Dear Azami: The Age Of Oros

Ah the perils of the equipment deck going accidentally sideways – take any commander with a decent amount of power and strap a Sword or four to it and
you’ve got yourself an accidental Voltron. That tends to suggest to me that the problem is not necessarily the equipment theme so much as it is the
equipment density, since having the right Sword is one thing, having a weapon for each possible limb is where things start to go in that
unintended direction. You want to pull this back to focusing on the Pestilence side of things, and we can give it one mighty heave in that direction if we
chop down the number of equipment and focus more on the parts you like.

This is a tricky one, because the line between fun and un-fun can be very thin indeed – and also because people don’t usually walk right into on-board
tricks, so there is the potential for your very favorite things to actually just say “all players skip their combat phase until they deal with X,” no
matter how much fun Brigid, Hero of Kinsbaile may be with deathtouch. For that reason I think we should widen the circle of fun things to include a little
bit more ping-type action as well as mass damage-dealing, and focus on ways to break what otherwise would be parity – allowing you to attack while your
opponents cannot effectively attack or block, so that the game doesn’t just hit a long stretch where nobody can do anything, you actually are
working to put them out of their misery instead of asking people to keep sitting there.

It’s a shame that we have to focus on a budget here, because the first card I thought of here is both very expensive and very likely in another one of your
Prismatic project decks – Avacyn, Angel of Hope would be very solid in a build like this Oros deck, but she is an unfortunate mix of “incredibly expensive”
and “popular format staple” that tells me we have to end up short of here. We’ll still end up adding a few expensive cards and playing key format staples
that are currently absent, but I want to play up the part that makes this interesting and downplay the parts that are boring for you or others around you,
so the broad strokes are going to involve playing more creatures, fewer equipment cards, and trying to give the deck a bit more beatdown muscle rather than
finding it ends up in games where no one can do anything for long stretches of time. Let’s start with the mana:

Out:

In:

This deck has way too many lands that come into play tapped, and it’s not getting very much in the way of benefits for them either. While I approve of
cycling lands in general concept and especially like them in decks that have little in the way of card drawing, they’re not really helping here, and I’d
rather shoot to play lands that give you back a spell for them later instead – thus Buried Ruin and Spinerock Knoll, either of which can be worth a real
spell later on in the game. Instead of playing things like Vivid lands, I played the cycle-completion game and saw you were short one of the three Temples,
then added things that find whatever land you want – Thawing Glaciers is very strong, but that’s not the only powerful option you’d missed out on, since
the Commander 2014 decks gave us what basically amounts to a Krosan Verge that every color can play, Myriad Landscape. That’s too good to pass up,
especially since your deck looks like it would be pretty happy to spend the first few turns smoothing its mana draw and making sure it has enough lands
before deploying play after play that has a serious board impact.

Not to mention the fact that equipment always gives you something to do with your mana later in the game, so drawing enough of it is key – and if you can
get it as basic lands, those are practically invincible in this format, while Signets and Keyrunes are not.

Moving over to the artifacts, let’s make some deep cuts:

We need less equipment overall, and I’d rather shy away from mana rocks in a deck that is already super vulnerable to board sweepers – it’s bad enough that
an Oblivion Stone might mess up your active board progression, it shouldn’t be invited to screw up your mana too, and since this is a very common problem
to encounter, we’ll switch around the artifacts you’re using to boost your mana.

In:

Armillary Sphere is an incredibly basic way to smooth your mana draws, but it’s also the best there is at what it does. Expedition Map can also be a mana
two-for-one, able to get the Ravnica bounceland of your choice, Thawing Glaciers or that Myriad Landscape, but it can also function as any of your utility
lands when you want to get that spell-like function out of it, or it can find you a key enabler – it’s not really easy to just pass around deathtouch, but
Expedition Map counts as yet another way to do it by finding your Vault of the Archangel, so it helps add to that critical density of a hard-to-get
resource.

Sword of Light and Shadow has all the hallmarks of exactly the sort of thing you asked me to avoid – it’s got a hefty price tag, and it’s very likely you
have a copy, but it’s in another Commander deck in your Prismatic arsenal. The reason I’d want to make this swap is not because Sword of Feast and Famine
is a “bad card” – quite the opposite, it’s probably the strongest Sword in this format – but because this deck is sorely lacking in card draw and could
desperately use another card that put cardboard back in your hand when you’re low on resources. Sword of Feast and Famine is great for having huge turns
where you use all of your mana twice over, but I’d rather focus on the later stages of the game where you’re chained to just your draw step as far as
acquiring new resources go, and it would be very strong to be able to upgrade your Sword to one that hit for Raise Dead rather than Raven’s Crime.

