Short on inspiration this week, I broke down and decided to build a Meren of Clan Nel Toth deck for everyone. I figured I could put a bit of a 75% spin on it and build a fun, powerful deck that would be able to hang with the big boys without trashing casual decks. I wanted to do it all. The results were very encouraging. There are a lot of great deck ideas and resources out there, and the deck seemed to build itself. Meren really is the new Nekusar, the Mindrazer with a veritable cornucopia of obvious inclusions. Everything fell together seamlessly, probably like the first time the guys in Chickenfoot all got together to jam. They were all in Mike Anthony’s garage drinking tequila and jamming, and everything just clicked into place. They played some old Van Halen tunes and riffed on some new, original stuff; then, Sammy Haggar says, “We should call the band Chickenfoot,” and then Chad Smith says, “I’m out of this band if we call it Chickenfoot; that’s literally the worst name for a band I’ve ever heard in my life,” and that’s the story of the band Chickenfoot.

I scrapped it. The whole article: the preamble (free of Chickenfoot references), the decklist, the postamble, all of it. I don’t like to do that because I don’t like to waste effort. It was a pretty miserable and frustrating experience, but I think it is for the best. I want to make a point with these articles when I can. Sometimes, I set out to build a deck that isn’t super-obvious, and the deck simply won’t let me; Kaseto, Orochi Archmage was that way. I set out thinking, “I’m going to maximize the effectiveness of hitting opponents with my creatures with cards like Nature's Will and not just build a basic Snake tribal deck,” and literally every Snake I put in the deck encouraged me to hit opponents with my creatures, and I ended up just jamming a thousand Snakes into the deck with a Nature's Will and a Sword of Feast and Famine, cards quite a few Kaseto decks ran incidentally anyway. I didn’t feel like scrapping that deck when it didn’t really turn out like I wanted it to, and that was no fault of my own, if you ask me. I would literally have been removing cards that rewarded me for hitting opponents with my creatures just because they were Snakes even though they were perfect for the deck. I’m not going to try to build a lesson about the very nature of 75% into every deck I build, but I don’t think I’m serving anyone by farting out a Meren deck that an EDHREC subroutine could have built on its own.

What is Stax? Originally, Stax was the name of any deck that played the card Smokestacks to destroy the opponents’ resources and lock them out of the game. Commander has access to a ton of “Stax-esque” cards that can all be used to form a giant machine of doom, tapping opponents’ stuff with Tangle Wire, ruining their untap steps with Static Orb, attenuating their attacks with Crawlspace, and blowing up their lands sometimes with cards like Smokestacks or Crucible of Worlds plus Strip Mine. Once your opponent was in a stranglehold, you won the game by laughing at him or her until he or she punched you in the mouth—I think. I’ve never actually seen a Stax deck win in Commander, but I have seen a group of people say, “Congratulations, you win,” and then finish the game from that point with the rest of the players at the table minus the player who won. I’m not saying, Don’t play Stax; do what you want. I won’t pretend the third deck I ever built didn’t run Stasis and a Recall for my Stasis when I ran out of mana and won with Serra Angel (plus Zephyr Falcon because I was a Planeswalker on a budget). Will some people hate your stupid face if you play Stax? Maybe. Is there a way to do Stax 75%? I used to not think so.

Looking at the deck I came up with based on a card from my Meren deck, it’s dawning on me that the way to do Stax 75% is to focus on a particular resource to keep opponents off. Being able to destroy their mana rocks and lands is the hallmark of a typical Stax deck, but we’re constrained a bit by the guideline we came up with early in this series that it’s preferable to punish players for doing things than it is to prevent them from doing things. I found I didn’t bristle at this guideline (and a vague one at that—I use the word preferable, after all, hardly Hamurabian of me) but used it as it was intended to be used: to guide me. It guided me right into a new concept. If we’re going to do 75% Stax, we can do it without attacking their mana and annoying them but still win the game by keeping the board free of creatures and punishing them for playing more creatures for us to kill. I think you probably know by now the card I built around.

We’re actually going to build a fairly stock Mazirek pile, but we’re going to make sure we have enough sac outlets and ways to punish opponents as well as beaters to get the job done. If you get rid of enough of their creatures, any Sakura-Tribe Elder can threaten to swing for lethal, so I am going to jam mostly utility creatures with the hope that our commander will make our creatures large enough to be our win condition. What will our deck end up looking like?

