#opressive

Opressive decks work by this theme: if your opponent can’t do anything, then you do not need to put effort into winning. What that means is that a Prison deck can function by using all buisness cards and have something as simple as a 1/1 or an Elixir of Immortality as a wincon. This makes the deck incredibly powerful and flexible as all the cards are working to accomplish the same thing so you never have awkward draws where the cards don’t mesh right. It also frees space in the deck to add more ways to acomplish this instead of trying to diversify threats and add protection for your threats. You do not need protection, because prison strategies protect themselves.

One thing I should bring up here is the difference between a prison and a pillow fort. A pillow fort is a deck that stops your opponent from interacting with you, while a prison stops your opponent from... well, doing anything. Its a defense vs offense of hard control and they both serve to have few ways to win in exchange for overwhelming domination of the game. Pillow forts have an inherent weakness though; your opponent can find answers. No matter how big you build that wall there will always be some way to get over it. Enchantment wipes, direct damage, alternate wincons. You give your opponent a lot of time to find a way through your defenses. Prison on the other hand is a lock. Your offensive control makes it so that players can’t find answers or can’t ever use them. This difference also makes a huge change in what it is like to play against. Pillow fort is often called boring to play against while prison is outright infuriating. Neither strategy will make you friends but if you are already burning bridges I will take a glass of my opponent’s tears to sip as I sit by the hellfire.

Building a Prison:

A prison is often defined by the central card that creates the final lock. In a 60 card deck you would often have 4 of that card and 4 of each of the cards that support it. In commander however you do not have this luxury. What you do have is redundant engines and your commander. The most important part of the prison is your warden, your commander must support and fuel whatever lock peices you are using to end all fun.

Stasis/Winter Orb

This is the classic prison dating way back from Magic’s past. The goal here is to make sure creatures and lands never untap and therefore your opponents can’t fight you. This strategy requires a way for you to overide the restricion of not untapping yourself. Seedborn Muse and many other green untappers exist to help abuse these engines, but there is one commander in particular that goes crazy in this style of deck; 

Derevi can continuously untap your own permanents or tap down opponents permanents, and if the bird wizard is ever forced to leave the field he has a set mana cost to replay so that you do not get punished by your own cards. Using low mana cost mana dorks as control peices and ramp allows the deck to function smoothly and have multiple angles to create the lock. Access to green gives the untappers and mana dorks, blue gives you statis and counterspells to disrupt the opponent early on and make sure the prison can be assembled, and white gives you artifact/enchantment tutors and redundant peices in Hokori Dust Drinker

Blood Moon/Contamination

The key to this type of prison is that you aren’t actually destroying their mana, you are just making it useless. Contamination will shut down any nonblack deck and Blood Moon punishes the greedy manabases of Commander. While these two are cards of the same style they are not often ran together because of what they need. Contamination need fodder creatures and Blood Moon requires land destruction to take care of basics. There is one commander that excellently combines these though

Shattergang Brothers makes use of the Jund creatures that make life completely miserable for opponents; Acidic Slime, Avalanch Riders, and so on. While it does seem odd that you would run a 3 color commander in a deck that is trying to change land types they overcome this quite easily. Green has many rampant growth type effects that makes your mana stable with basics so you can run Blood Moon. Green also has Mana dorks again which can be utilized later for either Shatergang’s effect or to feed Contamination. Meanwhile black recursion engines and card draw makes sure that the juices are always flowing for contamination and Shattergang’s black activation is still useable. It is odd to think of it this way but Contamination does make Necropotence much easier to cast in a 3 color deck. Red gives us artifact removal (Which can also be attache to creatures again) to make sure players do not try to break the lock with mana rocks to bypass their useless lands.

Smokestacks/Descent into Madness

Its Cristmas morning and you run down to get your presents, but what is there? Coal and soot, because the Phyrexians have consumed and burned everything away. Smokestack and the banned Braids, Cabal Minion (RIP Braids and her beautiful smile) are probably the most infamous prison cards ever made. The Stax archetype is still a powerful contender in Vintage. Braids may have been banned a few years back but at that time we got Smokestack 2: With a Vengeance! Descent is often overlooked but it is able to completely wipe away all of existence with time. These cards operate off of the principal of attrition. You will come out ahead when you are trading 1for1 and you are generating more cards than your opponent. Well, I might be severely biased in this warden, but hell, he works so well that I use him:

Probably one of the most underated mono-black commanders Chainer is the perfect warden for the stax prison. He generates plenty of bodies to sacrifice to Smokstack and Descent, and can control the board using your opponents dead creatures against them. Mono-black comes with the combined power of Kokusho and Gray Merchant of Asphodel to mitigate his life loss and turn Smokestack into a life draining each turn wincon. Necropotence can draw tons of cards to throw to Descent as your opponent’s hands and fields are exiled away. The thing that makes this warden so versatile here is that he activates at instant speed and with blacks tutor creatures he creates a toolbox that can answer your opponents plans despite the color restricion. Reanimate a Rune-Scarred Demon to find Imp’s Mischeif to stop a counterspell or redirect removal on your permanents, sacrifice the demon to Smokestack and do it again the next time a prisoner gets rowdy.