Because you’re so generally light on card draw, I added Mind’s Eye; if you’d rather stick with the less-obnoxious version you could add Phyrexian Arena
instead, but I went with the most-potent version first because you really have a disadvantage compared to a lot of other colors in Commander. Blue and
green are the two most potent resource-acquisition colors in the format, and those are the two colors you aren’t playing, so you should lean heavily on
resource-acquisition cards when you can find them even if they are a bit done-to-death in this format. To keep things interesting, I found another card
draw permanent that fits more nearly with your deck’s peculiar alignment – Angelheart Vial seems like it would be very high-functioning in a deck built
around cards like Pestilence, and once I started thinking about adding Sun Droplet, I kept looking and found this odd gem instead.

Those five empty slots are going to move over to the creature section instead, so you can draw more of them, and thus have a more active gameplan rather
than trying to assemble two-card semi-lock mechanisms and then muddling through the middle somehow. The more beaters you have, the more likely you are to
make one stick – and the last fattie your opponent doesn’t answer is the one that kills them, as Jamie Wakefield used to say!

Mardu Or Do Not, There Is No Try

This is a rough color combination for spells, but having a theme really helps flesh out what you’re trying to do. Sure, you could just play all big things
and format staples, throw around multiple colors’ worth of best possible haymakers, but those would completely erase the deck’s identity – you aren’t
playing Oros “just for the colors,” after all, you actually are trying to build a gameplan around this particular Dragon’s triggered ability. Oros +
deathtouch is a pretty solid trick, after all, and I think this is part of where the deck lost its way. We’re also going to wind up with a few
empty slots from this section as well, and those will allow us to add a sum total of nine creatures to the deck, so while we took a dozen cards out, we’re
only going to put eight back in.

Out
:

I don’t really like the “double damage” trick here; you’re trying to use Pestilence effects to control the board, not “just” deal damage to your opponents.
And the Death Pits of Rath may look like they “just” give everything deathtouch, but in actuality it regresses the game into an unfortunate boardstate
where there’s just a few enchantments in play saying ‘everything dies’ over and over again, which pushes the game into that uncomfortable slog in the
middle. Brigid with deathtouch can be awesome, Pestilence with deathtouch is just kind of ugh. The other cuts are simply because
I’m not sure the cards in question are actually any good at what they’re being asked to do, and we can find better things for the job.

Again, I’m making these cuts because I’m not sure they are the right things for the job – do you really need Disenchant-style effects, or are these just
being played because they can potentially be utility two-for-ones? When you have so few card draw effects, it makes sense to find room for the bigger ones
first – I like Night’s Whisper more than most, but it’s more critical to this deck to have a few things like Mind’s Eye than to have a few cheap advantage
spells, and thus we re-prioritize accordingly. Steelshaper’s Gift gets cut because we’re starting to have too much of that sort of stuff – too much
equipment and too many cards that find them – while the Wrath effects are being cut because I think we can do better. Both of these seem like they’re here
to prioritize on killing creatures that are indestructible – one puts them on the bottom of the deck, the other exiles them – and I’m more worried about
dying in a surprise attack or having to handle other types of permanents, so I’d rather move these around some.

In:

These may be pretty darn boring, but they do the job they’re asked and they do it at the speed I’m worried about. Starstorm may not be the most potent
version of this effect you can find – I was initially thinking of trying to get a little bit jiggy with Boros Reckoner, Stuffy Doll, and Blasphemous Act
here, then I realized what I actually wanted to do was to try and re-build The Aristocrats: Act II for Modern – but it works at instant speed, as
do Rout and Fated Retribution, which will help with the very-typical “die to a huge spell out of nowhere” problem we can often see with things like
Insurrection and Living Death. Austere Command is probably in half a dozen of your other Prismatic decks, but it’s in all of them for a reason – it
preferentially wipes all sorts of problems from the board, and that is exactly the sort of thing this deck could use to give it a little extra oomph in the removal section.

Any deck that lets me dig up Lashknife Barrier and put it to work is automatically a deck I love. You want to build a deck that preferentially
works around its own Pestilence effects? Back in the far-flung days of yore we would do that with Pestilence + Urza’s Armor, but I’m not really that worried about the damage our Pestilence effects does to us – so for half the mana of Urza’s Armor you get all of the effect I actually cared
about and draw a card to boot. Basically no one knows of this card because, duh, who likes Mercadian Masques block, really? – but I have fond
memories of doing silly things with multiple copies of this in draft and first-picked Warmongers, so I know it is exactly the sort of card you’re looking
for in your tricksy Pestilence deck.

