Dear Azami – Luck Be A Lady Tonight

Hi Noah,

I get a lot of submissions in a week, but in almost a year now of writing this column, this is the first one I’ve gotten for this particular
Commander, so yours stood out and got my attention. Building effective control decks in Commander is hard—after all, control is best when it is
pointed at a known enemy, and Commander decks may have a lot in common when it comes to the cost of the haymakers they try to cast or their willingness
to work out of their own graveyard as a resource, but they can also be wildly different from each other as well. That doesn’t mean we
shouldn’t try, just that we can expect it to be difficult to accomplish.

With a new problem in front of me, I started by asking the question, “What is Lady Evangela good at?”

The answer to that question, presumably, would guide the rest of the deck design, and what this particular Commander specializes in is careful control
of other commanders that may be more rough-and-tumble on the battlefield. The focus of the deck she is supporting, then, is presumably to control your
vulnerability to damage and attack, and this means controlling whether you yourself can be targeted by the opponents…letting them go after each
other is presumably fine; Lady Evangela’s defenses are for your needs first and foremost. This also helps me figure out how the game might play
out, since part of your overarching plan will be self-defense as a means to convince the opponents to work on each other while playing the role of
“combo breaker” to prevent unbounded kill mechanisms from wiping everyone out until it’s time to start winnowing down the group of players. In
the end, there can be only one.

That makes this an attrition-oriented control deck, i.e., about my favorite thing to play in Commander, for nice, long, fair games with a serious grind
to them and lots of opportunities to make good decisions and tactical plays that directly affect your ability to win the game. After all, half the fun
of all that interaction is that the interaction is you, not just the cards in your deck overpowering the game, so it really is crucial that
the game not be a completely lopsided affair of trying to do broken thing after broken thing. Mindslaver locks aren’t actually hard to build up,
but they aren’t interesting either, and there’s no reason to get excited to see a Lady Evangela deck and then play her as yet another
Commander chosen just for her colors.

Long games don’t exactly favor artifact mana sources, however, so that’s one of the first changes that will be made; your costs don’t
seem very expensive and thus acceleration instead of stable implementation is not something that will be continually favored. Powerful accelerants like
Mana Vault and Sol Ring are wonderful here for the tempo swings they can provide you, but the three guild Signets here are too vulnerable in the long
run to be relied upon.

Shifting things around, I started to identify cards that I didn’t think were working hard enough for you, and one of the problems that concerned
me was how many of your lands came into play tapped. Vesuva is a good card, but without Cabal Coffers in your deck it’s not something that is
really doing any serious strategic work, relying on “good card” status to earn the slot when you could try for a land that didn’t come into play
tapped instead. Likewise, I hesitate over the Vivid lands when there are still perfectly viable dual land alternatives without having to resort to pain
(be it Underground River or Underground Sea, your life total or your wallet).

Sticking the artifacts and the lands together, because the artifacts so clearly complement your mana-base and are part of its functioning design, I saw
the following as needing replacement:

Azorius Signet, Dimir Signet, Orzhov Signet: good color fixing, poor vulnerability over a long game to disappearing at an awkward moment.

Vesuva: not enough really going on with it here.

Vivid Creek, Vivid Marsh, Vivid Meadow: not enough fixing benefit offered, when you already have to watch comes-into-play-tapped concerns with multiple
cycles of lands.

Tectonic Edge: nonbasic lands are going to be a serious concern to you, and one of the things you are worst at interacting with. Based on this, then,
you need an upgrade in this slot to something that works more than once.

Orzhova, the Church of Deals: not nearly enough effect for the ‘cost,’ when a colorless land slot is being dedicated to the
super-slow-motion grinding away of life points. You have to spend five mana and tap this one hundred and twenty times to kill all of your
opponents. I can think of better things to spend 620 mana on than tapping this 120 times.

Right away, I wanted to shift the numbers to add a land, since I only wanted to replace two of these three artifact slots with actual mana
replacements. The rest was just reassigning land slots to utility and maintaining color balance needs, which gave us the following:

Wayfarer’s Bauble: small effects are much, much bigger than I think people often realize in this format. I get laughed at when I play
Ponder in Commander, often to the tune of ‘is that even good in this format?’ to which I heartily raise an eyebrow. You want
acceleration, you want color fixing, and you want this benefit not to disappear the first time Nevinyrral’s Disk is played. To accomplish this
you have very few options, and they aren’t glamorous. Wayfarer’s Bauble is a humble little card that happens to do exactly what you want,
so quietly awesome and so stealthily in-demand that I haven’t been able to get a copy for any of my decks in six months now of trying to
find one in stock at the Star City Games Store. Thankfully, the store has recently restocked, so I can include it in good faith (and eagerly await
putting in my next order, so one finally appears in my Commander build box).

