I've recently started seeing a lot more cEDH content. I think this is me, not the content world - for whatever reason, the algorithms have started pointing me toward more competitive stuff. I still have no interest in that particular format - I'm more a 'hang-with-my-friends-and-enjoy-myself' kind of player - but I've been seeing more about it recently.

One thing cEDH does really, really well is point us toward a goal. The goal is to WIN. And not just win, but win quickly, handily, and by any means possible within the rules. This is a nice focusing of what we're up to, because if the goal is to win, we don't run pet 7-drops that don't do anything, we run the most efficient versions of every card we can lay our hands on. We don't care about anyone else having fun, we care about beating them. Every deck must have Sol Ring and Ancient Tomb. Fetches and Shocks abound, as do original dual lands and Wheels of Fortune. Timetwister, that silly ol' ($5K) thing, shows up in basically every Blue deck. You build to win.

EDH, on the other hand, continues to attempt to be this social format, with its contracts and Rule Zeros and different power levels (as well as different understandings of what specific power levels are). We get decks which lock the board up and decks which play mostly draft chaff and precons of various power levels and cEDH players who swear they're not playing a cEDH deck.

The best way to manage this, I think, is to go into each game without any real objectives in the game other than to play it. Sure, try to win, or try to get your deck to do its thing, but if someone runs you over or keeps you out or your deck just doesn't behave, crack some jokes, enjoy the conversation with old or new friends, and don't worry about it. No one feeds you less if you lose (and if they do, restructure your life, please), and if you get picked on in your group because you aren't competitive enough, either switch to cEDH or find a new playgroup. (I understand those options aren't available to everyone. If you can't find another playgroup because of limited location or whatever, hopefully at least you can have an honest conversation with people about how you play and treat each other. Perhaps you come up with a proxy rule which lets you compete on the same level. Or whatever. But don't suffer in silence, and don't give up playing.)

The second best way is just to play with everyone else's stuff.

Poor Etali. The dino goes to battle the Phyrexians and ends up infected, turning into some skeletal 11/11 monstrosity. Of course, this works out for us, because we get a new color (Green) to add to the Red of the original Etali, plus we get this Indestructible transformed side which, un- (or mostly un-) blocked means death to a single player.

But we'll get to that. The primary focus of this deck is going to be that front side, Etali, Primal Conqueror. When this Dinosaur enters the Battlefield, everyone flips cards off the top of their Library until they flip a nonland card. Then we get to cast that, whatever it is, for free. Sometimes we'll get something useless or unusable (maybe we don't want to cast that Counterspell), but then it just gets Exiled and they don't get it either. Sometimes we'll get a Sol Ring or a Burnished Hart. Maybe we'll get a Dockside Extortionist or someone's Syr Konrad, the Grim. Or perhaps we'll wind up with their Ulamog, the Inifinte Gyre or Blightsteel Colossus. You never know.

So, we're not going to run any win conditions. Instead, we're going to go all-in on getting our Commander out, then doing it again, and again, and again, until we have all our opponents' stuff and we kill them with that. (We can always poison people to death with our Transformed Commander, too.) And to do that, we need, as usual, mana.

This deck is running 42 Lands. We want the mana. We want to hit the mana. We want to keep hands with six Lands, and we want to keep hands with two or three Lands knowing we'll draw into more. Most of our Lands are Basics, too, because we're going to seek them out with our ramp spells. We have a few double-colored Lands, most of which have "Mountain Forest" in the typeline so we can search for them with things like Wood Elves, which search for a "Forest", and just a few utility Lands. Rogue's Passage makes Primal Sickness a definite death, Kessig Wolf Run is just fun to have around, and Reliquary Tower is nice in decks which draw a bunch of cards.

In addition, we're running 12 cards which fetch Lands out of our deck and put them on the Battlefield. Since we're going to seven mana for the Commander, there's no need to run the one-for-ones like Rampant Growth, so instead, everything leaves us with at least two things. Sometimes that's two Lands, like Cultivate or Burnished Hart, and other times it's a Creature and a Land, like Farhaven Elf or Topiary Stomper. Either way, it's enough we should see at least one if not two ramp spells in our early game, which is basically all we want to do. In testing, I got Etali out on turn five every game.

Drawing will get us to those Land drops, put our action in our hands, and make sure we have access to the answers we need, so we're going to do a good amount of it. We've got some Enchantments like Colossal Majesty and Guardian Project, which keep cards moving into our Hand as we have Creatures around, and we have spells like Garruk, Primal Hunter and Return of the Wildspeaker, which will dump a large amount of cards on us. (I find it's worth it to wait on the Land drop before casting one of those, if possible, in case you draw into Reliquary Tower.) I can tell you, an opening hand with Elemental Bond, Cultivate, and five Lands is an absolute WINNER in this deck.

We can deal with a few threats, but hopefully we'll be able to steal enough or get lucky with what we rip to handle most things. Stuff like Abrade and Bolt Bend are fun solutions to problems, and Reclamation Elf deals with a multitude of sins, especially when you can make copies of it. It might be worth finding a spot for a small sweeper like Firespout or something to deal with Token decks. We also have a couple of protection spells like Tyvar's Stand to keep Etali alive through an attempted Murder-ing.

