I have a particular challenge in Magic. It's because I really like the cards I choose.

I can't imagine I'm alone here, but I take a great deal of care putting the cards I pick into a deck. That 99 has to play like a symphony - no wasted space, no useless chattel. I hate discarding cards for this very reason: I care a lot about that card! It's in here for a specific reason, and if it's in my 'yard, I can't play it!

This problem is so serious I actually built an entire deck designed to help cure the problem. And while I still have that Marchesa, the Black Rose deck and still play it, it only solves my problem with that specific deck. Every other deck - I'm still a total miser when it comes to my cards. Please don't make me discard!

But we know the best way to grow as players - and as people - is to break out of our comfort zones. So, I thought, let's do that. Let's get uncomfortable.

(First things first, just in case you don't know: "misanthropic" means "disliking humankind and avoiding human society".)

This dude is a jerk. But somehow, he seems like less of a jerk than Nath of the Gilt-Leaf, who I simply refuse to play against. Three colors, four mana, decent stats, plus we get Ward 2 for our troubles - seems decent. Plus, at the beginning of our Upkeep, everyone gets to draw extra cards. And who doesn't like drawing extra cards?!

But it's that Delirium effect which really makes this tick, because it seems to me pretty much everyone else is going to spend most of the game with a Hand size of three or less. That's nasty, hence this dude being a jerk. Let's see what we can do.

Winter EDH | Commander | Mark Wischkaemper

• Commander (1)
• 1 Winter, Misanthropic Guide

• Creatures (22)
• 1 Aclazotz, Deepest Betrayal
• 1 Demolisher Spawn
• 1 Dryad Arbor
• 1 Eternal Witness
• 1 Fate Unraveler
• 1 Haywire Mite
• 1 Ignoble Hierarch
• 1 Kederekt Parasite
• 1 Magus of the Wheel
• 1 Malevolent Chandelier
• 1 Osseous Sticktwister
• 1 Overlord of the Balemurk
• 1 Psychosis Crawler
• 1 Razorkin Needlehead
• 1 Sakura-Tribe Elder
• 1 Seizan, Perverter of Truth
• 1 Six
• 1 Stormfist Crusader
• 1 Tergrid, God of Fright
• 1 Tinybones, Bauble Burglar
• 1 Twitching Doll
• 1 Zurzoth, Chaos Rider

• Sorceries (10)
• 1 Blasphemous Act
• 1 Convert to Slime
• 1 Dark Deal
• 1 Deluge of Doom
• 1 Faithless Looting
• 1 Farseek
• 1 Monstrous Emergence
• 1 Nature's Lore
• 1 Three Visits
• 1 Toxic Deluge

• Instants (8)
• 1 Assassin's Trophy
• 1 Beast Within
• 1 Drag to the Roots
• 1 Grisly Salvage
• 1 Harrow
• 1 Peer Past the Veil
• 1 Terminate
• 1 Untimely Malfunction

• Planeswalkers (2)
• 1 Grist, the Hunger Tide
• 1 Ob Nixilis, the Hate-Twisted

• Artifacts (6)
• 1 Conduit of Worlds
• 1 Font of Mythos
• 1 Geth's Grimoire
• 1 Hedge Shredder
• 1 Howling Mine
• 1 Wayfarer's Bauble

• Battles (2)
• 1 Invasion of Ergamon
• 1 Invasion of Zendikar

• Enchantments (10)
• 1 Bandit's Talent
• 1 Bloodchief Ascension
• 1 Liliana's Caress
• 1 Megrim
• 1 Rites of Flourishing
• 1 Spiteful Visions
• 1 The Rollercrusher Ride
• 1 Ticket Booth // Tunnel of Hate
• 1 Underworld Dreams
• 1 Waste Not

• Lands (39)
• 1 Bojuka Bog
• 1 Cinder Glade
• 1 Command Tower
• 1 Commercial District
• 1 Demolition Field
• 1 Evolving Wilds
• 1 Fabled Passage
• 1 Field of Ruin
• 1 Geier Reach Sanitarium
• 1 Gnottvold Slumbermound
• 1 Great Furnace
• 1 Memorial to Folly
• 1 Memorial to Unity
• 1 Memorial to War
• 1 Mikokoro, Center of the Sea
• 1 Raucous Theater
• 1 Reliquary Tower
• 1 Riveteers Overlook
• 1 Savage Lands
• 1 Shifting Woodland
• 1 Smoldering Marsh
• 1 Takenuma, Abandoned Mire
• 1 Terramorphic Expanse
• 1 Tree of Tales
• 1 Twisted Landscape
• 1 Underground Mortuary
• 1 Vault of Whispers
• 1 Ziatora's Proving Ground
• 3 Mountain
• 4 Forest
• 4 Swamp

Buy This Deck Export text

The basic gameplan is going to be punishing people for drawing the cards we're forcing them to draw. We can also make them suffer for discarding (a thing they're likely to do a lot of). But in order to get them to do that, we have to have Delirium, which means we need to get things into the 'yard.

Herein lies what I think is the biggest challenge about decks like this. How badly do we want to get things into our 'yard? Badly enough to run a ton of rummage effects like Faithless Looting, or Wheel effects like Wheel of Fortune, to randomly dump things? I suspect that's the obvious answer.

