Readers!

Kamigawa is once again back in our lives, and it's promising everything you remember from last time, from the LASER swords, phase-shifting ninja planeswalkers and the giant Power Rangers mega zord. It's a crazy set with a ton of futuristic tropes, just like we remember. It also gave me some inspiration for my "play more Instants and Sorceries" quest because the easiest way to make sure you cast more Instants and Sorceries is to just double the amount you play. Don't double the number you run in your deck, you'd have to cut some gas to do that. Double the number you play. Double them. Here, I'll show you.

This only triggers once per turn, but not per turn cycle, meaning your Instants could end up doing a lot of work. There's a real problem with this card, though. It's seven mana for the first play, then 9, then 11, then a number that's too high for me to even calculate in this context (that's a lie, I once cast Awaken the Blood Avatar 10 times in a game I ended up losing). This deck will be extremely mana-hungry, especially with me being ready to play the most powerful Instants and Sorceries I can, hoping to benefit from doubling. Not only that, we're in Mono-Blue. That means no Cultivate, no Land Tax, no whatever Black and Red decks do to ramp (I once saw someone Demonic Tutor for a Basic Swamp and he seemed fine with that outcome). We're going to be VERY mana-hungry in a color that, unless you load up on mana rocks (we will) has a tough time playing Blue mage Magic in a Green mage world. What to do? Well, I don't know about you, but this is the 75% column and I checked the 75% guide and it said "The number of lands in play is zero sum" and it clicked that we should ramp the 75% way.

Stealing opponents' lands is... fraught. People dislike it, but they don't just not like it - someone who cast five board wipes in a game convinced an entire table to gang up on me because I cast a Herald of Leshrac, a seven-mana creature that is in the Ice Age block because the pace at which it becomes a problem that late in the game can best be described as "glacial". If you want to steal their lands, they are going to get upset, and if you're stealing their lands to play a creature that counters their spells, they are going to be double upset. They're going to attack you. A lot. I recommend having a plan for that, and my plan is to make them wish that they had not attacked you. Imagine my plan for that is a Trident, with tine one being Propaganda and Crawlspace, tine two being Aetherspouts and Aetherize and tine three being you threatening to flip the table if they don't stop attacking you. Or stealing their creatures if you can. Tine three is still in the development phase.

Remember, Jin can give you two Helm of Possession. I'm not saying it's a good use of lots of mana, but you can sac a creature you stole with Helm 1 to activate Helm 2, then repeat the process whenever you can untap the Helm that doesn't own anything. We can even play Helms 3 and 4. Their names as "Vedalken Shackles" and "Infinitoken with Vedalken Shackles written on it" and they are very effective. Give us the usual suspects of Sower of Temptation, Thieving Skydiver, and Agent of Treachery and you have a plan to make yourself public enemy numero uno. Good.

Jin is REALLY leaning into helping me out in my quest to play more Instants and Sorceries because he copies them as well as Artifacts. Want to know what he DOESN'T copy? That's right, Enchantments. I'm going to try not to take it personally, but being able to double Annex or Confiscate would be nice. Instead, I'm going to have to do something I never do - CUT or otherwise LIMIT the number of Enchantments I run, which feels like a betrayal of my core principles. I said I'd run more Instants and Sorceries, filthy, disposable, one-use things that they are, and I'm going to, even at the expense of my favorite card types. However, since I'm doing something I don't like to do very often, I'm going to do something else that's new - run a lot of countermagic.

Since Jin counters a spell, it's a smidge tougher to kill him than it is to kill other commanders that don't have pseudo-ward. Players may end up working together - baiting his ability with an inconsequential spell to get a kill spell aimed at Jin through. You need to be ready with backup countermagic in that instance. Not just any countermagic, though - we didn't just vow to steal their lands because we want to clutter up our side of the board, the point of stealing lands is to steal mana, and we're going to do that with our countermagic, too. Mana Drain and Spell Swindle come to mind immediately, but we may have created the perfect deck to try out Scattering Stroke - a card you had to look up because you didn't know what it did. I haven't run Scattering Stroke much because I'm not much for counterspells unless they're something like Avoid Fate or Desertion. However, if we're going to be clashing, it should be in a big mana deck like this one. Clash with impunity, knowing you may have discovered a Kirkland brand Mana Drain. I would even play Plasm Capture if I were allowed, but that's not new information about me.

What will this ungodly heap of unfamiliar spells, expensive creatures, basically no Enchantments and every "gain control" spell I can fit in here look like? We're about to find out. Also, I'm so excited that I couldn't wait to bring this up after the list like I normally do - I'm running High Tide in an EDH for the first time in my life. Wish me luck!