Oblation is here instead of the other utility cards you’d had – it’s less specific and more powerful, and able to take out some of those key Indestructible
permanents that I have to assume you were at least partially worried about. The last two additions are mid-power tutors that will help find the key
enchantments or creatures this deck thrives on – I don’t necessarily have a problem with tutoring, I just think you were doing too much tutoring for
equipment cards and would rather broaden it to “tutor for anything” instead.

There is another direction you could go with this section if you wanted to, but I went the other way by specific intent for once. If you wanted to narrow
in your focus on tutoring not just for equipment cards but specifically for Sunforger, you need to build this section out with key utility cards and cheap
problem-solvers to make Sunforger as good as possible… but that sounded like it would take us even further in the wrong direction, diluting the
characteristics you liked about the deck and turning it even more Voltron-ish. I love Sunforger something fierce, but this time (for once) it shall have to
be the road not travelled.

Science Fiction Creature Feature

There are a whole host of awesome creatures that could keep up with the theme we’re trying to do, and the difficulty is finding the right ones instead of
just playing ALL OF THE THINGS! Goblin
Sharpshooter with deathtouch? Pretty gross, right? Goblin Sharpshooter with Pestilence? Not-a-combo. We’re going to hew pretty closely to cards with high
power, that are on-flavor, and with positive synergy – and if we can get some awesome flavor bonuses at the same time, well, so much the better.

Out:

Mother of Runes has the same mondo-NON-bo problem that Goblin Sharpshooter had; can you really profitably give another creature protection from any color
when she’s tapping to save herself from your Pestilence effect? No, not really – so she gets cut even though she’s a beloved Commander creature. The other
three cuts are here to weaken the hold of equipment cards on this deck – if you want to be less Voltron-ish, the only way to do that is to affect the
density of Voltron-enabling things in your deck so you draw fewer of them each game. I will actually be adding back one creature that does wonky things
with equipment, since I liked the Windwalker’s effect in concept in this deck, just not the card itself…

In:

Leonin Shikari lets us move equipment around at instant speed, but I think paying equip costs is a bit more reliable than having to play, and keep alive, and tap… a kind-of janky small flier. I’d rather pay two mana than four mana to gain the right to do this, even if it means paying the real cost
of equipping too – we’ve cut the Argentum Armor, and thus have no real incentive to try and cheat here, and I’d rather stick with the simplest, cheapest
version of the effect – it works the same turn, thanks to not needing to tap, and can be used multiple times a turn if needed for whatever reason.

The other four cards are here to provide protection from our own damage effects, in one roundabout way or another. Eight-and-a-half-Tails at least doesn’t
die to a single Pestilence activation, and it can be used to give multiple creatures protection in the same turn, so it can protect itself as well as your
other threats needed. It’s just the bigger and stronger version of Mother of Runes, scaled up for the fact that Commander is a big-mana format… it will
work better here overall, even if the protection ability costs three mana to even turn on in the first place. Avacyn can likewise protect multiple
creatures a turn, while Gisela has been added not for the double-damage effect – I’d previously cut those, after all – but for the fact that she cuts
Pestilence damage-packets in half, and since Pestilence effects deal one damage X times instead of X damage once, neither you nor a creature you control
will ever suffer so much as a point of damage while she’s on the job.

Iroas is a weirder one – at first I assumed his text was exactly the same as Dolmen Gate’s, and I was sadly disappointed when I hunted that one up on
Gatherer and found it only prevented combat damage, making it entirely useless for our deck full of bizarre other damage sources we were trying to
turn non-symmetrical. Iroas, however, lacks that awkward “combat” word – any creature that is successfully attacking is immune to damage so long as Iroas
is around, so you turn the team sideways and then you do whatever nastiness you had in mind fully confident it will work in your favor. (It doesn’t hurt
that it’s also indestructible – or that sometimes, just sometimes, it might attack for a whopping seven damage itself. Knowing your backup copy of Mark of
Asylum isn’t going to disappear is a Good Thing.)

These aren’t all necessarily exactly on-theme – Massacre Wurm sticks out like a sore thumb here, since it gives -2/-2 rather than deal damage –
but they nonetheless advance the overall plan of what you’re trying to do, since Massacre Wurm is one-sided and “one-sided board wipes” is sort of the
theme here. And hey, it leaves more room for the big ones to fight in, right? It’s still on-plan even if it doesn’t have any other synergistic interactions
with the other cards you’re playing.

