MTG Salvation

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When I first started making an Azorius deck, I wanted to originally do something a little off-beat, something that would slow down the pace of the game, and something that really drove home the theme of taxing that was shared by blue and white. The result of that exercise was the abomination that is listed below.

Overall, I would consider this deck a total failure. Although it was fun to build and tune, the resulting deck was miserable to both play with and to play against. I either got hated out of the game from the opening die-roll or the opponents conceded one by one once their positions became less and less tenable. Never actually winning a game (as opposed to always getting concessions) ends up being nowhere near as fun as it sounds.

I post this deck as a cautionary tale; it is really easy to take a theme too far even when you aren’t trying to really be an ass. Your opponent’s have to be in a good place mentally to accept the challenge and to actually want to combat a deck like this, but even then it’s one of those things that is cute maybe once or twice.

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This decklist hasn’t been updated in a while, but it would most certainly have Baral, Chief of Compliance in the mix if I were to update it.

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Taxing “All” Spells

• Grand Arbiter Augustin IV – The leader of the deck for a reason, GAAIV does double-duty to not only make all your opponent’s stuff cost more but it also cheapens all of your colored spells to help counteract some of the other cost increases going on in the deck.
• Chancellor of the Annex – A little expensive, but it gets the job done well.
• Sphere of Resistance – Resistance is futile…
• Spelltithe Enforcer – Not quite “your money or your life”, but “your mana or your permanents” is as close as it gets in Magic: The Gathering.
• Rhystic Study – I guess we will allow our opponent’s to bribe us with cards instead of paying this tax…

Taxing Non-Creature Spells

• Thalia, Guardian of Thraben, Glowrider, Vryn Wingmare, Thorn of Amethyst – These are all symmetrical, so you have to be careful. These throw a huge monkey wrench in most deck’s gameplans by taxing their mana artifacts and ramps spells.
• Mystic Remora – Once again, we are not above bribery in the form of cards instead of our opponents paying the tax.

Taxing Creatures/Combat

• Æther Barrier – One of the few reasonable spells that makes creatures cost more.
• Invoke Prejudice – Most of your creatures are white (only 5 have have blue), so this will often double the cost of opponent’s creature spells.
• Windborn Muse, Archangel of Tithes, Propaganda, Ghostly Prison – If you want to attack me, it’s going to cost you.
• Dream Tides – I said, it’s going to cost you…
• Magus of the Tabernacle, The Tabernacle at Pendrell Vale, Pendrell Mists, Slow Motion, Cowed by Wisdom – If you want to keep those creatures around, it’s going to cost you even more.
• Blinding Angel – Sometimes, we make them skip combat altogether.
• Isperia, Supreme Judge – If your opponents do manage to actually attack you, they get to give you cards. Lucky them.

Other Taxes

• Leonin Arbiter, Aven Mindcensor – Taxes or limits searches on libraries, making fetchlands, ramp spells, and tutors all very inefficient.
• Supression Field – Taxes all non-mana activated abilities, with the big hit being to fetchlands.
• Kira, Great Glass-Spinner, Monastery Siege (usually choosing Dragons) – Taxes any spell targeting your creatures.
• Aura of Silence – Taxes artifacts and enchantments
• Squeeze – Sorceries now cost a fortune. The deck doesn’t run any Sorceries on purpose.
• Fatespinner – Instead of charging you mana, we’ll just start confiscating parts of your turn.

Tax Loopholes

• Sunscape Familiar, Stormscape Familiar, Sapphire Medallion, Pearl Medallion – Will reduce the cost of the appropriately colored spells you play.
• Cloud Key – You will likely be naming Enchantment most of the time.
• Land Tax – While the opponent is scuffling around trying to gather as much mana together as possible, you use this to your advantage and dig for lands. Shuffle them back with Jace, the Mind Sculptor for massive card advantage.

Other New Regulations

• Hushwing Gryff, Torpor Orb – ETB triggers shall not trigger.
• Linvala, Keeper of Silence, Cursed Totem – Activated abilities of creatures cannot be used.
• Stony Silence, Null Rod – Activated abilities of artifacts cannot be used.
• Damping Matrix – Listen to me when I say that activated abilities of artifacts and creatures cannot be used!
• Angel of Jubilation – Life can’t be paid nor creatures sacrificed to pay costs.
• Karmic Justice, Martyr's Bond – An Eye for and Eye…
• Hanna, Ship's Navigator, Sun Titan – Mandatory Recycling...

Disposal Procedures

• Swords to Plowshares, Path to Exile – Kill it
• Counterspell, Mana Leak, Arcane Denial – Counter it
• Capsize, Cyclonic Rift, Wash Out, Ætherize, Ætherspouts, Jace, the Mind Sculptor – Bounce it

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Cards in theme, but didn’t make the cut
You could make 3 decks with all the possible cards that could go into a deck like this, and if you are quite the masochist you can build all three, get some “friends” and play them all against one another (sounds about as much fun as a Forked Shahrazad). Since this thread is more for the sake of posterity than anything else, it made sense to document all the possibilities and why they were either not good enough or were too miserable even for this deck (which is saying something).

