The thread title is a backronym from "Zedruu the Goat." I do think this deck is the best thing ever, but you don't have to.
Zedruu - The Greatest Of All Time
Give a thing, gain a life, draw a card!
What is this deck, and why would I play it?
This deck is a lot of things. It's a solid amount of group hug, a unique selection of combos, and a tiny bit of chaos sprinkled on top. It is my understanding that every part of that last sentence has a bad reputation among magic players, but I think that's mostly because people are using these things wrong. It can be frustrating to play against a group hug player who pretends they aren't trying to win, a chaos player who actually isn't trying to win, or a combo player who does win with efficiency and consistency. This deck is not going to do any of that. It yearns for the win, it does everything in its power to get it, and it takes the game on a wild ride in the process.
You will like this deck if:
- You want relatively consistent success out of incredibly varied lines of play.
- You want to create unconventional board states.
- You want to play with cards you wouldn't otherwise use.
- Win or lose, you want a story to tell.
You will not like this deck if:
- You want to start each game with a defined game plan.
- You like to have some control over the game.
- You are afraid of enabling your opponents too much.
- You or the people you play with are set on never playing a combo, no matter how ridiculous.
Why Zedruu?
Zedruu the Greathearted's most important function is the card draw. Zedruu can feed you disgusting amounts of cards. If you want to match Zedruu's card advantage engine with a general, you would have to play something like Azami, Lady of Scrolls or Arcanis the Omnipotent, at which point you are just playing mono-U and you're down 2 colors and all the charm of the lovely goat-person. The red and white are necessary here, so Jeskai colored legends are the only real considerations. Of Jeskai colored legends, the only other option that lets you dig into your deck is Narset, Enlightened Master, which can provide similar value to zedruu in an even less predictable way. However, Zedruu is an active part of an infinite combo and a strong synergy with many cards here, so there would need to be changes to make this into a Narset deck, and then you'd have mostly the same deck while painting a big target on your face.
Also, Zedruu is the best.
The fastest way to see this whole deck is probably reading the list,
but casting Mindmoil is a close second.
This image is here to fill the white space.
The Deck
This is the deck exactly as it exists in real life pink sleeves (that make it easily identifiable when the cards get handed out to other people). This deck started the day the commander was released and has gone through many changes over the years since, but it has finally reached a point where I can say comfortably there isn't a change I wish I could make. That is not to say that I don't ever change the deck, but rather I'm long past the point where I keep a list of things I would play if I owned them.
The Comprehensive Guide of Everything the Deck Does
When this deck does what it wants to do, there are essentially 3 phases of the game.
Phase 1: Fix the mana, set up card draw, and hopefully get flash. Phase 2: Interact, sow chaos, and continue drawing cards. Phase 3: Win in one big swoop.
Phase 1 is all about making mana and playing Howling Mines and then the Howling Mines will find you more mana and you're ready to go, and that usually takes the first 4 or 5 turns. Phase 2 is all about card interactions, the subtle synergies within this deck as well as the interactions between these cards and things opponents might play that will keep people guessing instead of winning the game or destroying the card draw, and this part of the game could be 2 turns or 200 depending on the opponents. Phase 3 is doing something immensely stupid and flashy to win the game, and that almost universally takes 1 turn, 2 turns, or infinite turns and nothing inbetween.
In previous iterations of this thread, I claimed that any number of things could happen and I couldn't cover them all, but that's not going to be true anymore. The following is a list of how all the cards in the deck function followed by how they synergize with one another. I don't imagine that I'll really hit every possibility, but if there is anything missing, feel free to mention it and I will gladly make additions.
The first card to address is, of course....
Zedruu the Greathearted
Zedruu is the cornerstone of the deck. Although the 4 toughness can prove to be suprisingly useful at times, the power of Zedruu lies in two very relevant abilities. The first ability triggers on upkeep and gives life gain and card draw equal to the number of permanents you own that your opponents control. Repeated card draw is crucial to winning with this deck, and while there are many card draw effects in this deck, sometimes you don't draw them or they get removed, so having an engine in the command zone is absolutely necessary. The second ability allows you, at the cost of 3 mana, to donate your permanents to other players. By design, this is meant to enable the first ability, but it's important to remember that donating permanents is more versatile than just that even without any cards that benefit you to donate. The simplest example is the multiplayer situation where someone says "if I had one more mana I could save us from losing" and you can just hand it to them.
Playing Zedruu properly requires an understanding of certain rules in the game, many of them specific enough that not all players would be familiar with them, so below is a brief summary.
Ownership: The owner of a card is fairly obviously whoever's using the deck it started in. Ownership in the game does not care about the real world owner of the card, only the person who is using that deck. As often as I've made the joke "I loaned you that deck, so I should get to draw 20, right?", it does not work that way. The only cards you own when playing Zedruu are the cards from the deck you're playing. Ownership of tokens works differently because they don't exist at the start of the game. For tokens, the owner is whoever's control they entered under. For example, if you were to play Kiki-Jikki, Mirror Breaker and use it to make a token, you would be the owner of that token. If you play Forbidden Orchard and give an opponent a token, the opponent owns that token, so you do not draw off of those tokens. If you play Political Trickery and give someone Forbidden Orchard and then they give you the token (as will happen if it's 1 on 1), you own those and can donate them for value.
Control: Changing control is sort of the whole point of Zedruu. The two rules situations where control is iffy are auras and multiple control effects. Auras are easy, you just need to remember that control of an aura doesn't change what it's attached to. In my deck, the aura traditionally in question was Paradox Haze. If I enchant myself with Paradox Haze and then donate it, it still enchants me and thus I still get the extra upkeep. When multiple effects are giving players control of an object, the most recently applied effect is the one that counts, and an earlier effect ending doesn't change later effects. Example, if you Mind Control a creature and then donate the creature (not that you would, but you could), there would be two static effects giving control of the creature, but Zedruu was more recent and would be the one that wins. If Mind Control is destroyed later, it doesn't change control back to the original controller because Zedruu's effect still applies (and will continue to apply until the object leaves play or you or the current controller lose the game). If someone plays Mind Control on something donated with Zedruu, that effect will be most recent and give them control, but you'll end up drawing anyway so who cares!
A specific case of changing control is during combat. If an attacking or blocking creature changes control, it is removed from combat, and thus takes no damage. Thus, you can block a creature with your own, let's say it's Memnite, and then pay 3 into Zedruu to donate that Memnite, the attacker remains blocked but instead of Memnite dying it moves to the other side to help you draw more cards.
Trigger Resolution: Zedruu's only trigger condition is that you reach the beginning of the upkeep with her. No player gets priority during the untap step, and upkeep triggers happen before priority passes, so as soon as someone passes the turn to you, you're guaranteed that Zedruu will trigger. Even if your opponents control nothing you own, Zedruu's trigger still goes on the stack. Then priority passes before the trigger resolves, which means you can do things before it resolves, which is important because you can donate things in response to the trigger, and then X is counted during resolution. A common play for me is Pentad Prism on turn 2 followed by Zedruu on turn three and donating the prism on turn 4 in response to the trigger. Mind that this works both ways though, so if your opponents remove your donations in response to the trigger you'll draw less. But the trigger resolves independent of whether you still control Zedruu when it resolves, so targeted removal at Zedruu wont stop the draw, and if you're desperate enough, you can donate Zedruu to draw off of Zedruu's trigger.
Players Leaving the Game: I'm just going to paste a section of the comprehensive rules here because this is important.
800.4a When a player leaves the game, all objects (see rule 109) owned by that player leave the game and any effects which give that player control of any objects or players end. Then, if that player controlled any objects on the stack not represented by cards, those objects cease to exist. Then, if there are any objects still controlled by that player, those objects are exiled.
If you die while someone controls one of your cards, your card leaves with you.
If they die while controlling a card donated to them, the effect giving them control ends and it returns to whoever would control it without that effect.
If a card you own entered play under an opponent's control (e.g. they used Bribery), there is no effect giving them control, thus it stays in their control and falls under the last clause where everything left is exiled.
The most intricate application of these rules is in the Memnite/Warstorm Surge/Dissipation Field combo described further down. If you donate Dissipation Field to someone and then kill them, the Field comes back to you. But if you kill them with damage, the trigger from Dissipation Field is controlled by them and thus leaves the game with them. Basically, players dying is a big mess.
Which is ok, because big messes are sort of this decks M.O.
Zedruu's Points of Interaction
-"Global" permanents: Most the things zedruu donates from this deck are things that don't particularly care who controls them. Howling Mine and friends, -Opalescence/March of the Machines, Detention Sphere a Pentad Prism with no counters left... Anything that effects all players equally makes a fair candidate for donation.
-Political Trickery: the 3 land swapping cards set up zedruu draws smoothly. The 3 mana spells happen the turn before zedruu, and Shifting Borders is an instant and can be done in response to the first Zedruu trigger.
-creatures: generally, it's best not to donate creatures because sacrifice outlets (and board wipes) are common enough that you'll lose your donation quickly, but there is a handy little trick you can do in combat. If you block with a creature and then donate it after blocks, the change in controller removes the creature from combat, so you get a permanent over to an opponent and hold off an attacker (unless it has trample)
-Strionic Resonator: activate Strionic Resonator to copy Zedruu's upkeep trigger and gain double life and draw double cards.
-Sakashima the Impostor: Because Sakashima keeps his name, you can clone Zedruu to double up on the upkeep trigger.
-Infinite Reflection: while Infinite Reflection's etb trigger is always going to effect you, the effect that makes new creatures enter as copies applies to the controller of Infinite Reflection, so by donating Infinite Reflection, you can make your opponent's things enter as what you want, which is a great way to combat decks playing etb the gathering. Note: if you play it on a creature other than zedruu and don't have donate mana to respond to the trigger, you will turn zedruu into not zedruu and no longer be able to give Infinite Reflection away.
-Dissipation Field: Sometimes it's good to bounce creatures and sometimes it isn't, so the ability to throw around control at instant speed gives you some amount of control over Dissipation Field's effect.
-Alhammarret's Archive: With zedruu's first ability, the draw doubler can make you draw serious cards, but some games is the gateway to an inevitable death, and being able to give it away can save you.
-Cowardice: 3 mana into zedruu can bounce a creature you control whenever you want.
Notable Nonbos
-Forbidden Orchard: Ownership of tokens belongs to whoever they entered play under, so Forbidden Orchard does not count towards Zedruu's card draw.
-Strionic Resonator: Resonating zedruu's trigger is good synergy, but control of an ability relies on controlling the permanent, so if you donate a card away with Zedruu, you can no longer resonate its triggers
The 99
The other 99 cards in the deck are detailed below in the same format as zedruu is above: a brief description followed by a list of the notable interactions in the deck. A lot of interactions that use 3 or more cards, I'll talk about it at more length in a later section.
Lands
A note about the lands in this deck, (much like the rest of the deck) the lands go slightly against conventional wisdom. Short of the extreme decks that plan on winning in the first 3 or 4 turns, playing a deck with 34 lands is probably a bit low. But here it works due to the vast card draw and the other means of generating and fixing mana. The first 3 or 4 mana are key to getting the engine running, but once everyone is drawing 4 cards a turn, this deck can consistently hit every land drop while everyone else gets frustrated by percieved mana flood. I don't run a maximized mana base with fetches/duals/shocks because min/maxing zedruu's mana base would be like greasing the wheels of a K'nex car, but the lands are picked to carry their weight.
Basic Lands: 3 Islands, 3 Mountains, and 3 Plains. The cornerstone of magic: the gathering. Gotta have basics for a deck to function smoothly and resiliently.
-Political Trickery, etc: giving someone a basic is both non-threatening and inoffensive. I often trade basic for basic as a sign of good will early on.
Temple of Enlightenment, Temple of Epiphany, and Temple of Triumph: solid dual colored lands. They enter tapped, but they also give early scrys to smooth out the early games and get to the 3 or 4 mana needed to start the snowball.
-Bounce lands: picking a temple up on turn 2 to replay it turn 3 gets more scry. There are plenty of cards you don't care to draw in the first 3 turns, so spending the first 3 turns scrying 1 twice can honestly be a path to winning.
-Venser, the Sojourner: Venser's +2 can flicker the land to get another scry off of it.
Glacial Fortress, Clifftop Retreat, Sulfur Falls: check lands usually enter untapped and I happen to own all 3 of these.
Celestial Colonnade, Needle Spires, Wandering Fumarole: man lands are better than guildgates. The leave you with something to do after Planar Cleansing, but also have some fun tricks you can do.
-Mirrorweave: making all creatures a copy of an activated man land turns all creatures into unactivated man lands.
-Jeskai Ascendancy: manlands still make mana as creatures, so they work as mana dorks for Jeskai Ascendancy combos.
-Role Reversal: an activated manland can trade for a creature, leaving them with a land they likely can't attack with.
Azorius Chancery, Boros Garrison, and Izzet Boilerworks: The bounce lands are like two lands for the price of one! Seriously though, don't count these as multiple lands in your deck and don't be upset if you end up strip mined, but they do make a lot of early hands more attractive by ensuring the first few land drops.
-Temples: bouncing ETB lands for reuse is a way to take advantage of the downside
-Mindmoil: keeping an extra card in hand while still making land drops is akin to drawing an extra card with these out.
-Catch // Release: You can steal an opponent's land and bounce that temporary land instead of your own. Only recommended in 1v1 (or if someone really deserves it).
-Time Spiral, Teferi, Hero of Dominaria: untapping a set number of lands is better when they make more than 1 mana.
Filter Lands: Cascade Bluffs, Mystic Gate, and Rugged Prairie are just excellent, excellent color fixing. Let you go from 0 mana of a color to 2 in one shot, and that's huge. Every card with 2 or 3 colored symbols could count as a synergy here, but Kami of the Crescent Moon and Thought Reflection are the cards most notably helped by the filter lands.
Command Tower and Mystic Monastery: make all 3 colors and that's pretty neato.
Forbidden Orchard: makes all 5 colors and it gives someone a friend. In multiplayer, sometimes the spirit is even a good thing on its own, and even if it isn't, I've never foregone mana because I feared a 1/1. But remember the tokens are owned by whoever they entered under, so they don't feed zedruu. Boooo.
-Firestorm: the big sweeping removal in this deck requires a high number of creatures in play to work effectively. Forbidden Orchard discounts Blasphemous Act and makes targets for Firestorm.
-Mirrorweave: depending on what is being Mirrorweaved, having more things turn into it can be a positive thing.
-Political Trickery, etc: swapping Forbidden Orchard over to someone else makes them decide between making mana and giving away tokens.
Exotic Orchard: Potentially makes all 5 colors of mana, depending on opponents.
-Zedruu, Political Trickery, etc: trading or donating lands to an opponent can turn this into a reliable producer for all the colors of mana you need.
Nykthos, Shrine to Nyx: normal scenario, this makes 1 colorless. By the end of the game, this nets this deck an extra mana or two because this is a 3 color deck with no specific devotion themes that also donates away permanents, but on rare occasion, this is big mana.
-Leyline of Anticipation: free 2 devotion at the start of the game.
-Catch // Release/Unbender Tine: can untap target permanent, which can net mana if devotion to a color is high enough.
-Mirrorweave/Infinite Reflection: when all creatures are the same, they have the same mana cost.
-Leave // Chance: bouncing and replaying Nykthos can be a ritual with enough devotion.
Reliquary Tower: super valuable in a deck that draws 5 cards a turn. We want more cards and we want to keep them.
Mikokoro, Center of the Sea is like Howling Mine on a land and we like all the Howling Mines.
-Alhammarret's Archive: everyone else draws 1, but zedruu draws 2!
Gemstone Caverns: makes any color if you start with it in your opening hand, otherwise it's a nonbasic waste.
-Poltical Trickery, etc: if it doesn't have the luck counter, you can trade it away for a color producer instead.
-Howling Mine: turn 1 Howling Mine is best turn 1.
Forsaken City: makes any color of mana, at the cost of not untapping unless you exile a card. But we have lots of card, so no big deal.
-Political Trickery, etc: we can use this as early color fixing and then trade it for a land that untaps naturally.
-Flash enablers: the way the card is templated, if it starts the turn untapped, you can float a mana in response to its trigger, untap it, then tap again to get a pseudo-ritual during your upkeep. With this and Leyline, you can theoretically flash in Howling Mine in time to draw 2 on the second turn.
-Mirror of Fate/Time Spiral: this exiles cards, so you can have access to them with Mirror of Fate later. And when attempting to loop Mirror of Fate with Time Spiral, it can be hard to keep exactly 7 cards around to redraw, so this can manage you hand size a little.
Minamo, School at Water's Edge: an untapped blue land that can untap 5 relevant legendary permanents, as well as any random thing Sakashima turns into.
-Nykthos, Shrine to Nyx: 2 mana to untap Nykthos can make more mana.
-Azor's Gateway: can help turbo flip the gateway, but also untaps [c]Sanctum of the Sun[/c} for a lot of mana.
-Razia, Boros Archangel: redirect 6 damage instead of 3.
-Mikokoro, Center of the Sea: draw more cards.
-Nin, the Pain Artist: kill multiple things, or mill multiple people out if you have infinite mana.
Artifacts
Artifacts are the second most prevalent card type in the deck as they do most of the heavy lifting in the mana-making and card-drawing engines that let the deck succeed, but there are some fun bits in here.
Chrome Mox: this is classically degenerate despite being much worse than the original moxen, but is mostly here for that sweet, sweet turn 1 Howling Mine. The deck has 1 1-drop and 11 2-drops, so skipping straight to turn 2 is worth an extra card. Without Chrome Mox or Gemstone Caverns, this deck's 1-drops are tapped lands.
-Howling Mine: Turn 1, baby!
-Knowledge Pool/Possibility Storm: 0-mana spells are good when they're just going to be replaced anyway.
-Mind's Desire: Free storm count!
-Jeskai Ascendancy: Free loot and prowess!
-Leave // Chance: bouncing moxen with Leave can pay for leave.
Notable nonbos
-March of the Machines: kills 0 mana noncreature artifacts
-Mind's Desire: this doesn't make moxen any more free, and it still requires a card from hand to do anything, so hope you don't hit it.
Azorius Signet, Boros Signet, and Izzet Signet ramp by one and fix colors, basically ensuring the ability to play Zedruu on turn 3.
Thought Vessel: It's a mana rock that lets you keep 87 cards in hand, the castable version of reliquary tower.
Pentad Prism: Color fixing, a one time mana source equal to Dark Ritual if you wait a turn, occasionally 1 free storm, and a dummy permanent to donate. With 3 lands, Pentad Prism ensures turn 3 Zedruu into turn 4 donate to get the draw engine going ASAP.
-Zedruu: it's a do nothing permanent that mostly pays for itself to be donated
-Mind's Desire: Free storm count!
Howling Mine, Temple Bell, and Font of Mythos: everybody draws cards! The soul of this deck is repeated card draw. We don't particularly care that everyone else is drawing cards because we need the draw more and we use it better. Howling Mine is the cheapest, efficient option. Temple Bell costs 1 more but lets us draw first. Font of Mythos has double the power. They're each unique but they're all good.
-Zedruu: Howling Mine and Font of Mythos can be very safely donated for value.
-Flash!: Get to draw before everyone else
-Alhammarret's Archive: everybody draws but you draw double.
Strionic Resonater: copies triggered abilities. Oh boy, there are a lot of those.
-Howling Mine/Kami of the Crescent Moon,Walking Archive,Dictate of Kruphix,[c]Font of Mythos[c], and of course Zedruu: Draw double cards for 2 mana.
-Vedalken Plotter: two exchanges at once.
-Temples: scry 1 twice! Ok, maybe not the most useful option, but it exists.
-Bouncelands: Even less useful!
-Detention Sphere: exile 2 permanents instead of 1.
-Precursor Golem: get 4 tokens instead of 2. 15 power for 7 mana. After that, double the Precursor Golem target trigger to copy it for each other golem a second time.
-Venser, Shaper Savant: bounce 2 permanants or spells.
-Inferno Titan: an extra Lightning Bolt for 2 mana.
-Knowledge Pool: you can't get double spells out by copying cast triggers, but you can copy the etb and exile the top 6 from everybody, and there's bound to be some sweet stuff in there.
-Possibility Storm: unlike Knkowledge Pool, you can get double spells out of Possibility Storm, so go for it!
-Eye of the Storm: like Possibility Storm, it does its whole ability whether there was something to exile or not, so copy away. The copied ability will exile the spell that triggered in the first place, and then the original trigger will just cast everything a second time.
-Jeskai Ascendancy: copy the trigger for double looting, or copy for double untaps/pumps, whichever suits your interests.
-Mindmoil: probably only useful if you have draw doublers AND very, very few cards in hand.
-Warstorm Surge: Extra damage, could be a kill spell.
-Mind's Desire: storm is a triggered ability, so copying it is like doubling the storm count.
-Thousand-Year Storm: copying the trigger lets Resonator copy instants and sorceries.
-Arcbond: doubling up the damage practically ensures a board wipe.
Notable Poor Interaction
-You cannot strionic resonate the trigger of a permanent you donated with zedruu
Unbender Tine: untapping another target permanent may not seem like it's worth 4 mana, but this card has a high floor and a high ceiling and great flavor text. Also, it's got the political opportunity to untap other players things.
-bounce lands/Nykthos/Gilded Lotus: Tine is always a mana rock, but is upgraded by bigger mana makers
-Temple Bell/Mikokoro: or it can transform into a Howling Mine.
-Strionic Resonator: it can copy triggers.
-creatures: it can give a creature vigilance.
-Nin, the Pain Artist/Razia, Boros Archangel: it can help gun down creatures.
-Azor's Gateway: and of course, turbo gateway.
Vedalken Orrery: Gives everything flash, don't have to tap out and sit helplessly, and everything is better with flash. Don't believe me? Here's a list!
-All Howling Mine variants: get the extra draw before anyone else
-Knowledge Pool/Eye of the Storm: get access to the eye/pool first by flashing it in endstep and then untapping with free reign.
-Possibility Storm: respond to tutor effects with style, whatever they search for is that last thing they'll get.
-Rest In Peace: Surprise graveyard decks!
-Catch // Release: threaten mid attack
-creatures: everything is an ambush viper
-Dissipation Field: Double surprise token decks!
-Temporal Cascade: Surprise... cards in hand decks!
-Mind's Desire: I don't need my own storm, I'll just use yours instead.
Alhammarret's Archive: doubles all the life gain, which in this deck is just Zedruu at the moment, but it also doubles Zedruu's card draw, as well the 16 other ways this deck draws extra cards.
-Mindmoil, Leave // Chance: you put down your hand and draw twice that many
Gilded Lotus: black Lotus every turn. That's thousands of dollars worth of value every turn!
Mirror of Fate: exile your library and replace it with up to 7 cards you own that have been exiled. It's incredibly rare that this effect lets you win the game by activating it, but its strength appears when you activate it a second time and have access to all the cards it exiled on the first go.
-Echo Storm/Saheeli, Sublime Artificer: copy the Mirror, activate both, build your own Doomsday.
-Rest In Peace: Mirror exiles upon sacrfice and chooses itself, draw/cast/activate it again, build your own Doomsday.
-Time Spiral or Temporal Cascade: activate Mirror of Fate, shuffle it back in, draw it again, play it, and then build your own Doomsday
Knowledge Pool: I love Knowledge Pool. For those unfamiliar, when it enters the battlefield it exiles the top 3 cards from each players library, and then whenever someone casts a spell from hand, it exiles that too and lets them instead cast something previously exiled by Knowledge Pool, including other players' cards and including things it ate upon casting. Knowledge Pool makes for some of the messiest stack shananigans in MTG, but it does so much more. From getting hefty discounts, to stealing people's stuff, to multiplying cast triggers, Knowledge Pool never fails to shake up a game of magic.
-Zedruu: people will probably have to take your cards at some point, and then you can start power drawing.
-Echo Storm: can make a second/third/fourth Knowledge Pool because it triggers on both casts
-Mind's Desire: each cast into and out of Knowledge Pool is distinct, doubling the storm count. Storm triggers on cast, so even though the card is exiled, the storm copies happen.
-Jeskai Ascendancy: double cast triggers.
-Possibilty Storm/Eye of the Storm: allow you to take from the pool and from the storms. Also lets you cast your actual spells through Possibility Storm.
-Thousand-Year Storm: cast spells into the pool but keep the copies.
-Precursor Golem: golem triggers on cast, so the spells get copied for every other golem and then you get a spell from Knowledge Pool on top of that.
-Chrome Mox/Memnite/Firestorm/Pentad Prism/Ephemeral Shields: take the good stuff out and fill the pool with cheap/free cards that don't do anything without people throwing more cards away.
-Venser, the Sojourner: +2 can flicker permanents of yours that people played and bring them back on your side of the field. +2 can also flicker the Knowledge Pool if the contents are unsavory.
Enchantments
Zedruu's enchantments aren't always the cards people see the most of, but they are definitely the cards that opponents remember. Crazy enchantments are often the highlight of a zedruu victory as they offer the greatest impact and confusion to the board state.
Rest in Peace: Exiling the graveyard is huge, so this card is a staple of the format without any synergies to play with. And this deck doesn't really care about the graveyard, so it's very safe to just play out whenever.
-Zedruu: Rest In Peace is a very mana light donation target.
-Mirror of Fate: gets exiled by Rest In Peace on sacrifice, so it can choose itself to go into the deck. Also, just exiling graveyards can make a pile big enough to win with Mirror of Fate.
Detention Sphere: well known removal spell, it's an Oblivion Ring that also happens to hose token swarms (and if multiple opponents play Sol Ring, that's just awesome).
