Dear Azami – Zuberacide

You had me at Zuberacide. Embarrassing ways to kill people that are actually highly effective is a good way to end up here on Dear Azami because the dream of lighting a man on fire with an Ember-Fist Zubera just to watch him die is the kind of dream I can get behind. Just for bookkeeping’s sake, though, we have a few problems that need to be pointed out. First, Coalition Victory is not a card you are allowed to play in Commander because it is very, very banned. Second, even with this slot untouched, the deck is short a card. Third, worse yet, out of your six actual Zubera, one is doubled up, with Rushing-Tide Zubera listed twice.

So the theme of this deck amuses me, which is good enough to get you in the door. I’m not sure this is a Karona, False God deck instead of a deck that just uses her for her colors and sticks with it over the notion of a quasi-tribal theme. I would like to give some consideration to whether there is a more appropriate five-color commander for you that works better with the deck.

My first instinct was to dig deeper on the Shapeshifter theme that is a light riff to help up your Zubera count and go with Reaper King—any such member of column A would also count as a Scarecrow for column B, after all, and come with a Vindicate attached. Upon further reflection, however, I felt strongly pulled to Child of Alara. If you’re going to add a board control element, the firm one is better than the goofy and ineffective one, and this deck already by design is good at weathering Wrath effects and thus does not mind playing into one of its own.

If you could count on having Conspiracy in play, Sliver Overlord also would be an option, letting you set up Zuberas with his find-a-Sliver ability, but your intended use of Conspiracy is to force other things to fit the Zubera mold, not to somehow turn this funniest of creature types into Slivers to combo off with this other card. I can see plenty of commander options and am not sure yours is the best fit.

We’ll stick a pin in this and come back to it as we work more on the deck. I’d like to start building the shell of the thing to be better at what it does, and then maybe that will suggest whether Karona should be at the helm or someone else. Seeing Xenograft and Conspiracy in your list, I’m not compelled to discount Reaper King either, so we have three realistic options to helm the Death By A Thousand Zubera.

Looking at the engine cards, I’m actually dissatisfied with the "other ways to win" for much the same reason I’m dissatisfied with your ideal card to have in play while you’re trying to, Phyrexian Altar. This is the complexity of sending me a combo deck. I may want to help it work better, but I don’t want to tune it to be the most powerful engine on the block.

You want to go go karting with your Zubera deck and I’m down with that, but where you noted you were trying to build in "more interesting things," I instead saw efforts to take that same trick and make it work more often by giving alternative puzzle pieces the chance to fit instead. We’re going to end up compromising on that. Phyrexian Altar gets to stay, but we’re going to cut back on some of the easier pieces to go off with tangentially. If you’re going to Zubera someone to death, I want to see them Zuberad to death, not accidentally killed by Warstorm Surge because your deck can play Living Death a couple of times.

Working at the very beginning, let’s get started on the mana base. I see too many lands that come into play tapped for this deck to really hum and some lands that limit you in ways I consider unpleasant that we’re going to have to remove. There is going to be a minor domain subtheme to the deck by the time we’re through with it, so we’re going to look for replacements that give us access to basic land types in play.

So we need a specific form of raw fixing—I otherwise would be all-too-happy to supplement your "set of five Shards of Alara tri-lands" with "set of five Odyssey filter lands," as I have been quite content with those as high performers in the five-color decks I’ve tried in the past and expect they’d port over fairly well and at a cheap price. Needing to find basics for domain on the cheap instead suggested a different set of lands, even cheaper and far more recently printed, to the point where you almost certainly have them lying around somewhere if you’ve played Commander for a while.

Out: Vivid Crag, Vivid Creek, Vivid Grove, Vivid Marsh, Vivid Meadow

In: Grixis Panorama, Esper Panorama, Bant Panorama, Naya Panorama, Jund Panorama

You’re light on immediate color needs, and while you may not really need that one-of Plains very much for spell casting, it will end up counting almost like a part of a spell by itself as part of the domain cards and thus there is added value to adding fixers that are also finders.

Out: Ancient Ziggurat, Thran Quarry

Thran Quarry is one Wrath effect away from being a dead land in your graveyard, and those happen all the time, so we’re not going to set you up for its inevitable and unfortunate death. You could switch it for Gemstone Mine and be confident that it will at least tap for mana three times before it died, but even that improvement can be improved upon. Ancient Ziggurat sitting in a deck with five-mana, six-mana, and even more expensive spells than that is just another impediment to getting where you want to go, so it too is going to get an upgrade.