• Wrath of God, Supreme Verdict – I gradually cut all the Sorceries in the deck so that I could run Squeeze, but in the end you find that sweeping the board is overrated when your opponent’s can’t use the creatures they cast anyway.
• Fountain Watch, Greater Auramancy, Hanna’s Custody – Protecting your taxation machine from spells or effects is a good idea, but there is only so much space.
• Unifying Theory – Almost good enough to run as a very flavorful source of card draw.
• In the Eye of Chaos – We run too many instants to actually run this.
• Lodestone Golem, Trinisphere – Good cards that don’t quite make the cut.
• Stasis, Back to Basics, Static Orb, Winter Orb, Rising Waters, Embargo, Tsabo's Web, Storage Matrix, Hokori, Dust Drinker – You at least want to give your opponents a fighting chance.
• Opposition, Tangle Wire – Only slightly less annoying than not untapping at all.
• Collective Restraint, War Tax – One of them even has tax in the name, but more Propaganda effects weren’t necessary.
• Frozen Æther, Kismet, Loxodon Gatekeeper, Orb of Dreams, Thalia, Heretic Cathar – Since we aren’t preventing untapping, having things ETB tapped is more of a speedbump than anything.
• Brainwash, Oppressive Rays, Mana Chains – I like that these cards are cheap and reusable with Sun Titan, but I only had room for Cowed By Wisdom.
• Mana Matrix, Planar Gate, Feroz's Ban – These care perfect kinds of effects that just cost a little too much to be useful.
• Dissipation Field, Equilibrium, Erratic Portal, Crystal Shard, Words of Wind, Tradewind Rider, Tidespout Tyrant – There are lots of cards we could play that would make it nearly impossible for our opponent’s to keep a creature on the battlefield, but what fun would that be.
• Overburden, Mana Breach – These cards almost made it. They are quite nasty when they are on the battlefield, but both are symmetrical effects that can really hamper your own game plan if you are not careful.
• Land Equilibrium, Mana Vortex, Storm Cauldron, Sunder, Armageddon, Ravages of War – You can really mess with people’s mana if you want to , but all you’ll get is groans and auto-concessions.
• Grafdigger's Cage, Mana Web, Rest In Peace, Containment Priest – There are a few anti-shenanigan cards like this that I wanted to include, but there just wasn’t space.
• Dovescape – Mostly for the lols, but it can be a legitimate win-con (especially with Guile)
• Arcane Laboratory, Rule of Law, Eidolon of Rhetoric, Mana Maze – With all the taxing going on, there really isn’t a need to hold the opponent to one spell a turn.
• Ward of Bones – This card can be amazing in the right deck, but in a deck that relies on permanents to successfully lock someone out it often doesn’t prevent them from playing anything. However, it does a great job post-Armageddon of sealing up the game if that is what you are looking for. I am not.
• Knowledge Pool+Teferi, Mage of Zhalfir or Vesuvan Shapeshifter+Brine Elemental or Mycosynth Lattice + Karn, Silver Golem or March of the Machines – I like good synergies just as much as the next guy, but infinite locks with no chance of escape are just game-enders where it feels like nobody won.
• Mindlock Orb – There is plenty of anti-search hate as it is.
• Equipoise, Shimmer – Making things phase in and out ends up being more of a pain than it is worth.
• Teferi, Mage of Zhalfir, Grand Abolisher, Defense Grid – You really don’t need to worry about players playing things on your turn.
• Spirit of the Labyrinth – Hosing card draw can sometimes hurt you more than your opponents.
• World Queller, Smokestack, Michiko Konda, Truth Seeker – I wanted this to play out less like a Stax deck.
• Kataki, War's Wage, Energy Flux, Aura Flux – These hurt you more often than our opponent.
• Silent Arbiter, Crawlspace, Peacekeeper, Ensnaring Bridge, Moat, Magus of the Moat, Stonehorn Dignitary – Preventing creatures from attacking is good, but if all the other effects are going the right way then they won’t be able to attack anyway. The deck still runs Blinding Angel from this class of cards.
• Island Sanctuary+Mystic Decree – One of my favorite combos from yesteryear, so I thought it deserved a special mention.
• Shared Fate, Timesifter – Reserved for only your worst enemies.

Anyway, there have been a few thread recently that have talked about lockout cards in blue and white and overall stax/prison strategies, so I thought I would throw my deck and opinion in on the party. Hopefully, this saves people some time in figuring out what not to do. This is one of those decks that I have no intention of rebuilding, so take it for what its worth.

How would you feel about the deck had you went less into tax and more into control and more interactive effects?

Best individual card analysis I have read in a long time.

I tried testing the deck (missing The Tabernacle at Pendrell Vale and Invoke Prejudice but tried anyhow) but so far with little success. I am long dead before establishing enough tax control. Either I am killed by early random combo or 1/2 of my early creatures/enchantments/artifacts were destroyed/countered which slows taxing enough so that everyone can develop into late midgame which I can not win (except against aggro decks).

Can someone share advice on how to survive without stasis type effects.

Quote from Break3r »

How would you feel about the deck had you went less into tax and more into control and more interactive effects?