-Zedruu: Detention Sphere doesn't care who controls it, so donate away.
-Strionic Resonator: copy the trigger to exile 2 target permanents.
-Mirrorweave: exile all creatures.
-Leave // Chance/Venser, Shaper Savant: bounce in response to the trigger to exile something forever
Dictate of Kruphix: see Howling Mine. This one just has flash.
Jeskai Ascendancy: untaps creatures and loots. Both are very good effects, and the loot is a "may" ability if you're too close to drawing out.
-Alhammarret's Archive: draw 2 and only discard 1 to keep your hand as full as when you cast the spell.
-Strionic Resonator: get double the untap or double the loot, but not both, as they are two seperate triggers.
-March of the Machines: casting a noncreature spell now untaps all your artifacts, many of which make mana to pay for more noncreature spells.
-Crystalline Crawler: doesn't even need March of the Machines, it's a mana producing creature to untap.
-manlands: also mana producing creatures
-Mirrorweave: casting Mirrorweave while someone is attacking you makes all creatures the same thing, except now your creatures all untap and get +1/+1, so if you have enough blockers and something has equal power and toughness, it's just a Comeuppance.
-Venser, the Sojourner/Turnabout: a big turn of casting spells leads to some major prowessing, and a -1 or a Turnabout can sneak by blockers for an alpha strike. Yes, Zedruu has commander damaged people to death in this deck.
-Knowledge Pool/Possibility Storm/Eye of the Storm: multiply those spell casting triggers with these behemoths.
-Nin, the Pain Artist: Buff creatures to survive Nin and untap Nin for more draw.
Dissipation Field: can act as an attack deterrent if people don't want to replay their things. Proves most useful when non-combat damage gets involved, like Nekusar or Niv-Mizzet, and can hit noncreatures too like Staff of Nin. Watch out though, because you can accidentally fuel etb the gathering.
-Zedruu: by donating Dissipation Field to someone else, you can have some semblence of control over when things are getting bounced to hand.
-Vedalken Orrery/Leyline of Anticipation: surprise an attacking fleet by bouncing them all out of nowhere.
-Arcbond: the arcbonded creature deals damage to each player and would get bounced.
Leyline of Anticipation: see Vedalken Orrery, except this one feels like cheating in your opening hand.
March of the Machines: go from no creatures to many by turning artifacts into creatures. Suddenly those Howling Mines and mana rocks are blockers or even offensive threats. Also, you can give opponent's artifacts summoning sickness and make equipment unattachable.
-Mirrorweave/Infinite Reflection: turn your creatures into copies of an artifact or turn your artifacts into copies of a cool creature.
-Jeskai Ascendency: all noncreature spells you cast now untap all your mana rocks. Neat!
-Howling Mine: if you can attack someone unimpeded, you can tap Howling Mine to turn it off on other people's turns.
-Creature removal now works on artifacts.
Notable Poor Interaction
-Moxen: get killed by March of the Machines
-Artifacts that need to tap have summoning sickness. I'm looking at you, Mirror of Fate.
Opalescence: the same thing as March of the Machines, but for enchantments, which can be even neater.
-Mirrorweave/Infinite Reflection: turn all your enchantments into creatures or turn all your creatures into Warstorm Surges. You decide. Also, Mirrorweaving Possibility Storm is choice.
-Warstorm Surge: enters as a creature so it triggers itself.
-Eye of the Storm: 7/7s are big enough to be noteworthy.
-Creature removal now works on enchantments.
Mindmoil: each time you cast a card, you put your hand on the bottom and draw a new, equivalently-sized hand. This is genuinely one of the most underrated cards in magic. People like to plan ahead, and thus Mindmoil scares and offends them by making them rely on chance, but on average, you have a well mixed hand. Some mana production, so cheap spells, some bombs, and you end up playing them out in that order. With Mindmoil, you can play what you need at the time and then draw more of it. Suddenly you can ramp up a board of mana rocks in one turn, and then spend the rest of the game slamming haymakers because if you ever run out, you play something cheap and replace your hand with new haymakers. Don't fear Mindmoil. Just play it and see what happens.
-Leave // Chance: pump your hand back up with permanents.
-Alhammarret's Archive: put your hand down and draw that many x2. Extremely dangerous, handle with care.
-Venser, Shaper Savant: can bounce himself to do a 4 mana personal Windfall
Possibility Storm: possibility storm takes the spells you cast and replaces them with something else. Neat! Possibility Storm is actually a powerful tool for chaos because it can be really, really hard to kill, as your opponent's can't resolve spells from their hands. Meanwhile you just slam the cheapest cards you can until something silly happens.
-Strionic Resonator: copy the trigger to get to cast 2 spells from your deck
-Mind's Desire: every cast from hand is 2 storm, so storm builds up fast. But wait, there's more! If you cast Mind's Desire from your hand and have Possibility Storm resolve before the storm trigger, Possibility Storm will shove Mind's Desire back into your deck giving you the remote chance that the storm copies will shuffle Mind's Desire to the top and cast it a second time, truly making Mind's Desire the storm that storms.
-Knowledge Pool/Eye of the Storm: the other two permanents want to eat the spell, Possibility Storm doesn't care, and being in control of these things mean you can stack the triggers to get maximum benefit and give minimum benefit to others.
-Thousand-Year Storm: resolve a copy of the spells before they're eaten, build up storm count for future spells.
-Jeskai Ascendancy: double cast triggers for double loot and untaps
-Cheap crap!: moxen/memnite/firestorm are ultra cheap and can swing into big plays. 3 mana sorceries aren't as cheap, but they likely upgrade to bombs.
Barren Glory: it says win the game on it. What's better than that? Seriously though, winning with Barren Glory is too complicated to explain with two card synergies, but that doesn't mean this can't do anything. It can be a useless donation, it can be a 6/6, and it can give you 2 extra devotion to white.
Warstorm Surge: all of your creatures deal direct damage on entry. Pretty straight forward rain of fire.
-Opalescence: Warstorm Surge enters as a creature and triggers itself for 6 damage.
-Memnite: 0 mana for 1 damage. Huge value!
-Crystalline Crawler: up to 4 damage that pays for itself after
-Opalescence/March of the Machines: use Warstorm Surge as removal for all kinds of permanents
Eye of the Storm: whenever a player casts an instant or sorcery, Eye of the Storm exiles it, and then that player chooses to cast copies of any combination of cards exiled by Eye of the Storm. All spells in the storm are optional so you can choose not to cast them, and all the spells are cast at the same time. And then you end up with a giant nonsense stack and a 25 minute turn.
-Strionic Resonator: copy the Eye trigger and get a second cast of everything in it.
-Turnabout: every instant and sorcery can untap your lands or mana rocks to apy for itself and more.
-Catch // Release: repeatedly cast catch to steal mana from people to pay for more instants/sorceries, or pay 3 for catch to cast out release instead.
-Leave // Chance: can bounce Eye of the Storm if things get sketchy.
-Temporal Cascade/Time Spiral: let you keep digging for more instants and sorceries to run the gravy train.
-Possiblity Storm/Knowledge Pool: cast twice as many spells and be twice as happy. Possibility Storm in particular guarantees a second trigger of Eye of the Storm.
-Jeskai Ascendancy: every spell cast out of Eye of the Storm triggers the ascendancy, so the big pie of loots can likely find the next spell to trigger with.
-Mind's Desire: Eye of the Storm casting Mind's Desire is a cast so it does trigger storm, and then Eye of the Storm triggers on any instant or sorcery card, including ones cast from exile for free, so you can hit one with Mind's Desire to cast another Mind's Desire, and then the game likely just ends.
-Thousand-Year Storm: every spell cast becomes lots of spells.
Creatures
Where lands are the foundation of Magic: the Gathering, creatures are the face of it. Creatures aren't the face of this deck though because they mostly aim to do more of what the artifacts and enchantments are doing.
Memnite: swings for 1. 40 turn clock is OP. Memnite is great. It's an extra body on the field, a chump blocker, and sometimes a donate target for the cheap, cheap cost of free.
-Zedruu: the block and donate trick is almost always Memnite
-Mirrorweave: targeting Memnite is a great Forcefield imitation. Targetting anything else, Memnite gets to be something worth way more than 0 mana.
-Warstorm Surge: free damage! (part of a combo)
-Possibility Storm/Knowledge Pool: transform 0 mana into a more powerful card.
Kami of the Crescent Moon: See Howling Mine.
Nin, the Pain Artist: kills creatures and draws you cards, not quite the way you want to though. Nin is a mana sink and a panic button.
-Alhammarret's Archive: draw double the mana you spend.
-Cowardice: don't draw anything, but for 2 mana you can bounce a creature.
-Catch // Release: steal a creature, kill their creature, draw the cards yourself.
-Razia, Boros Archangel: shoot your creature, kill someone else's, draw the cards yourself.
-Unbender Tine/Jeskai Ascendancy: untap Nin to activate again.
-Jeskai Charm: give Nin lifelink.
-Arcbond: turn Nin into a board wipe.
Walking Archive: like Howling Mine but deserves its own entry. The ability to scale up in the event of mana flood is a big deal, and the instant speed nature makes extra counters act like Dictate of Kruphix.
-Mirrorweave: this card has defender, so Mirrorweave becomes "creatures can't attack this turn.
-Cathars' Crusade: each creature entering is another Howling Mine.
Note! this creature has defender. You can't pump it up to infinity and attack with it because it can't attack. You can however pump it to infinity and pass the turn and your opponents draw out, and that's lethal enough.
Vedalken Plotter: enters the battlefield and exchanges control of a land you control and a land an opponent controls. Even without synergies, this can be useful as a way to fix mana colors or defend against the powerful lands that get played in this format.
-Zedruu: if if you trade identical lands, the change in ownership means advantage for Zedruu.
-Venser, Shaper Savant: trade the lands and then return yours to your hand to Annex someone.
-Venser, the Sojourner: Venser does this trick even better. If you exchange lands, you can +2 to exile the land since it's a permanent you own and then it comes back under its owner's control, and that's just actually Annex. Even more, if you +2 again targetting the plotter, you can get the etb again to exchange lands and then +2 again to steal yours back. Chances are, nobody will let you do this for long, but while they answer Venser they're ignoring everything else you do.
-Leave // Chance: bounces permanents you own, so again you can steal the land back.
-Catch // Release: threaten a land, then exchange it for someone else's and keep the second one forever.
-Strionic Resonator: for the double exchange.
Crystalline Crawler: Double the Pentad Prism, double the fun. There are 5 other mana sources in the deck that can make the 4th mana color for full value in addition to land trading tricks. And then it's an alloy Myr on top of that.
-Jeskai Ascendancy: Jeskai Ascendancy and mana dorks are a well-known synergy, and this is no excpetion. Make a mana for each noncreature spell.
-Infinite Reflection: really interesting interation, all the creatures entering the battlefield have the converge effect apply, so if you can play creatures using all different colors (which you have access to all 5 cause of Crystalline Crawler), you can spam out creatures for free.
-Mirrorweave: wait for attacks, make everything a crawler, blocks, tap your crawlers to have bigger crawlers that your opponent and win at combat.
-Warstorm Surge: free damage!
-Mind's Desire: free storm!
-Cathars' Crusade: creatures entering now makes mana.
-Dack's Duplicate: gets all the cast counters by copying the Crawler (like the other clones), but also has haste and can make an additional mana, turning into a mana ritual.
Golden Guardian: fights your own creatures, which is sometimes a good thing, and then flips into ramp spell / token engine.
-Swans of Bryn Argoll: 2 mana, flip guardian draw 4 cards.
-Arcbond: turn the fight into 4 damage to everything.
-Catch // Release: steal a creature, make that fight the Guardian.
-Razia, Boros Archangel: lets Guardian flip fighting anything with 1 or more power.
-land untappers: generate 2 mana from 1 land.
-Zedruu: make tokens that can be donated to draw cards.
-Warstorm Surge: shoot things for 4 damage every turn.
Raff Capashen, Ship's Mage: See Vedalken Orrery for my love of flash explanations, but Raff only gives flash to artifacts and legends. If you ever want your deck to laugh off a Cyclonic Rift, this is the card for you.
-Vedalken Orrery: use Raff as the go between to give all your spells flash at instant speed.
-Howling Mine: flashing in Howling Mines, either end step or upkeep, gets you drawing before everyone else. Now that Shimmer Myr is upgrade to Raff, every Howling Mine effect is instant speed.
-Razia, Boros Archangel: it's really hard to lose at petty combat when you can flash in a monster like this.
Sakashima the Impostor: the clone that keeps its name so it can copy legendary creatures.
-legendary creatures!: Zedruu, Kami, Raff, Nin, Razia, Venser
Swans of Bryn Argoll: usually paired with Seismic Assault, but a great draw engine with a great many cards, and also a resilient blocker.
-Firestorm: turns Firestorm into major card advantage.
-Warstorm Surge: all creatures turn into draw spells
-Nin, the Pain Artist: turns into Blue Sun's Zenith
-[c]Razia, Boros Archangel[c]: can aim damage at swans to protect creatures, or can aim damage away from swans to prevent opponents drawing cards.
-Arcbond: swans survives a big arcbond and can draw you cards.
-Mirrorweave: can replace complicated combat math with everone drawing their whole deck.
Venser, Shaper Savant: the one pseudo counter in the deck, a very unique magic card.
-Warstorm Surge: or shock something
-Mindmoil: or wheel your hand
-Venser, the Sojourner: I'll have my Venser venser my Venser, eot my Venser comes back to venser your land.
-Mind's Desire: hitting Venser off of Mind's Desire lets you bounce the original Mind's Desire back to hand where you can recast it with more storm.
-Thousand-Year Storm: storm off a spell multiple times.
Precursor Golem: the crowned prince of stupid numbers, I've built entire edh decks around this dude. Here it stays fairly tame, but 9 power for 5 mana never hurt anybody.
-Walking Archive: is actually a golem. Sometimes that matters.
-Strionic Resonator: can copy both the etb and target triggers getting more golems or more spell copies (though there's only one spell in here you'd want to copy this way).
-Mirrorweave: aim at a token and you can make everything a Precursor Golem. Aim at something else, and you've got 3 bodies to become that thing.
-Vanish Into Memory: 4 mana to draw 9 and discard 3 at a later time is pretty strong.
-Catch // Release: fusing the spell costs 9, but that seems fair to make every player sacrifice 3 of each type of permanent. It's like crueler ultimatum.
-Arcbond: multiple arcbonds bounce damage back and forth.
-either venser: bounce the original, leave the tokens, get more tokens.
Inferno Titan: the big bomb creature here, a big threat on its own. Inferno Titan is my personal favorite of the titans, and there's plenty it can do here.
-Strionic Resonator: copy the 3 damage trigger
-Mirrorweave/Infinite Reflection: have an army of titans
-Venser, the Sojourner: makes Inferno Titan unblockable or flickers it for etb value and pseudo-vigilance.
-Opalescence/March of the Machines: let you burn away enchantments and artifacts.
Razia, Boros Archangel: Razia isn't good, but man is she Cool. Playing this card is more so a statement that I can get away with any inclusion here, but it is nice to win in combat sometimes.
-Nin, the Pain Artist: you draw the cards and then hurt someone else's creature.
-Arcbond: make your sweeper a bit more one-sided, or shoots more damage back at the target creature for a bigger wipe.
-Firestorm: get more damage onto a single target without so much discarding.
-Vanish Into Memory: 4 mana to draw 6 and discard 3.
-Swans of Bryn Argoll: get more cards from Arcbond or Firestorm, or just let opponents draw cause you're a nice person.
Instants
Instants are usually instant for a reason, the instants in Zedruu offer the most immediate interaction with opponents that the deck has to offer.
Firestorm: the most mana efficient burn spell on the market, you can do 100 damage for 1 red mana and all it takes is 10 other cards from your hand. It's a difficult card to play though, because you need to have as mana targets as the amount of damage you want to do, so killing big creatures often involves burning yourself.
-Forbidden Orchard: creates targets to let the damage rack up without needing to target anything important to you.
-March of the Machines/Opalescence: open up artifacts and enchantments to burn removal.
-Knowledge Pool/Eye of the Storm: trigger these permanents for the low cost of R, and if anyone wants to use them against you, they have to do the discarding anyway.
-Swans of Bryn Argoll: replace every card you have to discard.
-Thousand-Year Storm: double the firestorm gives you double the damage with the same amount of discards.
Ephemeral Shields: a protection spell for a creature. Keeping Zedruu from dying to a board wipe is a solid recipe for taking over a game of magic, and convoke lets you do wo potentailly with no mana up.
-Arcbond: lets a creature survive the board wipe.
-Knowledge Pool/Possibility Storm/Eye of the Storm/Jeskai Ascendancy/Mind's Desire: casting a free instant is kind of a big deal even if it has no relevant effect at the moment.
-Precursor Golem: I know it's just turning an opponent's 1 for 1 removal into a different 1 for 1, but blanking spot removal at a Precursor Golem feels nice because opponent's feel clever for bolting a golem and I like making them sad.
Leave // Chance: Leave lets you pick your permanents up, chance lets you cycle away your hand. Even before the internal synergy of the card, these effects are great to have around. Leave is a great response to board wipes, and chance is good for finding gas. Leave is great at clearing away your own permenents that are backfiring, and the specific phrasing of leave has interesting consequences with Zedruu, as you don't need to control something to bounce it
-Political Trickery, etc: trade a land, then bounce yours back to hand.
-Moxen/Signets/Pentad Prism: bounce mana rocks for added storm/mana fixing.
-Detention Sphere: bounce in response to exile trigger and never give the target back.
-Alhammarret's Archive: Discard X cards, draw 2X.
-Thousand-Year Storm: gives you a copy of Leave that resolves through and before cast triggers, so you can pick up a Possibility Storm that's in your way or Alhammarret's Archive before Mindmoil kills you.
-Mind's Desire: Leave on all your least expensive permaments can push a lot of storm.
-Mindmoil: bouncing permanents you don't need to combo can help you dig for a win aggressively. This includes lands.
-Planeswalkers: bounce planeswalkers at low loyalty and replay them.
Arcbond: as long as there's some kind of damage happening, Arcbond can be an instant speed board wipe and might just kill people
-Precursor Golem/Eye of the Storm/Bonus Round: multiple copies of Arcbond will make damage bounce back and forth between 2 creatures until 1 dies.
-Swans of Bryn Argoll: Swans not only always survives Arcbond, it also draws you cards (if your creature was the Arcbond target)
-Jeskai Charm: gives your creatures lifelink, and with Arcbond, the creature deals the damage.
-Dissipation Field: make the Arcbonded creature bounce.
-Nin, the Pain Artist: build an Earthquake.
-Razia, Boros Archangel: can protect a creature from Arcbond death.
Jeskai Charm: top a creature, zap a player or planeswalker, or pump the team with lifelink.
-Knowledge Pool: after putting a creature on top, you can Knowledge Pool to steal it from their deck.
-Eye of the Storm/Bonus Round: 4 damage isn't much, but if you start getting multiples, it adds up.
-Arcbond/Warstorm Surge: lifelink applies to direct damage too (doesn't effect creature not in play when charm is cast).
Mirrorweave: one of us... one of us... one of us... Mirrorweave makes everything the same thing. You can steal many a win by noticing when someone else has a big threat, or you can fog them by turning all their creatures into something much smaller. There are, of course, targets in the deck worth Mirrorweaving.
-Precursor Golem: to make it work, you have to target a token and let the trigger copy the spell to resolve at the original first, but once you have a pile of Precursor Golems in play, you can cast spells and have them copied an unreasonable amount of times.
-Inferno Titan: all your creatures are deadly titans, and then for every two attackers you have, you can kill an enemy creature for free.
-Walking Archive: has defender, so it can stop attacks for a turn.
-Swans of Bryn Argoll: turns combat into a massive draw event.
-Crystalline Crawler: with enough creatures, Mirrorweave can be a mana ritual.
-man-lands: animating a land and then Mirrorweaving it turns every other creature into a non-animated land until end of turn, making it very hard to attack you or block your land-creature.
-March of the Machines/Opalescence: target artifacts and enchanments cause it's fun!
-Detention Sphere: exile all creatures.
Turnabout: tap or untap all of target players artifacts, creatures, or lands. Turnabout is effectively a modal spell with 6 options and I've definitely used them all. Tap all opposing creatures to prevent attacks, tap all their artifacts or lands to constrain their mana (particularly against decks with counterspells), untap all creatures for surprise blocks, untap all lands for the mana ritual, untap all artifacts to reuse tap abilities. Turnabout does it all.
-Eye of the Storm: untapping lands almost certainly makes every instant or sorcery pay for itself until somebody wins.
-Bonus Round: if Turnabout didn't generate enough mana, cast it twice.
-Mind's Desire/Jeskai Ascendancy: turnabout acts as a free spell to trigger these things or add to storm.
-Temple Bell/Strionic Resonator: sometimes you just need to untap an artifact, and the mana rocks you have out get a free ride.
-Thousand-Year Storm: lots of Turnabouts.
Vanish Into Memory: blank a creature for a turn, and get some sweet card draw out of it to boot. Most satisfying when aimed at hydras, but there are some internal tricks for this as well.
-Precursor Golem: 4 mana to draw 9 and discard 3.
-Inferno Titan: use the firebreathing ability to increase the draw power, and then get an etb trigger from the titan as well.
-Razia, Boros Archangel: draw 6, discard 3.
-Clones: draw cards for power, have them re-enter as a smaller creature to keep cards in hand.
-Jeskai Ascendancy: the pump trigger from Jeskai Ascendancy increases the draw without increaing the discard.
Sorceries
Sorceries are usually the basic spells of a deck; ramp, cantrips, boardwipes, and all those reliable staples a normal deck needs. But that's not how it works here! Zedruu's sorceries are heavy hitters. Possibility Storm from Political Trickery can cause all sorts of madness.
Catch // Release: catch threatens a permanent, release elimates a lot of permanents. But also, secret secret, Catch can give a permanent haste for you, and in a deck that prefers to win in one big turn, summoning sickness can cause a bunch of issues.
-Zedruu: a classic zedruu shenanigan in a multiplayer scenario. 3 mana steals a permanent, 3 mana gives that card to somebody else. Like a confiscate for a friend.
-flash enablers: steal a creature, block with it, save some damage and kill a dude.
-Gilded Lotus: 3 mana untaps and makes 3 mana, free storm!
-Eye of the Storm: you can start stealing lands to pay for more instants and sorceries to make more copies of Catch. Also, you can cast Catch in and pull Release out.
-Precursor Golem: a fused Catch // Release will still only target one golem, so it'll copy the release for each golem and drop a nuke on the board.
-bounce lands: you can borrow someone else's land to pay the land bouncing cost to ramp yourself.
Political Trickery: see Vedalken Plotter, except this one is a sorcery.
Role Reversal: a political trickery that isn't limited to lands. Basically Confiscate that draws cards with Zedruu.
Echo Storm: makes multiple copies of an artifact.
-Knowledge Pool: get the cast trigger to copy knowledge pool before even getting your spell out. With 1 cast of Zedruu, you can have 4 Knowledge Pools.
-Mirror of Fate: 2 Mirrors makes Doomsday, 3 makes a Doomsday with a safety valve.
-Unbender Tine: like copying lands, also adds to devotion for Nykthos.
Mind's Desire: the storm that storms.
-moxen, Memnite, Pentad Prism, Crystalline Crawler, Ephemeral Shields, Turnabout, Time Spiral, so many cards are free: free storm
-Knowledge Pool/Eye of the Storm: makes more storm and more storm triggers.
-Possibility Storm: makes more storm and if you Possibility Storm away Mind's Desire, there's a chance you shuffle back into Mind's Desire from the storm copies and then you storm from your storm so you can storm while you storm.
-Venser, Shaper Savant: Venser bouncing Mind's Desire doesn't bounce the storm copies, so you can cast and storm twice.
Time Spiral: everyone draws a fresh hand, and you untap 6 lands. This is a gross card, and everyone knows it.
-bouncelands: make more mana then you spent on Time Spiral
-draw doubler: draw 14 instead of 7
-Eye of the Storm: every spell eaten by Eye gets you more mana and more draw to find more instants and sorceries
-Thousand-Year Storm: untap 6*X lands for the new hand to use.
-Mirror of Fate: Time Spiral shuffles in the graveyard and exiles itself, Mirror of Fate sacrifices itself and returns things from exile. It's difficult to do perfectly by balancing total cards in hand/library/graveyard, but you can just go off this way.
Temporal Cascade: everyone draws 7, or everyone shuffles hands and graveyards in, or its a 9 mana Timetwister. The one situation I can think of where the entwined spell is actually worth less mana to me than the individual halves. "Draw 7" lets you keep your big hand, "shuffle in" is actually incredibly oppressive, axing people's hands and destroying graveyard strategies.
-draw doublers: break the symmetry, draw 14.
-flash enablers: eliminate people's hands at instant speed.
Temporal Mastery: takes an extra turn. The miracle cost is fun when it happens (not too often when you draw 1000 cards a turn).
-everything: extra turn = play more magic.
-Eye of the Storm: dodge the exile limitation and take many turns.
-Mirror of Fate: negate the exile limitation and remiracle the spell.
-planeswalkers: extra turn can let you sneak through an ultimate.
Aminatou's Augury: for all intents and purposes, it's basically a second Mind's Desire.
Planeswalkers
The last card type represented here, these 2 planeswalkers round out the deck. There are exactly 2 planeswalkers in this deck because of Possibility Storm. If I play Possibility Storm, I have a card type where I know exactly what I'll flip into, and whichever one it is, they both can remove a Possibility Storm if I need to resolve something in my hand. This deck is not built to be able to protect planewalkers for very long, so they're mostly included for their immediate impact, but the ultimates are cool too.