In: Thawing Glaciers, Grand Coliseum

You’ve already got City of Brass in your deck, so clearly the downside of having to pay a little bit of life for the right color of mana is one you’re willing to accept in small doses. Grand Coliseum comes into play tapped—a clause you’ve shown you’re willing to accept—and for that benefit your City of Brass comes with a pain-free colorless option that is an acceptable compromise.

Thawing Glaciers is like the domain-making machine, as it can fetch out all five basic land types with just the one card and a sufficient amount of time, and thus is ideally suited to playing a slower, longer game as many of them are in Commander. We’ve cut five tap lands then immediately jammed two more back into the deck, but even a net gain of three more lands coming into play untapped is very beneficial when you have crossed the double-digit threshold of them. We’re at 11/36, where before there were fourteen of them. Improvements don’t have to be big to be meaningful.

Out: Swamp

In: Plains

This is a minor cosmetic shift for color-balance reasons. At the end of this, we’re going to have a few more white spells and will have cut down a fair bit on the double-black spells, so this just helps us fix the mana a little bit better at a very minimal cost.

Next we move on to the artifacts section, which I begin by taking a buzz saw to your second tier of mana rocks. We already have a deck that’s not thrilled to get hit with a sweeper, and losing board position and mana is a blow we can simply avoid if we try to—so we will try to while we’re in the redesign phase. This section actually gives us my favorite improvements to the deck overall.

This is because when I do this in my head, I’m cutting the cards that most offend me in the deck—the backup kill mechanisms like Warstorm Surge that let you kill someone with the juggling motions the deck is going to be capable of without it being "death by Zubericide"—and adding the interesting bits that go in here that work on top of the Zubericide plan and augment it with new angles and approaches instead of cheating us out of Zubera-powered doom.

Out: Helm of Awakening, Urza’s Incubator

Reducing mana costs is just not as effective as tapping for mana unless you’re using it as part of a snowball effect where you get a massive multiplier effect. Future Sight and Sensei’s Divining Top greatly appreciate Helm of Awakening, but casting a couple of Zubera doesn’t quite get us there. Urza’s Incubator works with about a dozen cards in the deck and does nothing otherwise, so it needs to be replaced with a card that does something more consistently.

Out: Star Compass, Manalith, Vessel of Endless Rest, Worn Powerstone

The B team of mana rocks. We’re keeping the quality players—Darksteel Ingot, Coalition Relic, Chromatic Lantern, Sol Ring, and Fellwar Stone—and scrapping the ones that don’t do quite enough for the investment you have to make in them. We’ll end up with roughly the same mana capabilities in the end, but we’re going to move some of those needs out of the artifacts section because we don’t want to over rely on things that go boom when a sweeper hits.

IN:

Thran Dynamo – Worn Powerstone’s getting the axe because spending two more mana for a Sol Ring that comes into play tapped stings a little. But for one more mana in, you get one more mana out every time you use it…and the ability to use it immediately, making it one of the most highly effective ramp effects in the format, as it effectively costs just one mana the turn you play it.

Armillary Sphere – The deck does want more mana out of this slot, and it does want colored mana fixing. Manalith is all well and good, but it doesn’t really feel like a considerable amount of ramping. Once we get past the idea that we have to accelerate rather than just fix, Armillary Sphere is a perfect fit with the domain minor theme elements that will be worked in later and meets our requirements for not blowing up when the board gets wiped.

Ashnod’s Altar – A companion to Phyrexian Altar, and to me at least the more palatable version because it makes colorless instead of letting you get the colored mana it would take to potentially loop Living Death-type effects with Archaeomancer as you work to build up the death-by-Zubera plan. I’m actually entirely fine with the goofing-with-Zubera combo plan so long as it has boundaries, so Ashnod’s Altar fits more with the "do this a lot!" plan than the "do it forever" boring grind of juggling the same cards till the table gets bored and dies. Ashnod’s Altar will work well with a few other effects we’re building into the deck without tipping over into the realm of the infinite, so I’m happy to include it.

