's VERY good, no doubt. That he can target all artifacts instead of just dorks is great. It's just that I've found that between his casting cost and activation cost he's only good when you're all set up, and by that time you've practically won the game anyway. In other words, in my personal experience I've found him to be win-more. But he's powerful enough that I'm always considering whether or not to re-add him.
Again, some of these (particularly Pithing Needle and Spine of Ish Sah, I distinctly remember trolling a Phelddagrif player a few weeks ago by tutoring a needle on his commander) are actually in my current decklist, but now that you mention it I see they're not in the decklist posted in the primer. Go figure. Thanks for bringing it to my attention, once again.
That said, some others of these cards I know I'm definitely not going to add, at least not to the main decklist, not because they're bad but because they're situational--like Mindslaver and Null Brooch. That's what the utility/silver bullets sections are for (as you can see, the Brooch is already covered in the utility section). I do think Mindslaver is a good addition for one of those two sections--against the right decks it's an instant win.
And others of these--like Mox Opal, Chronatog Totem, Everflowing Chalice and a few others--I probably won't be adding to anything (not without some serious convincing that they're worth it). The Opal I've actually playtested and the rest I will be making an educated guess when I say that I'm pretty confident that going overboard on the ramp is a bad idea. The way the deck is now, it never needs more than five mana. We want to get to 5 mana as fast as possible, but once we're there any additional mana is pretty useless (which is partly why Null Brooch actually works in this deck).
I think you came up with a good list of controversial cards, and so I will comment on each in order:
1. I'll probably elicit some eye rolls for saying this, but in my experience, the graveyard is not our friend. We have only 4 recursion effects: Junk Diver, Myr Retriever, Academy Ruins, and Buried Ruin (there is Scarecrone, but that only gets creatures). And except for Academy Ruins (which is the hardest to search for along with Buried Ruin since it's a land), the recursion is only to the hand, not to the battlefield, which means for anything big--forge, lattice, possessed portal)--even if we recur it from the grave, we still have to fetch and resolve Master Transmuter to get it into play. Elixir of Immortality shuffles the grave right into the library and puts those combo pieces where they're most accessible.
In short, in the event of "Crap, all my combo pieces are in the GY," instead of saying "now I have to spend a bunch of turns digging for a recursion dork and trying to locate and stick Master Transmuter" or saying "hopefully I will topdeck Academy Ruins or Tolaria West," you can say, "no big deal, activate Arcum, fetch and pop elixir, problem solved in 1 turn."
2. Bauble is a filler and can come out as necessary for something more important that also serves the purpose of ramp. If I had to replace it I'd do it with Millikin.
3. It's hard to explain without just providing a bunch of specific scenarios, but in my experience the moonvessel gets it done. If you play him and sac him on the same turn, he's basically a free dork; if you play him and sac him on a later turn, he nets you a free 1. In any scenario in which you plan on tutoring for an artifact and activating an artifact (the same one or a different one) on the same turn, his free 1 really helps.
4. Neurok Stealthsuit is, in my humble opinion, underrated. It is the only shroud-giving equipment in the game that can be equipped at instant speed barring Leonin Shikari. Even the ubiquitous Lightning Greaves can be defeated with a simple Lightning Bolt. The UU mind as well read "Counter target spell that targets a creature you control." I can't tell you how many multiplayer games I've stuck Arcum on turn 4 or 5 using this card alone, with no counters in the hand or anything. Most EDH decks don't use the stealthsuit because they either can't pull off the UU or don't care to give their commander shroud, but we can pay it, and we care a lot. Unless I'm just seeing this card completely the wrong way.
5. lol
6. Epochrasite is another one of those dorks that I find regularly gets it done whenever it comes into my hand. Drop it on turn 2, sac it on turn 4, it comes back turn 7 (or if it dies prematurely it'll be back on turn 6 or 5), allowing for a double arcum activation into a game-winning combo. Between Rings of Brighthearth and all the ways we have to untap Arcum, there will never be a time when we have "too much sac fodder."
7. Good question. I'll playtest Timetwister (proxxied for sure) and Windfall and see if they work better. This one isn't so easy to see without testing.
8. It's worked for me whenever I needed it to, so I haven't had any incentive to cut it yet. That said, with my extremely limited knowledge of statistics, I think your gut feeling is right. Quick headcount out of the decklist in my OP (which we already established is partially erroneous), I'm seeing 20 blue cards in the deck excluding FoW. A real statistician will probably show me who's the real boss here, but according to my handy dandy calculator, binompdf(9,20/99,1) yields about 30% chance of me having another blue card in hand besides a FoW on turn 4. I might replace it with something CMC1 like Turn Aside or Spell Pierce.