Saheeli, Sublime Artificer: army in a can, plus cloning artifacts and creatures.
-Mana rocks: the activated ability becomes a mana source.
-Howling Mine: turning Howling Mine into a creature lets it attack, or mana rock lets it tap, either way it turns of the symmetry of the card drawing.
-Knowledge Pool: makes an empty Knowledge Pool for your turn, sort like a build your own Decree of Silence.
-Mirror of Fate: Saheeli can get you Mirrors number 2 and 3.
-Knowledge Pool/Possibility Storm/Eye of the Storm: multiply those cast triggers.
Nahiri, the Harbinger: +2 rummage, -2 removal, -8 sneak attack a Knowledge Pool.
-Alhammarret's Archive: discard 1, draw 2.
-Possibility Storm: exile your own Possibility Storm to cast things straight from hand.
-Knowledge Pool: get the pool into play for free on your turn, and then take it away before anyone else gets access.
Venser, the Sojourner: +2 flicker, -1 unblockable creatures, -8 machine gun the board.
-Vedalken Plotter, etc: "If you exchange lands, you can +2 to exile the land since it's a permanent you own and then it comes back under its owner's control, and that's just actually Annex. Even more, if you +2 again targetting the plotter, you can get the etb again to exchange lands and then +2 again to steal yours back. Chances are, nobody will let you do this for long, but while they answer Venser they're ignoring everything else you do."
-Inferno Titan/Wartorm Surge: etb damage goes well with flickering.
-Precursor Golem: make more golem tokens.
-clones: reset clones
-permanents that backfire: exile something giving you trouble til end of turn.
-Knowledge Pool: people take your permanants, Venser bounces them back to you.
-Knowledge Pool/Possibility Storm/Eye of the Storm: +2 can reset these things. -8 can make multiple cast triggers a deadly tool.
Big Splashy Synergies
"This deck is not only able to go crazy - it also needs to do so."
Zedruu has won many games of edh in many remarkable ways, but casting individual spells and letting them act as a win condition alone is an incredibly rare outcome. In order to reach the point of victory, this deck almost requires that select pieces be strung together that grant the pilot an unfathomable board state or direct access to most or all of the deck. While I pride myself on winning in comically unique ways, the truth is that the win conditions are often purely academic exercises once one of the major engines gets up and running. Any one of these strategies could be picked out and made into a more focused, more consistent deck. Having done so with more than one of them, I've found it's my preference to weave them all into one deck and let chance decide what strategy to pursue in any given game.
Draw Doubling and Hand Cycling
This deck is full of cards dig: Howling Mine, Temporal Cascade, Time Spiral, Leave // Chance, Mindmoil, Jeskai Ascendancy. These cards are mostly designed to freshen your options rather than actively increase the number of cards in your hand, but once Alhammarret's Archive gets involved, you very swiftly draw through the entire deck, and then everything tends to just fall into place from there. The most extreme possibility here is Mindmoil, where every spell you cast doubles your cards in hand. If you were so inclined to focus a deck on just this aspect, Arjun, the Shifting Flame is Mindmoil in the command zone.
Also of note is the interaction between "draw on cast" effects like Mindmoil and Jeskai Ascendancy and what I will right now refer to as "cast on cast" effects: Mind's Desire, Knowledge Pool, Possibility Storm, and Eye of the Storm. Multiplying cast triggers like this leads to outrageously accelerated digging. If you exile 5 spells with a Mind's Desire, that can be 5 refreshed hands with Mindmoil (which is probably half the library) from which to find a way to win. And looting with Jeskai Ascendancy from all the spells in Eye of the Storm is likely to find you another to cast.
You have to be careful with draw doublers out, as you can quickly find yourself in the scenario where you have 1 turn or 1 spell cast before effectively you mill yourself to death. Because of this, there are ways in the deck to wiggle out of such a lock, the first of which is Zedruu. If draw doubling has you locked down, just donate the draw doubler with Zedruu and the problem is solved! Sometimes Zedruu isn't around and you don't have mana for that, but within the deck are Leave // Chance, Chaos Warp, and Detention Sphere to wipe things off the face of the earth. But what if you have Possibility Storm out and can't get those through? A planeswalker in hand can do it; there are only 2 in the deck, so casting one with the other in the library guarantees you the one from the library, and both can clear away a Possibility Storm. This may sound way too specific to build this purposely and keep bringing up, but Possibility Storm can be really oppressive if things go south, so this has been relevant on multiple occassions.
Making Mana to Make More Mana to Make More Mana...
This deck doesn't use too much mana until it's gotten that big ol' fist of cards, and then it uses a lot of mana that it makes in a hurry. How do we make lots of mana in a hurry? First up is mana rocks. Once you're far enough in, the moxen add a mana, the signets effectively cost 1, Gilded Lotus costs 2, Pentad Prism and Crystalline Crawler (and Phyrexian Metamorph on either of those or Gilded Lotus) are effectively free, and all these things at the right time can jump you from a few mana on your turn to double that the next turn. Having flash on your mana rocks means you can do this on your opponent's end step and then take a huge turn out of nowhere.
Another way to make a ton of mana is to untap lands repeatedly. Turnabout and Time Spiral are the cards that do this, Turnabout is generally a mega-ritual, and Time Spiral even nets positive mana with a bounceland in play. Put either of these into Eye of the Storm and instants and sorceries become free. This is a dangerous play if any of your opponent's can respond, but do it anyway cause it's super fun. Additionally, these cards and Unbender Tine can untap Nykthos, Unbender Tine being the most interesting because it (and copies of it) add to the devotion for Nykthos.
A third way to turn your mana into more mana is Jeskai Ascendancy with creatures that make mana. It could be Crystalline Crawler and clones of it, it could active man-lands, it could be mana rocks animated by March of the Machines. Whatever the combination of things is, you can start untapping mana with every non-creature spell, and suddenly you realize that a third of the deck is non-creature spells that cost 4 or less and by the end of the turn you've spent 20 or 30 mana.
And then there's Azor's Gateway, a card that can tap for 40 of any color. This deck has 4 ways to untap the gateway to turbo flip, and 5 to untap it as a land after flipping. Typically, a flipped Gateway takes 3 turns to end the game. There is an extra secret way to flip it in this deck as well. Saheeli, Sublime Artificer can turn Azor's Gateway into a clone of Golden Guardian, and then they can fight to flip Azor's Gateway into its printed backside, Sanctum of the Sun. I promise it works that way, and probably nobody will believe you when you try to do this.
Knowledge Pool, Possibility Storm, Eye of the Storm
These three cards have a lot in common. "Whenever a player casts a spell, exile that spell, then they play another spell." The trick is what happens when you control more than one at the same time and they all want to exile the same spell. Knowledge Pool is the simple one because it uses the word "if." If they exile the spell, they get one out of Knowledge Pool, but if they don't exile the spell to Knowledge Pool, they get nothing out. There could be 1000 Knowledge Pools, there would still only be one that gets the card and gives one back. Possibility Storm is similarly simple, but in the opposite way; there is no if, so the ability resolves to the end whether or not the spell is actually removed by Possibility Storm. If the spell gets countered or exiled by something else, you still get a spell from your library from Possibility Storm. This means, if there were 1000 Possibility Storms and you cast an artifact, you'd end up flipping through looking for 1000 artifacts (and the first trigger puts the triggering spell on the bottom, so you'd end up getting that one back as well.) Eye of the Storm lies somewhere between the two. There is no if in Eye of the Storm, so you get to cast the spells exiled by Eye of the Storm whether or not the original spell is exiled by it, but you only get to copy that spell if Eye of the Storm does eat it, so letting another permanent exile the spell means you only get to copy the cards otherwise exiled by Eye of the Storm. Another distinction of Eye of the Storm that differentiates it from the other two is that it triggers from spells cast from zones other than the hand. Possibility Storm and Knowledge Pool only trigger off cards cast from the hand, where Eye of the Storm triggers off of any instant or sorcery card played. (The "card" distinction is what keeps it from triggering itself). But this means that Eye of the Storm accepts spells cast off Knowledge Pool, Possibility Storm, and Mind's Desire.
If multiples of these are on the field and controlled by different players, what happens becomes dictated by whose turn it is and you better hope you've got instant speed everything, but there's not a strategy you can plan ahead for that situation, so go find a judge if you get bogged down or confused. But in the much more likely scenario that you're in charge of everything, you can stack the triggers in the order that benefits you. If you want a spell in Eye of the Storm, you have that resolve first and you've gotten what you want, you can still Possibility Storm if that's out, and you get nothing out of Knowledge Pool. If you have Knowledge Pool and Eye of the Storm, you can have Knowledge Pool resolve first, get a spell out of that, and still cast everything in Eye of the Storm. If the spell cast out of Knowledge Pool is an instant or sorcery, that will trigger Eye as well, and then you copy every spell exiled by Eye (including the one out of Knowledge Pool) twice. If you have Possibility Storm and Knowledge Pool, you can let Knowledge Pool resolve first, get a spell out, then Possibility Storm anyways, getting two spell from eat cast from hand. Letting Possibility Storm resolve first on spells your opponents cast can keep them from accessing Knowledge Pool or filling Eye of the Storm (though you can't prevent them from casting spells already in Eye of the Storm). And if you have all 3 permanents out and you cast an instant or sorcery, you can get something out of Knowledge Pool, cast an instant or sorcery from your deck, and cast all the instants and sorceries in the Eye (atleast twice).
As an illustration of how rediculous this can be, I will use an extreme example: you control all 3, you have 7 mana available, Knowledge Pool has an inconsequential instant or sorcery in it, and your hand contains Mind's Desire and Firestorm. Cast Mind's Desire, all 3 trigger, storm count 1. Knowledge Pool trigger on top eats Mind's Desire and casts an instant or sorcery out (from here referred to as "spell"), triggering Eye of the storm. Storm count is 2, stack is Eye/spell/PS on sorcery/Eye. With those on the stack, cast Firestorm from hand and let Knowledge Pool eat that as well, casting out Mind's Desire and triggering Eye again as well as the storm trigger. Storm count is 4, and the stack is Eye/storm trigger/Mind's Desire/PS on instant/Eye/Eye/spell/PS on sorcery/Eye. Eye exiles Mind's Desire, then copies it and triggers storm for 4 more copies, then the first storm trigger makes 3 more copies for a grand total of 8. 8 Mind's Desire, storm count 5, stack is PS on instant/Eye/Eye/spell/PS on sorcery/Eye. Possibility Storm finds an instant, triggering Eye of the Storm, recasting the instant and Mind's Desire for 7 more copies. Then eye trigger from casting Firestorm resolves casting the two spells for 9 more Mind's Desires up to 24. That's 24 Mind's Desires, storm count 10, and the stack is Eye/spell/PS on sorcery/Eye. Eye eats the spell first cast out of Knowledge Pool, then cast it and the two other spells in the Eye making 11 more Mind's Desires for 35 Mind's Desires, 13 storm, and just the original 2 triggers left. Possibility Storm resolves finding a sorcery to cast, triggering Eye of the Storm and casting all 4 things in the Eye, making 15 more Mind's Desire copies and getting up to 18 storm, and then the first Eye trigger that been waiting since we cast Mind's Desire resolves, casting all 4 things in the Eye again for 19 more copies of Mind's Desire, making a grand total of 72 copies of Mind's Desire. And by the time you could do this, that's probably the entire library.
And one more addition on top of these things is Thousand-Year Storm, which copies the instant and sorceries you cast regardless of whether something tries to eat them or not. With Thousand-Year Storm and 2 instants/sorceries cast, for example, Turnabout would copy twice before going into Eye of the Storm, and then copy 3 again on the way out for 6 copies of Turnabout in total.
Mirrorweave and Infinite Reflection Shenanigans
Mirrorweave is shenanigans. You can make all your stuff really good for a turn, or you can make your opponent's stuff really bad for a turn. A Memnite turns into an Inferno Titan, or your opponent's Lord of Extinction turns into a Vedalken Plotter. While Mirrorweave can certainly be used aggressively, the instant speed and effecting opponents creatures makes Mirrorweave a great defensive card. I've said enough about shrinking threats into 1/1s, but even more than that, you can give things defender and make them not attack, which is a big deal when it's something like a 40/40 protection from creatures Uril, the Miststalker. This format is plagued with evasion and protection abilities, and Mirrorweave is great at blanking them. Ground flyers, make hexproof targettable, remove trample, destroy through indestructible. This gets even more significant with the additions of March of the Machines and Opalescence. Mirrorweave can (and has) dug through some of the most elaborate pillowforts I've ever seen. When someone has enchantments to make them and their permanents hexproof and limit me to one spell a turn and make me pay 16 mana per attacker or some such nonsense and they think they're safe, I can turn all their creature and enchantments into simple Inferno Titans and then wipe them out with my own Inferno Titan attack triggers.
But then there's the aggressive use of Mirrorweave with noncreatures turned into creatures. Wanna play Doomsday? Mirrorweave Mirror of Fate and go to town (more on this shortly). Need to do some damage fast? Mirrorweave Warstorm Surge. Wanna cast a rediculous amount of spells? Mirrorweave Possibility Storm and get replacement spells from every creature in play. Wanna steal an opponent's creatures? Mirrorweave a manland, and then Political trickery the creature away. Bonus there, your opponent's creatures turned lands aren't creatures so they can't block. Just need a lot of mana? Mirrorweave a Gilded Lotus. The options are plentiful.
Infinite Reflection is a similar effect (that I've since cut, but I'll leave this section here for those interested), but so very very different that the usage of the two cards barely overlaps at all. The differences are a)Infinite Reflection only effects you, so you can't use it defensively against things in play, b)Infinite Reflection is sorcery speed (usually), and c) Infinite Reflection lasts forever. And I mean forever. It doesn't just change the creatures while it's in play, it changes them so good they stay changed after it leaves the battlefield. So what does one use Infinite Reflection for then? One thing you can do is be a nuisance with Zedruu, by enchanting Zedruu and donating the aura, all their creatures will enter the battlefield as Zedruu. Another thing it does that Mirrorweave doesn't is act really really aggressive. Only your creatures are all Inferno Titans now... whoops. And also, effecting creatures as they enter the battlefield, you get etb things as well. Inferno Titan is neat for that too, but the zaniest interaction is with Crystalline Crawler (or an animated Pentad Prism), as every creature you pay colors of mana 4 (which you have access to all 5 colors) enters with counters that make mana to play more things. It can actually become difficult to win when all your creatures are locked as mana dorks forever, but only because it locks away zedruu. This deck can win with only mana dorks as creatures. And as an added fringe interaction, Infinite Reflection does not effect tokens, so if you want to keep a creature through Infinite Reflection, you can make a token clone with Stolen Identity before firing off Infinite Reflection.
One last shenanigan with Infinite Reflection specifically is when March of the Machines and Knowledge Pool are out. If you turn all your creatures in play into Knowledge Pools, they have no imprinted cards and can just eat spells without giving anything back until they've all been satisified. That's like having a field full of Decree of Silence except they're all 6/6 creatures. Just some food for thought.
Strionic Resonator Spam
Strionic Resonator can target a lot of things (though the 2 mana can be pretty steep in this deck), but there are a handful that make the mana investment quite lucrative. First is Zedruu, as doubling the draw trigger is pretty darn nice. Second is the Storm Trio, Mind's Desire, Possibility Storm, and Eye of the Storm, as you can copy the triggers and double your spells. Then with Thousand-Year Storm going, you can effectively copy you instants and sorceries on the stack, and if that includes Turnabout you're in the money. You can do a similar trick with Jeskai Ascendancy, but that's a subject for the combos section.
Build Your Own Doomsday
By this point, I have to have mentioned building a Doomsday like 48,000 times, so now it's time to talk about what that actually means. Well, if my card tags worked right, you can just read Doomsday yourself and then I don't have to explain anything. Frankly, if you're reading this on a magic forum, you're probably familiar enough with Doomsday that I don't have to go on a long rant about what it is, certainly not all this trash I'm typing instead of "it picks a few cards from your library and replaces your library with those cards in the order of your choice," so let's move on to the "how" and "why" parts of playing jeskai doomsday. To turn Mirror of Fate into Doomsday, you need to exile your library first, and the easy way to do that is activate Mirror of Fate twice. The first activation exiles your library so that the second activation has a lot more options to choose from. There are a few ways to get two activations in the deck right now. To list them: Saheeli, Sublime Artificer, Echo Storm, Time Spiral, Temporal Cascade, Mirrorweave with March of the Machines, and Rest In Peace. Time Spiral and Temporal Cascade are a bit more tricky to pull off: you don't have much of a library because you activated Mirror of Fate already, so with enough care, you can manage the number of cards being shuffled in with the sorceries so that you redraw Mirror of Fate immediately or in short order. Rest In Peace is the best one, as exiling Mirror of Fate before it's ability resolves allows you to choose Mirror of Fate to put back into the library to redraw later. If you've done it right, the second time you activate, you're choosing up to 7 cards from essentially the entire deck to become your library.
In a Doomsday deck, you generally set your 5 card library to draw into the win. Well, it's a good thing we get those 2 extra cards to work with, because if you're trying to stack a win condition in this deck, you're likely looking to the next section...
4-Card Combos!
4 cards minimum, that's a hard rule. 2 or 3 card combos are efficient, and efficiency is lame-o. Feel free to ask any opponent ever, and they'll gladly tell you how lame your combo win was. But when it takes 4 or more pieces to create the infinite loop, at least you know you had to work for it! It's like assembling Blasting Station/Summoning Station/Salvaging Station/Grinding Station except my combos are better because they weren't designed by Wizards of the Coast they're extra double plus convoluted, and that's just the essence of style. I hope people reading understand the nonsense tone I'm going for, but in all seriousness, the greatest joy I've gotten out of making this thread is that more than just appreciating the deck style, people have immitated these win conditions, and that's just such lunacy that I can only smile.
Control Warstorm Surge, then use Zedruu to donate someone else Dissipation Field. Finally, play Memnite. Warstorm Surge triggers having Memnite deal 1 damage to that player, triggering Dissipation Field to return Memnite to your hand, and then Memnite costs zero so you can repeat this process for free until they die. If more than one opponent needs to die, the Dissipation Field will return to you when an opponent with it dies, just make sure not to kill with Memnite itself as the Dissipation Field trigger won't resolve to bounce it if the controler of that trigger dies.
But what if you don't have Memnite and you want to do the same trick? Luckily for you, there's a backup free creature. [c]Crystalline Crawler]/c] makes as much mana as it costs if you happen to make 4 colors of mana to cast it. Which you can do once you cast it because it makes any color of mana. Sweet!
But what if you have the Memnite, but not the Warstorm Surge? In that case, you can strap Infinite Reflection onto an Inferno Titan, and your free Memnite is now an Inferno Titan that does 3 damage on etb! you can even do this without Zedruu involved if you're willing to ping yourself a bunch of times.
Another infinite etb combo, and the one that forced me to acquire a Detention Sphere as I was already playing the other 3 cards. Opalescence makes Detention Sphere a creature, then Sakashima can clone Detention Sphere. Then it enters the battlefield and exiles a permanent not named Detention Sphere. And its name isn't Detention Sphere, it's name is Sakashima the Impostor, so it can exile itself. Then the leave the battlefield trigger returns itself to play. Throw in a Warstorm Surge and suddenly all your opponents die.
Play those 4 in no particular order. Now activate Mirror of Fate, which gets exiled by Rest In Peace, then pick Mirror of Fate and Temporal Mastery as 2 of the 3 cards you want to draw on your extra turn. Draw them, then repeat the process. Each cycle you get another turn and another card of your choice. This combo can be done with any extra draw effect, but Font of Mythos is just the simplest to explain. Howling Mine seems simpler, but since you only go in an exact circle, it only wins if your board can kill people already.
March of the Machines makes Strionic Resonator and your mana rocks into creatures. Jeskai Ascendancy triggers to untap your creatures. Strionic Resonator copies the Jeskai Ascendany trigger to untap all creatures, and that includes Strionic Resonator and mana rocks to pay for another activation. Lather, rinse, repeat. At the very least, those creatures will get pumped to infinity, but if you make an extra mana, you can have infinite mana as well. There are ways without multiple mana rocks in play: Crystalline Crawler is a mana dork and so are activated man lands.
Similarly enough that I'm just listing it in this combo, Strionic Resonator/mana rocks/Eye of the Storm/Turnabout. Strionic Resonator copies the Eye of the Storm trigger, copying turnabout to untap all your artifacts to let you copy the Eye of the Storm trigger again. If the mana rocks make 3 mana, it's infinite mana. If there's another spell in the Eye, that's infinite copies of that spell. Plenty of ways to end the game with infinite strionic resonator activations. And if you have both Turnabout and Catch // Release in Eye of the Storm, you can untap lands with Turnabout and Resonator with Catch to go infinite (and eventually cast infinite copies or Release, obviously)
Since this is the first combo listed with infinite mana, I'll mention the ways to win with infinite mana. Infinite mana with Nin, the Pain Artist draws your library, or mills someone to death, or kills everyone with Arcbond. Infinite mana with zedruu donates all permanents except for Barren Glory. Infinite mana with Walking Archive makes everyone draw infinite cards on their upkeep, so you can just pass the turn and win. Inferno Titan can be made arbitrarily large, especially with Warstorm Surge for the immediate kill.
(This one is a doozy. 4 cards put together in so convoluted a way that I was playing all the pieces for years before I noticed the full infinite. At this point, I think this combo is my greatest pride as a magic player.)
Have Eye of the Storm, Rest In Peace, and Mirror of Fate in play. Cast Mind's Desire, no prior storm necessary. Eye of the Storm triggers, then resolves, exiling Mind's Desire, then casting a copy. The original casting of Mind's Desire counts toward storm, so when the copy is cast, it makes a storm copy. With those two copies on the stack, respond by activating Mirror of Fate. It's exiled by Rest In Peace when it is sacrificed. When the ability resolves, you choose up to 7 face up exiled cards you own, which in this case is 2 cards: Mind's Desire and Mirror of Fate. Those 2 cards become your library and everything else is exiled. Then the copies of Mind's Desire resolve, exiling 2 random cards from your library, which are the only 2 cards in your library. Cast Mirror of Fate for free, then cast Mind's Desire for free, except this time the storm count is higher, so you can begin casting every spell in the deck for free as many times as you want. Infinite turns with Temporal Mastery, infinite mana with Turnabout, infinite damage with Warstorm Surge. My preferred win condition if I get this assembled is get flash and then make a big stack where everyone sacrifices all permanents with infinite Releases, shuffle hands and graveyards back in with Temporal Cascade, exile all libraries with infinite Knowledge Pool triggers, set up infinite turns, then resolve Barren Glory, and then pass the turn to myself.
Note: March of the Machines gives Mirror of Fate summoning sickness.
Ephemeral Shields radiating makes all your golems indestructible. Jeskai Charm gives them lifelink. Arcbond makes it so when one is damaged, it deals that much damage to everything, but since it targetted one golem, they'll trigger damage back and forth at each other. This would go on until they died, but they're indestructible so they can't die. And because they have lifelink, you gain life faster than you die while everyone else suffers. Just make sure that none of your opponents are immune to damage or have a lifelink golem or this line of play can cause a draw. And also make sure you can damage a creature. The combo is instant speed, so attacking with golems probably gets the job done, but the combo doesn't work without initial damage.
Additionally, this can be done without Jeskai Charm if you've somehow kept the highest life total at the table, and it can be done with Bonus Round instead of Precursor Golem so long as you have two creatures to apply the copies of the spells to. That version comes with the added bonus of theoretically having Zedruu deals the lethal damage.
I guess winning with Barren Glory isn't really a 4-card infinite combo, but it definitely feels like a combo win, and there are a few ways to do it. The most rediculous method, and consequently the easiest to pull off is the infinite Mind's Desire combo above. Otherwise, it's not easy to win with Barren Glory. It may not look like it, but there are 4 distinct requirements to triggering it and they're all difficult.
1) Control Barren Glory: seems easy enough, just play the card... but if someone can destroy it after you're out of cards and permanents, you're out of luck.
2) Control no other permanents: seems harder. The deck has 3 ways to get rid of all other permanents. First, you can make enough mana to donate everything with zedruu. Second, you can cast Leave // Chance to just pick them all up. Third, you can sacrifice everything to enough copies of Release, either by rediating across a ton of golems or copying a lot with Eye of the Storm and Bonus Round. (If you do that last part, you'll need to float mana to cast Barren Glory after the field is clear.)
3) Have no cards in hand: the hardest part. This deck spends all day drawing cards, and now they need to be gone. If you have infinite mana, you might be able to play everything and get rid of it, but lands get in the way. Otherwise, the 2 cards of note are Firestorm and Temporal Cascade. Both can clear out a hand, but Temporal Cascade is the best option, as it makes sure your opponent's can't surprise you after it resolves.
4) Reach your upkeep: going for the Barren Glory win and passing the turn naturally means not just Barren Glory needs to survive, you do too. And that means surviving the combined power of every creature in play. To avoid this scenario, we have Vedalken Orrery, Leyline of Anticipation, and Temporal Mastery to keep our opponents from taking any pesky turns between setting up Barren Glory and winning with it.
Played 1 game with this today against a Mayael the Anima deck. By turn 6, my opponent had dropped his entire hand down (conveniently) and had basically lethal on board.