Lifeline – Another way to sort-of "go off" using your plan of action to beneficially repeat a sacrifice chain to grow bigger and bigger Zubera effects. The symmetrical nature of the card makes it interesting and interactive in a fun and engaging way, rather than the no-fun brain-shut-down way this deck could go if it tried harder to combo off. Since it returns the toys on the very same turn, it lets you sac a Zubera squad, get the effect, then do it all again a second time later in the turn for a multiplicative effect without losing anything. The team will still come back in the next end step to repeat their sacrifice for fun and profit.

Mimic Vat – Not a combo piece or really a combo enabler, Mimic Vat is just a good card that is good with the cards you’re already playing and might do interesting things that are fun and beneficial. This deck needs a bit more fun variety. Everything else is focused in a very Arcade’s Funhouse kind of way—it’s interesting and looks like it might be fun but is really just trying to march you along in a specific way towards the pointy end. A few less-hard edges will increase your enjoyment of playing the deck and others’ enjoyment of playing against the deck.

Nim Deathmantle – Alongside Ashnod’s Altar, this effectively says "2: Flicker this creature," letting you take a single Zubera and a pile of lands and build up greater and greater effects. Because you get to stack the triggers, you can sacrifice a Zubera and put its death trigger on the stack, then Deathmantle’s trigger on the stack, and return the creature to life (and again to death, over and over again) as many times as you have the mana to spend, floating triggers all the time so that all resolve at the end and count the final number of Zubera-deaths when determining the size of their effect.

It’s all fun and games until Ember-Fist Zubera pokes out both eyes and saws off a few limbs, and you can laugh at Ashen-Skin Zubera til it costs all of the other players at the table four cards each from the hand. Deathmantle helps take the deck from funny ha-ha to funny uh-oh in a hurry.

Next we move on to the creature slots, where we are going to take advantage of the empty slot by moving the +1 over here to be filled and do the same for the duplicated Rushing-Tide Zubera. I want four total new cards and only have to make two cuts to get them, so let’s start there:

OUT:

Phyrexian Plaguelord – Cool, sure, but clearly being played not for his own "cool factor" but because he’s a free sacrifice outlet. That outlet has been substituted into the deck already with Ashnod’s Altar, so we can cut this without it affecting the way the deck plays out.

Skirge Familiar – Cut for being a pure resource exchange engine card. I’ve played Skirge Familiar before and know there are no good reasons (and plenty of bad ones) for doing so. I spent a fair chunk of time in Standard casting Yawgmoth’s Bargain and killing people thanks to Skirge Familiar, and it is a critical mass component of the Evil Ad Nauseam Needs To Be Banned Deck as a quick and dirty way to go from five mana to table-killing Exsanguinates worth of mana. I can see you going off with Floating-Dream Zubera and churning more and more free cards into your hand to throw away with Skirge Familiar, and that’s the unfun parasitic combo deck kind of "motion" that I want to shy away from and replace here.

IN:

Floating-Dream Zubera – My reasonable interpretation of your doubling up on the Rushing-Tide Zubera is that one of those two was meant to be Floating-Dream Zubera because this Zubera seems like it would be really powerful in your deck and not something you’d have casually forgotten.

Burning-Eye Zubera – Added to flesh out the full number of actual Zubera in the deck. While neither of the two 4CC Zubera have the same kind of death triggers as the five 2CC ones do, and you may quite reasonably find these dying and not adding anything at all for doing so, every time a Zubera dies the Zuberacide counter ticks up by one. We prefer real Zubera to Shapeshifter and Changelings anyway, so we start with all five original tribe members and the two late additions from Saviors of Kamigawa, just for completeness’s sake.

Eternal Witness – Archaeomancer #2, sort of. The "juggling" plan is not one I want to completely enable—I am still taking a hard look at that Phyrexian Altar for the sins it enables—but it is one I consider a vital function of the deck’s successful game plan. It just happens to be that I want it to have a reasonable upper boundary instead of being a goofy infinite-mana mechanism.

No matter how goofy the moving parts are in an infinite-mana loop mechanism, that mechanism is unfun and uninteresting, but it’s the unbounded part of the loop I object to, not the ability to begin looping effects as we build up the dead-Zubera count. Eternal Witness works with the same subset of spells you were using to recursively raise the Zuberacide count to keep it going and gets included to raise the effectiveness of that loop motion.