Nether Void/Grand Arbiter

This type of prison takes a different aproach, instead of reducing your opponent’s mana, you make their spells cost more... and then reduce their mana. Limiting opponents to one spell a turn cycle often can just bury them in tempo, but this deck doesn’t stop there. You use more and more Spheres of Resistance and other effects to make casting a single spell too much for an opponent to bear. Once that happens you start attacking lands and making sure that they can never come back. There are a lot of relly good wardens to support this prisoon, even Grand Arbiter himself is a massively oppressive commander, but there is one overlooked guy that I just love for this;

Ertai magnifies the pain of only casting one spell per turn, becaus eyou can counter one spell per turn. This deck is going to be heavily enchantment focused with cards like Invoke Prejudice, Nether Void, and In the Eye of Chaos (don’t you just love Legends?) so he can support that theme, and only costing one mana to activate is huge when everyone is starved for mana. He can be abused further with cards like Minamo, Schools at Water’s edge and a fully leveled Lighthouse Chronologist to act as a Seedborn Muse. That is where this deck gets extra spicy, because it is also Wizard Tribal! Patron Wizard and his friends of counterspells on sticks will both make a mess of your opponents limitation on mana and be fuel for Ertai when they have done their job. The best part is that since they are all creatures they start to work around things like Thorn of Amethist, Thalia, and Vryn Wingmare to opress opponents more than yourself.

Uba Mask/Chains of Mephistopholes

Now here is a very uncommon but very fun way to make a prison; hand conrtol. The idea here is to create a lock in which players will never have a hand. Uba Mask and Chains make sure that opponents cannot generate card advantage while you can through means that aren’t technicaly drawing via Necropotence and cards like Dark Confidant. Yes, I just advocated for using Bob in Commander. I get hit for 8 off my Ugin and I’m still loving him. That little off topic outburst aside this deck is pretty niche. it needs a commander that focuses on hands but is still useful when opponents are hellbent. What kind of sinister and evil warden would be up to such a task?

Oh yes, the Elder Dragon himself. Nicol will instantly get your opponents to zero cards in hand and start the punishment. The most interesting thing here is that Nicol gives us access to Blue and all of a sudden the possibilities are endless. Add in Notion Theif to create another way to break down player’s drawpower. Zur’s Weirding will cut off ever a player’s draw for turn while Necro and Bob are unaffected. Red gives us Stranglehold to cut off tutors as well. Your opponents will be left with nothing but their commanders, and with black magic by your side it will not be hard to make them cost more than whatever lands they had are able to produce.

Neverending Torment/Jester’s Cap

Ok, now this is just being silly but probably the most satisfying prison you can make. This prison does not attack the hand or field, it goes directly into libraries. This deck is also where we start to create a hard overlap between prison and pillow fort. Pillow  forts can be dissasembled... but not if they have no cards in their deck that can do it. You eliminate every single answer an opponent could draw and then sit back milling with Neverending Torment with certainty that there is no way to lose. Just immagining the amount of frustration as players realize there is no hope and you aren’t even trying to win anymore. Just sitting back and letting Torment do its thing makes me want to build this deck. Now the commander for this deck needs to support both the pillow fort and prison aspects, unfortunately there is not a commander that really screams what this deck wants to do but we do have this one:

Would Sharuum be better in a hyper combo shell? Yes, but we don’t play to win; we play to enjoy winning. Sharuum creates this quirky artifact enchantment shell where you can recur Jester’s Cap to exile opponents cards from their deck and use the white/blue enchantment support for the pillow fort. Hanna, Ships Navigator will be your officer as she was the one I wanted for the warden but she lacks the black to use Neverending Torment, Sadistic Sacrament, and the like. The interesting thing with Sharuum though is that if you have a way to ficker her each turn she bypasses the Epic restriction on Torment. Conjurer’s Closet will just go nuts here. Sharuum also has a nice body, and good stats too. She can fly over Moat and can block a large amount of non-green-fatty creatures. I actually am hoping that the new commander product will give us an Esper+ commander to support all noncreature spells that would work perfectly in this deck. Still, if you want to make a prison funhouse this is the way to go.

Mixing and Matching.

All of the wardens I described here are great for the type of prison I paired them with but they are not limited to that. For example my Chainer deck also uses opressive hand disruption and Contamination itself. Then there are commanders that thrive off of the combinations. Nath of the gilt Leaf in particular fuels Smokestacks by using the discard engines to empty hands and create tokens. A prison is built to be sturdy,and adding layers of different ways to lock out opponents will do just that. Add in more ways to torture your helpless opponents and watch the hope vanish from their eyes as they realize their innitial plan to break through just wont be enogh when confronted by a new larger wall.