My turn 7, having 8 cards in hand, I played Dream Halls, I discarded Jace to cast Eye of the Storm, then discarded March of the Machines to cast Mind's Desire. The net result of that is 6 copies of Mind's Desire, exiles 6 cards at random. 5 noncreature spells and a land. Played the land, cast Jeskai Ascendancy, cast the 4 other spells (none of which were instants or sorceries) using the loot to fish out a sorcery and a card of matching color. Turned out to be Warp World and Seismic Assault. Discard the assault to cast Warp World to trigger Eye of the Storm, decline to cast Warp World out, cast Mind's Desire with storm at 11. From those I got a Copy Enchantment on Jeskai Ascendancy and a Shifting Borders to trigger Eye of the storm again, then I cast artifacts and enchantments from exile until Zedruu was over 21 power, cast Turnabout to tap all his creatures, and hit for lethal with general damage.
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Zedruu: "This deck is not only able to go crazy - it also needs to do so."
Just wanted to chime in and offer you my thanks for creating such an exquisite deck and an opening post to match it. I'm constantly searching for ways to improve upon my own Zedruu deck and your thread has inspired me to reexamine several cards that I previously glossed over. It is refreshing to find another player who is more interested in telling a story with his or her deck rather than simply taking the quickest route to victory.
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WUBRGMr. Bones' Wild RideGRBUW Trap your friends in an endless game with this 23-card combo!
I took a look over at the thread you made, and what to donate with Zedruu really is a difficult question to answer. Donating things that lock someone out or kill them is just feel bad all around, but giving someone something they can kill you with is suicide and feels just as wrong. The best moments are always the instant speed saves where Zedruu can give a player the blocker they need to survive someone else's attack or the land they needed to aim removal at a third player, but with things like that it hardly matters what you have in the deck as long as it includes creatures and lands.
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Zedruu: "This deck is not only able to go crazy - it also needs to do so."
Yea, I've come to the conclusion that the type of cards I'm interested in donating are so oddly specific that almost no cards meet my criteria. The closest match I've stumbled across thus far is Contagion Engine, but that card has little to no synergy with the rest of my deck so I decided not to include it. Humble Defector is the shining example of nearly everything I want in creature form, but few other creature cards can meet that standard.
Something interesting I've realized during my journey to create the most entertaining games of Commander possible is that I am actually able to craft a better experience for everyone by raising the general power level of my deck. At first I was operating on a much lower level than my opponents. When I made my best effort to exert some kind of influence in the game, I was restricted by my ability to generate enough mana, cards, or other such resources necessary to create the fun gamestates that I desired. After recently including a few goodstuffy cards that I previously shied away from, I noticed how much more effective I had become at my goal.
Perhaps the greatest advantage I gathered from that adventure though was that because I resisted everyone's advances so little, players never perceive me as a threat anymore. As such, I was able to reconstruct my deck, removing all of the defensive cards that many other Zedruu decks pile on like Ghostly Prison. Aside from a few inclusions such as Wall of Denial, your deck seems to be constructed similarly. On another note, I am a bit surprised at how few mana rocks you've opted to include. With all of the cards you're drawing, I'd imagine that you often have a full grip and an empty coffer.
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This deck used to have about twice as many mana rocks, but I decided over time that I didn't like them. The rocks I was playing were 3 mana, all color things like Darksteel Ingot. As it turns out, they just don't work in this deck because I have to play the 3 and 4 cost cards before the more expensive cards matter. In the early game, if I pay 3 for a rock on turn 3, then turn 4 I have 5 mana and can play Dream Halls, Possibility Storm, Mindmoil, Venser... but I haven't had the chance to play my draw effects yet, so I don't actually care about those. Later in the game, I have a full grip of spells I want to play and I didn't ramp those early turns, so I'm tight on mana. I don't have the mana to be dropping in late game mana rocks if it costs me a net of more than 1. Sol ring and signets however get me to my 4 mana point faster, which is to say Zedruu, Vedalken Orrery, and Font of Mythos. And late in the game they're easy to toss down without missing a different spell because of it. If I were to add more mana rocks, I'd want them to cost 2 or less. I don't really like Mind Stone or colorless friends since this deck can be very color hungry particularly when Zedruu gets donating. The diamond cycle comes into play tapped making them just as bad after turn 2 as a mono-colored manalith. There's only one talisman that fits a wedge deck (Talisman of Progress here). Mana Crypt costs literally this deck. I suppose Chrome Mox and Mox Diamond would be valid options since discard fodder is plentiful.
And even if I did successfully get more artifact mana in here, I'd have some more mana to play with later in the game that doesn't play well with Seismic Assault, Mana Flare, or Turnabout.
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Zedruu: "This deck is not only able to go crazy - it also needs to do so."
I thought I'd chime in again after rereading your post. I'm a bit confused at to exactly how you recycle the Dissipation Field combo once you've killed a player with it. If you donate the Dissipation Field to a player and then kill them for whatever reason, the Field is going to end up in your exile because it was under their control when they lost the game. I suppose this isn't really a concern if you control a Venser, the Sojourner since you can blink Dissipation Field before the last point of damage is dealt. Mirror of Fate could also pull Dissipation Field out of exile to recycle the combo.
EDIT: Regarding mana rocks, if you happen to be interested in including any more of them, I would suggest Fellwar Stone to you. I don't know what the typical size of your multiplayer games are, but I tend to play with four players frequently. With four players, I always have access to at least two colors and frequently have access to all three.
The Dissipation Field does not exile when the player loses, it returns to your control.
The events when a player leaves the game:
800.4 When a player leaves the game, all objects owned by that player leave the game and any effects which give that player control of any objects or players end. Then, if that player controlled any objects on the stack not represented by cards, those objects cease to exist. Then, if there are any objects still controlled by that player, those objects are exiled.
So when they lose, Zedruu's effect that gave them control of the Dissipation Field ends, and the player that had control beneath that effect regains control. A lot of people think donated permanents get exiled because they're used to rules for things like Bribery, but in that case its not a control effect ending, so it stays in play until the "any objects still controlled by that player are exiled" part of the rule.
I may have to add Fellwar Stone just because I can already enable it by donating lands myself (and I have a couple lying around somewhere). I'm not sure I ever thought about that. Thanks.
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Zedruu: "This deck is not only able to go crazy - it also needs to do so."
I made 6 changes to the deck that can be seen in the change log.
I also changed the thread title to be goat based.
I feel required to add a tale of the deck's exploits here.
The other day, I was playing with two other people. One was Atogatog Ally tribal and the other was Surrak Dragonclaw good creatures. I had played Zedruu, Leyline of Anticipation, and an early Mana Flare. Atogatog excitedly casts Villainous Wealth targeting the Surrak player for 13. The spell exiles and then casts a frightening selection of creatures (and 1 Time Warp) off the top of the deck, so I respond to them by instant speed casting Infinite Reflection on Zedruu and then donating Infinite Reflection to Atogatog so that all the creatures would enter play as a copy of Zedruu.
Zedruu died on his second turn, and I think I still lost that round later, but I got to make that play, so I've got no complaints.
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Zedruu: "This deck is not only able to go crazy - it also needs to do so."
After splicing several aspects of your decklist into mine, I've noticed that I draw more cards than ever before, but still lack the mana necessary to cast them. Your decision to include both Chrome Mox and Mox Diamond in your decklist fills me with reassurance that my own decision to include those same cards in my deck was well warranted. I am all too often willing to exchange cards for mana, even at the inefficient rate that the moxen offer. Their synergy with Possibility Storm and other such cards is just gravy. I've also begun to contemplate whether or not Gemstone Caverns is worth experimenting with for the same reason that I've decided to include the moxen. Cards are plentiful in the deck, so I can easily suffer the early setback from the cost of putting it into play. If I don't draw it in my opening hand, chances are that I find the card much later in the game when I'm digging deep into my deck anyways and already have the luxury of playing whatever color land I want into play untapped, causing the colorless penalty to feel rather unimportant.
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WUBRGMr. Bones' Wild RideGRBUW Trap your friends in an endless game with this 23-card combo!
There's definitely an aspect of luck to it. The moxen aren't likely to get me the mana to cast the things I want, but rather get me the mana to cast the Turnabout, Mana Flare, Dream Halls, or Mind Over Matter that will hopefully allow me to drop my hand. But it doesn't always happen. Just last night, I had a turn where I got Thought Reflection and Teferi's Puzzle Box down on upkeep, drew 16 cards, and couldn't win because I didn't have the mana.
I'm running scenarios in my head to see if I could magical Christmasland a win on turn 1 with Gemstone Caverns. I know it currently could do a turn 2, and I've won as early as turn 4 in real life. I suppose with a Leyline of Anticipation in opening hand, Caverns is redundancy on things I can already do with a mox. This deck can hypothetically be pretty nuts.
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Zedruu: "This deck is not only able to go crazy - it also needs to do so."
This is one of the most Sparta-level madness I've seen in such a long time - maybe the paragon of Sparta-level madness. I love the fact that it's random but it's not. I love the fact that Zedruu is there to donate but not really. The only purpose of the donations are for card advantage. So it's basically a hodgepodge of not knowing whether to go for you first so you don't white rabbit a win or taking out the Prossh or Rafiq guy before they get the calculated and predictable win. Awesome.
I do have a couple of questions, though:
You seem to love copying things and making an insane amount of tokens that are copies, so what about casting cards like Clone Legion on yourself? It may seem to have a ridiculous casting cost, but from what I can tell you're basically casting things for free anyways, lol.
The low land count worries me a bit. I know you got more than a fair share of mana rocks, but how consistent has your mana availability been as you play?
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With regards to the mana availability, I would say something like 1 in every 4 or 5 games I miss a land drop or two at around 3 or 4 mana, but I'm dedicating my 2 or 3 or 4 mana turn playing pretty much only things that can dig me out lands. I don't remember the last time I got legitimately mana screwed since I'd have to be short lands while also not drawing extra draw cards or land tax or some such thing. The bounce lands also go a long way to not missing early land drops as well. And even if I do stall out for a bit, as long as I'm getting my library into my hand somehow, I'm getting closer to winning. With the right hand, I can go from zero to game over at like 5 mana.
The last time I was legitimately mana screwed out of a game, it was against a Karn deck. I Vedalken Plotter'd his Mishra's Workshop from him to try and hold him back, and I ended up stuck on 2 mana with no artifacts to play until I died.
With regards to Clone Legion, consider it on the list of things to test. I have been wanting a good silver bullet when someone gets a massive field of creatures since Mogg Infestation and Warp World are not good answers to something like a Krenko deck. I've been trying out Worldpurge, but my god, imagine Clone Legion under Eye of the Storm.
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Zedruu: "This deck is not only able to go crazy - it also needs to do so."
I really love this build for Zedruu and especially love it that you're running a blue commander and not using any counterspells. When playing against Zedruu in past edh games I've often found myself running into a constantly neverending wall of Forbids. I think I will throw your list together to surprise a bunch of friends with.
Thank you for the suggestions, but most of those don't even make consideration for one reason or another.
Gamble, Mystical Tutor,enlightened Tutor - Gamble would work extremely well, practically a 1 mana Demonic Tutor. I don't want that. I don't want the ability to just pick out a win condition from my deck. There used to be more tutor power in this deck (Wild Research, Idyllic Tutor) and everything but Academy Rector got cut simply because I get more enjoyment solving the jigsaw puzzle that random chance gives me than I do playing things reliably. If someone wanted to build a deck like this and include tutors, I won't tell them it's wrong, but it isn't to my personal taste.
Puca's Mischief - was in the deck years ago and got cut for not working well enough. The average CMC for things I want to donate is about 3. I don't really care that I can't get expensive things, but I have to have a nonland thing I'm willing to donate AND an opponent needs to have a nonland thing that costs equal or less, and you'd be surprised how often people can play a whole game of EDH without any one or two cost permanents. Not to mention, there are already 15 4 drops in the deck.
Celestial Dawn, Teferi, Mage of Zhalfir - I won't play these because 2 card combos are too feel bad. This goes beyond just trying to play nice and into actual multiplayer politics. If I have Zedruu out as the deck is, and someone can kill her without much cost, they'll probably do it. But if they're choosing between killing Zedruu and killing another player's Prophet of Kruphix, they're going to kill the Prophet. If I play Celestial Dawn (or any of the bad donation friends) in the deck, it would not necessarily be wrong of them to kill Zedruu in that scenario since Zedruu can basically instant kill them. And then not only did I draw hate at myself, I took away the kill spell that would have killed the Prophet. I can't play Teferi, or everyone at the table is obligated to do anything they can, even arch-enemy against me, just for getting Knowledge Pool or Possibility Storm in play. And if Teferi is in the deck, I can't play Knowledge Pool just for kicks because if I accidentally flip Teferi into the pool, someone else can get the lock just by playing an instant.
So I'm assuredly not going to add any of those.
Kher Keep - The deck usually doesn't have a ton of mana to sink into something like this. 6 mana to gain a life and draw a card each turn so long as the targeted player has no sac outlets and never gets attacked is quite the stretch, especially in a deck where mana is absolutely the limiting factor. But it is just trading out a basic land (probably a plains) for another land, so I may have to try this one out and see how it goes.
Mox Opal - I'm afraid that I wouldn't hit metalcraft reliably enough. The two moxen in the deck can power out turn 1 Howling Mine, Mox Opal cannot. That said, spellbook is often just a free Forced Fruition/Mindmoil/Jeskai Ascendancy/Possibility Storm/Knowledge Pool trigger that doesn't do anything and I'm happy with it, so perhaps even without metalcraft it'd be nice. That said, it's not worth upwards of $30 to me to try it out and see, so I'll probably skip out on this unless I get one in a trade.
Chaos Warp - Good suggestion. Can be downright mean in conjunction with the Political Trickery trio (6 mana, get rid of an opponents land and get a random card from my deck).
Flash is so powerful in this deck, I won't cut either of those. The redundancy is good. Howling Mine effects benefit me first with flash, Mirror of Fate and Elixir of Immortality have saved my butt from milling because of flash, a lot of my enchantments are secret silver bullets that can be backbreaking with flash (instant speed Dissipation Field, Rest in Peace, March of the Machines, etc. have ruined many a plan). And having flash lets you hold out until right before your turn, which lets you sort of Magosi, the Waterveil yourself to do two turns of stuff in a row which timed correctly can go from zero to win while everyone else is caught with their pants down.
At any rate, I'm going to make some changes to this thread soon to update it to it's current paper form. There's just one card that I want and am missing, and then I'll fix this up all at once. Kher Keep, Chaos Warp, and Mox Opal will probably not be in that change, but perhaps the next time after that.
Thanks for the suggestions.
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Zedruu: "This deck is not only able to go crazy - it also needs to do so."
Being something of a Zedruu connoisseur myself, I was a little skeptical when I clicked on this thread. It did not disappoint. One-hundred percent correctly titled. This deck is really something special.
Along the lines of Land Tax, have you considered Oath of Lieges? While it's definitely not as good as Tax, there's a lot of room between Land Tax and a bad card. It also makes a great gift. And since you run so many expensive cards, how about Mana Vault? It's a one-shot, but then you get to give it away. Similarly, Pentad Prism, Grim Monolith and Sphere of the Suns. A super-duper janky version of these, that sort of works better with flash, is Iceberg.
As for cuts, I don't like the walls, except maybe Wall of Omens. I think you'd be better served playing set-up cards, like Azorius Signet and Compulsive Research, during the early turns than walls. If you can get to your late-game sooner, with ramp and card draw/selection, you won't need to do as much blocking anyway.
Finally, here are some (relatively) low budget color fixing lands that come into play untapped:
Chaos Warp - Good suggestion. Can be downright mean in conjunction with the Political Trickery trio (6 mana, get rid of an opponents land and get a random card from my deck).
Hahaha, that's so mean. I never considered that play, even though I've been running Chaos Warp in my deck since day one. Zedruu giveth and Zedruu taketh away!
Ha! That Mana Vault tech is hilarious. I'm not going to do it, as funny as "ramp myself, punish someone else" would be. One shot 3 colorless doesn't do much for me since I'm so color hungry. I end up having Sol Ring mana fizzle frequently because I can't use 2 colorless. But Pentad Prism is something I can get behind. That can get Zedruu out the gate quick, ease the color burden of Seismic Assault and Mind over Matter, and act as a free cast later on.And yeah, Iceberg is janky. A little too janky. Lol.
I absolutely should be playing Oath of Lieges, and I have no idea why I never considered it. It could be better for me than land tax. If I get to the point where it doesn't trigger for me, I can donate land with Zedruu to get back to active while effectively losing nothing and gaining Zedruu donation momentum. And with paradox haze, I can chase down a ramp deck fast. And it's group hug, it fits right in.
Those walls have been my friends for so long, I really hesitate to axe them. I've thought about it, but Fog Bank and Wall of Denial are so good at holding back the early game cheap shots. I really am not a fan of people going "well, who's the best target for this Woolly Thoctar? Probably the guy who only has Zedruu!" But if the things I'm playing get me going faster, Zedruu can just gain me that 5 life back anyway, and it's rare that someone kills me with little beats, and a Memnite is just as good at stopping one 21 power commander as Wall of Denial. I guess it's just one more thing for me to try out. Or maybe I'll continue to play as is and pay closer attention to when and how I actually play them.
I'll take this opportunity to list the changes I've made recently. The cuts...
Wild Evocation: As much as this card makes a fun time, it doesn't do anything if I don't cast it, and I've just run out of reasons to play it. If I can play it and have other things in hand, I'll have more fun playing them. If I can play it and have nothing else, it doesn't do anything. It was a great inclusion when I had no Dream Halls or Mana Flare or Mind Over Matter (and was in a playgroup with like 10 wraths per deck), but none of that is true anymore and I've lived the dream of Wild Evocation with 15 copies of Forced Fruition in play.
Pandemonium: Another lived dream. I don't need redundancy on the combo with Memnite, Warstorm Surge is plenty, and I've done the Mirrorweave on Pandemonium.
Warp World: I play with two groups of people. One group hates this card. The other has a Krenko deck and a mono-gray deck, both of which benefit more from this card than I do. I love the card, and I hope to add it back one day, but for now it doesn't belong.
In their place, I added another mana rock and another rediculous combo.
Sacred Ground, Price of Glory: Donating Price of Glory makes it so an ability an opponent controls is destroying my lands. Then Sacred Ground brings it back untapped, thus making infinite mana on other people's turns. I thought this up a while ago and was excited to have another Zedruu-centric combo, but then was sad to find that I was not the first person to do it. And it wasn't like I had much use for infinite mana. My only mana sink is Zedruu...
Barren Glory: Infinite mana with Zedruu out can donate my entire field for the Barren Glory win, though if I'm being honest, it has been more common that I'll get out Mind Over Matter and Gilded Lotus with more cards in hand than on the field.
Barren Glory will probably get cut eventually when the novelty wears off, but for now I'm having fun with it.
Under consideration:
Oath of Lieges: I'll get a copy and find a place for it because that's a good addition.
Pentad Prism: I want to add it, but the low impact nature means I feel no pressure to add it and probably won't until I naturally want to cut things and need an addition.
Chaos Warp: It's removal, but fun removal. Also not getting priority enough for me to actively cut for it.
Tidespout Tyrant: I've been testing this one thoroughly. It's very strong. Another source of infinite mana with Sol Ring and a zero-cost card, which also adds another way to Memnite/Warstorm Surge people. It ends games if I get it in multiples. I have no question that it is a validly powerful inclusion that leads to many fascinating board states, but I worry that it crosses the line into "too much" and I'll end up cutting it like Psychosis Crawler.
Venser's Journal: With the loss of Wild Evocation, this is now the top of the list of things I rarely bother casting. By the time I can cast this, I very often has no maximum hand size already, and if the life gain is significant, it means I have cards in hand to do more important things than gain life. It's occassionally strong when my hand is full from just Land Tax, and it is a strong card, but it's more suited to control decks that want to keep a big hand and not just end the game (or decks with Necropotence).
Copy Enchantment: This very rarely hits that sweet spot of relevance. It tends to fit solidly into dead card or overkill.
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Zedruu: "This deck is not only able to go crazy - it also needs to do so."
I have yet to fully construct my Zedruu deck and am still trading cards for the pieces I need, but I just thought I'd point out that if you do decide to get a Mox Opal and Glimmervoid then you should put in Seat of the Synod, Ancient Den, and Great Furnace just as ways to easily up your artifact count (however they are vulnerable to getting killed by March of the Machines). Also a good, if slow, ramp combo is Crucible of Worlds and any fetchland (like Evolving wilds, Flooded Strand, or myriad landscape) Crucible is expensive though, and I'd only recommend trying it out if you already have one.
Other colorless ramp fun can be had by using Thawing Glaciers and Rings of Brighthearth for two lands an activation or you could use any way to untap the glaciers and reactivate it before it returns to your hand at the end of turn. A part of me feels like Amulet of Vigor would be fun here as well (and prove to have some weird interactions with other cards in the deck) but I don't know if it deserves a slot in the 99.
One other card I'd like to mention is Mycosynth Lattice. If you have one (as it is another expensive card not worth trading for unless you MUST have it) it something fun to experiment with. I know you play this deck in a group hug way, so I'd reccomend not playing the lattice with March of the Machines (a destroy all lands now and forever lockout) unless you float enough mana to follow it up with something like Descent of the Dragons and wipe the board giving everyone an army of flying 4/4 dragons (It sounds like it would be the most awesome boardwipe ever).
I don't like giving people creatures because they tend to sacrifice them and make me sad. Perplexing Chimera doubly so because the ability to auto-counter my spells forces me to bait out the trigger before I can do anything important, and that's just uncomfortable.
I have yet to fully construct my Zedruu deck and am still trading cards for the pieces I need, but I just thought I'd point out that if you do decide to get a Mox Opal and Glimmervoid then you should put in Seat of the Synod, Ancient Den, and Great Furnace just as ways to easily up your artifact count (however they are vulnerable to getting killed by March of the Machines). Also a good, if slow, ramp combo is Crucible of Worlds and any fetchland (like Evolving wilds, Flooded Strand, or myriad landscape) Crucible is expensive though, and I'd only recommend trying it out if you already have one.
Other colorless ramp fun can be had by using Thawing Glaciers and Rings of Brighthearth for two lands an activation or you could use any way to untap the glaciers and reactivate it before it returns to your hand at the end of turn. A part of me feels like Amulet of Vigor would be fun here as well (and prove to have some weird interactions with other cards in the deck) but I don't know if it deserves a slot in the 99.
One other card I'd like to mention is Mycosynth Lattice. If you have one (as it is another expensive card not worth trading for unless you MUST have it) it something fun to experiment with. I know you play this deck in a group hug way, so I'd reccomend not playing the lattice with March of the Machines (a destroy all lands now and forever lockout) unless you float enough mana to follow it up with something like Descent of the Dragons and wipe the board giving everyone an army of flying 4/4 dragons (It sounds like it would be the most awesome boardwipe ever).
Crucible + fetchlands is a fine engine for not missing any land drops. I already do that pretty well by drawing cards. Thawing Glaciers is great with Rings of Brighthearth and Amulet of Vigor, but those cards need to otherwise justify themselves. Amulet of Vigor would work with basically Thawing Glaciers and the bounce lands, not nearly good enough to warrant a slot. Right now, the deck has 8 permanents with non-mana activated abilities. Copying Elixir of Immortality is useless. Copying Zedruu just saves me 1 mana. Copying Walking Archive just saves me 2 mana. Copying Seismic Assault would be very desperate. Copying Mind Over Matter can get me 4 mana from a discard instead of 3. Copying Venser would be almost entirely useless. Copying Jace or Mikokoro might be worth drawing a card in a pinch. The one really good use is Mirror of Fate, since double that ability is Doomsday. So Rings would largely be a dead card or really mana intensive card draw unless I happen to draw it alongside Mirror of Fate. I'm ok playing cards that are dead without counterparts, but Rings would be dead in the beginning without support cards and also dead at the end since there's nothing it does here to actually win the game. It's another instance of "card is really good, I really like it, just not in this deck."
And since I don't think Rings or Amulet are worth the slot even with Thawing Glaciers, I can't justify Thawing Glaciers as it'd just be a mana-sucking way to ensure I don't miss land drops, a problem I usually don't have. Which is all fine, since Thawing Glaciers and Amulet of Vigor have a happy existence in my Patron of the Moon deck.
I can see your thoughts with the Mycosynth Lattice suggestion. It does interesting things (and color fixing!), which should be able to do fun things with other interesting cards, but careful examination shows that killing things with March of the Machines is really its only interaction with this deck. Nothing else here cares about things being artifacts. If I was playing some "artifacts matter" cards, like Blinkmoth Urn or Bludgeon Brawl (lol) or Unwinding Clock, then it could definitely lead down some fun avenues for building ideas.
Basically, the cards which you're suggesting are going a different route than me, which is cool. Have fun with it.
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Zedruu: "This deck is not only able to go crazy - it also needs to do so."
Cool, yeah I was spitballing ideas for fun. Right now I'm thinking of including some all stars from my Keranos, god of storms deck like Mirror Gallery and copy effects (I'd use the gallery and cast clones of keranos so that all the copies of keranos turned on his devotion and then I'd get a ton of triggers on my draw step to either draw five cards or deal 12 damage to something or someone). Here I'd just copy Zedruu a bunch of times for the addtional draw or give everyone a copy of Zedruu for the hell of it.
Anther card I'm considering making a spot for is Empyrial Plate because with all the card draw I've seen Zedruu give as a general it could easily push Zedruu past 21 commander damage and win late game.
Now you've got me curious. Obviously playing blue to tutor Mirror Gallery and play clone effects, which general would be silliest if you start cloning it?