Balefire Dragon is another great thing to have with deathtouch going on, and even better with deathtouch and lifelink – Basilisk Collar on a Balefire
Dragon is like living the dream, let me tell you, as I know all too well from my often-repeated attempts to pull off shenanigans with Godo, Bandit Warlord
as my commander. Ashling the Pilgrim is a very different creature indeed when she’s capable of surviving her own board-wipe effect, and between this deck’s
tendency to give her deathtouch and its cards like Mark of Asylum she can do things she has never really dreamed of before in this deck – and should be put
to work accordingly. She’s potent enough that she’s sometimes played as the commander of a deck with 99 basic Mountains, and she’s actually surprisingly
good there, putting her into a deck with all sorts of tricks that let you keep her around and turn her board-wipe effect up on overdrive means she’ll be
even better for you than she is when she is doing all of that heavy lifting by herself.

Scourge of Kher Ridges is another gross card that loves a Basilisk Collar; that it casts both halves of Rough // Tumble instead of just Pyroclasm means
that it keeps itself around while doing mean things with deathtouch, and the same benefit can be found with Subterranean Spirit. A fair chunk of your deck
is trying to figure out how to preferentially portion damage around without killing your own cards, and the reason you have multiple Swords of X and Y is
because that allows your creatures with interesting tap effects to stay alive once you make one damage technically “lethal” via deathtouch effects.
Subterranean Spirit comes with the protection built right into the card, so all it’s missing is the deathtouch to make it disgusting. Add that with one
equipment card or the various other ways your deck is capable of stapling that ability to other cards and you’ve built yourself quite a nasty monster.

That leaves us three slots left, and we’re looking for pingers – thankfully, that’s something that black and red excel at, so we have a wealth of options
available to us and will be seeking out only the top performers in our deck rather than trying to make this a whole other theme. These are just “more
things that are great with deathtouc0,h” and they all happen to be pretty solid in Commander even without it just because they’re potent cards with
board-control effects, and they’ll help put things a little bit over-the-top without needing any other cards to work with them – a fair chunk of your cards
need themselves + deathtouch effect + some form of protection, and each of these will be good even without deathtouch and turn into absolute monsters if
they happen to gain it.

Deathbringer Thoctar is basically that Goblin Sharpshooter we’d opted not to include but in a form that doesn’t worry about things like “dying to
Pestilence” or “summoning sickness,” or even “whether your opponent can respond to the ability being put on the stack” if you have multiple +1/+1 counters
and enough patience to choose the right moment. It’s just awesome by itself to begin with because big things happen all the time in Commander, and it has
been the focus of many a Sheldon Menery story over the years, but give it a Basilisk Collar and it’s downright vile. Kumano, Master Yamabushi has all of
the Masticore parts you need with none of the pesky “discard a card” clause attached, and it even has the advantage of exiling creatures that have been
pinged with its effect – if you’re facing creature-recursion, as we so often do in this format, Kumano can help keep it in check even without an equipment
helping turn him up to eleven and that will take some of the heavy lifting off of that single copy of Bojuka Bog that is otherwise your only card
addressing that very-common situation.

And the last addition almost hates gaining deathtouch – sure, she can machine-gun more creatures to death that way, but if they actually die she
can’t steal them once they’re Vampires! Olivia Voldaren will help keep things rolling even if somehow another player is likewise focusing on
damage-prevention cards – the “and becomes a Vampire” clause doesn’t actually care whether the creature was damaged, and stealing control of it is yet
another way to address a permanent that you can target but not destroy, such as an Indestructible monster.

Putting it all together, we get the following:

Commander: Oros, the Avenger

Sean McKeown

Test deck on 11-30--0001

Commander

Creatures (29)

• 1 Eight-and-a-Half-Tails
• 1 Kumano, Master Yamabushi
• 1 Godo, Bandit Warlord
• 1 Leonin Shikari
• 1 Subterranean Spirit
• 1 Paladin en-Vec
• 1 Thrashing Wumpus
• 1 Plague Spitter
• 1 Scourge of Kher Ridges
• 1 Ashling the Pilgrim
• 1 Brigid, Hero of Kinsbaile
• 1 Purity
• 1 Stonehewer Giant
• 1 Deathbringer Thoctar
• 1 Stoneforge Mystic
• 1 Hedron-Field Purists
• 1 Pestilence Demon
• 1 Massacre Wurm
• 1 Urabrask the Hidden
• 1 Rune-Scarred Demon
• 1 Bloodgift Demon
• 1 Olivia Voldaren
• 1 Balefire Dragon
• 1 Gisela, Blade of Goldnight
• 1 High Priest of Penance
• 1 Archetype of Finality
• 1 Iroas, God of Victory
• 1 Avacyn, Guardian Angel
• 1 Zurgo Helmsmasher