Well don't that beat all.
Now that I look at it again, I think you're right, which is a bad thing because that means my playgroup has been doing it wrong this whole time. I'll dig around online to see if there's anything else about this, but for now it looks like you have it right and I'll change the thread soon so as not to mislead people.
Maaaaaaan, I knew someone would call me out on it. I did mention Millikin in the OP, you see? A handful of games I ended up losing because Millikin actually milled important stuff and with my opponents' meddling (exiled my elixir from the library, kept removing my recursion pieces and Master Transmuter) I actually wasn't able to fish it up from the GY fast enough, so one day I got so upset that I said, "I can make do without that stupid sneezing wicker dummy."
I know he's good and that he belongs her. I'll put him in the decklist in the OP so no one else comes up and says, "Gee whiz, where's Millikin?" I just have kind of a personal vendetta against it.
Me too. I do run them. The list above just doesn't seem to reflect that. I may or may not have been half asleep when I wrote it.
Legacy: GWR Enchantress <--That's my banner! (lol tinypic removed it)
Casual: WB [[Primer]]Clerics Tribal; BU Affinity
EDH: ...U [[Primer]]Arcum Dagsson; BG Legal Stax; B Illegal Stax
Proxy: .WX TriniStax
Other stuff: [[Official]]Shuffling, Truth + Maths
I run all of the same 4 recursion effects (plus Scarecrone) you do, plus a Reito Lantern in my Arcum list. It's been pretty handy for when games go unexpectedly long (like turn 6 or 7 ;)) since I can fetch the lantern with Arcum if one of my combo pieces goes to the yard and I want it back in my library. It's also cheap enough to cast if I draw it, and it provides a pretty useful effect overall. In a pinch, Reito Lantern also functions as a bit of graveyard hate.
EDIT: I guess you're running Elixir of Immortality for this same effect, and it may be a better choice since it's cheaper mana-wise.
This "love" intrigues me. Teach me to fake it.
UR Nin, the Pain Artist
WUB Zur the Enchanter (Retired)
UB Oona, Queen of the Fae (Pseudo-Retired)
GWUBAtraxa, Praetor's Voice PrimerGWUB
GWURoon Bant Blink WhateverGWU
BRGLord Windgrace LandsBRG
I hadn't considered the pact. That's probably a good replacement choice.
Turn 4 or 5 is not exactly a "combo turn" per se, it's not like we're playing legacy High Tide or ANT where we combo off and the next turn doesn't matter. Generally we try to win on turn 6 or 7 after disrupting everyone else at the table. Turn 4 is, however, an extremely important turn insofar that we make our most risky play--tapping out to cast Arcum. I know you probably recognized that already, I'm just clarifying it for posterity.
Also, I want to take a moment to reiterate the power of Jester's Cap. I beat my friend's girlfriend playing Sharuum (girls and their girly generals) 3 games in a row the other day just by pulling off a successful cap on her Sculpting Steel, Phyrexian Metamorph, and Sword of the Meek...one game I even managed to pull it off T3.
Legacy: GWR Enchantress <--That's my banner! (lol tinypic removed it)
Casual: WB [[Primer]]Clerics Tribal; BU Affinity
EDH: ...U [[Primer]]Arcum Dagsson; BG Legal Stax; B Illegal Stax
Proxy: .WX TriniStax
Other stuff: [[Official]]Shuffling, Truth + Maths
GWUBAtraxa, Praetor's Voice PrimerGWUB
GWURoon Bant Blink WhateverGWU
BRGLord Windgrace LandsBRG
Ah, yes, well, that is our game-winning combo, correct, achieved through synergy of Darksteel Forge, Mycosynth Lattice, and Nevinyrral's Disk.
But we don't actually need counter backup for it. Arcum tutors the pieces directly onto the battlefield, or otherwise we hardcast them after drawing our entire deck with Basalt Monolith + Rings of Brighthearth + Sensei's Divining Top (at which point we'll have all our deck's counters in our hand anyway).
Where countermagic like Force of Will really comes in handy is during the crucial turn where we play our commander. Generally we will tap out to do it, and even if we equip him with Lightning Greaves or something similar on the same turn it still helps to have countermagic in hand to stop the numerous things that can still get around the greaves (Wrath of God, Lightning Bolt in response, whatever).
