MTG Salvation

Hey everyone be so I've decided that my second deck is going to be either arc um or sharuum. I am not concerned about other peoples feelings as I play in a very competitive meta so I want your thoughts on why commander makes a more competitive deck. Sharuum acts as a combo piece herself while arcum gives you the tutor ability available at command if you need to find a combo piece. Each has their pros and cons but I want others opinions on the two and just for difference the most competitive decks in my meta currently are mono blue control with infinite combos mostly infinite turns, a five color horde of notions control/ good stuff two vesper control decks featuring a lot of wrath and cyclonic rift type effects. One different deck that sometimes dominates is an gonna deck that can go off on turn 3 or 4 consistently.

Sharuum. More colours means more countermeasures; Arcum can't run targeted discard or efficient spot removal.

Your best bet would be to stick with Sharuum. Arcum doesn't have nearly as much reach.

Quote from Tsollensazzir

Sharuum the Hegemon is a very cool, interactive general for an artifact based deck. You should run Arcum Dagsson as a part of the deck because you can run a lot of cool shenanigans with Sharuum's etb effect, plus some more cool artifacts. If you want I can post my old Sharuum EDH deck.

TSZ.

Sure that would be cool I'm going to go with sharuum and am currently picking away at several decklists right now!

I run two decks myself, Marath and Arcum. Marath is more interactive and fun to play. Arcum is a complete solitaire deck where you don't care what anyone else is playing while you create the artifact apocalypse. I agree that Sharuum has more answers, but Arcum is your man if you want to explosively win in one turn from a seemingly empty board.

I prefer Sharuum because she has more colors, which means more answers. However, Arcuum is better of you don't have the mana fixing and if your aim is to draw into your combo and counterspells so that you can control the board with counters. It's not as versaile as Sharuum, but it could work.

I prefer Arcum just because everyone and their dog plays Sharuum for artifact combo shenanigans. I feel like there's more room for some interesting interactions. Though, if you're interested in raw power, Sharuum would most likely be your best bet.

Sharuum is incredibly fun, love this Sphinx.

I think your choice depends on the type of combos you want to play. Sharuum primarly sets up combos that involve herself (ie Sharuum, Sculpting Steel, Disciple of the Vault) while Arcum likes to set up hard locks like Darksteel Forge, Nevinyrral's Disk, and Mycosynth Lattice. Both can include other combos like top combo, infi mana, or infi turn. Both, being blue, have good control although Sharuums colors give her access to more answers. Both tend to have lots of mana rocks and therefore ramp pretty hard, but Arcum is cheaper so he is most likely going to come down first. Both are equally hard to protect not having shroud or hexproof, although Sharuum doesn't need haste while Arcum often suffers from not having it. They both tutor reliably although Sharuum's tutors are cheaper and more efficient with access to black. Overall I'd say that Sharuum has an advantage over Arcum due to her access to more colors. Arcum is still a really good commander though, and if I had to choose one it would probably be him. It's more my style of deck.

One thing to also take into consideration is that with Arcum, you pretty much have to play combo.

While Sharuum is a lot more flexible. Can have a deck that has a combination of playstyles such as, voltron, sphinx tribal, combo, and esper goodstuffs.

If arcum doesn't have a devastating reputation at the club, I would go with him. Mainly for the reason that someone else mentioned earlier - he explodes from nothing to a completely devastating board state in one turn. everyone knows Sharuum - that kitty is a huge heatscore and everyone stares at every move you make since you can combo out so easily. If arcum is in play with nothing but a couple artifact creature lands or pitiful myr creatures, the game is essentially over as well but it isn't as obvious.

I used to win constantly with my arcum deck. Now people will use their force of will or mana drain to counter stupid things like plague myr in order to make sure there is nothing on the board that arcum can use.

Sharuum has the colors, but I like Arcum better because you can get what you want when you need with his fetch. And its not like blue has no control cards or answers.

Arcum! Last Friday night I ran three tables in a row on turn four.

Three tables, three walking ballista kills by turn four.

Pretty solid.

Seriously why do we not have automatic archiving? After a set amount of time a thread has no replies. It should get automatically archived. It will avoid all these necro threads.

Arcum Dagsson all the way!

Here is a link to my list for ideas.

I built other super competitive decks all with real cards, but this one I proxied when I had a super competitive EDH group that allowed proxies to balance out power and explore things to the max. It was super fun and very fast! =D