Iname, Life Aspect – Another card that helps loop a little, but this one is fair insofar as the infinite-loop boundary is pre-banned by its self-exile requirements to pull off any sort of loop-like effect. I thought it would be beneficial to add another card that works somewhat in that way and applaud its built-in boundary that prevents infinite recursion as entirely reasonable and fair. You don’t need to hit infinite, and you don’t even need to hit a lot to make juggling dead Zubera a thing worth doing.

This brings us to the last section of the deck, the spells. I’ve nominated twelve to be cut, and we’ll go down that list identifying the reasons why before we add back into the deck with their replacements.

Coalition Victory – Banned card is banned.

Weird Harvest – Just like Skirge Familiar, this is a pure engine card that literally has no fair uses in that an effort to use it "fairly" would see three players mop the floor entirely with you. So when you’re playing it, the aim is to play it to win right there on the spot. You’re clearly not going to help your opponent stop you with any of the wonderful toys that you just helped them mass Tutor up, so passing the turn is not on your list of priorities when resolving this spell. We’re going to cut it for the pure unadulterated unfun combo piece that it is.

Rite of Consumption – Dying to recursive Zuberas is presumably the justification for sitting through a big combo. Rite of Consumption is an "alternate win" combo condition: grow that Carrion Feeder or Bloodflow Connoisseur to sufficient size and chuck it at a player until they’re dead. That’s not interesting, even if it might be effective, so as we’re streamlining the deck to be better at the Zubera-sacrificing game, we’re also going to take out the pieces that just kill people dead without taking a 1/2 Zubera’s death to fire the effect off.

Diabolic Intent – I don’t think the extra Tutor power is helpful here, and there really aren’t enough creatures this deck wants to sacrifice in order to enable it. A mix of Living Death effects and Second Sunrise effects as your engine pieces means that some of them don’t care if you’ve sacked a Zubera a few turns ago to turn on your Tutor…and some of them really care because they don’t work with that pre-dead Zubera.

Conflux – At this price range, it’s the absolute top-end of your mana curve before you do something silly, and I don’t think it is actually that helpful here. Yes, it can search up five different Zubera, but in actuality, it’s going to get a mix of resurrection effects, sacrifice outlets, and Zubera to eat. We can do about as well just by adding more cheap card draw to the deck, so we’re going to drop down the mana curve some and do this without needing to spend a ton of mana to do it.

Warstorm Surge – Cutting back on the ways to incidentally kill someone while juggling an unbounded Living Death chain. Doing it the fun and interesting way with Zubera triggers is worthwhile and a cute enough trick to build the deck around; doing it with whatever dorks happen to be enough to hit critical mass and watching people die with your own personal Pandemonium is not, so out it goes.

Attrition – This seems to be in as a sacrifice outlet, but we’ve got plenty of those without tacking a mana cost on and it doesn’t seem like it is very helpful in its normal usage.

Devouring Greed – While this is a potentially powerful thing you get to do, like Rite of Consumption it makes things that little bit too easy in a way that doesn’t feel satisfying, so it gets the axe. I’d rather play a card that fits and has additional uses.

Haunted Crossroads – If you’re using this for recursive benefits, it puts the creature in a zone you have a much harder time accessing, so the savings for doing so is not worth playing the card. This will be replaced for a similar style of effect that can actually work with the many-dead-Zubera plan by putting the card directly into a zone you can access it from, rather than the top of your deck where it’s hard to reaccess it.

Footbottom Feast – Cut for similar reasons as Haunted Crossroads, this isn’t really helping us in any meaningful way except possibly to duck a Bojuka Bog effect, and we’re going to add another card that helps you to access Team Dead Zuberas instead of this one. If the concern was dodging graveyard removal, you can do that surprisingly well by just playing more slowly a fair chunk of the time. It’s not an out-and-out race to combo the table, after all, but a negotiated dance of play and counter-play as you try to kill the opponent around their plays. You can frequently puzzle a way out without needing to resort to cards like this to try and protect these fragile resources.

Ribbons of the Reikai – Your benefit for playing the Spirit tribe is what, exactly, a mana’s worth of discount on a card drawing spell, maybe two? Much more likely than using this to draw seven cards for five mana is having this be unimpressive—a card or two—or outright stranded following a sweeper effect. I’d prefer a real card drawing spell that always works for the advertised amount, and we can find it if we try.

