In this installment we’ll explore a different archetype that dovetails quite nicely with our Dralnu strategy, but explores a slightly different method of setting up the Rise of the Dark Realms or Living Death finisher.

Sometimes you’ll have to come at your problem from an entirely different angle to shake up a stagnant meta. In this case we’re going to explore the idea of ditching Dralnu as a commander and going with something a little more meta-appropriate.

“If you always do what you’ve always done, you’ll always get what you’ve got.”

In the last installment of The Metaworker, we refurbished a Dralnu list that was struggling to keep up in the face of an Azorius deck that lands hard locks on the board fairly early on in the game. Sometimes, however, effecting change in your local playgroup goes beyond tweaking your current strategy.

Note: I wrote this article before Conspiracy 2 was spoiled. Leovold is probably a superior hand hate general and provides an interesting (and very powerful) shell, but rather than re-writing this entire article I decided to include him as one of the 99.

Hand Hate and Response to Threats in EDH

Before we begin, I just want to add a bit of a caveat here. We’re going to be exploring a concept that not every playgroup will be comfortable with – hand hate. Some people lump hand hate in with mass land destruction, stax, and other such strategies due to the fact that it is a means of denying your opponents access to resources. This is a fair description. My current meta is 100% accepting of all kinds of resource denial strategies, but your mileage may vary.

When we look at big, bomby threats in EDH, there are a number of ways we can deal with them. Counterspells, spot/mass removal, and boomerang effects are the most common you’ll see because they generally fall under the concept of the “spirit of Commander”.

Beyond that, there are resource denial strategies like mass land destruction, tax, stax, and hand disruption.

Rather than dealing with threats as they come up, these strategies focus on preventing these threats from ever becoming relevant. They tend to be a little more difficult to build around, as the effects are usually templated to be symmetrical. This means a fair amount of deckbuilding has to go into breaking the symmetry so we’re left with all of the positives but none of the negatives.

Why Damia?

The resource denial strategy I’ve selected for breaking through the staxy meta we’re dealing with is hand hate. While forcing our opponents to discard threats, we’re often forced to discard some of our own cards in the process. This means to pull this off, we’re going to need a card draw engine in a can to keep our foot on the gas. Damia is one of the best commanders to do this, and her Sultai colour identity gives us access to black for discard effects, green for ramp, and blue for stack interaction.