A large part of the reason Arcum Dagsson EDH is so powerful is that literally the only card we need to stick in order to win the game is Arcum himself. To that end, most opponents will do everything in their power to ensure Arcum never sticks.
Same story for a lot of other strong toolbox generals like Zur the Enchanter and Captain Sisay.
EDIT: Fixed thread's decklist, added a few more tidbits.
Legacy: GWR Enchantress <--That's my banner! (lol tinypic removed it)
Casual: WB [[Primer]]Clerics Tribal; BU Affinity
EDH: ...U [[Primer]]Arcum Dagsson; BG Legal Stax; B Illegal Stax
Proxy: .WX TriniStax
Other stuff: [[Official]]Shuffling, Truth + Maths
GWUBAtraxa, Praetor's Voice PrimerGWUB
GWURoon Bant Blink WhateverGWU
BRGLord Windgrace LandsBRG
I wouldn't argue that you shouldn't play Force of Will, but if you were only playing either FoW OR Pact of Negation, I'd choose Pact, since I can more reliably come up with 3UU than I can come up with an extra U card I can pitch. That being said, playing both is not a bad idea.
That's if you've already won. In my experience piloting Arcum, sometimes I need that extra counter to get there. If there was some way I could tutor for Rings, Monolith, and the Top simultaneously at instant speed, I'd fully agree with you. But there are always times between fetching Rings and the other two pieces where a free counter can mean the difference between winning and losing.
This "love" intrigues me. Teach me to fake it.
UR Nin, the Pain Artist
WUB Zur the Enchanter (Retired)
UB Oona, Queen of the Fae (Pseudo-Retired)
My point is just that sticking Arcum is 95% of the game and that's almost always where our counter backup will come most in handy.
Obviously anyone who's played Arcum knows this already. I'm just clarifying it for the people who are unfamiliar (like Xeroxed).
If your meta is removal heavy and you're the one everyone's targeting, that's when I'd board in Null Brooch (if they're targeting you with spells) or drop Torpor Orb (if they're targeting you with creature triggers like Uktabi Orangutan).
Legacy: GWR Enchantress <--That's my banner! (lol tinypic removed it)
Casual: WB [[Primer]]Clerics Tribal; BU Affinity
EDH: ...U [[Primer]]Arcum Dagsson; BG Legal Stax; B Illegal Stax
Proxy: .WX TriniStax
Other stuff: [[Official]]Shuffling, Truth + Maths
GWUBAtraxa, Praetor's Voice PrimerGWUB
GWURoon Bant Blink WhateverGWU
BRGLord Windgrace LandsBRG
This "love" intrigues me. Teach me to fake it.
UR Nin, the Pain Artist
WUB Zur the Enchanter (Retired)
UB Oona, Queen of the Fae (Pseudo-Retired)
EDH Primers
Phelddagrif - Zirilan
EDH
Thrasios+Bruse - Pang - Sasaya - Wydwen - Feather - Rona - Toshiro - Sylvia+Khorvath - Geth - QMarchesa - Firesong - Athreos - Arixmethes - Isperia - Etali - Silas+Sidar - Saskia - Virtus+Gorm - Kynaios - Naban - Aryel - Mizzix - Kazuul - Tymna+Kraum - Sidar+Tymna - Ayli - Gwendlyn - Phelddagrif 4 - Liliana - Kaervek - Phelddagrif 3 - Mairsil - Scarab - Child - Phenax - Shirei - Thada - Depala - Circu - Kytheon - GrenzoHR - Phelddagrif - Reyhan+Kraum - Toshiro - Varolz - Nin - Ojutai - Tasigur - Zedruu - Uril - Edric - Wort - Zurgo - Nahiri - Grenzo - Kozilek - Yisan - Ink-Treader - Yisan - Brago - Sidisi - Toshiro - Alexi - Sygg - Brimaz - Sek'Kuar - Marchesa - Vish Kal - Iroas - Phelddagrif - Ephara - Derevi - Glissa - Wanderer - Saffi - Melek - Xiahou Dun - Lazav - Lin Sivvi - Zirilan - Glissa
PDH - Drake - Graverobber - Izzet GM - Tallowisp - Symbiote Brawl - Feather - Ugin - Jace - Scarab - Angrath - Vraska - Kumena Oathbreaker - Wrenn&6
Good catch. I think I overspoke a bit.