I'd prefer to be a little more careful, though, with my dislike of discarding. Instead of running a ton of ways to discard, we're going to run a couple, which allow us to get cards into the 'yard in the event someone uses their Bojuka Bog on us (a good idea, I might add) or we're desperate. But mostly, we're going to count on normal gameplay dumping things into the 'yard for us, and we might do a few things to help it along.

A quick note about Winter here. We have to have at least four card types in our 'yard for the ability to start working, but note the ability counts how many card types we have, then subtracts that number from seven to find our opponents' maximum Hand size. So if we have six card types in our 'yard, their max Hand is one. As a refresher, there are currently eight - Land, Creature, Artifact, Enchantment, Planeswalker, Battle, Instant, and Sorcery. We have at least a couple of examples of each of these, so ideally we can make people's Hand size zero.

Starting with our Lands, we have 40. It looks like 39 up there, but that's because Dryad Arbor is a Creature. Hey, look at that! If Dryad Arbor ends up in the 'yard, we've got two card types already. Nice. Anyway, 40 Lands. We need it. We want to cast Winter either on time or a turn early, so hitting our drops will be key. Most of our Lands are helping with colors, but we have a few which sacrifice themselves for some effect (Terramorphic Expanse is an amazing start for this deck) and a Reliquary Tower, since there is a chance we'll end up with more cards than seven and don't actually want to dump any more of them.

Our ramp is mostly focused on two-mana (or less) spells, and preferably ones which wind up in the 'yard. Wayfarer's Bauble is a great example. Turn one, play it out, turn two, sac it, turn three, Winter. Perfect. Invasion of Ergamon works too, although it doesn't put anything in the 'yard. Sakura-Tribe Elder is wonderful here. Harrow is pricier but puts an Instant and a Land in the 'yard for us. Ignoble Hierarch is good too, and Farseek will get us a dual Land (or a tri-land if Ziatora's Proving Ground is still in our library). The key here is ramping by turn two and doing it in lots of different ways so we make sure to vary what kind of cards are hitting our 'yard.

Faithless Looting is too good here to pass up. An early one can insure Delirium as soon as Winter hits the 'field, and a late one can push us there, find us action, whatever we need. We've also got a few Wheel effects like Dark Deal and Peer Past the Veil, but it's not what we're going to do all the time. We do have Grisly Salvage, which will dump some stuff for us. And there are the Howling Mines, like, well, Howling Mine, Font of Mythos, and Rite of Flourishing.

But therein lies the rub. Because in addition to all these ways of drawing extra cards for everyone, not only will we make them discard them all, we're going to punish them for it. Megrim is the classic here: an Enchantment which says "whenever an opponent discards a card, Megrim deals 2 damage to that player". Liliana's Caress does the same thing. Underworld Dreams punishes for drawing, as do Fate Unraveler, Razorkin Needlehead, and Psychosis Crawler. We're going to flood the battlefield with ways to make it cost to draw and discard, all while we're making people draw and discard a bunch. It'll be really nasty, and they won't like it.

We've also got Waste Not, Tinybones, Bauble Burglar, Zurzoth, Chaos Rider - plenty of ways to do things other than damage when people discard. I'm particularly fond of Aclazotz, Deepest Betrayal here, since we'll definitely get some Bats out of the deal. Anything which makes tokens will be useful to chump block when the attacks start coming our way, as they surely will.

Haywire Mite is a great card in our deck. For two mana, we can both destroy something and put two card types in our 'yard. But one thing about Jund is we get removal for days, so we've got things like Assassin's Trophy and Terminate. I love Untimely Malfunction. Deluge of Doom works great for us. Hopefully we're up and running before anyone gets any serious board state, but just in case, we've got a number of spells to get us out of a jam. Convert to Slime will almost always leave us with a decently-sized Ooze on the 'field.

I'm a big fan of Conduit of Worlds in this deck. It lets us get Lands back if we have more than one in the 'yard, so we don't miss Land drops (and can keep using something like Fabled Passage), plus it lets us cast something we milled and maybe want to use, like, say, Aclazotz, Deepest Betrayal. Eternal Witness does a similar thing. Six also does that, though we have to discard Lands to do it, which isn't necessarily a bad thing.

I also really like Demolisher Spawn here; this thing is expensive, but imagine dropping it after a couple of turns of Aclazotz or whatever. That's a lot of damage flying around.

One card I left out for price but would be bonkers here is Sheoldred, the Apocalypse. Getting her out the turn after (or before) Winter would be devastating to the table. So, if you have one laying around looking for a home, look no further and jam her here.

If there is a lot of graveyard hate in your group, you have two options. One is to give yourself Hexproof with something like Witchbane Orb for protection against cards like that Bog, and the other is to add cards that let you move your graveyard to your library, like Campfire or Feldon's Cane.

This deck is a bit meaner than the decks I normally build, but I argue it still feels better than something like Nath. [Ed. note: Mark is kidding himself. This deck is mean.] Somehow drawing the extra cards each turn makes it feel like there's hope, and they get to keep them until their end step, so they have a while to work with what they draw. That said, if you're going to play this and you're used to friendlier games, be ready to play something much kinder in the second game!

Thanks for reading.