Planeswalkers (1)

• 1 Nahiri, the Lithomancer

Lands (39)

• 6 Plains
• 1 Thawing Glaciers
• 1 Reflecting Pool
• 7 Swamp
• 6 Mountain
• 1 Shadowblood Ridge
• 1 Winding Canyons
• 1 Boros Garrison
• 1 Orzhov Basilica
• 1 Rakdos Carnarium
• 1 Molten Slagheap
• 1 Terramorphic Expanse
• 1 Spinerock Knoll
• 1 Bojuka Bog
• 1 Evolving Wilds
• 1 Command Tower
• 1 Buried Ruin
• 1 Vault of the Archangel
• 1 Temple of Silence
• 1 Temple of Triumph
• 1 Temple of Malice
• 1 Nomad Outpost
• 1 Myriad Landscape

Spells (30)

• 1 Kusari-Gama
• 1 Pestilence
• 1 Diabolic Tutor
• 1 Starstorm
• 1 Sword of Light and Shadow
• 1 Sword of Fire and Ice
• 1 Loxodon Warhammer
• 1 Shriveling Rot
• 1 Mind's Eye
• 1 Oblation
• 1 Lashknife Barrier
• 1 Rout
• 1 Screams of the Damned
• 1 Pyrohemia
• 1 Molten Disaster
• 1 Austere Command
• 1 Beseech the Queen
• 1 Mark of Asylum
• 1 Armillary Sphere
• 1 Magebane Armor
• 1 Expedition Map
• 1 Basilisk Collar
• 1 Chain Reaction
• 1 Angelheart Vial
• 1 Darksteel Plate
• 1 Underworld Connections
• 1 Gorgon's Head
• 1 Fated Retribution
• 1 Crackling Doom
• 1 Commander's Sphere

As always, for participating in this week’s edition of Dear Azami you will receive a $20 coupon to the StarCityGames.com Store; I’m hoping that we
can dodge the top end of your very reasonable budget concerns by asking whichever deck had your Sword of Light and Shadow in it to trade up to a Sword of
Feast and Famine instead, which would cut out the most expensive card at the top of the list. As it is, we still kept it to just $140 in changes – our
most-expensive upgrade on record was a few years back and amounted to something like $750 that one time when a reader told Cassidy “budget be damned!” in a
deck focusing on only pre-1996 cards, and while I like to keep it around $100, I’m not Larry Wilmore, “keeping it a hundred” is not
actually a budget rule.

Breaking them down price-wise, they cost as follows:

We’ve seen some new Elder Dragons with Dragons of Tarkir, and we would entirely understand if you’re all excited to start putting some of the awesome new legendary creatures in that set to work. Our email link is still a work-in-progress, but if you’d like to send us a submission, the email address is just DearAzami at gmail dot com if you want to send it in – the low-tech method still works well enough, I’m told, while we work on getting a secured direct link working to paste at the bottom of each article.

I don’t know which Dragon has caught your fancy, but I’m a fan of Dragonlord Dromoka – I really liked Baneslayer Angel, and I love hosing blue mages, so being able to play a Blueslayer Dragon as my commander has me pondering the inconceivable and finally putting together my first-ever G/W Commander deck, embracing the “little kid” mentality and beating far more sophisticated players to death in combat. I am pretty sure I am supposed to like the new Silumgar best, and that is definitely a sweet Dragon, but wanting to build a controlling black/blue deck is not new for me – I call that day “any day that ends with the letters –DAY,” so as good as it may be, it’s not really that exciting for me. But a Selesnya card I actually want to play? Inconceivable!

Want to submit a deck for consideration to Dear Azami? We’re always accepting deck submissions to consider for use in a future article, like Sam’s Jhoira of the Ghitu deck or Rob’s Glissa the Traitor Tiny Leaders 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 StarCityGames.com!

Like what you’ve seen? Feel free to explore more of Dear Azami here, in the Article Archives! 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!

And feel free to check Jess’s own Command of Etiquette column on Hipsters of the Coast for more Commander and casual content!