Dear Azami – Writing Damia’s Wrongs

Damia, Sage of Stone

Cassidy Silver

States on 10-16-2011

Commander

Creatures (21)

• 1 Birds of Paradise
• 1 Psychatog
• 1 Withered Wretch
• 1 Myojin of Night's Reach
• 1 Eternal Witness
• 1 Mystic Snake
• 1 Trinket Mage
• 1 Mindless Automaton
• 1 Necroplasm
• 1 Oracle of Mul Daya
• 1 Drana, Kalastria Bloodchief
• 1 Primeval Titan
• 1 Geth, Lord of the Vault
• 1 Consecrated Sphinx
• 1 Massacre Wurm
• 1 Sheoldred, Whispering One
• 1 Phyrexian Metamorph
• 1 Brutalizer Exarch
• 1 Jin-Gitaxias, Core Augur
• 1 Phantasmal Image
• 1 Rune-Scarred Demon

Planeswalkers (1)

• 1 Garruk Wildspeaker

Lands (38)

• 8 Forest
• 1 Underground River
• 1 City of Brass
• 8 Swamp
• 8 Island
• 1 Yavimaya Hollow
• 1 Overgrown Tomb
• 1 Watery Grave
• 1 Dreadship Reef
• 1 Terramorphic Expanse
• 1 Sunken Ruins
• 1 Reliquary Tower
• 1 Drowned Catacomb
• 1 Misty Rainforest
• 1 Verdant Catacombs
• 1 Bojuka Bog
• 1 Command Tower

Spells (39)

• 1 Hinder
• 1 Nostalgic Dreams
• 1 Mystical Tutor
• 1 Mind Over Matter
• 1 Yawgmoth's Will
• 1 Necropotence
• 1 Sol Ring
• 1 Journeyer's Kite
• 1 Forbid
• 1 Capsize
• 1 Burgeoning
• 1 Darksteel Ingot
• 1 Foil
• 1 Time Stretch
• 1 Future Sight
• 1 Mind's Desire
• 1 Oblivion Stone
• 1 Cadaverous Bloom
• 1 Explosive Vegetation
• 1 Fact or Fiction
• 1 Holistic Wisdom
• 1 Far Wanderings
• 1 Spellbook
• 1 Putrefy
• 1 Demonic Collusion
• 1 Harmonize
• 1 Null Profusion
• 1 Coalition Relic
• 1 Suffer the Past
• 1 Exsanguinate
• 1 Ratchet Bomb
• 1 Nihil Spellbomb
• 1 Black Sun's Zenith
• 1 Blue Sun's Zenith
• 1 Praetor's Counsel
• 1 Praetor's Grasp
• 1 Beast Within
• 1 Spell Crumple
• 1 Mind Unbound

Welcome, Cassidy, and I am suddenly very glad that my
article last week talked about Grimgrin, Corpse-Born, rather than Olivia Voldaren. Considering that you wrote about her this week in your own
column, it could have been one of those awkward moments where we both wore the same dress to the prom. (Never mind the inherent awkwardness that comes
from a dude wearing a dress to the prom in the first place.) This week, you’ve asked me for some help figuring out Damia, Sage of Stone, and I
think the first step to understanding Damia is to look at first principles.

Damia is a 4/4 for seven mana, of three different colors. She is not very good at defending herself, having not-particularly-large stats, a fairly high
mana cost for those stats, and no immediate impact on the board or immediate means to protect herself from either pinpoint removal effects or mass
removal.

Damia, if left unchecked, is a card-drawing machine that fills your grip every single turn, a fact which is well worth looking into. She
doesn’t want to go in a combo deck, seeming best suited to a deck that just tries to play a bunch of cards each turn, so she will be at her best
in a midrange deck that has somewhat cheap mana costs, and/or mana ramp, and/or alternate casting costs to work with. There are a lot of ways to work
with alternate mana costs, from pitch spells to Pacts to other situational things like Massacre, so I would assume that a deck built around Damia would
try to build up its early position, disrupt the board at least a little, and then stick Damia and try to play a flurry of spells, some big and some
small.

