For today’s installment of The Metaworker, I’ll be dealing with one of the most common pitfalls of Commander deck construction – lack of focus. Quite often a lack of focus results from a lack of planning before starting to compile a rough draft decklist, although it can also come from a stubborn insistence that a card is so powerful that it belongs in any decklist whose colour identity will allow it.

Today’s decklist comes from Reddit user Stupidwill92

/u/Stupidwill92 writes:

The strategy I like to play is to sit back on powerful instants, and only use them when I need to, casting Dralnu

when the coast is clear to basically put my graveyard back into my hand, and finally cast a game-changing spell,

like Rise of the Dark Realms to win. A guy at my LGS plays Rasputin, Dreamweaver blinks, and it is oppressive to say the least. He usually has a lock on the game by turn 6 or so, through the use of recursion engines, blink enablers, and utility creatures. Things like Glen Elendra, Archmage + Archaeomancer + Ghostly Flicker, with Body Double and Parallax Wave as backup. So my question is on how to punch through board stalls and locks. When I take a look at this list, I instinctively divide it up into the following packages so I can compare what Stupidwill92 says it does to what it can actually do.

Disruption

What are the strengths of Dralnu, Lich Lord? From the sounds of things, /u/Stupidwill92 has made a pretty solid choice in Dralnu as a commander – especially given his preference for draw-go control as a playstyle. Dralnu really excels at hand hate, selective disruption, and a grindy, attrition-based strategy. Dralnu is one of a few commanders that allows you to treat your (and quite often your opponents’) graveyard like an extension of your hand. This allows you to break the symmetry of mass discard and mill cards, abuse sacrifice outlets, and get a few recursion engines of your own going.

What are the weaknesses of Azorius lockdown? Quite fortunately for us, lockdown strategies often rely on some combination of permanents that asymmetrically tax or interfere with a player’s ability to cast threats efficiently. A lockdown deck aims to make it to the late game while grinding out incremental card advantage, which is exactly where our Dralnu list is going to thrive. Dimir as a colour identity provides plenty of ways to interact directly with the board to bounce, counter, and remove key lockdown pieces, clearing out the clutter that’s going to prevent our wincons from going off. Do we tweak or start from scratch?

Being that /u/Stupidwill92’s is right around $100 with no more than $30 spent on a single card, it’s most reasonable to start with tweaking this deck. In the next episode we’ll explore the concept a little more fully, taking the list into a colour identity that I feel is a little more prepared to handle the lockdown strategies he is describing in his meta. Being that this is the case, I feel very comfortable setting some goals that will help direct my card selection. 1) Let’s fill up those graveyards! 2) Captalize on full graveyards by including a reanimator package. 3) Pare down the disruption package to ensure our ability to participate in the early game.

So, without further ado, here are the cuts.

I’ve included some strict upgrades to the mana acceleration package. Liliana of the Dark Realms and Crypt Ghast are some of the most effective pieces to any big mana strategy in black. They’ll get you there a lot faster than Caged Sun, and you might even grind out some life by extorting along the way. Expedition Map is a strict upgrade over Wayfarer’s Bauble because it allows you to grab some of your utility lands, and get your Cabal Coffers / Urborg interaction online more reliably. I felt we were a little light on wincons, so I’ve included one that I think is incredibly appropriate for our strategy. Consuming Aberration can outright kill people in the late game, is a prime reanimator target, and isn’t quite as reliant on big mana. Finally, as a replacement for Talrand, I really like Teferi, Mage of Zhalfir. Teferi is going to allow you to cast your wincons uncontested, and I think it fits right into what you’re trying to do here. The revised decklist fills up graveyards with terrifying efficiency. It utilizes top-tier black mana acceleration to set up our late game bombs, and sheds some of the overcosted disruption in the original list in favour of cards that serve to advance our own strategy. Stay tuned for the next episode, where we’ll look at an alternate approach to handling this meta – taking a dive into the Sultai colour identity with Damia, Sage of Stone.

If you are struggling with a problem in your local meta, send a message to chefsati on reddit with a detailed description of the dominant threats in your meta. Be sure to include the commander (and archetype if applicable) as well as the pilot’s preferred ways of closing out the game. Also include your decklist, budget, and any deckbuilding restrictions you’ve imposed on yourself (themes, house rules/banlist, and overall spikiness of your playgroup). Your situation may be solved in a future installment of The Metaworker.