Mind Stone: acceleration early, invisible late. The problem of disappearing when you need it is softened by the ability to cycle it when it will
otherwise be destroyed, which is an admirable good-faith effort on the card’s part and makes it worthy of inclusion when more color-fixing
options might otherwise take precedent.

Shizo, Death’s Storehouse: you have a little bit of a concern in the ‘actually killing people’ department, coming from the fact that
your army is not especially large or robust, and your Commander doesn’t have impressive power stats to work with. Shizo can add a little bit of
strategic interaction to a few other cards to help get the kill across, like adding a Catch-22 clause to Sheoldred…you can’t block her if you
have swamps, you can block her if you have a black creature…eh, eh, eh!

Dust Bowl: replaces Tectonic Edge, and does so with a massive increase in tactical ability over a long game. Repeated use pinpoint land destruction
should relax what might otherwise be an overwhelming need in this deck, in the face of enemy Coffers or pushing through several Mazes of Ith.

Skycloud Expanse, Darkwater Catacombs: two very cheap dual lands that come into play untapped and work like signets, only as lands. I would include
both of your on-color filter lands before moving on to Vivid lands, especially since you have very few color-intensive costs that truly care,
like Necropotence.

Kor Haven: Lady Evangela on a land. Part of your defense is the statement that the opponent should go over there first if they want to be
effective, and overlapping these defensive layers is worth doing.

Volrath’s Stronghold: normally a land I intentionally opt out of, based on the fact that I tend to find my black decks have a lot of
graveyard recursion and thus don’t actually gain a tactical element by its inclusion. This deck, however, is very light on that recursion, and
thus would benefit greatly from being able to choose a draw or two in the later stages of the game thanks to Volrath’s Stronghold, especially
with its reliance on single meaningful threats to carry the game in a controlling fashion later on.

Mystifying Maze: another overlapping defense mechanism in your mana-base, helping to ensure that you’ll draw at least one way to get a little
extra defense out of your lands over the course of a game as well as increase the ability to affect the battlefield without having to overload on
creature-controlling instants.

Moving on, we’ll work on the support spells next, and I think those make the biggest shifts to how the deck operates overall. You still want to
be able to control the board, but not every card you’ve selected is actually doing that, and we need to streamline things in order to actually
fill the needs you have thanks to the role you have selected.

Acquire: simply off-theme and not really doing anything meaningful for you. The obvious question starts off with, why isn’t this Bribery
instead, which I suspect has more of a metagame component than you included in your email—maybe the friends that you play with fairly regularly
aren’t especially vulnerable to Bribery, but a single Acquire can swing a game massively? On the face of things, however, this just doesn’t
fit smoothly, and we are looking for things that do.

Profane Command: yes, a two-for-one is good in Commander, but the amount of mana you have to spend to accomplish that starts to detract from how useful
the card actually is. In more aggressive decks, where the other two modes have considerable utility, this can actually just say BBX: Kill a player.
With that wording, Profane Command is a good addition. With BB7, kill target creature and buy back one threat, the question again comes up as to
whether this is so big of an improvement that it’s not just going to be better to play Angel of Despair. Unsurprisingly, that hits it on
the nose in one.

Unmake: I like pinpoint removal that serves a specific function, and both Path and Plow already do this admirably. Mortify adds another instant, so
you’re reasonably well-covered in the “I have a trick, no really, I do!” department, and Unmake is not so efficient that I don’t start to
want something else. Snuff Out, Slaughter Pact, and Submerge all have the benefit of potentially being able to save your bacon while you’re
tapped out while Unmake always asks for three mana. Oblation can handle any permanent, even a Commander, with negligible downside, and Vindicate can do
very similarly at sorcery speed if you ask it to. Ultimately, Unmake is not high on the list of best strategic options and needs to be cut accordingly.

Day of Judgment, Wrath of God: I like a good wrath in Commander, and have within recent memory put these two in a deck specifically on that
merit. In this deck, however, you require a little bit more from your wrath effects, and these need upgrades accordingly.

Propaganda: decent, but I can think of an upgrade for a slight mana cost, and will be leaning in that direction instead.