Having a first look through your deck, it’s too “goodstuff” and no synergy, no active game-plan other than trying to push a lot of card
advantage engines and some board control alongside decent creatures. That is something that will need to gel, moving forward, so I think first
principles are important to look at here more than any other Commander I’ve reviewed so far, because Damia works so very differently
than a traditional Magic card does, turning the game away from drawing one card a turn to drawing however many cards you can play in a single turn (up
to seven). So instead of a semi-control shell focusing on card advantage, I want to focus on cheating on mana costs and advancing early board position
to get Damia online faster and playing a flurry of spells once she is in play, and a couple of cards to help protect her while we’re at it. Card
drawing is less important so long as you can avoid getting your commander killed repeatedly or tucked on the bottom of your deck, so you don’t
need nearly as many of them as you have here, when instead you can focus on Damia’s survival and profit from there.

And unlike most of my other submissions, you have a body of work on TCGPlayer that informs me very neatly what your price-point is for cards… for
example, I wouldn’t normally suggest Vampiric Tutor for someone based off of just the information provided, but you included a copy in your take
on Olivia Voldaren, so I see it as fair game even if it’s ‘pricey.’ I try to scale my inclusions to a practical level of restraint,
but in this case I will not be sparing the rod save for presuming that your not including Breeding Pool was an inflexible choice and otherwise go from
there without too much worry as to the price of any cards I might be suggesting. The last submission I took, for Grimgrin and his Zombie legion, a Sensei’s Divining
Top was not included despite it being obviously good in every deck not based around a Null Rod / Damping Matrix strategy of activated-ability denial…
and you will not be seeing the same courtesy extended to you here. You presumably have one or would do well to pick one up, if you’re slinging
fetchland/Ravnica-dual manabases and a significant investment in Commander cardboard like Vampiric Tutor to work with.

So without further ado, let’s wade in and get our hands dirty.

The first series of cuts will be in the lands. Your lands aren’t working quite hard enough, and the 8/8/8 basics split needs to be cut into for
some more nonbasic lands. Working with the numbers on the manabase I came up with the following set of cuts:

City of Brass — Not worth the repeated life loss you can expect to happen; Damia is going to try and have you spend as much mana as possible each
turn, so this drawback starts to become severe.

Underground River — You can do better for a UB dual land pretty easily these days.

Reliquary Tower — With your hand size over seven, Damia draws you no cards per turn. Sure, this is good with Necropotence, but that card is also no good with Damia, and will not be surviving the round of cuts.

3x Island, 3x Forest, 2x Swamp — Shaved for room.

I also noted that your decklist was 100 cards, not 99, so we’re making eleven cuts here but will only be adding ten cards back. The manabase will
still have the same proportions, since I already know Expedition Map is going to be added, so this is not really a problem and we’ll get to that
during the spells portion of filling things back in.

Creeping Tar Pit, HinterlandHarbor, WoodlandCemetery, Evolving Wilds, Thawing Glaciers — Additional dual land action to help pay all of your
appropriate casting costs as easily as possible.

Tolaria West — Utility-land-finder as well as just awesome thing to have access to in your deck. If I like Expedition Map enough to want to add
it to every deck, imagine how much I must love a land that is an Expedition Map.

Mosswort Bridge — Free-spell addition that is basically a pure upgrade to the power of your Primeval Titan, since you can get Bridge + Tar Pit
and only need one other stray point of power somewhere to get a free spell on the cheap. Perfectly good without the Titan, too.

Dimir Aqueduct — Not just a dual land, but included in your lines of play as a means to re-use Bojuka Bog. Primeval Titan getting Bojuka Bog +
Dimir Aqueduct, return the Bog to your hand and replay it as your land for the turn, is a pretty awesome line of play to have available in the games
you face off against graveyard recursion from multiple players.

Cabal Coffers + Urborg, Tomb of Yawgmoth — Obviously awesome mana-power combo is awesome and obvious. You have access to Primeval Titan,
Expedition Map, and Tolaria West to work with easily, and could have Sylvan Scrying and Reap and Sow if you wanted to go that far, least you could do
is add the lands that make your Exsanguinate awesome instead of highly mediocre.