Mazirek Sax ? Commander | Jason Alt

• Commander (0)

• Creatures (38)
• 1 Aerie Ouphes
• 1 Archfiend of Depravity
• 1 Avenger of Zendikar
• 1 Butcher of Malakir
• 1 Corpsejack Menace
• 1 Creakwood Liege
• 1 Deathrite Shaman
• 1 Den Protector
• 1 Desecration Demon
• 1 Disciple of Bolas
• 1 Eternal Witness
• 1 Fertilid
• 1 Fleshbag Marauder
• 1 Golgari Guildmage
• 1 Greenwarden of Murasa
• 1 Grim Haruspex
• 1 Harvester of Souls
• 1 Hooded Hydra
• 1 It That Betrays
• 1 Mortician Beetle
• 1 Mycoloth
• 1 Nether Traitor
• 1 Puppeteer Clique
• 1 Reaper of the Wilds
• 1 Reassembling Skeleton
• 1 Sakura-Tribe Elder
• 1 Scavenging Ooze
• 1 Shriekmaw
• 1 Smothering Abomination
• 1 Vulturous Zombie
• 1 Woodfall Primus
• 1 Burnished Hart
• 1 Solemn Simulacrum
• 1 Wurmcoil Engine
• 1 Jarad, Golgari Lich Lord
• 1 Sheoldred, Whispering One
• 1 Sidisi, Undead Vizier
• 1 Skullbriar, the Walking Grave

• Spells (25)
• 1 Krosan Grip
• 1 Putrefy
• 1 Tribute to the Wild
• 1 Wake the Dead
• 1 Barter in Blood
• 1 Death Cloud
• 1 Decree of Pain
• 1 Killing Wave
• 1 Primal Growth
• 1 Syphon Flesh
• 1 Attrition
• 1 Awakening Zone
• 1 Deadbridge Chant
• 1 Deathreap Ritual
• 1 Dictate of Erebos
• 1 Evolutionary Leap
• 1 From Beyond
• 1 Grave Pact
• 1 Hardened Scales
• 1 Perilous Forays
• 1 Birthing Pod
• 1 Mimic Vat
• 1 Nim Deathmantle
• 1 Skullclamp
• 1 Sol Ring

• Lands (36)
• 11 Forest
• 11 Swamp
• 1 Blighted Fen
• 1 Buried Ruin
• 1 Command Tower
• 1 Evolving Wilds
• 1 Ghost Quarter
• 1 Golgari Rot Farm
• 1 Grim Backwoods
• 1 High Market
• 1 Overgrown Tomb
• 1 Reliquary Tower
• 1 Tectonic Edge
• 1 Temple of Malady
• 1 Woodland Cemetery
• 1 Miren, the Moaning Well

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I’m really encouraged by how this turned out. We are going to have a very easy time keeping opponents’ boards clear of creatures by virtue of the removal and the Grave Pact effects. We will gain a bonus sacrificing our own creatures, true, but the real bonus is making opponents sacrifice something also, generating another trigger and clearing the way for our beaters.

I tried to strike a decent balance between utility creatures that allowed us to sacrifice them for advantage and cards that triggered when we did so. This list is a suggestion—as long as you stick to the theme of punishing opponents for playing creatures for us to make them sacrifice, you’re on the right track and can tune the deck to your liking. Death Cloud can hurt their lands, but it’s hardly a focus of the deck, and it’s included because of how much work it does making them sac creatures. The land destruction is incidental and nonproblematic.

I had to cut a lot of interesting cards, such as Golgari Germination, Ashling, the Extinguisher, and Cauldron of Souls. I was a little rich on mana, but I like to be able to play my spells. My playables may have suffered a bit, but there are always more cards we could add: Doubling Season, Bitterblossom, Phyrexian Arena. The list is long, and we decided to focus on our Sax effects. Try to find room for cards that replace the creatures we lose, such as Ghoulcaller Gisa.

What do we think? Is Sax the way to do 75% Stax? I really think so. While we didn’t really stray too far from a basic Mazirek build, we did tailor it to suit our needs, maximizing the number of Grave Pact effects and cards like Smothering Abomination that keep us rewarded for making them make hard choices. I would have liked a bit more recursion, and I am playing a lot of nontraditional Mazirek cards like Deadbridge Chant. Cards like that aren’t for everyone. If you prefer, jam some more persist creatures and go to town sacrificing them instead of utility creatures since you don’t have as many ways to return them to play as I’d like. Go your own way with it—just remember the most important thing is to punish opponents for giving you more creatures to make them lose. We’re not preventing them from playing them by destroying their lands, hands, and man . . . a rocks. We’re simply generating a ton of triggers the more targets they put in front of us. What is more 75% than that?