Side note: I guess I'm getting another Opalescence. I may ease my cuts by giving Secred Ground and Price of Glory the axe already.
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Give a thing, gain a life, draw a card!
This deck is a lot of things. It's a solid amount of group hug, a unique selection of combos, and a tiny bit of chaos sprinkled on top. It is my understanding that every part of that last sentence has a bad reputation among magic players, but I think that's mostly because people are using these things wrong. It can be frustrating to play against a group hug player who pretends they aren't trying to win, a chaos player who actually isn't trying to win, or a combo player who does win with efficiency and consistency. This deck is not going to do any of that. It yearns for the win, it does everything in its power to get it, and it takes the game on a wild ride in the process.
You will like this deck if:
- You want relatively consistent success out of incredibly varied lines of play.
- You want to create unconventional board states.
- You want to play with cards you wouldn't otherwise use.
- Win or lose, you want a story to tell.
You will not like this deck if:
- You want to start each game with a defined game plan.
- You like to have some control over the game.
- You are afraid of enabling your opponents too much.
- You or the people you play with are set on never playing a combo, no matter how ridiculous.
Why Zedruu?
Zedruu the Greathearted's most important function is the card draw. Zedruu can feed you disgusting amounts of cards. If you want to match Zedruu's card advantage engine with a general, you would have to play something like Azami, Lady of Scrolls or Arcanis the Omnipotent, at which point you are just playing mono-U and you're down 2 colors and all the charm of the lovely goat-person. The red and white are necessary here, so Jeskai colored legends are the only real considerations. Of Jeskai colored legends, the only other option that lets you dig into your deck is Narset, Enlightened Master, which can provide similar value to zedruu in an even less predictable way. However, Zedruu is an active part of an infinite combo and a strong synergy with many cards here, so there would need to be changes to make this into a Narset deck, and then you'd have mostly the same deck while painting a big target on your face.
Also, Zedruu is the best.
but casting Mindmoil is a close second.
This image is here to fill the white space.
1x Azorius Chancery
1x Izzet Boilerworks
1x Boros Garrison
1x Cascade Bluffs
1x Mystic Gate
1x Rugged Prairie
1x Temple of Enlightenment
1x Temple of Epiphany
1x Temple of Triumph
1x Clifftop Retreat
1x Glacial Fortress
1x Sulfur Falls
1x Celestial Colonnade
1x Needle Spires
1x Wandering Fumarole
1x Mystic Monastery
1x Command Tower
1x Exotic Orchard
1x Forbidden Orchard
1x Nykthos, Shrine to Nyx
1x Gemstone Caverns
1x Forsaken City
1x Minamo, School at Water's Edge
1x Mikokoro, Center of the Sea
1x Reliquary Tower
3x Island
3x Mountain
3x Plains
Creatures (14)
1x Memnite
1x Kami of the Crescent Moon
1x Nin, the Pain Artist
1x Vedalken Plotter
1x Walking Archive
1x Crystalline Crawler
1x Golden Guardian
1x Raff Capashen, Ship's Mage
1x Sakashima the Impostor
1x Swans of Bryn Argoll
1x Venser, Shaper Savant
1x Precursor Golem
1x Inferno Titan
1x Razia, Boros Archangel
1x Chrome Mox
1x Azorius Signet
1x Azor's Gateway
1x Boros Signet
1x Howling Mine
1x Izzet Signet
1x Pentad Prism
1x Strionic Resonator
1x Thought Vessel
1x Temple Bell
1x Font of Mythos
1x Unbender Tine
1x Vedalken Orrery
1x Alhammarret's Archive
1x Gilded Lotus
1x Mirror of Fate
1x Knowledge Pool
Enchantments (14)
1x Rest in Peace
1x Detention Sphere
1x Dictate of Kruphix
1x Jeskai Ascendancy
1x Dissipation Field
1x Leyline of Anticipation
1x March of the Machines
1x Opalescence
1x Mindmoil
1x Possibility Storm
1x Barren Glory
1x Thousand-Year Storm
1x Warstorm Surge
1x Eye of the Storm
1x Firestorm
1x Ephemeral Shields
1x Leave // Chance
1x Arcbond
1x Jeskai Charm
1x Mirrorweave
1x Turnabout
1x Vanish Into Memory
Sorceries (9)
1x Catch // Release
1x Political Trickery
1x Role Reversal
1x Echo Storm
1x Mind's Desire
1x Time Spiral
1x Temporal Cascade
1x Temporal Mastery
1x Aminatou's Augury
Planeswalkers (3)
1x Saheeli, Sublime Artificer
1x Nahiri, the Harbinger
1x Venser, the Sojourner
The Comprehensive Guide of Everything the Deck Does
When this deck does what it wants to do, there are essentially 3 phases of the game.
Phase 1: Fix the mana, set up card draw, and hopefully get flash.
Phase 2: Interact, sow chaos, and continue drawing cards.
Phase 3: Win in one big swoop.
Phase 1 is all about making mana and playing Howling Mines and then the Howling Mines will find you more mana and you're ready to go, and that usually takes the first 4 or 5 turns. Phase 2 is all about card interactions, the subtle synergies within this deck as well as the interactions between these cards and things opponents might play that will keep people guessing instead of winning the game or destroying the card draw, and this part of the game could be 2 turns or 200 depending on the opponents. Phase 3 is doing something immensely stupid and flashy to win the game, and that almost universally takes 1 turn, 2 turns, or infinite turns and nothing inbetween.
In previous iterations of this thread, I claimed that any number of things could happen and I couldn't cover them all, but that's not going to be true anymore. The following is a list of how all the cards in the deck function followed by how they synergize with one another. I don't imagine that I'll really hit every possibility, but if there is anything missing, feel free to mention it and I will gladly make additions.
The first card to address is, of course....
Zedruu the Greathearted
Zedruu is the cornerstone of the deck. Although the 4 toughness can prove to be suprisingly useful at times, the power of Zedruu lies in two very relevant abilities. The first ability triggers on upkeep and gives life gain and card draw equal to the number of permanents you own that your opponents control. Repeated card draw is crucial to winning with this deck, and while there are many card draw effects in this deck, sometimes you don't draw them or they get removed, so having an engine in the command zone is absolutely necessary. The second ability allows you, at the cost of 3 mana, to donate your permanents to other players. By design, this is meant to enable the first ability, but it's important to remember that donating permanents is more versatile than just that even without any cards that benefit you to donate. The simplest example is the multiplayer situation where someone says "if I had one more mana I could save us from losing" and you can just hand it to them.
Playing Zedruu properly requires an understanding of certain rules in the game, many of them specific enough that not all players would be familiar with them, so below is a brief summary.
Ownership: The owner of a card is fairly obviously whoever's using the deck it started in. Ownership in the game does not care about the real world owner of the card, only the person who is using that deck. As often as I've made the joke "I loaned you that deck, so I should get to draw 20, right?", it does not work that way. The only cards you own when playing Zedruu are the cards from the deck you're playing. Ownership of tokens works differently because they don't exist at the start of the game. For tokens, the owner is whoever's control they entered under. For example, if you were to play Kiki-Jikki, Mirror Breaker and use it to make a token, you would be the owner of that token. If you play Forbidden Orchard and give an opponent a token, the opponent owns that token, so you do not draw off of those tokens. If you play Political Trickery and give someone Forbidden Orchard and then they give you the token (as will happen if it's 1 on 1), you own those and can donate them for value.
Control: Changing control is sort of the whole point of Zedruu. The two rules situations where control is iffy are auras and multiple control effects. Auras are easy, you just need to remember that control of an aura doesn't change what it's attached to. In my deck, the aura traditionally in question was Paradox Haze. If I enchant myself with Paradox Haze and then donate it, it still enchants me and thus I still get the extra upkeep. When multiple effects are giving players control of an object, the most recently applied effect is the one that counts, and an earlier effect ending doesn't change later effects. Example, if you Mind Control a creature and then donate the creature (not that you would, but you could), there would be two static effects giving control of the creature, but Zedruu was more recent and would be the one that wins. If Mind Control is destroyed later, it doesn't change control back to the original controller because Zedruu's effect still applies (and will continue to apply until the object leaves play or you or the current controller lose the game). If someone plays Mind Control on something donated with Zedruu, that effect will be most recent and give them control, but you'll end up drawing anyway so who cares!
A specific case of changing control is during combat. If an attacking or blocking creature changes control, it is removed from combat, and thus takes no damage. Thus, you can block a creature with your own, let's say it's Memnite, and then pay 3 into Zedruu to donate that Memnite, the attacker remains blocked but instead of Memnite dying it moves to the other side to help you draw more cards.
Trigger Resolution: Zedruu's only trigger condition is that you reach the beginning of the upkeep with her. No player gets priority during the untap step, and upkeep triggers happen before priority passes, so as soon as someone passes the turn to you, you're guaranteed that Zedruu will trigger. Even if your opponents control nothing you own, Zedruu's trigger still goes on the stack. Then priority passes before the trigger resolves, which means you can do things before it resolves, which is important because you can donate things in response to the trigger, and then X is counted during resolution. A common play for me is Pentad Prism on turn 2 followed by Zedruu on turn three and donating the prism on turn 4 in response to the trigger. Mind that this works both ways though, so if your opponents remove your donations in response to the trigger you'll draw less. But the trigger resolves independent of whether you still control Zedruu when it resolves, so targeted removal at Zedruu wont stop the draw, and if you're desperate enough, you can donate Zedruu to draw off of Zedruu's trigger.
Players Leaving the Game: I'm just going to paste a section of the comprehensive rules here because this is important.
If you die while someone controls one of your cards, your card leaves with you.
If they die while controlling a card donated to them, the effect giving them control ends and it returns to whoever would control it without that effect.
If a card you own entered play under an opponent's control (e.g. they used Bribery), there is no effect giving them control, thus it stays in their control and falls under the last clause where everything left is exiled.
The most intricate application of these rules is in the Memnite/Warstorm Surge/Dissipation Field combo described further down. If you donate Dissipation Field to someone and then kill them, the Field comes back to you. But if you kill them with damage, the trigger from Dissipation Field is controlled by them and thus leaves the game with them. Basically, players dying is a big mess.
Which is ok, because big messes are sort of this decks M.O.
-"Global" permanents: Most the things zedruu donates from this deck are things that don't particularly care who controls them. Howling Mine and friends, -Opalescence/March of the Machines, Detention Sphere a Pentad Prism with no counters left... Anything that effects all players equally makes a fair candidate for donation.
-Political Trickery: the 3 land swapping cards set up zedruu draws smoothly. The 3 mana spells happen the turn before zedruu, and Shifting Borders is an instant and can be done in response to the first Zedruu trigger.
-creatures: generally, it's best not to donate creatures because sacrifice outlets (and board wipes) are common enough that you'll lose your donation quickly, but there is a handy little trick you can do in combat. If you block with a creature and then donate it after blocks, the change in controller removes the creature from combat, so you get a permanent over to an opponent and hold off an attacker (unless it has trample)
-Strionic Resonator: activate Strionic Resonator to copy Zedruu's upkeep trigger and gain double life and draw double cards.
-Sakashima the Impostor: Because Sakashima keeps his name, you can clone Zedruu to double up on the upkeep trigger.
-Infinite Reflection: while Infinite Reflection's etb trigger is always going to effect you, the effect that makes new creatures enter as copies applies to the controller of Infinite Reflection, so by donating Infinite Reflection, you can make your opponent's things enter as what you want, which is a great way to combat decks playing etb the gathering. Note: if you play it on a creature other than zedruu and don't have donate mana to respond to the trigger, you will turn zedruu into not zedruu and no longer be able to give Infinite Reflection away.
-Dissipation Field: Sometimes it's good to bounce creatures and sometimes it isn't, so the ability to throw around control at instant speed gives you some amount of control over Dissipation Field's effect.
-Alhammarret's Archive: With zedruu's first ability, the draw doubler can make you draw serious cards, but some games is the gateway to an inevitable death, and being able to give it away can save you.
-Cowardice: 3 mana into zedruu can bounce a creature you control whenever you want.
Notable Nonbos
-Forbidden Orchard: Ownership of tokens belongs to whoever they entered play under, so Forbidden Orchard does not count towards Zedruu's card draw.
-Strionic Resonator: Resonating zedruu's trigger is good synergy, but control of an ability relies on controlling the permanent, so if you donate a card away with Zedruu, you can no longer resonate its triggers
The 99
The other 99 cards in the deck are detailed below in the same format as zedruu is above: a brief description followed by a list of the notable interactions in the deck. A lot of interactions that use 3 or more cards, I'll talk about it at more length in a later section.
Lands
A note about the lands in this deck, (much like the rest of the deck) the lands go slightly against conventional wisdom. Short of the extreme decks that plan on winning in the first 3 or 4 turns, playing a deck with 34 lands is probably a bit low. But here it works due to the vast card draw and the other means of generating and fixing mana. The first 3 or 4 mana are key to getting the engine running, but once everyone is drawing 4 cards a turn, this deck can consistently hit every land drop while everyone else gets frustrated by percieved mana flood. I don't run a maximized mana base with fetches/duals/shocks because min/maxing zedruu's mana base would be like greasing the wheels of a K'nex car, but the lands are picked to carry their weight.
Basic Lands: 3 Islands, 3 Mountains, and 3 Plains. The cornerstone of magic: the gathering. Gotta have basics for a deck to function smoothly and resiliently.
-Political Trickery, etc: giving someone a basic is both non-threatening and inoffensive. I often trade basic for basic as a sign of good will early on.
Temple of Enlightenment, Temple of Epiphany, and Temple of Triumph: solid dual colored lands. They enter tapped, but they also give early scrys to smooth out the early games and get to the 3 or 4 mana needed to start the snowball.
-Bounce lands: picking a temple up on turn 2 to replay it turn 3 gets more scry. There are plenty of cards you don't care to draw in the first 3 turns, so spending the first 3 turns scrying 1 twice can honestly be a path to winning.
-Venser, the Sojourner: Venser's +2 can flicker the land to get another scry off of it.
Glacial Fortress, Clifftop Retreat, Sulfur Falls: check lands usually enter untapped and I happen to own all 3 of these.
Celestial Colonnade, Needle Spires, Wandering Fumarole: man lands are better than guildgates. The leave you with something to do after Planar Cleansing, but also have some fun tricks you can do.
-Mirrorweave: making all creatures a copy of an activated man land turns all creatures into unactivated man lands.
-Jeskai Ascendancy: manlands still make mana as creatures, so they work as mana dorks for Jeskai Ascendancy combos.
-Role Reversal: an activated manland can trade for a creature, leaving them with a land they likely can't attack with.
Azorius Chancery, Boros Garrison, and Izzet Boilerworks: The bounce lands are like two lands for the price of one! Seriously though, don't count these as multiple lands in your deck and don't be upset if you end up strip mined, but they do make a lot of early hands more attractive by ensuring the first few land drops.
-Temples: bouncing ETB lands for reuse is a way to take advantage of the downside
-Mindmoil: keeping an extra card in hand while still making land drops is akin to drawing an extra card with these out.
-Catch // Release: You can steal an opponent's land and bounce that temporary land instead of your own. Only recommended in 1v1 (or if someone really deserves it).
-Time Spiral, Teferi, Hero of Dominaria: untapping a set number of lands is better when they make more than 1 mana.
Filter Lands: Cascade Bluffs, Mystic Gate, and Rugged Prairie are just excellent, excellent color fixing. Let you go from 0 mana of a color to 2 in one shot, and that's huge. Every card with 2 or 3 colored symbols could count as a synergy here, but Kami of the Crescent Moon and Thought Reflection are the cards most notably helped by the filter lands.
Command Tower and Mystic Monastery: make all 3 colors and that's pretty neato.
Forbidden Orchard: makes all 5 colors and it gives someone a friend. In multiplayer, sometimes the spirit is even a good thing on its own, and even if it isn't, I've never foregone mana because I feared a 1/1. But remember the tokens are owned by whoever they entered under, so they don't feed zedruu. Boooo.
-Firestorm: the big sweeping removal in this deck requires a high number of creatures in play to work effectively. Forbidden Orchard discounts Blasphemous Act and makes targets for Firestorm.
-Mirrorweave: depending on what is being Mirrorweaved, having more things turn into it can be a positive thing.
-Political Trickery, etc: swapping Forbidden Orchard over to someone else makes them decide between making mana and giving away tokens.
Exotic Orchard: Potentially makes all 5 colors of mana, depending on opponents.
-Zedruu, Political Trickery, etc: trading or donating lands to an opponent can turn this into a reliable producer for all the colors of mana you need.
Nykthos, Shrine to Nyx: normal scenario, this makes 1 colorless. By the end of the game, this nets this deck an extra mana or two because this is a 3 color deck with no specific devotion themes that also donates away permanents, but on rare occasion, this is big mana.
-Leyline of Anticipation: free 2 devotion at the start of the game.
-Catch // Release/Unbender Tine: can untap target permanent, which can net mana if devotion to a color is high enough.
-Mirrorweave/Infinite Reflection: when all creatures are the same, they have the same mana cost.
-Leave // Chance: bouncing and replaying Nykthos can be a ritual with enough devotion.
Reliquary Tower: super valuable in a deck that draws 5 cards a turn. We want more cards and we want to keep them.
Mikokoro, Center of the Sea is like Howling Mine on a land and we like all the Howling Mines.
-Alhammarret's Archive: everyone else draws 1, but zedruu draws 2!
Gemstone Caverns: makes any color if you start with it in your opening hand, otherwise it's a nonbasic waste.
-Poltical Trickery, etc: if it doesn't have the luck counter, you can trade it away for a color producer instead.
-Howling Mine: turn 1 Howling Mine is best turn 1.
Forsaken City: makes any color of mana, at the cost of not untapping unless you exile a card. But we have lots of card, so no big deal.
-Political Trickery, etc: we can use this as early color fixing and then trade it for a land that untaps naturally.
-Flash enablers: the way the card is templated, if it starts the turn untapped, you can float a mana in response to its trigger, untap it, then tap again to get a pseudo-ritual during your upkeep. With this and Leyline, you can theoretically flash in Howling Mine in time to draw 2 on the second turn.
-Mirror of Fate/Time Spiral: this exiles cards, so you can have access to them with Mirror of Fate later. And when attempting to loop Mirror of Fate with Time Spiral, it can be hard to keep exactly 7 cards around to redraw, so this can manage you hand size a little.
Minamo, School at Water's Edge: an untapped blue land that can untap 5 relevant legendary permanents, as well as any random thing Sakashima turns into.
-Nykthos, Shrine to Nyx: 2 mana to untap Nykthos can make more mana.
-Azor's Gateway: can help turbo flip the gateway, but also untaps [c]Sanctum of the Sun[/c} for a lot of mana.
-Razia, Boros Archangel: redirect 6 damage instead of 3.
-Mikokoro, Center of the Sea: draw more cards.
-Nin, the Pain Artist: kill multiple things, or mill multiple people out if you have infinite mana.
Artifacts
Artifacts are the second most prevalent card type in the deck as they do most of the heavy lifting in the mana-making and card-drawing engines that let the deck succeed, but there are some fun bits in here.
Chrome Mox: this is classically degenerate despite being much worse than the original moxen, but is mostly here for that sweet, sweet turn 1 Howling Mine. The deck has 1 1-drop and 11 2-drops, so skipping straight to turn 2 is worth an extra card. Without Chrome Mox or Gemstone Caverns, this deck's 1-drops are tapped lands.
-Howling Mine: Turn 1, baby!
-Knowledge Pool/Possibility Storm: 0-mana spells are good when they're just going to be replaced anyway.
-Mind's Desire: Free storm count!
-Jeskai Ascendancy: Free loot and prowess!
-Leave // Chance: bouncing moxen with Leave can pay for leave.
Notable nonbos
-March of the Machines: kills 0 mana noncreature artifacts
-Mind's Desire: this doesn't make moxen any more free, and it still requires a card from hand to do anything, so hope you don't hit it.
Azorius Signet, Boros Signet, and Izzet Signet ramp by one and fix colors, basically ensuring the ability to play Zedruu on turn 3.
Thought Vessel: It's a mana rock that lets you keep 87 cards in hand, the castable version of reliquary tower.
Pentad Prism: Color fixing, a one time mana source equal to Dark Ritual if you wait a turn, occasionally 1 free storm, and a dummy permanent to donate. With 3 lands, Pentad Prism ensures turn 3 Zedruu into turn 4 donate to get the draw engine going ASAP.
-Zedruu: it's a do nothing permanent that mostly pays for itself to be donated
-Mind's Desire: Free storm count!
Howling Mine, Temple Bell, and Font of Mythos: everybody draws cards! The soul of this deck is repeated card draw. We don't particularly care that everyone else is drawing cards because we need the draw more and we use it better. Howling Mine is the cheapest, efficient option. Temple Bell costs 1 more but lets us draw first. Font of Mythos has double the power. They're each unique but they're all good.
-Zedruu: Howling Mine and Font of Mythos can be very safely donated for value.
-Flash!: Get to draw before everyone else
-Alhammarret's Archive: everybody draws but you draw double.
Strionic Resonater: copies triggered abilities. Oh boy, there are a lot of those.
-Howling Mine/Kami of the Crescent Moon,Walking Archive,Dictate of Kruphix,[c]Font of Mythos[c], and of course Zedruu: Draw double cards for 2 mana.
-Vedalken Plotter: two exchanges at once.
-Temples: scry 1 twice! Ok, maybe not the most useful option, but it exists.
-Bouncelands: Even less useful!
-Detention Sphere: exile 2 permanents instead of 1.
-Precursor Golem: get 4 tokens instead of 2. 15 power for 7 mana. After that, double the Precursor Golem target trigger to copy it for each other golem a second time.
-Venser, Shaper Savant: bounce 2 permanants or spells.
-Inferno Titan: an extra Lightning Bolt for 2 mana.
-Knowledge Pool: you can't get double spells out by copying cast triggers, but you can copy the etb and exile the top 6 from everybody, and there's bound to be some sweet stuff in there.
-Possibility Storm: unlike Knkowledge Pool, you can get double spells out of Possibility Storm, so go for it!
-Eye of the Storm: like Possibility Storm, it does its whole ability whether there was something to exile or not, so copy away. The copied ability will exile the spell that triggered in the first place, and then the original trigger will just cast everything a second time.
-Jeskai Ascendancy: copy the trigger for double looting, or copy for double untaps/pumps, whichever suits your interests.
-Mindmoil: probably only useful if you have draw doublers AND very, very few cards in hand.
-Warstorm Surge: Extra damage, could be a kill spell.
-Mind's Desire: storm is a triggered ability, so copying it is like doubling the storm count.
-Thousand-Year Storm: copying the trigger lets Resonator copy instants and sorceries.
-Arcbond: doubling up the damage practically ensures a board wipe.
Notable Poor Interaction
-You cannot strionic resonate the trigger of a permanent you donated with zedruu
Azor's Gateway: it's not free, but it's fairly efficient card filtering, and it if happens to flip, you're in the money.
-Unbender Tine/Minamo, School at Water's Edge/Catch // Release/Turnabout/Time Spiral: untapping this card repeatedly get's very out of hand.
-Mirror of Fate: exiled cards can be recycled later.
-Alhammarret's Archive: both named after sphinx's. Also, draw 2 exile one is pretty good.
Unbender Tine: untapping another target permanent may not seem like it's worth 4 mana, but this card has a high floor and a high ceiling and great flavor text. Also, it's got the political opportunity to untap other players things.
-bounce lands/Nykthos/Gilded Lotus: Tine is always a mana rock, but is upgraded by bigger mana makers
-Temple Bell/Mikokoro: or it can transform into a Howling Mine.
-Strionic Resonator: it can copy triggers.
-creatures: it can give a creature vigilance.
-Nin, the Pain Artist/Razia, Boros Archangel: it can help gun down creatures.
-Azor's Gateway: and of course, turbo gateway.
Vedalken Orrery: Gives everything flash, don't have to tap out and sit helplessly, and everything is better with flash. Don't believe me? Here's a list!
-All Howling Mine variants: get the extra draw before anyone else
-Knowledge Pool/Eye of the Storm: get access to the eye/pool first by flashing it in endstep and then untapping with free reign.
-Possibility Storm: respond to tutor effects with style, whatever they search for is that last thing they'll get.
-Rest In Peace: Surprise graveyard decks!
-Catch // Release: threaten mid attack
-creatures: everything is an ambush viper
-Dissipation Field: Double surprise token decks!
-Temporal Cascade: Surprise... cards in hand decks!
-Mind's Desire: I don't need my own storm, I'll just use yours instead.
Alhammarret's Archive: doubles all the life gain, which in this deck is just Zedruu at the moment, but it also doubles Zedruu's card draw, as well the 16 other ways this deck draws extra cards.
-Mindmoil, Leave // Chance: you put down your hand and draw twice that many
Gilded Lotus: black Lotus every turn. That's thousands of dollars worth of value every turn!
Mirror of Fate: exile your library and replace it with up to 7 cards you own that have been exiled. It's incredibly rare that this effect lets you win the game by activating it, but its strength appears when you activate it a second time and have access to all the cards it exiled on the first go.
-Echo Storm/Saheeli, Sublime Artificer: copy the Mirror, activate both, build your own Doomsday.
-Rest In Peace: Mirror exiles upon sacrfice and chooses itself, draw/cast/activate it again, build your own Doomsday.