Next we’ll cut into the spell package, and see what isn’t working. This is the deepest series of cuts to me, because while some things are cute, they aren’t necessarily functioning optimally even at their appointed tasks, and you have much too much card drawing here. Damia
will do a lot of heavy lifting herself, so you only need to really try and go out of your way to support yourself until you can get her to stick for a
turn, not play through a Necropotence-fueled Plan A.

Spellbook — Actively counteracts Damia’s usefulness, or ‘does nothing.’ I cut this when attached to a land, and I am
definitely cutting this as part of your spell base.

Cadaverous Bloom, Demonic Collusion, Foil, Mind Over Matter — Cute but low-functioning. It’s true that being able to get cards out of your
hand will help you draw more cards faster with Damia, but the cards you are drawing still have to do something, and they have to be effective at their
jobs. Buying back Demonic Collusion sounds good, till you realize you’re just going to have to spend five mana to cast it a second time, and you
can do much, much better than that just by spending that five mana towards playing cards.

Holistic Wisdom — A favorite card of mine from its time in Standard, when I played it in a Heartbeat-style deck that bought back Early Harvest
over and over again, but I don’t think it is actually doing very much for you here. Mana becomes your choke point each turn, not card access, so
spending mana to get to do the same stuff over and over again is just not going to be as good as not spending mana and just doing stuff.

Blue Sun’s Zenith, Journeyer’s Kite, Mind Unbound, Necropotence, Null Profusion — We don’t need to hyper-focus on card drawing; Damia will
do that for us if we treat her right and play her carefully. Journeyer’s Kite was replaced directly by Thawing Glaciers, if you want to look at
it that way, while otherwise I am just cutting the hyper-expensive card drawers with the belief that you need to invest your mana in things that affect
the board, not things that draw you more cards in case your Commander doesn’t function at an inopportune moment. You still have plenty of draw to
rely on, just no Necropotence and six-plus-mana draw spells.

Mind’s Desire — What’s the highest storm you can reasonably expect to play this at, just using your own cards? Damia draws you up to seven
cards, two of them are lands, and if you play your cards right you get to cast Mind’s Desire for five, flipping three spells and two lands. Three
spells at random and the mana to cast them is pretty good, but I think this best case scenario is highly optimistic, and the more pessimistic
look at the card is the practical one. If you’re lucky this will draw two spells and cast them, and meanwhile it clunks up your hand as you hope
to do that. Cut.

Black Sun’s Zenith, Ratchet Bomb — More efficient options exist and will be put to work.

Capsize — A ‘good card’ in Commander, but not necessarily a good card for your deck. Damia wants you to commit your mana each turn to
playing spells from your hand, and holding a card in your hand for the right to spend six mana on a bounce effect runs against the grain of how Damia
plays.

Praetor’s Grasp — A good card, but tutors that look in your deck will be better for you than tutors that look in someone else’s.

Suffer the Past — We’re going to work your Bojuka Bog harder, so we do not need to resort to these sorts of tactics.

Cutting into the creatures next, I found I was quite a bit gentler, only making four cuts. Some of those were just slight shifts to a different card to
work the same idea a little harder on another angle, so really I was rather happy with where your creature base was, and just wanted to fix the spells
and the hyper-focus on card draw enchantments back to a more reasonable level.

Brutalizer Exarch — Not as good as Primal Command which you didn’t seem to like well enough to include. Versatile, sure, but six mana is a
hefty investment to you as it will jam your hand when you could just be playing two other spells instead, so it will slow you down.

Drana, Kalastria Bloodchief — I love Drana and consider her on the short-list of awesome black Commanders to lead a deck, but your mana is too
precious and her effect not in keeping for what you need at the price you want to pay.

Necroplasm — I am not convinced this is doing anything useful, and there are easier ways to suppress token creature strategies.

Withered Wretch — A shift to a different card name provides meaningful benefits that you can take advantage of.

By my count, that gives us 21 slots to work with, and things can start to get real interesting from here on out if we try to focus on the
things Damia can help you do instead of just ‘goodstuff.dec’ like your initial focus seemed to be. We’ll start with the
highly uninteresting, purely ‘stock’ additions, then go to the creatures, and finish up with the spells… which is where things start to
go a little wonky.