A usual match in my playgroup is generally 3 people, sometimes it's a duel (but even in duels we use multiplayer rules, not french rules). Less often but still with some frequency we will play 4-man FFA or 5-man FFA. When I wrote this primer I was writing from the mindset of someone playing in multiplayer but still with a relatively small handful of opponents, my "native setting" so to speak.
I corrected the section in question to explicitly state the fact that Possessed Portal is an extremely powerful card no matter how many people are at the table, but in games of 4+ people it demands more skill and caution to use properly.
From personal experience I have used Possessed Portal in a large multiplayer game (I think it was 5 people) on only 2 occasions I can remember. That said, both of those games I won largely because of the Portal. I don't think it would be right to say "If your playgroup >3, don't run Possessed Portal." I think instead how it should be phrased, which is what I reworded the primer to say, that if your playgroup >3, exercise caution in its use, or support it with Unwinding Clock/Nuisance Engine/etc.
As I continue expanding the post, please let me know of any other instances where I let the fact that I am used to playing in smaller multiplayer groups and duels with multiplayer rules preclude my explanation of Arcum in a larger group setting.
I think you're touching on something important, which is that with pretty much everything I'm saying in this primer, "Your Mileage May Vary" insofar that the list I run in my meta might not be best suited for your meta. My meta isn't full of Wrath of God, only Zur the Enchanter likes doing that (except he uses Cataclysm/Winds of Rath). The "YMMV, know your meta more than anything" sentiment is one I'll try to work into the OP as much as I can.
In your wrath-heavy meta, what do you tutor for first if not Lightning Greaves (or some similar card) or Myr Turbine? I would assume Null Brooch or something of the sort?
Legacy: GWR Enchantress <--That's my banner! (lol tinypic removed it)
Casual: WB [[Primer]]Clerics Tribal; BU Affinity
EDH: ...U [[Primer]]Arcum Dagsson; BG Legal Stax; B Illegal Stax
Proxy: .WX TriniStax
Other stuff: [[Official]]Shuffling, Truth + Maths
Have you considered running smokestack itself? It doesn't really lock down as hard as portal does, but it's easier to throw out earlier with a myr turbine or whathaveyou without the potential to backfire quite as badly.
EDH Primers
Phelddagrif - Zirilan
EDH
Thrasios+Bruse - Pang - Sasaya - Wydwen - Feather - Rona - Toshiro - Sylvia+Khorvath - Geth - QMarchesa - Firesong - Athreos - Arixmethes - Isperia - Etali - Silas+Sidar - Saskia - Virtus+Gorm - Kynaios - Naban - Aryel - Mizzix - Kazuul - Tymna+Kraum - Sidar+Tymna - Ayli - Gwendlyn - Phelddagrif 4 - Liliana - Kaervek - Phelddagrif 3 - Mairsil - Scarab - Child - Phenax - Shirei - Thada - Depala - Circu - Kytheon - GrenzoHR - Phelddagrif - Reyhan+Kraum - Toshiro - Varolz - Nin - Ojutai - Tasigur - Zedruu - Uril - Edric - Wort - Zurgo - Nahiri - Grenzo - Kozilek - Yisan - Ink-Treader - Yisan - Brago - Sidisi - Toshiro - Alexi - Sygg - Brimaz - Sek'Kuar - Marchesa - Vish Kal - Iroas - Phelddagrif - Ephara - Derevi - Glissa - Wanderer - Saffi - Melek - Xiahou Dun - Lazav - Lin Sivvi - Zirilan - Glissa
PDH - Drake - Graverobber - Izzet GM - Tallowisp - Symbiote Brawl - Feather - Ugin - Jace - Scarab - Angrath - Vraska - Kumena Oathbreaker - Wrenn&6
I used to run Smokestack itself. I even ran Tangle Wire, too, as a homage to the constructed stax deck as we know it.
The problem with Smokestack in EDH is the same problem it has in Legacy and Vintage: it is slow. It really only begins to hurt when you crank it up to 2+ counters, and that takes a whopping 3+ turns to accomplish, and in that time you should've won the game already. In Legacy and Vintage, there are cards like Chalice of the Void, Sphere of Resistance, Glowrider, Trinisphere, Lodestone Golem, and so on that serve as early denial while Smokestack itself is still coming online. Pretty much all of those neat toys are useless or impractical here in EDH.