-Time Spiral or Temporal Cascade: activate Mirror of Fate, shuffle it back in, draw it again, play it, and then build your own Doomsday
Knowledge Pool: I love Knowledge Pool. For those unfamiliar, when it enters the battlefield it exiles the top 3 cards from each players library, and then whenever someone casts a spell from hand, it exiles that too and lets them instead cast something previously exiled by Knowledge Pool, including other players' cards and including things it ate upon casting. Knowledge Pool makes for some of the messiest stack shananigans in MTG, but it does so much more. From getting hefty discounts, to stealing people's stuff, to multiplying cast triggers, Knowledge Pool never fails to shake up a game of magic.
-Zedruu: people will probably have to take your cards at some point, and then you can start power drawing.
-Echo Storm: can make a second/third/fourth Knowledge Pool because it triggers on both casts
-Mind's Desire: each cast into and out of Knowledge Pool is distinct, doubling the storm count. Storm triggers on cast, so even though the card is exiled, the storm copies happen.
-Jeskai Ascendancy: double cast triggers.
-Possibilty Storm/Eye of the Storm: allow you to take from the pool and from the storms. Also lets you cast your actual spells through Possibility Storm.
-Thousand-Year Storm: cast spells into the pool but keep the copies.
-Precursor Golem: golem triggers on cast, so the spells get copied for every other golem and then you get a spell from Knowledge Pool on top of that.
-Chrome Mox/Memnite/Firestorm/Pentad Prism/Ephemeral Shields: take the good stuff out and fill the pool with cheap/free cards that don't do anything without people throwing more cards away.
-Venser, the Sojourner: +2 can flicker permanents of yours that people played and bring them back on your side of the field. +2 can also flicker the Knowledge Pool if the contents are unsavory.
Enchantments
Zedruu's enchantments aren't always the cards people see the most of, but they are definitely the cards that opponents remember. Crazy enchantments are often the highlight of a zedruu victory as they offer the greatest impact and confusion to the board state.
Rest in Peace: Exiling the graveyard is huge, so this card is a staple of the format without any synergies to play with. And this deck doesn't really care about the graveyard, so it's very safe to just play out whenever.
-Zedruu: Rest In Peace is a very mana light donation target.
-Mirror of Fate: gets exiled by Rest In Peace on sacrifice, so it can choose itself to go into the deck. Also, just exiling graveyards can make a pile big enough to win with Mirror of Fate.
Detention Sphere: well known removal spell, it's an Oblivion Ring that also happens to hose token swarms (and if multiple opponents play Sol Ring, that's just awesome).
-Zedruu: Detention Sphere doesn't care who controls it, so donate away.
-Strionic Resonator: copy the trigger to exile 2 target permanents.
-Mirrorweave: exile all creatures.
-Leave // Chance/Venser, Shaper Savant: bounce in response to the trigger to exile something forever
Dictate of Kruphix: see Howling Mine. This one just has flash.
Jeskai Ascendancy: untaps creatures and loots. Both are very good effects, and the loot is a "may" ability if you're too close to drawing out.
-Alhammarret's Archive: draw 2 and only discard 1 to keep your hand as full as when you cast the spell.
-Strionic Resonator: get double the untap or double the loot, but not both, as they are two seperate triggers.
-March of the Machines: casting a noncreature spell now untaps all your artifacts, many of which make mana to pay for more noncreature spells.
-Crystalline Crawler: doesn't even need March of the Machines, it's a mana producing creature to untap.
-manlands: also mana producing creatures
-Mirrorweave: casting Mirrorweave while someone is attacking you makes all creatures the same thing, except now your creatures all untap and get +1/+1, so if you have enough blockers and something has equal power and toughness, it's just a Comeuppance.
-Venser, the Sojourner/Turnabout: a big turn of casting spells leads to some major prowessing, and a -1 or a Turnabout can sneak by blockers for an alpha strike. Yes, Zedruu has commander damaged people to death in this deck.
-Knowledge Pool/Possibility Storm/Eye of the Storm: multiply those spell casting triggers with these behemoths.
-Nin, the Pain Artist: Buff creatures to survive Nin and untap Nin for more draw.
Dissipation Field: can act as an attack deterrent if people don't want to replay their things. Proves most useful when non-combat damage gets involved, like Nekusar or Niv-Mizzet, and can hit noncreatures too like Staff of Nin. Watch out though, because you can accidentally fuel etb the gathering.
-Zedruu: by donating Dissipation Field to someone else, you can have some semblence of control over when things are getting bounced to hand.
-Vedalken Orrery/Leyline of Anticipation: surprise an attacking fleet by bouncing them all out of nowhere.
-Arcbond: the arcbonded creature deals damage to each player and would get bounced.
Leyline of Anticipation: see Vedalken Orrery, except this one feels like cheating in your opening hand.
March of the Machines: go from no creatures to many by turning artifacts into creatures. Suddenly those Howling Mines and mana rocks are blockers or even offensive threats. Also, you can give opponent's artifacts summoning sickness and make equipment unattachable.
-Mirrorweave/Infinite Reflection: turn your creatures into copies of an artifact or turn your artifacts into copies of a cool creature.
-Jeskai Ascendency: all noncreature spells you cast now untap all your mana rocks. Neat!
-Howling Mine: if you can attack someone unimpeded, you can tap Howling Mine to turn it off on other people's turns.
-Creature removal now works on artifacts.
Notable Poor Interaction
-Moxen: get killed by March of the Machines
-Artifacts that need to tap have summoning sickness. I'm looking at you, Mirror of Fate.
Opalescence: the same thing as March of the Machines, but for enchantments, which can be even neater.
-Mirrorweave/Infinite Reflection: turn all your enchantments into creatures or turn all your creatures into Warstorm Surges. You decide. Also, Mirrorweaving Possibility Storm is choice.
-Warstorm Surge: enters as a creature so it triggers itself.
-Eye of the Storm: 7/7s are big enough to be noteworthy.
-Creature removal now works on enchantments.
Mindmoil: each time you cast a card, you put your hand on the bottom and draw a new, equivalently-sized hand. This is genuinely one of the most underrated cards in magic. People like to plan ahead, and thus Mindmoil scares and offends them by making them rely on chance, but on average, you have a well mixed hand. Some mana production, so cheap spells, some bombs, and you end up playing them out in that order. With Mindmoil, you can play what you need at the time and then draw more of it. Suddenly you can ramp up a board of mana rocks in one turn, and then spend the rest of the game slamming haymakers because if you ever run out, you play something cheap and replace your hand with new haymakers. Don't fear Mindmoil. Just play it and see what happens.
-Leave // Chance: pump your hand back up with permanents.
-Alhammarret's Archive: put your hand down and draw that many x2. Extremely dangerous, handle with care.
-Venser, Shaper Savant: can bounce himself to do a 4 mana personal Windfall
Possibility Storm: possibility storm takes the spells you cast and replaces them with something else. Neat! Possibility Storm is actually a powerful tool for chaos because it can be really, really hard to kill, as your opponent's can't resolve spells from their hands. Meanwhile you just slam the cheapest cards you can until something silly happens.
-Strionic Resonator: copy the trigger to get to cast 2 spells from your deck
-Mind's Desire: every cast from hand is 2 storm, so storm builds up fast. But wait, there's more! If you cast Mind's Desire from your hand and have Possibility Storm resolve before the storm trigger, Possibility Storm will shove Mind's Desire back into your deck giving you the remote chance that the storm copies will shuffle Mind's Desire to the top and cast it a second time, truly making Mind's Desire the storm that storms.
-Knowledge Pool/Eye of the Storm: the other two permanents want to eat the spell, Possibility Storm doesn't care, and being in control of these things mean you can stack the triggers to get maximum benefit and give minimum benefit to others.
-Thousand-Year Storm: resolve a copy of the spells before they're eaten, build up storm count for future spells.
-Jeskai Ascendancy: double cast triggers for double loot and untaps
-Cheap crap!: moxen/memnite/firestorm are ultra cheap and can swing into big plays. 3 mana sorceries aren't as cheap, but they likely upgrade to bombs.
Barren Glory: it says win the game on it. What's better than that? Seriously though, winning with Barren Glory is too complicated to explain with two card synergies, but that doesn't mean this can't do anything. It can be a useless donation, it can be a 6/6, and it can give you 2 extra devotion to white.
Thousand-Year Storm: every instant or sorcery you cast has a [c]Bonus Round[c/] attached to it.
-Possibility Storm/Knowledge Pool/Eye of the Storm: mutiple casts count up the TYS count very quickly.
-Strionic Resonator: can copy storm triggers/
-Venser, Shaper Savant: can bounce the original spell to recast for even more copies.
Warstorm Surge: all of your creatures deal direct damage on entry. Pretty straight forward rain of fire.
-Opalescence: Warstorm Surge enters as a creature and triggers itself for 6 damage.
-Memnite: 0 mana for 1 damage. Huge value!
-Crystalline Crawler: up to 4 damage that pays for itself after
-Opalescence/March of the Machines: use Warstorm Surge as removal for all kinds of permanents
Eye of the Storm: whenever a player casts an instant or sorcery, Eye of the Storm exiles it, and then that player chooses to cast copies of any combination of cards exiled by Eye of the Storm. All spells in the storm are optional so you can choose not to cast them, and all the spells are cast at the same time. And then you end up with a giant nonsense stack and a 25 minute turn.
-Strionic Resonator: copy the Eye trigger and get a second cast of everything in it.
-Turnabout: every instant and sorcery can untap your lands or mana rocks to apy for itself and more.
-Catch // Release: repeatedly cast catch to steal mana from people to pay for more instants/sorceries, or pay 3 for catch to cast out release instead.
-Leave // Chance: can bounce Eye of the Storm if things get sketchy.
-Temporal Cascade/Time Spiral: let you keep digging for more instants and sorceries to run the gravy train.
-Possiblity Storm/Knowledge Pool: cast twice as many spells and be twice as happy. Possibility Storm in particular guarantees a second trigger of Eye of the Storm.
-Jeskai Ascendancy: every spell cast out of Eye of the Storm triggers the ascendancy, so the big pie of loots can likely find the next spell to trigger with.
-Mind's Desire: Eye of the Storm casting Mind's Desire is a cast so it does trigger storm, and then Eye of the Storm triggers on any instant or sorcery card, including ones cast from exile for free, so you can hit one with Mind's Desire to cast another Mind's Desire, and then the game likely just ends.
-Thousand-Year Storm: every spell cast becomes lots of spells.
Creatures
Where lands are the foundation of Magic: the Gathering, creatures are the face of it. Creatures aren't the face of this deck though because they mostly aim to do more of what the artifacts and enchantments are doing.
Memnite: swings for 1. 40 turn clock is OP. Memnite is great. It's an extra body on the field, a chump blocker, and sometimes a donate target for the cheap, cheap cost of free.
-Zedruu: the block and donate trick is almost always Memnite
-Mirrorweave: targeting Memnite is a great Forcefield imitation. Targetting anything else, Memnite gets to be something worth way more than 0 mana.
-Warstorm Surge: free damage! (part of a combo)
-Possibility Storm/Knowledge Pool: transform 0 mana into a more powerful card.
Kami of the Crescent Moon: See Howling Mine.
Nin, the Pain Artist: kills creatures and draws you cards, not quite the way you want to though. Nin is a mana sink and a panic button.
-Alhammarret's Archive: draw double the mana you spend.
-Cowardice: don't draw anything, but for 2 mana you can bounce a creature.
-Catch // Release: steal a creature, kill their creature, draw the cards yourself.
-Razia, Boros Archangel: shoot your creature, kill someone else's, draw the cards yourself.
-Unbender Tine/Jeskai Ascendancy: untap Nin to activate again.
-Jeskai Charm: give Nin lifelink.
-Arcbond: turn Nin into a board wipe.
Walking Archive: like Howling Mine but deserves its own entry. The ability to scale up in the event of mana flood is a big deal, and the instant speed nature makes extra counters act like Dictate of Kruphix.
-Mirrorweave: this card has defender, so Mirrorweave becomes "creatures can't attack this turn.
-Cathars' Crusade: each creature entering is another Howling Mine.
Note! this creature has defender. You can't pump it up to infinity and attack with it because it can't attack. You can however pump it to infinity and pass the turn and your opponents draw out, and that's lethal enough.
Vedalken Plotter: enters the battlefield and exchanges control of a land you control and a land an opponent controls. Even without synergies, this can be useful as a way to fix mana colors or defend against the powerful lands that get played in this format.
-Zedruu: if if you trade identical lands, the change in ownership means advantage for Zedruu.
-Venser, Shaper Savant: trade the lands and then return yours to your hand to Annex someone.
-Venser, the Sojourner: Venser does this trick even better. If you exchange lands, you can +2 to exile the land since it's a permanent you own and then it comes back under its owner's control, and that's just actually Annex. Even more, if you +2 again targetting the plotter, you can get the etb again to exchange lands and then +2 again to steal yours back. Chances are, nobody will let you do this for long, but while they answer Venser they're ignoring everything else you do.
-Leave // Chance: bounces permanents you own, so again you can steal the land back.
-Catch // Release: threaten a land, then exchange it for someone else's and keep the second one forever.
-Strionic Resonator: for the double exchange.
Crystalline Crawler: Double the Pentad Prism, double the fun. There are 5 other mana sources in the deck that can make the 4th mana color for full value in addition to land trading tricks. And then it's an alloy Myr on top of that.
-Jeskai Ascendancy: Jeskai Ascendancy and mana dorks are a well-known synergy, and this is no excpetion. Make a mana for each noncreature spell.
-Infinite Reflection: really interesting interation, all the creatures entering the battlefield have the converge effect apply, so if you can play creatures using all different colors (which you have access to all 5 cause of Crystalline Crawler), you can spam out creatures for free.
-Mirrorweave: wait for attacks, make everything a crawler, blocks, tap your crawlers to have bigger crawlers that your opponent and win at combat.
-Warstorm Surge: free damage!
-Mind's Desire: free storm!
-Cathars' Crusade: creatures entering now makes mana.
-Dack's Duplicate: gets all the cast counters by copying the Crawler (like the other clones), but also has haste and can make an additional mana, turning into a mana ritual.
Golden Guardian: fights your own creatures, which is sometimes a good thing, and then flips into ramp spell / token engine.
-Swans of Bryn Argoll: 2 mana, flip guardian draw 4 cards.
-Arcbond: turn the fight into 4 damage to everything.
-Catch // Release: steal a creature, make that fight the Guardian.
-Razia, Boros Archangel: lets Guardian flip fighting anything with 1 or more power.
-land untappers: generate 2 mana from 1 land.
-Zedruu: make tokens that can be donated to draw cards.
-Warstorm Surge: shoot things for 4 damage every turn.
Raff Capashen, Ship's Mage: See Vedalken Orrery for my love of flash explanations, but Raff only gives flash to artifacts and legends. If you ever want your deck to laugh off a Cyclonic Rift, this is the card for you.
-Vedalken Orrery: use Raff as the go between to give all your spells flash at instant speed.
-Howling Mine: flashing in Howling Mines, either end step or upkeep, gets you drawing before everyone else. Now that Shimmer Myr is upgrade to Raff, every Howling Mine effect is instant speed.
-Razia, Boros Archangel: it's really hard to lose at petty combat when you can flash in a monster like this.
Sakashima the Impostor: the clone that keeps its name so it can copy legendary creatures.
-legendary creatures!: Zedruu, Kami, Raff, Nin, Razia, Venser
Swans of Bryn Argoll: usually paired with Seismic Assault, but a great draw engine with a great many cards, and also a resilient blocker.
-Firestorm: turns Firestorm into major card advantage.
-Warstorm Surge: all creatures turn into draw spells
-Nin, the Pain Artist: turns into Blue Sun's Zenith
-[c]Razia, Boros Archangel[c]: can aim damage at swans to protect creatures, or can aim damage away from swans to prevent opponents drawing cards.
-Arcbond: swans survives a big arcbond and can draw you cards.
-Mirrorweave: can replace complicated combat math with everone drawing their whole deck.
Venser, Shaper Savant: the one pseudo counter in the deck, a very unique magic card.
-Warstorm Surge: or shock something
-Mindmoil: or wheel your hand
-Venser, the Sojourner: I'll have my Venser venser my Venser, eot my Venser comes back to venser your land.
-Mind's Desire: hitting Venser off of Mind's Desire lets you bounce the original Mind's Desire back to hand where you can recast it with more storm.
-Thousand-Year Storm: storm off a spell multiple times.
Precursor Golem: the crowned prince of stupid numbers, I've built entire edh decks around this dude. Here it stays fairly tame, but 9 power for 5 mana never hurt anybody.
-Walking Archive: is actually a golem. Sometimes that matters.
-Strionic Resonator: can copy both the etb and target triggers getting more golems or more spell copies (though there's only one spell in here you'd want to copy this way).
-Mirrorweave: aim at a token and you can make everything a Precursor Golem. Aim at something else, and you've got 3 bodies to become that thing.
-Vanish Into Memory: 4 mana to draw 9 and discard 3 at a later time is pretty strong.
-Catch // Release: fusing the spell costs 9, but that seems fair to make every player sacrifice 3 of each type of permanent. It's like crueler ultimatum.
-Arcbond: multiple arcbonds bounce damage back and forth.
-either venser: bounce the original, leave the tokens, get more tokens.
Inferno Titan: the big bomb creature here, a big threat on its own. Inferno Titan is my personal favorite of the titans, and there's plenty it can do here.
-Strionic Resonator: copy the 3 damage trigger
-Mirrorweave/Infinite Reflection: have an army of titans
-Venser, the Sojourner: makes Inferno Titan unblockable or flickers it for etb value and pseudo-vigilance.
-Opalescence/March of the Machines: let you burn away enchantments and artifacts.
Razia, Boros Archangel: Razia isn't good, but man is she Cool. Playing this card is more so a statement that I can get away with any inclusion here, but it is nice to win in combat sometimes.
-Nin, the Pain Artist: you draw the cards and then hurt someone else's creature.
-Arcbond: make your sweeper a bit more one-sided, or shoots more damage back at the target creature for a bigger wipe.
-Firestorm: get more damage onto a single target without so much discarding.
-Vanish Into Memory: 4 mana to draw 6 and discard 3.
-Swans of Bryn Argoll: get more cards from Arcbond or Firestorm, or just let opponents draw cause you're a nice person.
Instants
Instants are usually instant for a reason, the instants in Zedruu offer the most immediate interaction with opponents that the deck has to offer.
Firestorm: the most mana efficient burn spell on the market, you can do 100 damage for 1 red mana and all it takes is 10 other cards from your hand. It's a difficult card to play though, because you need to have as mana targets as the amount of damage you want to do, so killing big creatures often involves burning yourself.
-Forbidden Orchard: creates targets to let the damage rack up without needing to target anything important to you.
-March of the Machines/Opalescence: open up artifacts and enchantments to burn removal.
-Knowledge Pool/Eye of the Storm: trigger these permanents for the low cost of R, and if anyone wants to use them against you, they have to do the discarding anyway.
-Swans of Bryn Argoll: replace every card you have to discard.
-Thousand-Year Storm: double the firestorm gives you double the damage with the same amount of discards.
Ephemeral Shields: a protection spell for a creature. Keeping Zedruu from dying to a board wipe is a solid recipe for taking over a game of magic, and convoke lets you do wo potentailly with no mana up.
-Arcbond: lets a creature survive the board wipe.
-Knowledge Pool/Possibility Storm/Eye of the Storm/Jeskai Ascendancy/Mind's Desire: casting a free instant is kind of a big deal even if it has no relevant effect at the moment.
-Precursor Golem: I know it's just turning an opponent's 1 for 1 removal into a different 1 for 1, but blanking spot removal at a Precursor Golem feels nice because opponent's feel clever for bolting a golem and I like making them sad.
Leave // Chance: Leave lets you pick your permanents up, chance lets you cycle away your hand. Even before the internal synergy of the card, these effects are great to have around. Leave is a great response to board wipes, and chance is good for finding gas. Leave is great at clearing away your own permenents that are backfiring, and the specific phrasing of leave has interesting consequences with Zedruu, as you don't need to control something to bounce it
-Political Trickery, etc: trade a land, then bounce yours back to hand.
-Moxen/Signets/Pentad Prism: bounce mana rocks for added storm/mana fixing.
-Detention Sphere: bounce in response to exile trigger and never give the target back.
-Alhammarret's Archive: Discard X cards, draw 2X.
-Thousand-Year Storm: gives you a copy of Leave that resolves through and before cast triggers, so you can pick up a Possibility Storm that's in your way or Alhammarret's Archive before Mindmoil kills you.
-Mind's Desire: Leave on all your least expensive permaments can push a lot of storm.
-Mindmoil: bouncing permanents you don't need to combo can help you dig for a win aggressively. This includes lands.
-Planeswalkers: bounce planeswalkers at low loyalty and replay them.
Arcbond: as long as there's some kind of damage happening, Arcbond can be an instant speed board wipe and might just kill people
-Precursor Golem/Eye of the Storm/Bonus Round: multiple copies of Arcbond will make damage bounce back and forth between 2 creatures until 1 dies.
-Swans of Bryn Argoll: Swans not only always survives Arcbond, it also draws you cards (if your creature was the Arcbond target)
-Jeskai Charm: gives your creatures lifelink, and with Arcbond, the creature deals the damage.
-Dissipation Field: make the Arcbonded creature bounce.
-Nin, the Pain Artist: build an Earthquake.
-Razia, Boros Archangel: can protect a creature from Arcbond death.
Jeskai Charm: top a creature, zap a player or planeswalker, or pump the team with lifelink.
-Knowledge Pool: after putting a creature on top, you can Knowledge Pool to steal it from their deck.
-Eye of the Storm/Bonus Round: 4 damage isn't much, but if you start getting multiples, it adds up.
-Arcbond/Warstorm Surge: lifelink applies to direct damage too (doesn't effect creature not in play when charm is cast).
Mirrorweave: one of us... one of us... one of us... Mirrorweave makes everything the same thing. You can steal many a win by noticing when someone else has a big threat, or you can fog them by turning all their creatures into something much smaller. There are, of course, targets in the deck worth Mirrorweaving.
-Precursor Golem: to make it work, you have to target a token and let the trigger copy the spell to resolve at the original first, but once you have a pile of Precursor Golems in play, you can cast spells and have them copied an unreasonable amount of times.
-Inferno Titan: all your creatures are deadly titans, and then for every two attackers you have, you can kill an enemy creature for free.
-Walking Archive: has defender, so it can stop attacks for a turn.
-Swans of Bryn Argoll: turns combat into a massive draw event.
-Crystalline Crawler: with enough creatures, Mirrorweave can be a mana ritual.
-man-lands: animating a land and then Mirrorweaving it turns every other creature into a non-animated land until end of turn, making it very hard to attack you or block your land-creature.
-March of the Machines/Opalescence: target artifacts and enchanments cause it's fun!
-Detention Sphere: exile all creatures.
Turnabout: tap or untap all of target players artifacts, creatures, or lands. Turnabout is effectively a modal spell with 6 options and I've definitely used them all. Tap all opposing creatures to prevent attacks, tap all their artifacts or lands to constrain their mana (particularly against decks with counterspells), untap all creatures for surprise blocks, untap all lands for the mana ritual, untap all artifacts to reuse tap abilities. Turnabout does it all.
-Eye of the Storm: untapping lands almost certainly makes every instant or sorcery pay for itself until somebody wins.
-Bonus Round: if Turnabout didn't generate enough mana, cast it twice.
-Mind's Desire/Jeskai Ascendancy: turnabout acts as a free spell to trigger these things or add to storm.
-Temple Bell/Strionic Resonator: sometimes you just need to untap an artifact, and the mana rocks you have out get a free ride.
-Thousand-Year Storm: lots of Turnabouts.
Vanish Into Memory: blank a creature for a turn, and get some sweet card draw out of it to boot. Most satisfying when aimed at hydras, but there are some internal tricks for this as well.
-Precursor Golem: 4 mana to draw 9 and discard 3.
-Inferno Titan: use the firebreathing ability to increase the draw power, and then get an etb trigger from the titan as well.
-Razia, Boros Archangel: draw 6, discard 3.
-Clones: draw cards for power, have them re-enter as a smaller creature to keep cards in hand.
-Jeskai Ascendancy: the pump trigger from Jeskai Ascendancy increases the draw without increaing the discard.
Sorceries
Sorceries are usually the basic spells of a deck; ramp, cantrips, boardwipes, and all those reliable staples a normal deck needs. But that's not how it works here! Zedruu's sorceries are heavy hitters. Possibility Storm from Political Trickery can cause all sorts of madness.
Catch // Release: catch threatens a permanent, release elimates a lot of permanents. But also, secret secret, Catch can give a permanent haste for you, and in a deck that prefers to win in one big turn, summoning sickness can cause a bunch of issues.
-Zedruu: a classic zedruu shenanigan in a multiplayer scenario. 3 mana steals a permanent, 3 mana gives that card to somebody else. Like a confiscate for a friend.
-flash enablers: steal a creature, block with it, save some damage and kill a dude.
-Gilded Lotus: 3 mana untaps and makes 3 mana, free storm!
-Eye of the Storm: you can start stealing lands to pay for more instants and sorceries to make more copies of Catch. Also, you can cast Catch in and pull Release out.
-Precursor Golem: a fused Catch // Release will still only target one golem, so it'll copy the release for each golem and drop a nuke on the board.
-bounce lands: you can borrow someone else's land to pay the land bouncing cost to ramp yourself.
Political Trickery: see Vedalken Plotter, except this one is a sorcery.
Role Reversal: a political trickery that isn't limited to lands. Basically Confiscate that draws cards with Zedruu.
Echo Storm: makes multiple copies of an artifact.