Dance of the Dead, Animate Dead: it’s true that reanimation is within black’s forte, but these are being included because they’re so
cheap that they have to be effective, even when they are not the sharpest of tools at the job. Blunt force trauma is of course still perfectly
lethal, but I prefer picking my tools with care for skillful implementation, so I aim to replace these accordingly.

Adding back into the deck, we’ll start with these last two substitutions and work our way back through the spells before moving to the creatures.

Grim Harvest: I have at this point, I fear, written love letters to this little Coldsnap common. As recursion, it scales to the needs you
require addressing, since it is essentially unbounded (except by mana) in what it can accomplish. It’s not a permanent that sits in play, and
it’s not even a spell that cares about mundane countermagic—sure, Withered Wretch can make it unhappy, but it can do that by stealing the
target away too, so it’s not exactly an unanticipated issue. The key to having solid control over a Commander game comes with being able to close
out the late-game after you’ve established the ability to sway the game as you see fit, and Grim Harvest helps assure you can do exactly that by
maintaining the threats that it takes to finish a game in the face of even the most withering of late-game creature removal volleys.

Necromancy: I’m not opposed to reanimation in concept, but much prefer it when it adds a tactical ability to your repertoire.
Necromancy, being able to be played as an instant and thus as a combat trick (or even a counterspell, with a dead Draining Whelk), is just in a league
of its own with the tactics and dirty tricks it allows, in addition to being an inexpensive way to resurrect the your pick of a variety of dead
creatures as the situation requires.

Collective Restraint: if you are only going to play one Propaganda effect, it might as well be the most powerful single one you can find in strength
alone, which for your three-color deck is Collective Restraint. There may not sound like much of a barrier differentiating two mana and three mana per
attacker, but it definitely exists, certainly where the fourth or fifth potential attacking creature is concerned.

Twisted Justice: part card draw, part creature removal, but it should be reasonably within your deck’s capabilities to isolate a single threat
from at least one player at the table, and this can cash in to both kill that threat and draw you a fresh hand while you’re at it.

Decree of Pain: speaking of card draw and creature removal, Decree of Pain does these two things so expertly it needs to be thrown at the top of your
to-do list, as it is exactly the bomb sweeper this deck craves.

Rout: a slight but not inconsiderable upgrade to your Wrath of God effects. Like Necromancy, the ability to have an instant-speed answer instead of one
that is chained to sorcery-speed magic is incredibly potent in Commander and deserves consideration on that level alone. One of the dangers of mass
removal spells is that they are generally played on your own turn, which might not always be fast enough to prevent your imminent demise.

Oblivion Stone: I was resistant to add this at first. It seemed to me like its exclusion might have been intentional and decided upon because you have
a few creatures you really wanted to protect, some equipment you thought were important, plus a few enchantments that were worth hanging onto. I was
content to leave it by the wayside and move on until I had another thought: how many things does your Sun Titan actually interact with? That
number was not very high, and then I realized Oblivion Stone could easily be on that ‘list of things,’ with the ability to pop an O-Stone
and protect the Sun Titan every turn. And yes, somehow I had never thought of using Sun Titan with that card before. It just hasn’t come up for
me yet.

There is one last slot, marked on my tally as “replacement for Profane Command,” which I am going to shift over to a blank slot on the creature count
side of things. Hint: it has a name, and rhymes with Mangel of Repair.

Moving over to the creatures, we’re almost done, but what really needs to be done is just some streamlining. Threat durability and amazing
utility are the two most important things to consider, and when you can find a card that happens to have both of these things then so much the better.

Geist of Saint Traft: hexproof is strong, as is effectively six power for three mana, but this isn’t Standard—a 2/2 ground-pounder that
happens to deal an extra four with each attack isn’t actually that special in Commander. You start with 40 life instead of 20, three times as
many opponents, and everyone can kill a hexproof 2/2 in lots of ways besides just blocking. As powerful as the Geist is—powerful enough to be a
serious contender at the helm of his own deck—he just doesn’t fit the focus of your deck and has too many liabilities to overcome.

Magister Sphinx: a fundamental question I see a lot is, ‘is setting someone’s life to 10 good enough?’ In the case of your deck, the
point is not to get an extra 30 up-front with your fatty, so you’re just as happy swinging extra times with a solid control position established
instead of pulling this trick off. Fundamentally you could have a bit of a problem with opponents setting their life to ‘infinite’ instead
of 40, but from a complete control standpoint you have your Lady and a lot of equipment to stack on her, so commander damage as a workaround to that
problem is an acceptable logistical fix. Thus, with the ability not being required—it doesn’t actually benefit you to—the
responses to this card and Sorin Markov can be surprisingly heavy-handed.