Damnation, Demonic Tutor, Expedition Map, Lightning Greaves, Sensei’s Divining Top, Vampiric Tutor — Super obviously awesome cards are both super
and obvious. Lightning Greaves here is used more to protect Damia from pinpoint removal than to grant haste, so it is just the cheapest mana cost you
can spend on a shroud-giving mechanism rather than specifically ‘a way to make combat happen faster’ for which it is usually employed.

Pact of Negation, Slaughter Pact — Free spells are good, even if they are free with an asterisk and some heavy penalties if an awkwardly-timed
Winter Orb ruins your day. The more spells you can play over the course of a trip around the table, the more cards Damia draws you.

Submerge — Another experiment with free spells. Not hyper-efficient creature removal, but a good response to a shuffle effect, and one that will
be free a very large proportion of the time. Usually we don’t stress over price so much, but with Damia, lower prices make for higher
opportunities as you deploy more spells, and Submerge was one of those cards I knew I wanted immediately.

Spellweaver Volute — Another exploration of the free-spell concept, you have plenty of sorceries to put it to work, and after your initial
investment of mana can expect to start reaping about a free spell a turn out of this downright bizarre little card.

Explore, Time Warp — Two versions of the same card, the Blue one can be forgiven for being more expensive, since it also says ‘untap all of
your lands’ while you’re at it. The advantage from Exploring is so small as to be easily missed, but vital, and still good even on eleven
mana instead of two so that you play an extra card out of your hand for Damia.

Decree of Pain, Hex, Phthisis — Additional removal to assist with your overall plan. Decree is just too awesome not to play, and with its cycling
ability stands in as your Ratchet Bomb replacement. Phthisis is powerful and thanks to Suspend happens to work quite nicely with Damia, while Hex hits
a very sweet spot to pay you off for her use — a mass removal spell that can often solve all of the problems that trouble you, yet still leaves
Damia in play to benefit from the following turn.

Druidic Satchel — This is my replacement for your Journeyer’s Kite, which will often get you a land off the top of your deck (especially in
concert with cards like Future Sight, Sensei’s Divining Top, and Oracle of Mul-Daya that tell you when is the right time) and which is my new
personal fascination. I have been playing with it in Standard control deck shells to very happy result, and quietly bought several hundred of them on
Magic Online… that’s how awesome I think this addition is, and how happy I think you’ll be to add it to your Damia deck. It’s good
enough for me to play at States, it might be a card that quietly impresses you if you put it to work, without assistance it tends to help you draw only
spells each turn, and with assistance can be a mana-ramping, card-advantage machine.

Constant Mists — This little buyback spell can keep you alive at very low cost, and while ‘keeping a card in your hand every turn’ is
counter-intuitive to Damia’s goals, ‘not dying in combat to beaters’ is very much what she wants to be doing, and she will draw you a
consistent stream of lands to feed this with. If you only draw six cards a turn but also don’t die when people try to kill you, you’re
still doing it right.

Chamber of Manipulation — Another cute addition, and one suggested to me in the forums last week for the Grimgrin deck since that commander is a
sacrifice outlet. This commander is a card-draw outlet, and thus can provide food for the Chamber and gain benefits by mucking up the combat situation
or stealing interesting creatures, assisting with Operation: Don’t Die at a ‘cost’ that when working smoothly is actually a benefit.

And now for the few creature additions:

Nezumi Graverobber — A harder-working, and easier to cast, version of Withered Wretch. Yes, it is more expensive to use, but it also has much
higher upsides, which is important given that your deck is actually quite creature-light, and you need more creatures capable of making a serious
impact all by themselves.

Avenger of Zendikar — The literal definition of ‘creatures that make an impact by themselves,’ Avenger of Zendikar has been killing
entire tables of people in Commander since he was printed, and is the right man for the job for you.

Volrath’s Shapeshifter — The only ‘interesting’ choice I have for you here in this bunch, Volrath’s Shapeshifter both enables
you to discard whenever such might be convenient, and is a potential mana-cheating method for getting creatures from your hand onto the table with the
ability to attack already. An interesting and quirky card that does strange things, and happens to work quite nicely with Damia.