-Knowledge Pool: get the cast trigger to copy knowledge pool before even getting your spell out. With 1 cast of Zedruu, you can have 4 Knowledge Pools.
-Mirror of Fate: 2 Mirrors makes Doomsday, 3 makes a Doomsday with a safety valve.
-Unbender Tine: like copying lands, also adds to devotion for Nykthos.
Mind's Desire: the storm that storms.
-moxen, Memnite, Pentad Prism, Crystalline Crawler, Ephemeral Shields, Turnabout, Time Spiral, so many cards are free: free storm
-Knowledge Pool/Eye of the Storm: makes more storm and more storm triggers.
-Possibility Storm: makes more storm and if you Possibility Storm away Mind's Desire, there's a chance you shuffle back into Mind's Desire from the storm copies and then you storm from your storm so you can storm while you storm.
-Venser, Shaper Savant: Venser bouncing Mind's Desire doesn't bounce the storm copies, so you can cast and storm twice.
Time Spiral: everyone draws a fresh hand, and you untap 6 lands. This is a gross card, and everyone knows it.
-bouncelands: make more mana then you spent on Time Spiral
-draw doubler: draw 14 instead of 7
-Eye of the Storm: every spell eaten by Eye gets you more mana and more draw to find more instants and sorceries
-Thousand-Year Storm: untap 6*X lands for the new hand to use.
-Mirror of Fate: Time Spiral shuffles in the graveyard and exiles itself, Mirror of Fate sacrifices itself and returns things from exile. It's difficult to do perfectly by balancing total cards in hand/library/graveyard, but you can just go off this way.
Temporal Cascade: everyone draws 7, or everyone shuffles hands and graveyards in, or its a 9 mana Timetwister. The one situation I can think of where the entwined spell is actually worth less mana to me than the individual halves. "Draw 7" lets you keep your big hand, "shuffle in" is actually incredibly oppressive, axing people's hands and destroying graveyard strategies.
-draw doublers: break the symmetry, draw 14.
-flash enablers: eliminate people's hands at instant speed.
Temporal Mastery: takes an extra turn. The miracle cost is fun when it happens (not too often when you draw 1000 cards a turn).
-everything: extra turn = play more magic.
-Eye of the Storm: dodge the exile limitation and take many turns.
-Mirror of Fate: negate the exile limitation and remiracle the spell.
-planeswalkers: extra turn can let you sneak through an ultimate.
Aminatou's Augury: for all intents and purposes, it's basically a second Mind's Desire.
Planeswalkers
The last card type represented here, these 2 planeswalkers round out the deck. There are exactly 2 planeswalkers in this deck because of Possibility Storm. If I play Possibility Storm, I have a card type where I know exactly what I'll flip into, and whichever one it is, they both can remove a Possibility Storm if I need to resolve something in my hand. This deck is not built to be able to protect planewalkers for very long, so they're mostly included for their immediate impact, but the ultimates are cool too.
Saheeli, Sublime Artificer: army in a can, plus cloning artifacts and creatures.
-Mana rocks: the activated ability becomes a mana source.
-Howling Mine: turning Howling Mine into a creature lets it attack, or mana rock lets it tap, either way it turns of the symmetry of the card drawing.
-Knowledge Pool: makes an empty Knowledge Pool for your turn, sort like a build your own Decree of Silence.
-Mirror of Fate: Saheeli can get you Mirrors number 2 and 3.
-Knowledge Pool/Possibility Storm/Eye of the Storm: multiply those cast triggers.
Nahiri, the Harbinger: +2 rummage, -2 removal, -8 sneak attack a Knowledge Pool.
-Alhammarret's Archive: discard 1, draw 2.
-Possibility Storm: exile your own Possibility Storm to cast things straight from hand.
-Knowledge Pool: get the pool into play for free on your turn, and then take it away before anyone else gets access.
Venser, the Sojourner: +2 flicker, -1 unblockable creatures, -8 machine gun the board.
-Vedalken Plotter, etc: "If you exchange lands, you can +2 to exile the land since it's a permanent you own and then it comes back under its owner's control, and that's just actually Annex. Even more, if you +2 again targetting the plotter, you can get the etb again to exchange lands and then +2 again to steal yours back. Chances are, nobody will let you do this for long, but while they answer Venser they're ignoring everything else you do."
-Inferno Titan/Wartorm Surge: etb damage goes well with flickering.
-Precursor Golem: make more golem tokens.
-clones: reset clones
-permanents that backfire: exile something giving you trouble til end of turn.
-Knowledge Pool: people take your permanants, Venser bounces them back to you.
-Knowledge Pool/Possibility Storm/Eye of the Storm: +2 can reset these things. -8 can make multiple cast triggers a deadly tool.
Big Splashy Synergies
"This deck is not only able to go crazy - it also needs to do so."
Zedruu has won many games of edh in many remarkable ways, but casting individual spells and letting them act as a win condition alone is an incredibly rare outcome. In order to reach the point of victory, this deck almost requires that select pieces be strung together that grant the pilot an unfathomable board state or direct access to most or all of the deck. While I pride myself on winning in comically unique ways, the truth is that the win conditions are often purely academic exercises once one of the major engines gets up and running. Any one of these strategies could be picked out and made into a more focused, more consistent deck. Having done so with more than one of them, I've found it's my preference to weave them all into one deck and let chance decide what strategy to pursue in any given game.
Draw Doubling and Hand Cycling
This deck is full of cards dig: Howling Mine, Temporal Cascade, Time Spiral, Leave // Chance, Mindmoil, Jeskai Ascendancy. These cards are mostly designed to freshen your options rather than actively increase the number of cards in your hand, but once Alhammarret's Archive gets involved, you very swiftly draw through the entire deck, and then everything tends to just fall into place from there. The most extreme possibility here is Mindmoil, where every spell you cast doubles your cards in hand. If you were so inclined to focus a deck on just this aspect, Arjun, the Shifting Flame is Mindmoil in the command zone.
Also of note is the interaction between "draw on cast" effects like Mindmoil and Jeskai Ascendancy and what I will right now refer to as "cast on cast" effects: Mind's Desire, Knowledge Pool, Possibility Storm, and Eye of the Storm. Multiplying cast triggers like this leads to outrageously accelerated digging. If you exile 5 spells with a Mind's Desire, that can be 5 refreshed hands with Mindmoil (which is probably half the library) from which to find a way to win. And looting with Jeskai Ascendancy from all the spells in Eye of the Storm is likely to find you another to cast.
You have to be careful with draw doublers out, as you can quickly find yourself in the scenario where you have 1 turn or 1 spell cast before effectively you mill yourself to death. Because of this, there are ways in the deck to wiggle out of such a lock, the first of which is Zedruu. If draw doubling has you locked down, just donate the draw doubler with Zedruu and the problem is solved! Sometimes Zedruu isn't around and you don't have mana for that, but within the deck are Leave // Chance, Chaos Warp, and Detention Sphere to wipe things off the face of the earth. But what if you have Possibility Storm out and can't get those through? A planeswalker in hand can do it; there are only 2 in the deck, so casting one with the other in the library guarantees you the one from the library, and both can clear away a Possibility Storm. This may sound way too specific to build this purposely and keep bringing up, but Possibility Storm can be really oppressive if things go south, so this has been relevant on multiple occassions.
Making Mana to Make More Mana to Make More Mana...
This deck doesn't use too much mana until it's gotten that big ol' fist of cards, and then it uses a lot of mana that it makes in a hurry. How do we make lots of mana in a hurry? First up is mana rocks. Once you're far enough in, the moxen add a mana, the signets effectively cost 1, Gilded Lotus costs 2, Pentad Prism and Crystalline Crawler (and Phyrexian Metamorph on either of those or Gilded Lotus) are effectively free, and all these things at the right time can jump you from a few mana on your turn to double that the next turn. Having flash on your mana rocks means you can do this on your opponent's end step and then take a huge turn out of nowhere.
Another way to make a ton of mana is to untap lands repeatedly. Turnabout and Time Spiral are the cards that do this, Turnabout is generally a mega-ritual, and Time Spiral even nets positive mana with a bounceland in play. Put either of these into Eye of the Storm and instants and sorceries become free. This is a dangerous play if any of your opponent's can respond, but do it anyway cause it's super fun. Additionally, these cards and Unbender Tine can untap Nykthos, Unbender Tine being the most interesting because it (and copies of it) add to the devotion for Nykthos.
A third way to turn your mana into more mana is Jeskai Ascendancy with creatures that make mana. It could be Crystalline Crawler and clones of it, it could active man-lands, it could be mana rocks animated by March of the Machines. Whatever the combination of things is, you can start untapping mana with every non-creature spell, and suddenly you realize that a third of the deck is non-creature spells that cost 4 or less and by the end of the turn you've spent 20 or 30 mana.
And then there's Azor's Gateway, a card that can tap for 40 of any color. This deck has 4 ways to untap the gateway to turbo flip, and 5 to untap it as a land after flipping. Typically, a flipped Gateway takes 3 turns to end the game. There is an extra secret way to flip it in this deck as well. Saheeli, Sublime Artificer can turn Azor's Gateway into a clone of Golden Guardian, and then they can fight to flip Azor's Gateway into its printed backside, Sanctum of the Sun. I promise it works that way, and probably nobody will believe you when you try to do this.
Knowledge Pool, Possibility Storm, Eye of the Storm
These three cards have a lot in common. "Whenever a player casts a spell, exile that spell, then they play another spell." The trick is what happens when you control more than one at the same time and they all want to exile the same spell. Knowledge Pool is the simple one because it uses the word "if." If they exile the spell, they get one out of Knowledge Pool, but if they don't exile the spell to Knowledge Pool, they get nothing out. There could be 1000 Knowledge Pools, there would still only be one that gets the card and gives one back. Possibility Storm is similarly simple, but in the opposite way; there is no if, so the ability resolves to the end whether or not the spell is actually removed by Possibility Storm. If the spell gets countered or exiled by something else, you still get a spell from your library from Possibility Storm. This means, if there were 1000 Possibility Storms and you cast an artifact, you'd end up flipping through looking for 1000 artifacts (and the first trigger puts the triggering spell on the bottom, so you'd end up getting that one back as well.) Eye of the Storm lies somewhere between the two. There is no if in Eye of the Storm, so you get to cast the spells exiled by Eye of the Storm whether or not the original spell is exiled by it, but you only get to copy that spell if Eye of the Storm does eat it, so letting another permanent exile the spell means you only get to copy the cards otherwise exiled by Eye of the Storm. Another distinction of Eye of the Storm that differentiates it from the other two is that it triggers from spells cast from zones other than the hand. Possibility Storm and Knowledge Pool only trigger off cards cast from the hand, where Eye of the Storm triggers off of any instant or sorcery card played. (The "card" distinction is what keeps it from triggering itself). But this means that Eye of the Storm accepts spells cast off Knowledge Pool, Possibility Storm, and Mind's Desire.
If multiples of these are on the field and controlled by different players, what happens becomes dictated by whose turn it is and you better hope you've got instant speed everything, but there's not a strategy you can plan ahead for that situation, so go find a judge if you get bogged down or confused. But in the much more likely scenario that you're in charge of everything, you can stack the triggers in the order that benefits you. If you want a spell in Eye of the Storm, you have that resolve first and you've gotten what you want, you can still Possibility Storm if that's out, and you get nothing out of Knowledge Pool. If you have Knowledge Pool and Eye of the Storm, you can have Knowledge Pool resolve first, get a spell out of that, and still cast everything in Eye of the Storm. If the spell cast out of Knowledge Pool is an instant or sorcery, that will trigger Eye as well, and then you copy every spell exiled by Eye (including the one out of Knowledge Pool) twice. If you have Possibility Storm and Knowledge Pool, you can let Knowledge Pool resolve first, get a spell out, then Possibility Storm anyways, getting two spell from eat cast from hand. Letting Possibility Storm resolve first on spells your opponents cast can keep them from accessing Knowledge Pool or filling Eye of the Storm (though you can't prevent them from casting spells already in Eye of the Storm). And if you have all 3 permanents out and you cast an instant or sorcery, you can get something out of Knowledge Pool, cast an instant or sorcery from your deck, and cast all the instants and sorceries in the Eye (atleast twice).
As an illustration of how rediculous this can be, I will use an extreme example: you control all 3, you have 7 mana available, Knowledge Pool has an inconsequential instant or sorcery in it, and your hand contains Mind's Desire and Firestorm. Cast Mind's Desire, all 3 trigger, storm count 1. Knowledge Pool trigger on top eats Mind's Desire and casts an instant or sorcery out (from here referred to as "spell"), triggering Eye of the storm. Storm count is 2, stack is Eye/spell/PS on sorcery/Eye. With those on the stack, cast Firestorm from hand and let Knowledge Pool eat that as well, casting out Mind's Desire and triggering Eye again as well as the storm trigger. Storm count is 4, and the stack is Eye/storm trigger/Mind's Desire/PS on instant/Eye/Eye/spell/PS on sorcery/Eye. Eye exiles Mind's Desire, then copies it and triggers storm for 4 more copies, then the first storm trigger makes 3 more copies for a grand total of 8. 8 Mind's Desire, storm count 5, stack is PS on instant/Eye/Eye/spell/PS on sorcery/Eye. Possibility Storm finds an instant, triggering Eye of the Storm, recasting the instant and Mind's Desire for 7 more copies. Then eye trigger from casting Firestorm resolves casting the two spells for 9 more Mind's Desires up to 24. That's 24 Mind's Desires, storm count 10, and the stack is Eye/spell/PS on sorcery/Eye. Eye eats the spell first cast out of Knowledge Pool, then cast it and the two other spells in the Eye making 11 more Mind's Desires for 35 Mind's Desires, 13 storm, and just the original 2 triggers left. Possibility Storm resolves finding a sorcery to cast, triggering Eye of the Storm and casting all 4 things in the Eye, making 15 more Mind's Desire copies and getting up to 18 storm, and then the first Eye trigger that been waiting since we cast Mind's Desire resolves, casting all 4 things in the Eye again for 19 more copies of Mind's Desire, making a grand total of 72 copies of Mind's Desire. And by the time you could do this, that's probably the entire library.
And one more addition on top of these things is Thousand-Year Storm, which copies the instant and sorceries you cast regardless of whether something tries to eat them or not. With Thousand-Year Storm and 2 instants/sorceries cast, for example, Turnabout would copy twice before going into Eye of the Storm, and then copy 3 again on the way out for 6 copies of Turnabout in total.
Mirrorweave and Infinite Reflection Shenanigans
Mirrorweave is shenanigans. You can make all your stuff really good for a turn, or you can make your opponent's stuff really bad for a turn. A Memnite turns into an Inferno Titan, or your opponent's Lord of Extinction turns into a Vedalken Plotter. While Mirrorweave can certainly be used aggressively, the instant speed and effecting opponents creatures makes Mirrorweave a great defensive card. I've said enough about shrinking threats into 1/1s, but even more than that, you can give things defender and make them not attack, which is a big deal when it's something like a 40/40 protection from creatures Uril, the Miststalker. This format is plagued with evasion and protection abilities, and Mirrorweave is great at blanking them. Ground flyers, make hexproof targettable, remove trample, destroy through indestructible. This gets even more significant with the additions of March of the Machines and Opalescence. Mirrorweave can (and has) dug through some of the most elaborate pillowforts I've ever seen. When someone has enchantments to make them and their permanents hexproof and limit me to one spell a turn and make me pay 16 mana per attacker or some such nonsense and they think they're safe, I can turn all their creature and enchantments into simple Inferno Titans and then wipe them out with my own Inferno Titan attack triggers.
But then there's the aggressive use of Mirrorweave with noncreatures turned into creatures. Wanna play Doomsday? Mirrorweave Mirror of Fate and go to town (more on this shortly). Need to do some damage fast? Mirrorweave Warstorm Surge. Wanna cast a rediculous amount of spells? Mirrorweave Possibility Storm and get replacement spells from every creature in play. Wanna steal an opponent's creatures? Mirrorweave a manland, and then Political trickery the creature away. Bonus there, your opponent's creatures turned lands aren't creatures so they can't block. Just need a lot of mana? Mirrorweave a Gilded Lotus. The options are plentiful.
Infinite Reflection is a similar effect (that I've since cut, but I'll leave this section here for those interested), but so very very different that the usage of the two cards barely overlaps at all. The differences are a)Infinite Reflection only effects you, so you can't use it defensively against things in play, b)Infinite Reflection is sorcery speed (usually), and c) Infinite Reflection lasts forever. And I mean forever. It doesn't just change the creatures while it's in play, it changes them so good they stay changed after it leaves the battlefield. So what does one use Infinite Reflection for then? One thing you can do is be a nuisance with Zedruu, by enchanting Zedruu and donating the aura, all their creatures will enter the battlefield as Zedruu. Another thing it does that Mirrorweave doesn't is act really really aggressive. Only your creatures are all Inferno Titans now... whoops. And also, effecting creatures as they enter the battlefield, you get etb things as well. Inferno Titan is neat for that too, but the zaniest interaction is with Crystalline Crawler (or an animated Pentad Prism), as every creature you pay colors of mana 4 (which you have access to all 5 colors) enters with counters that make mana to play more things. It can actually become difficult to win when all your creatures are locked as mana dorks forever, but only because it locks away zedruu. This deck can win with only mana dorks as creatures. And as an added fringe interaction, Infinite Reflection does not effect tokens, so if you want to keep a creature through Infinite Reflection, you can make a token clone with Stolen Identity before firing off Infinite Reflection.
One last shenanigan with Infinite Reflection specifically is when March of the Machines and Knowledge Pool are out. If you turn all your creatures in play into Knowledge Pools, they have no imprinted cards and can just eat spells without giving anything back until they've all been satisified. That's like having a field full of Decree of Silence except they're all 6/6 creatures. Just some food for thought.
Strionic Resonator Spam
Strionic Resonator can target a lot of things (though the 2 mana can be pretty steep in this deck), but there are a handful that make the mana investment quite lucrative. First is Zedruu, as doubling the draw trigger is pretty darn nice. Second is the Storm Trio, Mind's Desire, Possibility Storm, and Eye of the Storm, as you can copy the triggers and double your spells. Then with Thousand-Year Storm going, you can effectively copy you instants and sorceries on the stack, and if that includes Turnabout you're in the money. You can do a similar trick with Jeskai Ascendancy, but that's a subject for the combos section.
Build Your Own Doomsday
By this point, I have to have mentioned building a Doomsday like 48,000 times, so now it's time to talk about what that actually means. Well, if my card tags worked right, you can just read Doomsday yourself and then I don't have to explain anything. Frankly, if you're reading this on a magic forum, you're probably familiar enough with Doomsday that I don't have to go on a long rant about what it is, certainly not all this trash I'm typing instead of "it picks a few cards from your library and replaces your library with those cards in the order of your choice," so let's move on to the "how" and "why" parts of playing jeskai doomsday. To turn Mirror of Fate into Doomsday, you need to exile your library first, and the easy way to do that is activate Mirror of Fate twice. The first activation exiles your library so that the second activation has a lot more options to choose from. There are a few ways to get two activations in the deck right now. To list them: Saheeli, Sublime Artificer, Echo Storm, Time Spiral, Temporal Cascade, Mirrorweave with March of the Machines, and Rest In Peace. Time Spiral and Temporal Cascade are a bit more tricky to pull off: you don't have much of a library because you activated Mirror of Fate already, so with enough care, you can manage the number of cards being shuffled in with the sorceries so that you redraw Mirror of Fate immediately or in short order. Rest In Peace is the best one, as exiling Mirror of Fate before it's ability resolves allows you to choose Mirror of Fate to put back into the library to redraw later. If you've done it right, the second time you activate, you're choosing up to 7 cards from essentially the entire deck to become your library.
In a Doomsday deck, you generally set your 5 card library to draw into the win. Well, it's a good thing we get those 2 extra cards to work with, because if you're trying to stack a win condition in this deck, you're likely looking to the next section...
4-Card Combos!
4 cards minimum, that's a hard rule. 2 or 3 card combos are efficient, and efficiency is lame-o. Feel free to ask any opponent ever, and they'll gladly tell you how lame your combo win was. But when it takes 4 or more pieces to create the infinite loop, at least you know you had to work for it! It's like assembling Blasting Station/Summoning Station/Salvaging Station/Grinding Station except my combos are better because
they weren't designed by Wizards of the Coastthey're extra double plus convoluted, and that's just the essence of style. I hope people reading understand the nonsense tone I'm going for, but in all seriousness, the greatest joy I've gotten out of making this thread is that more than just appreciating the deck style, people have immitated these win conditions, and that's just such lunacy that I can only smile.Memnite/Zedruu, the Greathearted/Warstorm Surge/Dissipation Field = Infinite Damage
Control Warstorm Surge, then use Zedruu to donate someone else Dissipation Field. Finally, play Memnite. Warstorm Surge triggers having Memnite deal 1 damage to that player, triggering Dissipation Field to return Memnite to your hand, and then Memnite costs zero so you can repeat this process for free until they die. If more than one opponent needs to die, the Dissipation Field will return to you when an opponent with it dies, just make sure not to kill with Memnite itself as the Dissipation Field trigger won't resolve to bounce it if the controler of that trigger dies.
But what if you don't have Memnite and you want to do the same trick? Luckily for you, there's a backup free creature. [c]Crystalline Crawler]/c] makes as much mana as it costs if you happen to make 4 colors of mana to cast it. Which you can do once you cast it because it makes any color of mana. Sweet!
But what if you have the Memnite, but not the Warstorm Surge? In that case, you can strap Infinite Reflection onto an Inferno Titan, and your free Memnite is now an Inferno Titan that does 3 damage on etb! you can even do this without Zedruu involved if you're willing to ping yourself a bunch of times.
Opalescence/Detention Sphere/Sakashima the Impostor/Warstorm Surge = Infinite damage
Another infinite etb combo, and the one that forced me to acquire a Detention Sphere as I was already playing the other 3 cards. Opalescence makes Detention Sphere a creature, then Sakashima can clone Detention Sphere. Then it enters the battlefield and exiles a permanent not named Detention Sphere. And its name isn't Detention Sphere, it's name is Sakashima the Impostor, so it can exile itself. Then the leave the battlefield trigger returns itself to play. Throw in a Warstorm Surge and suddenly all your opponents die.
Rest In Peace, Mirror of Fate, Temporal Mastery, Font of Mythos = Infinite turns
Play those 4 in no particular order. Now activate Mirror of Fate, which gets exiled by Rest In Peace, then pick Mirror of Fate and Temporal Mastery as 2 of the 3 cards you want to draw on your extra turn. Draw them, then repeat the process. Each cycle you get another turn and another card of your choice. This combo can be done with any extra draw effect, but Font of Mythos is just the simplest to explain. Howling Mine seems simpler, but since you only go in an exact circle, it only wins if your board can kill people already.
Jeskai Ascendancy/Strionic Resonator/March of the Machines/Mana Creatures = Infinitely large creatures and maybe infinite mana
March of the Machines makes Strionic Resonator and your mana rocks into creatures. Jeskai Ascendancy triggers to untap your creatures. Strionic Resonator copies the Jeskai Ascendany trigger to untap all creatures, and that includes Strionic Resonator and mana rocks to pay for another activation. Lather, rinse, repeat. At the very least, those creatures will get pumped to infinity, but if you make an extra mana, you can have infinite mana as well. There are ways without multiple mana rocks in play: Crystalline Crawler is a mana dork and so are activated man lands.
Similarly enough that I'm just listing it in this combo, Strionic Resonator/mana rocks/Eye of the Storm/Turnabout. Strionic Resonator copies the Eye of the Storm trigger, copying turnabout to untap all your artifacts to let you copy the Eye of the Storm trigger again. If the mana rocks make 3 mana, it's infinite mana. If there's another spell in the Eye, that's infinite copies of that spell. Plenty of ways to end the game with infinite strionic resonator activations. And if you have both Turnabout and Catch // Release in Eye of the Storm, you can untap lands with Turnabout and Resonator with Catch to go infinite (and eventually cast infinite copies or Release, obviously)
Since this is the first combo listed with infinite mana, I'll mention the ways to win with infinite mana. Infinite mana with Nin, the Pain Artist draws your library, or mills someone to death, or kills everyone with Arcbond. Infinite mana with zedruu donates all permanents except for Barren Glory. Infinite mana with Walking Archive makes everyone draw infinite cards on their upkeep, so you can just pass the turn and win. Inferno Titan can be made arbitrarily large, especially with Warstorm Surge for the immediate kill.
Eye of the Storm, Mind's Desire, Rest in Peace, Mirror of Fate
(This one is a doozy. 4 cards put together in so convoluted a way that I was playing all the pieces for years before I noticed the full infinite. At this point, I think this combo is my greatest pride as a magic player.)
Have Eye of the Storm, Rest In Peace, and Mirror of Fate in play. Cast Mind's Desire, no prior storm necessary. Eye of the Storm triggers, then resolves, exiling Mind's Desire, then casting a copy. The original casting of Mind's Desire counts toward storm, so when the copy is cast, it makes a storm copy. With those two copies on the stack, respond by activating Mirror of Fate. It's exiled by Rest In Peace when it is sacrificed. When the ability resolves, you choose up to 7 face up exiled cards you own, which in this case is 2 cards: Mind's Desire and Mirror of Fate. Those 2 cards become your library and everything else is exiled. Then the copies of Mind's Desire resolve, exiling 2 random cards from your library, which are the only 2 cards in your library. Cast Mirror of Fate for free, then cast Mind's Desire for free, except this time the storm count is higher, so you can begin casting every spell in the deck for free as many times as you want. Infinite turns with Temporal Mastery, infinite mana with Turnabout, infinite damage with Warstorm Surge. My preferred win condition if I get this assembled is get flash and then make a big stack where everyone sacrifices all permanents with infinite Releases, shuffle hands and graveyards back in with Temporal Cascade, exile all libraries with infinite Knowledge Pool triggers, set up infinite turns, then resolve Barren Glory, and then pass the turn to myself.