Stormscape Familiar: first off, like a signet, this is mana production you can expect to die in a stiff breeze, but, unlike the signets, this will just
spontaneously combust the first time a removal spell sneezes. I’m not even sure it’s the right Familiar for your needs. Nightscape Familiar
or Sunscape Familiar would affect your blue spells, which might be the important ones to save some mana on, and at least Nightscape Familiar would be
able to regenerate itself instead of always dying automatically. None of these, however, seem like they are required and fit your deck, so it’ll
just get substituted out.

Guiltfeeder: the question once again is just how quickly do you need to kill your opponents that you want to play dedicated creatures to
exactly that task and no other? I don’t think the answer is “this quickly,” so a creature with more board impact is a better fit.

Scion of Darkness: for less mana you can have the same effect on a threat that has both additional tactical options and increased durability.
The interesting bit is the part where you get to resurrect a dead creature, and you can do that on a better and more efficient creature, so
that’s an easy swap.

Building in the last replacements, then, we get the following additions to the deck’s threat capabilities.

Ink-Eyes, Servant of Oni: our replacement for Scion of Darkness, a pure upgrade thanks to the regeneration (threat durability is key!) and the
wacky Ninjutsu ability that will help make sure it actually lands the blow, which is better than trample at least for the first hit. Ink-Eyes also has
some extra utility with cards like Snapcaster Mage, Stoneforge Mystic, Draining Whelk, and titans, so there’s just solid synergy here all around.

Angel of Despair: speaking of things that might get better with returning to your hand, hello “rhymes with Mangel of Repair.” Angel of Despair seems to
be the card that Profane Command is trying to be in this deck— combination threat and removal spell—and is the right card for the job.
Extra levels of recursion just make the angel better, so it’s perfect to begin with and the best card to use with new additions
Volrath’s Stronghold and Grim Harvest as well as old friends like Debtor’s Knell.

Keiga, the Tide Star: another good intersection of solid threat and good utility, this time a threat that even if it disappears immediately has an
immediate impact on the board and leaves you something behind. Keiga makes that instant-speed Necromancy even better than anticipated, and it
is exactly this sort of control card that your deck wants to reach for. Yosei is more powerful, sure, but Keiga does the right job and earns
the slot.

Blinding Angel: this one’s a little bit odd of me, but with Lady Evangela’s theme of preventing harm in the first place, Blinding Angel
seems like a solid addition to selectively shut off one person’s attack capabilities. With two different swords and a warhammer, the chances are
solid that a Blinding Angel can be made to connect repeatedly against several opponents at a table. The effect provided is yet another overlapping
layer of defense, and one you can use to save your neighbors as well as yourself in a politicking situation.

Enigma Sphinx: this one’s just hard to kill with its built-in recursion mechanism. The cascade has only countermagic as dead hits, which
in and of itself is not a reason not to play the card (but is worth mentioning, before someone points out the nonbo in the forums). The cascade effect
will actually quite often bring another threat to the table, though you don’t have any way besides tutors and Brainstorm to select the top card
of your deck, and this built-in card advantage is an incredible boon alongside the fact that the darn thing keeps putting itself back near the top of
your deck when it dies.

This leaves us with just one slot, and for that slot I wanted to select “a dumb animal.” The thought started with Darksteel Colossus, passé though
it is in a world where Blightteel exists, but either of these falls along the wayside easily enough in the face of a good removal spell so I wanted a
less indestructible but actually harder to kill creature. With some reflection and comparison, I selected the following:

Inkwell Leviathan: yes, there were a lot of possible choices for this one. Even sticking within just its own creature type, Stormtide Leviathan was
potentially a better inclusion (it controls the board, after all) but the role I was looking to fill was closer, specifically. Something that
can finish the game in the face of a handful of spot removal, and thus something with shroud. Simic Sky Swallower was actually the card for the job,
but not in your colors, and the nearest approximation cost a little bit more and, well, flew a little bit less, but these are not really sins
to hold against Inkwell Leviathan. With a huge butt, technically an evasion ability, and the needed intersection of “high power, trample, and shroud”
it fits the role I cast it for, and should do good work for you actually finishing off a game you’re ahead and should be able to win.