Mind Over Matter – Just like cutting Skirge Familiar, this is the same card with a slightly different identity, a resource-exchanger that lets you go off with Fecundity or Floating-Dream Zubera and make just as much mana as you please off of it. I like the combo motion for this deck but dislike things that get too broken too easily, and these resource exchange cards are getting cut so that we can rely on paying mana for spells and being limited by our mana supply in just how crazy we can go.

I didn’t cut out all of your cheap-shot cards. I left you Flesh Allergy, because unlike dying to a Warstorm Surge that is in play while you juggle effects, I think this would actually be something your opponent considered interesting and actually fun to die to once in a while. This is because like pointing an arbitrarily large number of Ember-Fist Zubera triggers their way, one-shotting someone to death with Flesh Allergy stores up a whole lot of work that had to get put into it first and thus only happens at the end of a pretty interesting turn without being offensively cheesy like Rite of Consumption.

Before we can add in these remaining dozen slots, we really need an answer to the question from before: are we switching commanders? As I’ve worked on it some more, I’ve reached the conclusion that the answer to that question is yes. Not to speak too ill of Karona, this particular False God has a fine fit in tribe-based decks that can actually use the attack phase to finish an opponent off, but that’s not what you’re doing.

Trying to play Sliver Overlord in a sideways fashion by searching for creatures you’ve forced to become Slivers just for his amusement isn’t really interesting because Sliver Overlord decks are already just fine combo decks on their own without needing a goofy trick to "make it worthwhile," and my thinking that Child of Alara might be worthwhile as an additional tool to help get out of a difficult board state doesn’t actually thrill or interest me.

What does interest me, however, is the intersection of Xenograft and Conspiracy in this deck with your Zubera plan and how token creatures can beneficially "prime the pump" as it were. If you started a far-from-infinite Zubera-juggling turn by sacrificing half a dozen token creatures that happen to technically have the Zubera tribe stapled to them, suddenly your first real Zubera dying fires off a massively multiplied effect with that first death trigger, and I wanted to pursue adding a few token-making cards to the deck to do that.

While pursuing that vein of interaction, Reaper King gives the deck a new and goofy-but-interesting angle to take, where your enchantments suddenly drop Scarecrows into play and token-making effects come with a bunch of Vindicates stapled to them. That seemed at least as valid a conceptual idea as Karona and more worthwhile to pursue in that it will actually seem interesting and fun if you veer down that road, and we want more things that keep it fresh and fun while trying to be effective with this highly, highly ineffective plan of amusing terror.

Out: Karona, False God

In: Reaper King

This also gives us a few suggestions for the kinds of cards we’ll want to add back in, while we’re at it.

IN:

Kodama’s Reach, Cultivate – I had promised a few more mana fixers, and ones that work with domain. While green is a fairly minor color to this deck, there are more than enough ways to find your first green mana on time in the early game because of how many five-colored sources you have overall, and this will help ramp up in a way that won’t get knocked back down the first time an Oblivion Stone appears on the table.

We want something that helps fix our colors but not fall apart on us later in the game, and while these aren’t absolutely the most powerful ramp effects available, they’re still quite solid and perfectly fit our needs both by providing two mana to our eventual pool of resources and being very reliable over the course of the game.

Rite of Replication – You will never see a Reaper King deck without Rite of Replication because living the dream of 25 Vindicates for kicking it on your commander is a worthwhile dream to have. It is every bit as effective for you on any Zubera of your choice, and hilarity ensues from the moment you pick that little 1/2 as your choice of target to when everyone dies because you did.

That it’s also a potentially powerful card to use with other, fair play usages is not something to look down your nose at, either, just like playing Mimic Vat. And I can even see this being very useful unkicked just copying any Zubera to add to your initial tally with an explosive turn, to the point where I gave serious consideration to Crackling Counterpart as well before deciding we didn’t want to go that deep down the clone-a-Zubera hole.

Increasing Devotion, Conqueror’s Pledge – Powerful white token makers that crank out a serious number of bodies, starting the sacrifice party off right especially if they just happen to be Zuberas at the time.