Death and Gitaxias | Commander | Jason Alt

• Commander (1)
• 1 Jin Gitaxias, Progress Tyrant

• Creatures (19)
• 1 Agent of Treachery
• 1 Cosima, God of the Voyage // The Omenkeel
• 1 Emry, Lurker of the Loch
• 1 Etherium Sculptor
• 1 Grand Architect
• 1 Master Thief
• 1 Master Transmuter
• 1 Memnarch
• 1 Padeem, Consul of Innovation
• 1 Palladium Myr
• 1 Phyrexian Metamorph
• 1 Roil Elemental
• 1 Silver Myr
• 1 Solemn Simulacrum
• 1 Sower of Temptation
• 1 Urza, Lord High Artificer
• 1 Vedalken Archmage
• 1 Vedalken Engineer
• 1 Walking Atlas

• Instants (12)
• 1 Aetherize
• 1 Aetherspouts
• 1 Brainstorm
• 1 Counterspell
• 1 Cyclonic Rift
• 1 Desertion
• 1 Dramatic Reversal
• 1 Fierce Guardianship
• 1 Mana Drain
• 1 Scattering Stroke
• 1 Spell Swindle
• 1 Whir of Invention

• Sorceries (10)
• 1 Alrund's Epiphany
• 1 Blatant Thievery
• 1 Expropriate
• 1 High Tide
• 1 Karn's Temporal Sundering
• 1 Ponder
• 1 Reshape
• 1 River's Rebuke
• 1 Thoughtcast
• 1 Time Stretch

• Enchantments (5)
• 1 Annex
• 1 Confiscate
• 1 Mechanized Production
• 1 Propaganda
• 1 War Tax

• Artifacts (16)
• 1 Crawlspace
• 1 Darksteel Forge
• 1 Everflowing Chalice
• 1 Hedron Archive
• 1 Helm of Possession
• 1 Lightning Greaves
• 1 Mind Stone
• 1 Moonsilver Key
• 1 Rings of Brighthearth
• 1 Sol Ring
• 1 Swiftfoot Boots
• 1 Thran Dynamo
• 1 Unwinding Clock
• 1 Vedalken Shackles
• 1 Voltaic Key
• 1 Worn Powerstone

• Lands (37)
• 28 Island
• 1 Academy Ruins
• 1 Buried Ruin
• 1 Darksteel Citadel
• 1 Inventors' Fair
• 1 Mystic Sanctuary
• 1 Reliquary Tower
• 1 Seat of the Synod
• 1 Treasure Vault
• 1 Urza's Saga

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This is an excellent starting point. That said, I think there is quite a bit of work that still needs to be done. I realize that it isn't the most exciting thing in the world to have someone hand you a decklist they don't have 100% confidence in - as a content creator, isn't it my job to smooth the rough edges? That said, it's been my policy for a few years to get something very close to what I think is correct and let the reader do the last 5% of the work. If I gave you a deck and told you it was done, you'd play some games, find some things that didn't work and address them. You'd cut a card you don't vibe with and add a pet card. You'd make it your own. I want you to make all of the decks I suggest your own - this column wasn't about teaching you to build Jin-Gitaxias, it is to highlight a way to build all of your decks that you can connect with. A lot of the time I'm analyzing my own biases to figure out if my tendencies are instructive. To the extent that they're not, I want readers to subtract my bias and add their own. That's unfortunately how a human brain works.

All of that said, I think I went too high with the average Mana Value. You may find you want Time Warp over Time Stretch, for example. Four turns are better than two but Time Stretch costs a million mana. This isn't a deck that lets us cheat spells into play, reduce their cost or otherwise mitigate a high Mana Value - Jin doubles the spell. That's great when you have... I want to say 17 mana to play a Time Stretch? When you don't, but you had 5 and could have cast Time Warp and doubled it, you're going to feel stupid. It's sexy to copy an Expropriate or a Blatant Thievery, but again, we're doubling the spells so isn't a five mana double Bribery better? Especially in a deck that imagines itself the archenemy. This is a learning experience for me, too - I don't run enough Instants and Sorceries and I'm trying to run more. It's very possible all of mine are wrong, though my choices were informed by seeing if other people were doing the same kinds of things I'm attempting to. I saw a lot of people running Expropriate and not a lot of people running Compulsive Research because, hey, that's a draw 6!

I wish there were more ways to take lands, but I get why there aren't. If you look at a card like Cosima, you can actually glean a ton about how design feels about land theft. The front of Cosima is an absurd card that, in the right deck, draws like 8 cards before it gives you a creature with 8 +1/+1 counters on it. Your opponents can't stop you from putting counters on Cosima and it's really tough to stop you from popping it to draw. On the back, you have a clunky, small boat that can't even attack on its own and needs to deal combat damage to take their land. That disparity in relative ease of use should tell you everything you need to know about how much WotC wants you stealing other people's lands. You can do it, but you need to hit them with a five mana 2/3 with no evasion, and THAT card is from the same set as Demonic Consultation and Necropotence.

I'm filibustering my own article when it's clear it's time to wrap things up, so I'll leave you with a final note - some of my late and painful cuts. I cut Liquimetal Coating and Torque even though it makes it easier to steal lands with your artifact theft abilities. Torque plus Memnarch is a ridiculous way to steal lands when they probably have a Sol Ring you can just take with Thieving Skydiver. Realistically, if you take two mana rocks, you're ramped enough to go off, especially with your own pile of mana rocks. I don't need this to be a Memnarch deck, though swapping out a Jin into a Memnarch deck would actually be pretty seamless and maybe even more powerful. You cut stuff like Illusionists' Bracers but your Fabricates are doubled, which rules. I cut Isochron Scepter, too, for lack of targets because the better Scepter is, the more rinky-dink it feels to copy the spell with Jin. I'm not here to cast a double Ponder, I want to Wash Out two whole colors. If you want to add the Liquimetal cards back in, do - they were a painful cut.

That does it for me, readers. I hope you're enjoying my exploration of my own aversion to single-use spells and my embracing my role as Archenemy. Until next time!