To be honest, that was the point of the deck in the first place; to create a deck that put all the "tax" cards in one place. I think that a straight-up UW control with a few key tax cards might be much better at actually controlling the game, but I'm not sure that it necessarily means you will face less hate.

Quote from gmmicko »

Best individual card analysis I have read in a long time.

I tried testing the deck (missing The Tabernacle at Pendrell Vale and Invoke Prejudice but tried anyhow) but so far with little success. I am long dead before establishing enough tax control. Either I am killed by early random combo or 1/2 of my early creatures/enchantments/artifacts were destroyed/countered which slows taxing enough so that everyone can develop into late midgame which I can not win (except against aggro decks).

Can someone share advice on how to survive without stasis type effects.

If you are facing down a lot of combo or counter-magic, then you would need to step up your game as well and really ratchet up the hate. This deck was created for slowing down a pretty laid-back meta where synergy and theme are the usual suspects. I would take a hard look at the kinds of hate you need for your meta and cut the tax cards that are less likely to matter. You then have room to add in more countermagic of your own (cards like Force of Will, Misdirection, Daze, Swan Song, and Spell Pierce would all go a long way towards protecting your board state). I would also add in more tutoring (Enlightened Tutor especially) and card draw (especially some early cantrips like Brainsorm, Ponder, and Preordain).

There's a Grand Arbiter deck in my regular playgroup, and a few cards that perform very well in there that I do not see in your list are Lodestone Golem (which you note as excluded for not making the cut) and the new Dampening Sphere. The latter is particularly brutal, depending on your opponent.

Any thoughts on:

• Sakashima the Impostor - you can double down on your commander which might be nice.
• Helm of the Host - ok.... I totally get that this is a lot of mana but just.... think about putting this on your commander lol.
• Soul Tithe - its decent removal especially when you tax casting more things. I like it given that it can be put on any nonland permanent.

Quote from Outcryqq »

There's a Grand Arbiter deck in my regular playgroup, and a few cards that perform very well in there that I do not see in your list are Lodestone Golem (which you note as excluded for not making the cut) and the new Dampening Sphere. The latter is particularly brutal, depending on your opponent.

Lodestone Golem is perfectly fine here and should probably be in the deck. Damping Sphere is an interesting combo hoser that is much more in-theme than Arcane Laboratory and friends, and I would definitely swap it in for something like Invoke Prejudice (which is hard to cast in time to matter).

Quote from ISBPathfinder »

Any thoughts on:

• Sakashima the Impostor - you can double down on your commander which might be nice.
• Helm of the Host - ok.... I totally get that this is a lot of mana but just.... think about putting this on your commander lol.
• Soul Tithe - its decent removal especially when you tax casting more things. I like it given that it can be put on any nonland permanent.

- Sakashima the Impostor (and probably Phyrexian Metamorph) could both easily be in the deck. Copying GAAIV seem especially saucy.
- Helm of the Host on GAAIV is pretty nasty, but copying pretty much any creature in this deck would be really good. I don't see you having that kind of time, but it's worth a shot given the upside of pulling off some epic wins by smashing people with multiple Spelltithe Enforcers, or Sun Titans.
- Soul Tithe is solid; if I actually updated this deck this would replace Cowed By Wisdom. The deck hasn't really been updated for the last 2-3 years worth of sets, but maybe its time to dust it off and throw it into the ring once again.

If your opponents don't concede how do you close out the games? also do you feel like you can keep enough cards in your hand without Rhystic Study and/or Mystic Remora in play?

Quote from Alex916 »

If your opponents don't concede how do you close out the games? also do you feel like you can keep enough cards in your hand without Rhystic Study and/or Mystic Remora in play?

The concession problem is one of the primary reasons I abandoned the deck, but a Chancellor of the Annex or Isperia, Supreme Judge are sometimes enough to get the job done. For a deck like this, it's probably appropriate to add in some annoying win-cons like Azor's Elocutors or Mechanized Production.

As for card advantage, there is probably a need to run a few more cheap card draw effects like Ponder, Brainstorm, or Preordain, but you do have Jace, FoF, and TfK and often you can just sit back and wait unless you have a more cutthroat meta. If you do, then I'm pretty sure that you can control the game with less taxing effects and more controllish cards that actually remove the troublesome threats.

Yes, you should play the Ucantrip suite.

Thoughts on winning
1. Decree of Justice can avoid any tax and is uncounterable + instant speed
2. Cut most of your creatures, add Humility and up your planeswalker count
3. Combo wins (e.g. Rest in Peace + Helm of Obedience, infinite mana + X spell)
4. Monastery Mentor, IF you think you can protect him. He's nuts in U/W Control (imagine Future Sight + Sensei's Divining Top)
5. Isochron Scepter combos
6. Changing your entire deck to use GAAIV as the commander, but mainly just a control piece. Play U/W blink with GAAIV as commander

I like that you're going in on Squeeze. My opponents pretty much spend T3-4 only playing green ramp so it would shut them out hard. You can play Invoke Prejudice T4 reliably with color rocks and Mystic Gate. You should play it as much as possible just because I can't believe it's an actual card.