Note: March of the Machines gives Mirror of Fate summoning sickness.
Precursor Golem/Ephemeral Shields/Jeskai Charm/Arcbond
Ephemeral Shields radiating makes all your golems indestructible. Jeskai Charm gives them lifelink. Arcbond makes it so when one is damaged, it deals that much damage to everything, but since it targetted one golem, they'll trigger damage back and forth at each other. This would go on until they died, but they're indestructible so they can't die. And because they have lifelink, you gain life faster than you die while everyone else suffers. Just make sure that none of your opponents are immune to damage or have a lifelink golem or this line of play can cause a draw. And also make sure you can damage a creature. The combo is instant speed, so attacking with golems probably gets the job done, but the combo doesn't work without initial damage.
Additionally, this can be done without Jeskai Charm if you've somehow kept the highest life total at the table, and it can be done with Bonus Round instead of Precursor Golem so long as you have two creatures to apply the copies of the spells to. That version comes with the added bonus of theoretically having Zedruu deals the lethal damage.
Barren Glory
I guess winning with Barren Glory isn't really a 4-card infinite combo, but it definitely feels like a combo win, and there are a few ways to do it. The most rediculous method, and consequently the easiest to pull off is the infinite Mind's Desire combo above. Otherwise, it's not easy to win with Barren Glory. It may not look like it, but there are 4 distinct requirements to triggering it and they're all difficult.
1) Control Barren Glory: seems easy enough, just play the card... but if someone can destroy it after you're out of cards and permanents, you're out of luck.
2) Control no other permanents: seems harder. The deck has 3 ways to get rid of all other permanents. First, you can make enough mana to donate everything with zedruu. Second, you can cast Leave // Chance to just pick them all up. Third, you can sacrifice everything to enough copies of Release, either by rediating across a ton of golems or copying a lot with Eye of the Storm and Bonus Round. (If you do that last part, you'll need to float mana to cast Barren Glory after the field is clear.)
3) Have no cards in hand: the hardest part. This deck spends all day drawing cards, and now they need to be gone. If you have infinite mana, you might be able to play everything and get rid of it, but lands get in the way. Otherwise, the 2 cards of note are Firestorm and Temporal Cascade. Both can clear out a hand, but Temporal Cascade is the best option, as it makes sure your opponent's can't surprise you after it resolves.
4) Reach your upkeep: going for the Barren Glory win and passing the turn naturally means not just Barren Glory needs to survive, you do too. And that means surviving the combined power of every creature in play. To avoid this scenario, we have Vedalken Orrery, Leyline of Anticipation, and Temporal Mastery to keep our opponents from taking any pesky turns between setting up Barren Glory and winning with it.
Changelog
4/18/2015
- Enduring Ideal
- Quest for Ancient Secrets
- Temple Bell
- 1 of each basic
+ Mind Over Matter
+ Horn of Greed
+ Chrome Mox
+ Mox Diamond
+ Mikokoro, Center of the Sea
+ Forbidden Orchard
6/18/2015
-Pandemonium
-Wild Evocation
-Psychosis Crawler
-Warp World
+Gilded Lotus
+Sacred Ground
+Price of Glory
+Barren Glory
8/30/2015
-Fog Bank
-Wall of Denial
-Spellbook
-Elixir of Immortality
-Sol Ring
-Horn of Greed
-Venser's Journal
-Sacred Ground
-Mana Flare
-Price of Glory
+Oath of Lieges
+Pentad Prism
+Firestorm
+Temporal Cascade
+Anvil of Bogardan
+Expedition Map
+Alhammarret's Archive
+Starfield of Nyx
+Tidespout Tyrant
+Phyrexian Metamorph
11/5/2015
-Wall of Omens
-Mogg Infestation
-Starfield of Nyx
+Vanish Into Memory
+Blasphemous Act
+Noyan Dar, Roil Shaper
1/26/2016
-Infinite Reflection
-Temporal Trespass
-life gain lands
+Sakashima, the Impostor
+Shared Fate
+filter lands
3/6/2016
- Rite of Replication
- one of each basic
+ Myojin of Seeing Winds
+ scry temples
9/24/2016
- Jace Beleren
- Tidespout Tyrant
- Shared Fate
+ Nahiri, the Harbinger
+ Aetheflux Reservoir
+ Drogskol Reaver
10/3/2017
- Evolving Wilds
- Terramorphic Expanse
- Academy Rector
- Clever Impersonator
- Swans of Bryn Argoll
- Drogskol Reaver
- Myojin of Seeing Winds
- Expedition Map
- Aetherflux Reservoir
- Blasphemous Act
- Land Tax
- Oath of Lieges
- Copy Enchantment
- Paradox Haze
- Seismic Assault
- Dream Halls
- Forced Fruition
- Mind Over Matter
+ Gemstone Caverns
+ Nykthos, Shrine to Nyx
+ Exotic Orchard
+ Goblin Welder
+ Crystalline Crawler
+ Precursor Golem
+ Sky Hussar
+ Inferno Titan
+ The Locust God
+ Strionic Resonator
+ Temple Bell
+ Leave // Chance
+ Chaos Warp
+ Catch // Release
+ Nahiri's Wrath
+ Stolen Identity
+ Detention Sphere
+ Infinite Reflection
7/2/2018
- 3x Island
- 2x Mountain
- 2x Plains
- Goblin Welder
- Shimmer Myr
- Noyan Dar
- Sky Hussar
- The Locust God
- Mox Diamond
- Anvil of Bogardan
- Teferi's Puzzle Box
- Thought Reflection
- Chaos Warp
- Nahiri's Wrath
- Stolen Identity
- Nahiri, the Harbinger
+ Clifftop Retreat
+ Glacial Fortress
+ Silfer Falls
+ Celestial Colonnade
+ Needle Spires
+ Wandering Fumerole
+ Nin, the Pain Artist
+ Dack's Duplicate
+ Raff Capashen
+ Swans of Bryn Argoll
+ Venser, Shaper Savant
+ Razia, Boros Archangel
+ Unbender Tine
+ Cathars' Crusade
+ Cowardice
+ Ephemeral Shields
+ Arcbond
+ Jeskai Charm
+ Bonus Round
+ Teferi, Hero of Dominaria
6/22/2019
- Dack's Duplicate
- Phyrexian Metamorph
- Cowardice
- Cathars' Crusade
- Infinite Reflection
- Shifting Borders
- Bonus Round
- Mountain
- Island
+ Minamo, School at Water's Edge
+ Forsaken City
+ Thousand-Year Storm
+ Role Reversal
+ Golden Guardian
+ Azor's Gateway
+ Saheeli, Sublime Artificer
+ Echo Storm
+ Aminatou's Augury
My turn 7, having 8 cards in hand, I played Dream Halls, I discarded Jace to cast Eye of the Storm, then discarded March of the Machines to cast Mind's Desire. The net result of that is 6 copies of Mind's Desire, exiles 6 cards at random. 5 noncreature spells and a land. Played the land, cast Jeskai Ascendancy, cast the 4 other spells (none of which were instants or sorceries) using the loot to fish out a sorcery and a card of matching color. Turned out to be Warp World and Seismic Assault. Discard the assault to cast Warp World to trigger Eye of the Storm, decline to cast Warp World out, cast Mind's Desire with storm at 11. From those I got a Copy Enchantment on Jeskai Ascendancy and a Shifting Borders to trigger Eye of the storm again, then I cast artifacts and enchantments from exile until Zedruu was over 21 power, cast Turnabout to tap all his creatures, and hit for lethal with general damage.
Just wanted to chime in and offer you my thanks for creating such an exquisite deck and an opening post to match it. I'm constantly searching for ways to improve upon my own Zedruu deck and your thread has inspired me to reexamine several cards that I previously glossed over. It is refreshing to find another player who is more interested in telling a story with his or her deck rather than simply taking the quickest route to victory.
Trap your friends in an endless game with this 23-card combo!
I took a look over at the thread you made, and what to donate with Zedruu really is a difficult question to answer. Donating things that lock someone out or kill them is just feel bad all around, but giving someone something they can kill you with is suicide and feels just as wrong. The best moments are always the instant speed saves where Zedruu can give a player the blocker they need to survive someone else's attack or the land they needed to aim removal at a third player, but with things like that it hardly matters what you have in the deck as long as it includes creatures and lands.
Something interesting I've realized during my journey to create the most entertaining games of Commander possible is that I am actually able to craft a better experience for everyone by raising the general power level of my deck. At first I was operating on a much lower level than my opponents. When I made my best effort to exert some kind of influence in the game, I was restricted by my ability to generate enough mana, cards, or other such resources necessary to create the fun gamestates that I desired. After recently including a few goodstuffy cards that I previously shied away from, I noticed how much more effective I had become at my goal.
Perhaps the greatest advantage I gathered from that adventure though was that because I resisted everyone's advances so little, players never perceive me as a threat anymore. As such, I was able to reconstruct my deck, removing all of the defensive cards that many other Zedruu decks pile on like Ghostly Prison. Aside from a few inclusions such as Wall of Denial, your deck seems to be constructed similarly. On another note, I am a bit surprised at how few mana rocks you've opted to include. With all of the cards you're drawing, I'd imagine that you often have a full grip and an empty coffer.
Trap your friends in an endless game with this 23-card combo!
And even if I did successfully get more artifact mana in here, I'd have some more mana to play with later in the game that doesn't play well with Seismic Assault, Mana Flare, or Turnabout.
I thought I'd chime in again after rereading your post. I'm a bit confused at to exactly how you recycle the Dissipation Field combo once you've killed a player with it. If you donate the Dissipation Field to a player and then kill them for whatever reason, the Field is going to end up in your exile because it was under their control when they lost the game. I suppose this isn't really a concern if you control a Venser, the Sojourner since you can blink Dissipation Field before the last point of damage is dealt. Mirror of Fate could also pull Dissipation Field out of exile to recycle the combo.
EDIT: Regarding mana rocks, if you happen to be interested in including any more of them, I would suggest Fellwar Stone to you. I don't know what the typical size of your multiplayer games are, but I tend to play with four players frequently. With four players, I always have access to at least two colors and frequently have access to all three.
Trap your friends in an endless game with this 23-card combo!
The events when a player leaves the game:
800.4 When a player leaves the game, all objects owned by that player leave the game and any effects which give that player control of any objects or players end. Then, if that player controlled any objects on the stack not represented by cards, those objects cease to exist. Then, if there are any objects still controlled by that player, those objects are exiled.
So when they lose, Zedruu's effect that gave them control of the Dissipation Field ends, and the player that had control beneath that effect regains control. A lot of people think donated permanents get exiled because they're used to rules for things like Bribery, but in that case its not a control effect ending, so it stays in play until the "any objects still controlled by that player are exiled" part of the rule.
I may have to add Fellwar Stone just because I can already enable it by donating lands myself (and I have a couple lying around somewhere). I'm not sure I ever thought about that. Thanks.
I also changed the thread title to be goat based.
I feel required to add a tale of the deck's exploits here.
The other day, I was playing with two other people. One was Atogatog Ally tribal and the other was Surrak Dragonclaw good creatures. I had played Zedruu, Leyline of Anticipation, and an early Mana Flare. Atogatog excitedly casts Villainous Wealth targeting the Surrak player for 13. The spell exiles and then casts a frightening selection of creatures (and 1 Time Warp) off the top of the deck, so I respond to them by instant speed casting Infinite Reflection on Zedruu and then donating Infinite Reflection to Atogatog so that all the creatures would enter play as a copy of Zedruu.
Zedruu died on his second turn, and I think I still lost that round later, but I got to make that play, so I've got no complaints.
After splicing several aspects of your decklist into mine, I've noticed that I draw more cards than ever before, but still lack the mana necessary to cast them. Your decision to include both Chrome Mox and Mox Diamond in your decklist fills me with reassurance that my own decision to include those same cards in my deck was well warranted. I am all too often willing to exchange cards for mana, even at the inefficient rate that the moxen offer. Their synergy with Possibility Storm and other such cards is just gravy. I've also begun to contemplate whether or not Gemstone Caverns is worth experimenting with for the same reason that I've decided to include the moxen. Cards are plentiful in the deck, so I can easily suffer the early setback from the cost of putting it into play. If I don't draw it in my opening hand, chances are that I find the card much later in the game when I'm digging deep into my deck anyways and already have the luxury of playing whatever color land I want into play untapped, causing the colorless penalty to feel rather unimportant.
Trap your friends in an endless game with this 23-card combo!
I'm running scenarios in my head to see if I could magical Christmasland a win on turn 1 with Gemstone Caverns. I know it currently could do a turn 2, and I've won as early as turn 4 in real life. I suppose with a Leyline of Anticipation in opening hand, Caverns is redundancy on things I can already do with a mox. This deck can hypothetically be pretty nuts.
Well done, mate!
I do have a couple of questions, though:
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The last time I was legitimately mana screwed out of a game, it was against a Karn deck. I Vedalken Plotter'd his Mishra's Workshop from him to try and hold him back, and I ended up stuck on 2 mana with no artifacts to play until I died.
With regards to Clone Legion, consider it on the list of things to test. I have been wanting a good silver bullet when someone gets a massive field of creatures since Mogg Infestation and Warp World are not good answers to something like a Krenko deck. I've been trying out Worldpurge, but my god, imagine Clone Legion under Eye of the Storm.
Gamble, Mystical Tutor,enlightened Tutor - Gamble would work extremely well, practically a 1 mana Demonic Tutor. I don't want that. I don't want the ability to just pick out a win condition from my deck. There used to be more tutor power in this deck (Wild Research, Idyllic Tutor) and everything but Academy Rector got cut simply because I get more enjoyment solving the jigsaw puzzle that random chance gives me than I do playing things reliably. If someone wanted to build a deck like this and include tutors, I won't tell them it's wrong, but it isn't to my personal taste.
Puca's Mischief - was in the deck years ago and got cut for not working well enough. The average CMC for things I want to donate is about 3. I don't really care that I can't get expensive things, but I have to have a nonland thing I'm willing to donate AND an opponent needs to have a nonland thing that costs equal or less, and you'd be surprised how often people can play a whole game of EDH without any one or two cost permanents. Not to mention, there are already 15 4 drops in the deck.
Celestial Dawn, Teferi, Mage of Zhalfir - I won't play these because 2 card combos are too feel bad. This goes beyond just trying to play nice and into actual multiplayer politics. If I have Zedruu out as the deck is, and someone can kill her without much cost, they'll probably do it. But if they're choosing between killing Zedruu and killing another player's Prophet of Kruphix, they're going to kill the Prophet. If I play Celestial Dawn (or any of the bad donation friends) in the deck, it would not necessarily be wrong of them to kill Zedruu in that scenario since Zedruu can basically instant kill them. And then not only did I draw hate at myself, I took away the kill spell that would have killed the Prophet. I can't play Teferi, or everyone at the table is obligated to do anything they can, even arch-enemy against me, just for getting Knowledge Pool or Possibility Storm in play. And if Teferi is in the deck, I can't play Knowledge Pool just for kicks because if I accidentally flip Teferi into the pool, someone else can get the lock just by playing an instant.
So I'm assuredly not going to add any of those.
Kher Keep - The deck usually doesn't have a ton of mana to sink into something like this. 6 mana to gain a life and draw a card each turn so long as the targeted player has no sac outlets and never gets attacked is quite the stretch, especially in a deck where mana is absolutely the limiting factor. But it is just trading out a basic land (probably a plains) for another land, so I may have to try this one out and see how it goes.
Mox Opal - I'm afraid that I wouldn't hit metalcraft reliably enough. The two moxen in the deck can power out turn 1 Howling Mine, Mox Opal cannot. That said, spellbook is often just a free Forced Fruition/Mindmoil/Jeskai Ascendancy/Possibility Storm/Knowledge Pool trigger that doesn't do anything and I'm happy with it, so perhaps even without metalcraft it'd be nice. That said, it's not worth upwards of $30 to me to try it out and see, so I'll probably skip out on this unless I get one in a trade.
Chaos Warp - Good suggestion. Can be downright mean in conjunction with the Political Trickery trio (6 mana, get rid of an opponents land and get a random card from my deck).
Flash is so powerful in this deck, I won't cut either of those. The redundancy is good. Howling Mine effects benefit me first with flash, Mirror of Fate and Elixir of Immortality have saved my butt from milling because of flash, a lot of my enchantments are secret silver bullets that can be backbreaking with flash (instant speed Dissipation Field, Rest in Peace, March of the Machines, etc. have ruined many a plan). And having flash lets you hold out until right before your turn, which lets you sort of Magosi, the Waterveil yourself to do two turns of stuff in a row which timed correctly can go from zero to win while everyone else is caught with their pants down.
At any rate, I'm going to make some changes to this thread soon to update it to it's current paper form. There's just one card that I want and am missing, and then I'll fix this up all at once. Kher Keep, Chaos Warp, and Mox Opal will probably not be in that change, but perhaps the next time after that.
Thanks for the suggestions.
Along the lines of Land Tax, have you considered Oath of Lieges? While it's definitely not as good as Tax, there's a lot of room between Land Tax and a bad card. It also makes a great gift. And since you run so many expensive cards, how about Mana Vault? It's a one-shot, but then you get to give it away. Similarly, Pentad Prism, Grim Monolith and Sphere of the Suns. A super-duper janky version of these, that sort of works better with flash, is Iceberg.
As for cuts, I don't like the walls, except maybe Wall of Omens. I think you'd be better served playing set-up cards, like Azorius Signet and Compulsive Research, during the early turns than walls. If you can get to your late-game sooner, with ramp and card draw/selection, you won't need to do as much blocking anyway.
Finally, here are some (relatively) low budget color fixing lands that come into play untapped:
Hahaha, that's so mean. I never considered that play, even though I've been running Chaos Warp in my deck since day one. Zedruu giveth and Zedruu taketh away!
I absolutely should be playing Oath of Lieges, and I have no idea why I never considered it. It could be better for me than land tax. If I get to the point where it doesn't trigger for me, I can donate land with Zedruu to get back to active while effectively losing nothing and gaining Zedruu donation momentum. And with paradox haze, I can chase down a ramp deck fast. And it's group hug, it fits right in.
Those walls have been my friends for so long, I really hesitate to axe them. I've thought about it, but Fog Bank and Wall of Denial are so good at holding back the early game cheap shots. I really am not a fan of people going "well, who's the best target for this Woolly Thoctar? Probably the guy who only has Zedruu!" But if the things I'm playing get me going faster, Zedruu can just gain me that 5 life back anyway, and it's rare that someone kills me with little beats, and a Memnite is just as good at stopping one 21 power commander as Wall of Denial. I guess it's just one more thing for me to try out. Or maybe I'll continue to play as is and pay closer attention to when and how I actually play them.
I'll take this opportunity to list the changes I've made recently. The cuts...
Wild Evocation: As much as this card makes a fun time, it doesn't do anything if I don't cast it, and I've just run out of reasons to play it. If I can play it and have other things in hand, I'll have more fun playing them. If I can play it and have nothing else, it doesn't do anything. It was a great inclusion when I had no Dream Halls or Mana Flare or Mind Over Matter (and was in a playgroup with like 10 wraths per deck), but none of that is true anymore and I've lived the dream of Wild Evocation with 15 copies of Forced Fruition in play.
Pandemonium: Another lived dream. I don't need redundancy on the combo with Memnite, Warstorm Surge is plenty, and I've done the Mirrorweave on Pandemonium.
Psychosis Crawler: People started guessing how I was going to win once I had Mindmoil or Forced Fruition down. I am not interested in ever being predicted.
Warp World: I play with two groups of people. One group hates this card. The other has a Krenko deck and a mono-gray deck, both of which benefit more from this card than I do. I love the card, and I hope to add it back one day, but for now it doesn't belong.
In their place, I added another mana rock and another rediculous combo.
Gilded Lotus: One time someone had a Gilded Lotus, and I had March of the Machines and Jeskai Ascendancy, and then I put Infinite Reflection on the Lotus and proceeded to win in grand fashion that turn. So I put my own in the deck.
Sacred Ground, Price of Glory: Donating Price of Glory makes it so an ability an opponent controls is destroying my lands. Then Sacred Ground brings it back untapped, thus making infinite mana on other people's turns. I thought this up a while ago and was excited to have another Zedruu-centric combo, but then was sad to find that I was not the first person to do it. And it wasn't like I had much use for infinite mana. My only mana sink is Zedruu...
Barren Glory: Infinite mana with Zedruu out can donate my entire field for the Barren Glory win, though if I'm being honest, it has been more common that I'll get out Mind Over Matter and Gilded Lotus with more cards in hand than on the field.
Barren Glory will probably get cut eventually when the novelty wears off, but for now I'm having fun with it.
Under consideration:
Oath of Lieges: I'll get a copy and find a place for it because that's a good addition.
Pentad Prism: I want to add it, but the low impact nature means I feel no pressure to add it and probably won't until I naturally want to cut things and need an addition.
Chaos Warp: It's removal, but fun removal. Also not getting priority enough for me to actively cut for it.
Tidespout Tyrant: I've been testing this one thoroughly. It's very strong. Another source of infinite mana with Sol Ring and a zero-cost card, which also adds another way to Memnite/Warstorm Surge people. It ends games if I get it in multiples. I have no question that it is a validly powerful inclusion that leads to many fascinating board states, but I worry that it crosses the line into "too much" and I'll end up cutting it like Psychosis Crawler.
Things I'm considering cutting:
Wall of Denial,Fog Bank: I may not need them. I'd have to try to find out.
Venser's Journal: With the loss of Wild Evocation, this is now the top of the list of things I rarely bother casting. By the time I can cast this, I very often has no maximum hand size already, and if the life gain is significant, it means I have cards in hand to do more important things than gain life. It's occassionally strong when my hand is full from just Land Tax, and it is a strong card, but it's more suited to control decks that want to keep a big hand and not just end the game (or decks with Necropotence).
Copy Enchantment: This very rarely hits that sweet spot of relevance. It tends to fit solidly into dead card or overkill.
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Other colorless ramp fun can be had by using Thawing Glaciers and Rings of Brighthearth for two lands an activation or you could use any way to untap the glaciers and reactivate it before it returns to your hand at the end of turn. A part of me feels like Amulet of Vigor would be fun here as well (and prove to have some weird interactions with other cards in the deck) but I don't know if it deserves a slot in the 99.
One other card I'd like to mention is Mycosynth Lattice. If you have one (as it is another expensive card not worth trading for unless you MUST have it) it something fun to experiment with. I know you play this deck in a group hug way, so I'd reccomend not playing the lattice with March of the Machines (a destroy all lands now and forever lockout) unless you float enough mana to follow it up with something like Descent of the Dragons and wipe the board giving everyone an army of flying 4/4 dragons (It sounds like it would be the most awesome boardwipe ever).
I don't like giving people creatures because they tend to sacrifice them and make me sad. Perplexing Chimera doubly so because the ability to auto-counter my spells forces me to bait out the trigger before I can do anything important, and that's just uncomfortable.
Crucible + fetchlands is a fine engine for not missing any land drops. I already do that pretty well by drawing cards. Thawing Glaciers is great with Rings of Brighthearth and Amulet of Vigor, but those cards need to otherwise justify themselves. Amulet of Vigor would work with basically Thawing Glaciers and the bounce lands, not nearly good enough to warrant a slot. Right now, the deck has 8 permanents with non-mana activated abilities. Copying Elixir of Immortality is useless. Copying Zedruu just saves me 1 mana. Copying Walking Archive just saves me 2 mana. Copying Seismic Assault would be very desperate. Copying Mind Over Matter can get me 4 mana from a discard instead of 3. Copying Venser would be almost entirely useless. Copying Jace or Mikokoro might be worth drawing a card in a pinch. The one really good use is Mirror of Fate, since double that ability is Doomsday. So Rings would largely be a dead card or really mana intensive card draw unless I happen to draw it alongside Mirror of Fate. I'm ok playing cards that are dead without counterparts, but Rings would be dead in the beginning without support cards and also dead at the end since there's nothing it does here to actually win the game. It's another instance of "card is really good, I really like it, just not in this deck."
And since I don't think Rings or Amulet are worth the slot even with Thawing Glaciers, I can't justify Thawing Glaciers as it'd just be a mana-sucking way to ensure I don't miss land drops, a problem I usually don't have. Which is all fine, since Thawing Glaciers and Amulet of Vigor have a happy existence in my Patron of the Moon deck.
I can see your thoughts with the Mycosynth Lattice suggestion. It does interesting things (and color fixing!), which should be able to do fun things with other interesting cards, but careful examination shows that killing things with March of the Machines is really its only interaction with this deck. Nothing else here cares about things being artifacts. If I was playing some "artifacts matter" cards, like Blinkmoth Urn or Bludgeon Brawl (lol) or Unwinding Clock, then it could definitely lead down some fun avenues for building ideas.
Basically, the cards which you're suggesting are going a different route than me, which is cool. Have fun with it.
Anther card I'm considering making a spot for is Empyrial Plate because with all the card draw I've seen Zedruu give as a general it could easily push Zedruu past 21 commander damage and win late game.
Side note: I guess I'm getting another Opalescence. I may ease my cuts by giving Secred Ground and Price of Glory the axe already.