#zedruu

Reasonable Chaos? Where I come from, we call that "Stax".

The first card I'd recommend is one I bring up fairly often!

Jailbreak gives you full control over what you do with it, it can ramp early by getting back a fetchland or bring back a Chaos piece late or give an opponent a piece back to deal with something bad. Since you have full control over it, it's almost never fully bad for you.

Spell Pod is pretty bad in practice, but given how many Chaos effects stop spells cast from hand and do not care what happens to them before replacing them, you can pod them to get something else cast from Exile that won't get Possibility Stormed or Knowledge Pooled or what have you, while still getting the extra spell with those.

You can also use it as a threat: Cast something from your hand that might be awful for some other player to deal with, and ask for a favor if you pod it instead, though without offering guarantees that whatever else you'd spin into won't be worse.

Observed Stasis is a pretty great Commander removal in general. It draws usually one or two cards, and removing all abilities plus ability to block of a commander will cripple plenty of decks. It's instant speed, can mess up a combat, and in Zedruu it's one of those removals you can them give away to somebody else to trigger Zedruu a bit more. As long as you don't give it to the person you've enchanted the commander of, the "Enchant creature an opponent controls" part is still valid. Though being able to give it to the person to free their commander at any time is also something you can negotiate with!

In general, since so much of Chaos ends up with spells being cast from exile, a package of support for exile and casting spells from there could help the game actually end at some point, plenty of other options than these two, as Prosper decks prove.

As it turns out, the other randomly chosen Commander ended up being Zedruu, a favorite for many people. I originally had more to say on Zedruu, but making her was taking awhile, and I didn’t want to push the file to two pages when the rest of the writing would have taken less than half a page. I’ll include it in the eventual Compendium instead.

As the great goat would wish, I shall give this to you

Alpha Brawl can be a great way to take out a large portion of your enemy’s creatures. Pick the largest (or second largest creature if the first is too big) creature they control, so most of the smaller ones should die, and since state-based actions aren’t checked in the middle, they’ll still deal damage to it (though Wither/Infect do put a damper on things) and hopefully clear the enemy’s board. If there’s no way to get the math to work in your favor, though, start looking at their smallest creatures, instead.

Political Partners: Ludevic Necro-Alchemist and Ravos, Soultender 

This is a strange one. I have suddenly become interesting in using some of the less abundant mechanics of the conspiracy sets, such as Vote and Goad,  to build a deck. It’s probably not going to work, but I thought about using esper for the best voting cards and then adding red to get access to donation mechanics and cards with Goad to build a political themed deck. Unfortunately the only combination that made sense was these two for the commanders. We don’t really need double strike and we won’t be using that many artifacts which takes the boros partners out of the picture. Azorius has only Ishai to offer which doesn’t help us much either. Whereas Ludevic gives them incentive to attack others which is one thing we want and Ravos gets us any creatures we may need back. 

Here, Take This

This is basically a Zedruu deck, with voting, if you haven’t noticed already. So it will have many of the things such a deck would have. Creatures such as Djinn of Infinite Deceits, Akroan Horse, Drooling Ogre and Steel Golem, Donation spells such as Harmless Offering and then other permanents that donate or exchange control of things such as Conjured Currency and Avarice Totem.

Sleeper Agents 

For some reason the thought of donating a creature to another player and then having it beat up someone else really appeals to me. For this Zedruu, the Greathearted among other donation or exchange effects have a strong presence in this deck. As well as enchantments such as Vow of Duty, Lust for War and similar effects to prevent your creatures coming back at you or at least punishing your opponents for doing so. Creatures with Goad such as Grenzo, Havoc Raiser and Jeering Homunculus could also be funny to divert attention away from you.  

Everyone has the right to vote (except for Red)

I was surprised to find that there aren’t many voting cards and if some of the best ones weren’t in black this would be just a straight up Zedruu deck. Black gives you access to voting cards such as Capital Punishment, Bite of the Black Rose and Tyrant’s Choice as well as Grudge Keeper which makes voting more interesting. Red doesn’t have cards with vote, unsurprisingly, I don’t think red care who’s in power. Blue and white both have ways to make voting more interesting with Ballot Broker, Brago’s Representative and Illusion of Choice not to mention Expropriate the most powerful of all the voting cards. 

It’s good to be King (Or Queen) 

 Despite giving away potentially everything you own, people are still going to be coming for you, so you’re going to have to stay outta the way. Especially when you start gaining life and make them lose life for having these permanents with Sanguine Bond. Why not use some of my personal favorites? Sphere of Safety, Propaganda, Norn’s Annex and Ghostly Prison as well as Kazuul, Tyrant of the Cliffs and Windborn Muse to make attacking you suddenly very expensive. White has a few fog abilities too, but that’s up to you. 

And Finally... 

Y’all were asking for the PDF with these Zedruu tokens earlier. I couldn’t find them on @inkwell-looter‘s page anymore, so here’s the PDF file I have. Just print and cut them out!