Now for the fun thing. We're going to figure out ways to have Etali enter the Battlefield a lot. In this color combination, we have a couple different ways: we can bounce it to our Hand with something like Temur Sabertooth, we can flicker it with Conjurer's Closet or Voyager's Staff, or we can make Token copies of it, most of which will automatically Exile themselves thanks to the Legendary rule, but not before putting their trigger on the stack. Helm of the Host and Blade of Selves both do this well. Sword of Hearth and Home will Flicker Etali. Jaxis, the Troublemaker will make a token, as will Delina, Wild Mage or Heat Shimmer. When we need to discard to hand size or something like Jaxis, the cards that do these effects are the ones we don't throw away. Ramp? Sure. Lands? You bet. Keep the ways of getting Etali to enter the Battlefield again and again.

Strionic Resonator and Lithoform Engine both copy the Trigger, which works great. Mirrorpool is a little hard for us to use, but if we can, it can be an extra trigger for us.

A couple more notes on this stuff. There are some fun combos you can wind up with. Conjurer's Closet plus Flameshadow Conjuring, for example, work great together: you flicker Etali with the Closet, then pay the and get two triggers. Keep your eyes open for those. The other is don't play out extra ways to make more Etalis until you absolutely must, especially repeatable ones. If you've got Splinter Twin on Etali, now is not the time to play out Mirage Phalanx, unless you're going to die without a bunch more Etali triggers and it's the only way you can get them. The key issue is once they die in this deck, they're dead, and rather than run ways to try to recover them (Eternal Witness, for example, though that might be good here since we can also make copies of it) we're just running more ways to do our thing.

On the other hand, don't be afraid to go for big plays. If you have a couple of Sorcery-based ways to make copies, plus a Jaxis and a Strionic Resonator, go for it on a single turn. This deck is about excess - a 7/7 Trampling Commander is already a big threat, and an 11/11 poisoning Creature with Trample and Indestructible is even worse. And instead of messing with those things, we're stealing everyone else's stuff. Go for broke.

We have a few ways of granting Haste, like Rising of the Day and Fires of Yavimaya. That's less about Etali than it is about stuff we steal. Stolen Strategy is like a mini-Etali that happens every turn, but we do have to pay for those spells, so having plenty of mana will be nice. And Mirror Box is fun because it lets us keep our Etali copies, which gets pretty absurd pretty quickly.

Oh, yeah, you can also always flip Etali for 10 mana and poison someone to death. It's a thing worth remembering. Also, if you make a token copy of Primal Sickness, it'll be a copy of Primal Sickness (so it will probably die), but if you flicker Primal Sickness, it'll return as Primal Conqueror, giving you the trigger. You might want to have a way of turning Etali back to Primal Conqueror if you flip it.

Down with The Sickness | Commander | Mark Wischkaemper

• Commander (1)
• 1 Etali, Primal Conqueror

• Creatures (13)
• 1 Burnished Hart
• 1 Delina, Wild Mage
• 1 Farhaven Elf
• 1 Flamerush Rider
• 1 Hellkite Courser
• 1 Jaxis, the Troublemaker
• 1 Mirage Phalanx
• 1 Orthion, Hero of Lavabrink
• 1 Reclamation Sage
• 1 Solemn Simulacrum
• 1 Temur Sabertooth
• 1 Topiary Stomper
• 1 Wood Elves

• Planeswalkers (2)
• 1 Garruk, Primal Hunter
• 1 Lukka, Bound to Ruin

• Instants (9)
• 1 Abrade
• 1 Beast Within
• 1 Bolt Bend
• 1 Hunter's Insight
• 1 Momentous Fall
• 1 Return of the Wildspeaker
• 1 Return to Nature
• 1 Snakeskin Veil
• 1 Tyvar's Stand

• Sorceries (12)
• 1 Blasphemous Act
• 1 Circuitous Route
• 1 Cultivate
• 1 Explosive Vegetation
• 1 Heat Shimmer
• 1 Hunter's Prowess
• 1 Kodama's Reach
• 1 Migration Path
• 1 Nissa's Pilgrimage
• 1 Ranger's Path
• 1 Rishkar's Expertise
• 1 Twinflame

• Enchantments (12)
• 1 Colossal Majesty
• 1 Elemental Bond
• 1 Fires of Yavimaya
• 1 Flameshadow Conjuring
• 1 Garruk's Uprising
• 1 Guardian Project
• 1 Mirror March
• 1 Molten Echoes
• 1 Rhythm of the Wild
• 1 Rising of the Day
• 1 Splinter Twin
• 1 Stolen Strategy

• Artifacts (9)
• 1 Blade of Selves
• 1 Conjurer's Closet
• 1 Golden Argosy
• 1 Helm of the Host
• 1 Lithoform Engine
• 1 Mirror Box
• 1 Strionic Resonator
• 1 Sword of Hearth and Home
• 1 Voyager Staff

• Lands (42)
• 12 Mountain
• 17 Forest
• 1 Cinder Glade
• 1 Command Tower
• 1 Highland Forest
• 1 Kessig Wolf Run
• 1 Mirrorpool
• 1 Reliquary Tower
• 1 Rockfall Vale
• 1 Rogue's Passage
• 1 Sanctum of Eternity
• 1 Sheltered Thicket
• 1 Stomping Ground
• 1 Temple of Abandon
• 1 Wooded Ridgeline

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As I said, the only things I'd be thinking about is possibly Eternal Witness and maybe a mini-Wrath or two like Firespout. Otherwise, I think this is pretty solid. You could always spend more money and put more expensive cards in it, but personally I think this deck is just right like this. Part of me wants to put together a version with white-bordered cards and beaten-up versions of things, just to remind myself what I'm doing - I'm messing around with silliness.

I'd love your thoughts on this, the state of EDH vs. cEDH, or anything else this made you think of! Please feel free to reach out on social media.

Thanks for reading.