Putting these all together, we get the following decklist:

Lady Evangela

Sean McKeown

Test deck on 01-15-2012

Commander

Creatures (22)

• 1 Ink-Eyes, Servant of Oni
• 1 Blinding Angel
• 1 Keiga, the Tide Star
• 1 Weathered Wayfarer
• 1 Angel of Despair
• 1 Draining Whelk
• 1 Dread
• 1 Ghastlord of Fugue
• 1 Archon of Justice
• 1 Divinity of Pride
• 1 Inkwell Leviathan
• 1 Sphinx of the Steel Wind
• 1 Enigma Sphinx
• 1 Stoneforge Mystic
• 1 Serra Ascendant
• 1 Grave Titan
• 1 Sun Titan
• 1 Consecrated Sphinx
• 1 Sheoldred, Whispering One
• 1 Sphinx of Uthuun
• 1 Bloodgift Demon
• 1 Snapcaster Mage

Lands (35)

• 1 Strip Mine
• 2 Plains
• 1 Reflecting Pool
• 1 Volrath's Stronghold
• 1 Kor Haven
• 2 Swamp
• 2 Island
• 1 Tundra
• 1 Shizo, Death's Storehouse
• 1 Skycloud Expanse
• 1 Darkwater Catacombs
• 1 Flood Plain
• 1 Bad River
• 1 Dust Bowl
• 1 Watery Grave
• 1 Godless Shrine
• 1 Hallowed Fountain
• 1 Prahv, Spires of Order
• 1 River of Tears
• 1 Mystic Gate
• 1 Sunken Ruins
• 1 Fetid Heath
• 1 Arcane Sanctum
• 1 Reliquary Tower
• 1 Drowned Catacomb
• 1 Glacial Fortress
• 1 Marsh Flats
• 1 Bojuka Bog
• 1 Celestial Colonnade
• 1 Creeping Tar Pit
• 1 Mystifying Maze
• 1 Isolated Chapel

Spells (46)

• 1 Brainstorm
• 1 Hinder
• 1 Counterspell
• 1 Mystical Tutor
• 1 Enlightened Tutor
• 1 Force of Will
• 1 Swords to Plowshares
• 1 Necropotence
• 1 Mana Vault
• 1 Sol Ring
• 1 Demonic Tutor
• 1 Necromancy
• 1 Impulse
• 1 Forbid
• 1 Darksteel Ingot
• 1 Collective Restraint
• 1 Decree of Pain
• 1 Promise of Power
• 1 Oblivion Stone
• 1 Loxodon Warhammer
• 1 Lightning Greaves
• 1 Phyrexian Arena
• 1 Wayfarer's Bauble
• 1 Syphon Mind
• 1 Mind Stone
• 1 Dromar's Charm
• 1 Rout
• 1 Fact or Fiction
• 1 Twisted Justice
• 1 Debtors' Knell
• 1 Mortify
• 1 Grim Harvest
• 1 Return to Dust
• 1 Austere Command
• 1 Cryptic Command
• 1 Esper Charm
• 1 Path to Exile
• 1 Rite of Replication
• 1 Sword of Feast and Famine
• 1 Praetor's Grasp
• 1 Sword of War and Peace
• 1 Command Tower
• 1 Spell Crumple
• 1 Swiftfoot Boots
• 1 Forbidden Alchemy
• 1 Unburial Rites

As always, there is a $20 coupon to the Star City Games Store for your participation, which is good enough to get you a solid half of the cards
listed…or a Volrath’s Stronghold, your choice. Apparently that card got expensive when I wasn’t looking and the fact that I, um,
don’t have one in my Commander deckbuilding box is starting to make me think I should jump and get one (…or more…) before it climbs
too much higher. Last time I remember looking, I could have sworn the price was $10, which means either I’m hallucinating or haven’t looked
in forever, and I can’t really say which.

For next week I want to have a little more fun and build a new deck entirely up from scratch, chasing the theme of “I’ve never seen this commander before…” Join me then to take a road not yet traveled, and I don’t just mean that of the Lady of the Mountain.
I’ve seen that one built just to be ornery, after all!

— Sean McKeown

Want to submit a deck for consideration to Dear Azami? We’re always accepting deck submission to consider for use in a future article, likeJiggs’
Shirei, Shizo’s Caretaker deck or Connor’s Rosheen Meanderer
deck. Only one deck submission will be chosen per article, but being selected for the next edition of Dear Azami includes not just deck
advice but also a $20 coupon to the StarCityGames.com Store!

Email Sean a deck submission using this link here!

Like what you’ve seen? Feel free to explore more of “Dear Azami” here, in the Article
Archives! And feel free to follow Sean on Facebook…sometimes there are extra surprises and bonus content to be found over on his Facebook Fan Page, as well as previews of the next week’s
column at the end of the week!