With this build, you’re playing the card draw and recursion game quite strongly still, but are trying much harder to cheat on mana costs and burn
the resources Damia draws you to keep alive effectively and the board clear of major threats. There is more tutoring to find the key cards (and, well,
which card is key will be highly contextual) and more creature power to close a game out, because Avenger of Zendikar solves most ‘my opponents
are still alive’ problems quite neatly. Hopefully this builds in more synergy, and reverses the trend of the deck not gelling together by going
of in this new direction.

The final decklist is this:

Damia, Sage of Stone

Sean McKeown

States on 10-16-2011

Commander

Creatures (20)

• 1 Birds of Paradise
• 1 Psychatog
• 1 Volrath's Shapeshifter
• 1 Nezumi Graverobber
• 1 Myojin of Night's Reach
• 1 Eternal Witness
• 1 Mystic Snake
• 1 Trinket Mage
• 1 Mindless Automaton
• 1 Oracle of Mul Daya
• 1 Avenger of Zendikar
• 1 Primeval Titan
• 1 Geth, Lord of the Vault
• 1 Consecrated Sphinx
• 1 Massacre Wurm
• 1 Sheoldred, Whispering One
• 1 Phyrexian Metamorph
• 1 Jin-Gitaxias, Core Augur
• 1 Phantasmal Image
• 1 Rune-Scarred Demon

Planeswalkers (1)

• 1 Garruk Wildspeaker

Lands (38)

• 5 Forest
• 1 Cabal Coffers
• 1 Thawing Glaciers
• 7 Swamp
• 5 Island
• 1 Yavimaya Hollow
• 1 Dimir Aqueduct
• 1 Overgrown Tomb
• 1 Watery Grave
• 1 Dreadship Reef
• 1 Terramorphic Expanse
• 1 Urborg, Tomb of Yawgmoth
• 1 Tolaria West
• 1 Mosswort Bridge
• 1 Sunken Ruins
• 1 Drowned Catacomb
• 1 Misty Rainforest
• 1 Verdant Catacombs
• 1 Bojuka Bog
• 1 Creeping Tar Pit
• 1 Evolving Wilds
• 1 Command Tower
• 1 Hinterland Harbor
• 1 Woodland Cemetery

Spells (40)

• 1 Sensei's Divining Top
• 1 Hinder
• 1 Nostalgic Dreams
• 1 Vampiric Tutor
• 1 Mystical Tutor
• 1 Yawgmoth's Will
• 1 Time Warp
• 1 Sol Ring
• 1 Demonic Tutor
• 1 Forbid
• 1 Burgeoning
• 1 Constant Mists
• 1 Darksteel Ingot
• 1 Time Stretch
• 1 Future Sight
• 1 Decree of Pain
• 1 Oblivion Stone
• 1 Lightning Greaves
• 1 Explosive Vegetation
• 1 Submerge
• 1 Fact or Fiction
• 1 Chamber of Manipulation
• 1 Far Wanderings
• 1 Hex
• 1 Putrefy
• 1 Phthisis
• 1 Damnation
• 1 Harmonize
• 1 Coalition Relic
• 1 Pact of Negation
• 1 Slaughter Pact
• 1 Spellweaver Volute
• 1 Expedition Map
• 1 Explore
• 1 Exsanguinate
• 1 Nihil Spellbomb
• 1 Praetor's Counsel
• 1 Beast Within
• 1 Spell Crumple
• 1 Druidic Satchel

As always, for your participation in this week’s Dear Azami, you will find in your email box a $20 coupon to the Star City Games online
store, to potentially help pay for any replacements and substitutions you might want to make. The cards I suggested for addition to the deck have the
following prices, for your consideration:

Hopefully this isn’t as big of a problem as it looks like, since for a lot of these, I went off the fact that you included them in other decks,
meaning that you have them and would just need to shuffle proxies around from one to the other based on which you were playing at the moment as you
give Damia another spin. Thanks a lot for coming on Dear Azami, and we’ll be keeping an eye out for your writings about Commander!

— 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,
like Alex’s Vish Kal
deck or Ben’s Zombie-tribal Grimgrin
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!

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