Ordered Migration – The first of the two domain cards, Ordered Migration is surprisingly powerful for a card that looks as goofy as it looks and feels as goofy as it feels. Five power of fliers out of a single card is better-than-Lingering-Souls kind of "good," and like these other token makers it can let you have a good time set to either Zubera or Scarecrow in a way that should prove intriguing.

Storm Herd – The ‘let’s make tokens!" theme taken to its ultimate end point. If 25 Vindicates off of a kicked Rite of Replication is a feel good plan with Reaper King around, 40 or more when this card resolves has to be so good you have to target things multiple times so you don’t start killing off your own stuff while you’re at it. And even without one of your two enchantments to set these to Zubera or Scarecrow, alongside Ashnod’s Altar or Phyrexian Altar this is actually just a ridiculous mana Ritual.

This is a side I’ve never seen Storm Herd played for before and thus is one that your opponents should even find interesting as it obliterates them, which will help make up for the fact that I have taken away your Skirge Familiar and Mind Over Matter cards. Spend 8: Make 40-80 mana is a hell of a resource conversion right there, and it is this intersection of clever and good that is where this deck smothers everyone to death in a fun way they can appreciate. So we chase that flavor, knowing that the ceiling of fun is very high and the worst that can happen is it takes a while to make something worthwhile and interesting happen. I can even see a game state where just Storm Herd and Flesh Allergy combine to kill an opponent, with no other work done…and them appreciating that.

Aether Mutation – Not quite as many tokens, but this is Commander, where your target might be an Eldrazi, an eight-drop, or a Blightsteel Colossus more often than anything else. You can get a lot of tokens out of this for the price in Commander, and I wanted just one more token producer that worked at a high rate before deciding the variability is something I was actually fine with.

It won’t always be impressive—you can’t even guarantee it’ll make five, like Ordered Migration, because making any at all relies on the bounce spell resolving instead of being countered by a lack of targets—but there will be games where it overcompensates and even games where you need that bounce effect before you can go off, like when facing down a Withered Wretch with everything else in place. This crunched in an interesting way just enough for me to want to add it here, though I’m really remembering it and hoping to find it a new and different home somewhere else in the near future instead…

Buried Alive – If Iname, Death’s Aspect is worth playing as a set-up card, then Buried Alive should likewise be just as playable to you for its ability to set up Living Death effects with a sufficient number of Zubera victims.

Allied Strategies – Our second domain card replaces Ribbons of the Reikai by changing the variable number from "number of Spirits in play" to "number of basic land types you control," when we’ve set that second number as something you can realistically set to four or even all five without a problem. Spending five mana to draw five cards is a really good deal—it’s like paying one more on your Fact or Fiction but getting to keep ’em all instead.

Phyrexian Reclamation – Our upgrade of Haunted Crossroads, this can potentially work as part of a combo motion engine alongside any Zubera and Ashnod’s Altar and can get downright nutty as a life gain card when that Zubera is Silent-Chant Zubera. After all, that two life you pay is something you get back every time, and this cycle would then be BW: Gain 2N life, where N is the number of iterations we’re on. It’s just a higher power level than Haunted Crossroads while having all the same benefits and can even just be used as a "fair" card too if you have to… Slow-motion Zubericide is a thing you may find yourself having to resort to.

Corpse Dance – Possibly my favorite card in Commander, though definitely in the Top 5, as it is too similar in effective application to Grim Harvest, which for a while was my hands-down snap-answer to favorite card in the format to play with. Corpse Dance is never going to generate you infinite mana or anything like that, but it will do good work for you alongside a sacrifice outlet and any Zubera, especially thanks to the fact that as an instant you’re able to stack all of the Zubera triggers without resolving any in between your Reanimation effect, letting you get the best value possible as you use it a few times. Being able to go "good enough" instead of "go broken" is where I feel this deck should be aiming for, and Corpse Dance is an excellent tool for that particular job.