The reason portal is so much better is that it comes online immediately, and it has an Uba Mask effect built right in. Like Smokestack, we still get the benefit of being able to sacrifice the portal to its own effect when we no longer need it for some healthy board advantage.
Legacy: GWR Enchantress <--That's my banner! (lol tinypic removed it)
Casual: WB [[Primer]]Clerics Tribal; BU Affinity
EDH: ...U [[Primer]]Arcum Dagsson; BG Legal Stax; B Illegal Stax
Proxy: .WX TriniStax
Other stuff: [[Official]]Shuffling, Truth + Maths
Also, have you thought of running Magosi, the Waterveil? It takes the slot of a land (so you don't have to cut anything else), and has the potential to give you infinite turns with cards you are already running, namely, Rings of Brighthearth, Voltaic Key (or Clock of Omens, or Unwinding Clock) and Mycosynth Lattice. In case you haven't seen this, here's how it works: With Magosi out, before you play your land for the turn, you pay U and tap Magosi to add the eon counter and skip your next turn. Then you use Voltaic Key or another untapper and untap Magosi, with Mycosynth Lattice out making Magosi an artifact. Then you activate the last ability on Magosi to take an extra turn, paying 2 more and copying this ability with your Rings. You then get to take two extra turns, but skip the first of these, netting you an extra turn. Since you had to return Magosi to your hand, you play it as your land for the turn and it comes into play tapped. On your extra turn, Magosi untaps naturally, and you repeat the process for infinite turns. All it takes are the four cards, and 2U mana (3U mana with Voltaic Key) from other sources, and you can go infinite. It's a four-card combo, I know, but we are playing a general who fetches all of the pieces except Magosi, and most opponents won't see this line of play coming until it's too late (or unless they've seen it before). It makes a good contingency plan if one of your opponent's gets cheeky and nukes your Basalt Monolith or names your Sensei's Divining Top with their Pithing Needle.
I'm not advocating this as being a first line of attack, but I really enjoy building decks with lots of ways to win, and the drawback of including this combo is having a comes-into-play-tapped land that taps for U.
This "love" intrigues me. Teach me to fake it.
UR Nin, the Pain Artist
WUB Zur the Enchanter (Retired)
UB Oona, Queen of the Fae (Pseudo-Retired)
What? I have no idea what you're talking about... *shifty eyes*
As to your blurb on Magosi, the Waterveil, no, I was not familiar with that combo, but it seems fairly straightforward (I don't think there's a single card with a Time Vault-esque effect that can't be broken with enough effort and the right tools.
While it's a neat party gimmick, I'm not convinced it's reliable enough of a wincon to merit removing an Island for it, given that its a CIPT nonbasic. True, we end up tutoring for some of the pieces (at very least Rings of Brighthearth, anyway) as part of our core gameplan, but tutoring the land itself is the most crucial part, and it's nigh impossible for us to do that without taking up a considerable amount of time.
We have two land tutors, one of which, Tolaria West, is a land itself. The other is Expedition Map, which is tutorable by arcum, but it would still take a lot of time to set up. And plus any player worth his salt will Wasteland/Strip Mine/whatever Magosi on the turn it comes into play tapped before I get a chance to activate it.
Personally, if my meta is loaded with Pithing Needle, I'd rather tune my deck to deal with the needles themselves than scrape the bottom of the barrel for additional, if slow and inconsistent, wincons.
All that said, it is a valid combo, and it is probably easier to accomplish in this deck than in most others, so I suppose I can throw 1x Magosi of the Waterveil in the SB.
Legacy: GWR Enchantress <--That's my banner! (lol tinypic removed it)
Casual: WB [[Primer]]Clerics Tribal; BU Affinity
EDH: ...U [[Primer]]Arcum Dagsson; BG Legal Stax; B Illegal Stax
Proxy: .WX TriniStax
Other stuff: [[Official]]Shuffling, Truth + Maths
Actually, I just devoted the second post in the thread entirely to metagame tuning.
Hopefully it will draw enough attention to the fact that Arcum is more about the metagame than...well, most other decks I can think of in the format.
Legacy: GWR Enchantress <--That's my banner! (lol tinypic removed it)
Casual: WB [[Primer]]Clerics Tribal; BU Affinity
EDH: ...U [[Primer]]Arcum Dagsson; BG Legal Stax; B Illegal Stax
Proxy: .WX TriniStax
Other stuff: [[Official]]Shuffling, Truth + Maths