Leovold Stax

     Hello and welcome to the Daily MTG, your one stop shop for all of your Magic needs. Today we delve into the wonderful format of Commander for a deck tech of fun and happiness. Of course, if you know anything about the word "stax" and what it means in the land of Magic, you know that the last bit was sarcasm. Stax is in reference to the concept of a taxing control build based around opponents discarding cards and sacrificing lands, and just making the game difficult to impossible to win for your opponents, while you grind them out with accumulated value over the course of the game. You may be thinking to yourself one of two things,  "Oh dear mother of God, that sounds like a horrific experience for everyone involved!" or "THIS IS MY JAM!!!". Either way, this is going to be fun for me.

     Now that we know what Stax is, we can get to the other part of the title means. That is of course, the king of being a huge d**k himself, Leovold, Emissary of Trest.

     Yes, he is exactly as oppressive as he seems. In the format of Commander, you always have access to your Commander throughout the entire game. So when your objective is to do two things, it's always handy to have your Commander do at least one of those things. This used to be a dangerous wager when tuck was a thing, but it isn't anymore, so go ham. In a Stax deck, we will want to tax our opponents lands, and make them discard their hands. Leovold here helps A LOT with the discarding of hands, thanks to his first ability. This ability works very well in conjunction with a little something called a "wheel effect", which is when all players discard there hands and draws a certain amount of cards. So there's good news and bad news. The bad news is that Red is the king 

of these effects, and Leovold doesn't have this color. The good news is that Black and Blue are pretty good supplementary colors for this. So, to go over why this is so good, when you cast, say Windfall, and the most cards is 7, all players discard their hands, then your opponents draw 1 and you draw 7. This is insane value, obviously, and can put you ahead of the curb, but Commander is a crazy format by nature, and all it takes is for someone to rip a big fat spell to make you real sad. That's where the second part of Stax comes in.

     A neat thing about Magic, is that your opponents only cast spells if you let them. Everybody knows this, at least deep down in their souls, but they play fair to almost kinda fair Magic. Unless you want to play Stax. Which is what we're doing. YAY!!! In this deck, we are going to tax our opponents for playing lands, creatures and spells, and for having them. Smokestack is a beautiful example of this concept. You have permanents? That sucks, how about instead you slowly sacrifice them all. The flip side of this coin is that it is a symmetrical effect, meaning that it effects everyone, including you. Throughout the deck there are multiple effects that are similar to Smokestack, as that it is such a beauty, and this is why Smokestack is gorgeous. This gets a little complicated, so pay attention here. You are playing a normal game of Commander, you play Smokestack, now, not only do you have to sacrifice your permanents first, but throughout the course of the game, everyone keeps casting spells and permanents to sacrifice, and eventually you just have to sacrifice Smokestack, and that was a huge waste of time and now everyone hates you. The thing that you have forgotten though, is that this is not a normal game of Commander. In this game, your opponents have no hands and can draw the bare minimum of cards possible, while you are unhindered in you activities. This means that your opponents will have to start sacrificing their important permanents, i.e. their lands, while you can continue to throw out  random cheap permanents. The best part is, once your opponents are properly neutered, you can sacrifice Smokestack to itself.


     Now that you have made sure that your opponents can do nothing for the rest of the game, it's time for the hard lock. This deck has a neat one. The first card that you will require is your Commander. The next is a sweet gem called Teferi's Puzzlebox. This card is a hidden gem, found usually in punishing card draw decks, like Nekusar, or in Chaos decks. In this deck though, it provides the ultimate lock. You'll have to explain it to your opponents when they ask if there's anyway out of it. At the beginning of there draw step, the Box triggers, then they draw a card for their turn. The trigger then resolves, so they put all the cards in their hand, including the one that they just drew, onto the bottom of their library. At that point, they would usually draw that many cards and continue with their turn, but thanks to Leovold, instead they now draw nothing, and have no hand. Each turn now, they only have the chance to cast the one card they draw during their draw step, which means that it has to be an instant, and if you've done your job right, they'll never be able to cast them.

     Finally, we look at one of the most important aspects of any Commander deck, consistency. For this, the deck needs two main elements; ramp and card draw. Card draw is basically covered thanks to all of the wheel effects we run, and thanks to Green (the best ramp color around) we have access to an array of very nice ramp spells, not to mention the very powerful artifact ramp. As you may note in the decklist linked below, there are a ton of artifacts, which is why artifact tutors are important for this deck. For that specifically, I would like to bring up Tezzeret the Seeker. This is the man of my dreams here people. He ramps by untapping mana rocks (artifacts that tap for mana). He can also search for our artifact lands with his -X ability, which creates redundancy in lands, which means more mana, and more fodder for Smokestack. Finally, he can search for Teferi's Puzzlebox as soon as he hits the board, which, of course, is amazing.

Thanks for reading, and if you have anything you'd like to add or suggest for the deck, go ahead and comment and I'll get to you ASAP! See you tomorrow!

The decklist: http://tappedout.net/mtg-decks/16-10-16-leovold-stax/

If the link doesn't work, you can also access it by going onto tappedout.com and typing in Leovold Stax. The deck will have been created by ShimianSpectre.