Putting it all together, we get the following decklist:

Zubracide with Reaper King

Sean McKeown

Test deck on 01-27-2013

Commander

Creatures (21)

• 1 Xiahou Dun, the One-Eyed
• 1 Carrion Feeder
• 1 Silent-Chant Zubera
• 1 Iname, Life Aspect
• 1 Iname, Death Aspect
• 1 Floating-Dream Zubera
• 1 Ember-Fist Zubera
• 1 Dripping-Tongue Zubera
• 1 Ashen-Skin Zubera
• 1 Eternal Witness
• 1 Mistform Warchief
• 1 Mistform Ultimus
• 1 Burning-Eye Zubera
• 1 Rushing-Tide Zubera
• 1 Amoeboid Changeling
• 1 Shapesharer
• 1 Chameleon Colossus
• 1 Reaper King
• 1 Viscera Seer
• 1 Bloodflow Connoisseur
• 1 Archaeomancer

Lands (36)

• 1 Forbidden Orchard
• 2 Forest
• 2 Plains
• 1 Thawing Glaciers
• 1 Reflecting Pool
• 1 City of Brass
• 4 Swamp
• 2 Mountain
• 5 Island
• 1 Grand Coliseum
• 1 Terramorphic Expanse
• 1 Arcane Sanctum
• 1 Bant Panorama
• 1 Crumbling Necropolis
• 1 Esper Panorama
• 1 Grixis Panorama
• 1 Jund Panorama
• 1 Jungle Shrine
• 1 Naya Panorama
• 1 Savage Lands
• 1 Seaside Citadel
• 1 Exotic Orchard
• 1 Rupture Spire
• 1 Evolving Wilds
• 1 Command Tower
• 1 Transguild Promenade

Spells (43)

• 1 Vampiric Tutor
• 1 Living Death
• 1 Corpse Dance
• 1 Sol Ring
• 1 Demonic Tutor
• 1 Fellwar Stone
• 1 Goblin Bombardment
• 1 Conspiracy
• 1 Darksteel Ingot
• 1 Fecundity
• 1 Kodama's Reach
• 1 Buried Alive
• 1 Patriarch's Bidding
• 1 Decree of Pain
• 1 Ashnod's Altar
• 1 Second Sunrise
• 1 Concentrate
• 1 Phyrexian Reclamation
• 1 Lifeline
• 1 Thran Dynamo
• 1 Allied Strategies
• 1 Aether Mutation
• 1 Twilight's Call
• 1 Phyrexian Altar
• 1 Ordered Migration
• 1 Fact or Fiction
• 1 Aura Shards
• 1 Compulsive Research
• 1 Storm Herd
• 1 Careful Consideration
• 1 Harmonize
• 1 Coalition Relic
• 1 Armillary Sphere
• 1 Conqueror's Pledge
• 1 Rite of Replication
• 1 Cultivate
• 1 Flesh Allergy
• 1 Mimic Vat
• 1 Nim Deathmantle
• 1 Xenograft
• 1 Increasing Devotion
• 1 Faith's Reward
• 1 Chromatic Lantern

As always, for your participation in this week’s Dear Azami you will receive a $20 coupon to StarCityGames.com, because it would just be rude of me to help disassemble your deck without helping you to reassemble it back together again. We here at Dear Azami aim to be helpful, as well as to please. Cassidy and I both try and keep it to a reasonable minimum so we’re not going crazy, unless asked to, and the total price of the alterations we’ve made comes at just over $40, which is not bad at all considering we’re trying to help meet you halfway there.

Someday, I suspect Cassidy and I will team up on the same deck to see how different we can make it without exceeding that $20 coupon… We’ve tried a lot of different things, after all, but not a hard budget limit and a deck fix-off. We’ve seen two submissions mashed into one deck before, so you’d think one submission being pulled apart into two decks would be the logical next step…

Here’s the list of this week’s alterations, sorted by price for your consideration. More than half of the deck changes fit under a dollar each, so I’m comfortable believing these swaps will be easy to make…to make up for the fact that we’ve swapped your Commander out, too.

I look forward to hearing back about how many people you managed to kill in a single game off of just Ember-Fist Zubera triggers, though of course I will happily settle for stories of opponents attacked for lethal solely by the spawn of dead Dripping-Tongue Zuberas. And the first time Storm Herd taps for twice your life total in mana, the entire table takes a drink, right? Isn’t that how these things work?

— Sean McKeown

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 Andrew’s Lovisa Coldeyes deck or Josh’s Intet the Dreamer 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!

Email us a deck submission using this link here!

Like what you’ve seen? Feel free to explore more of Dear Azami herea> 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! Follow Cassidy on his Facebook page here or check out his Commander blog!