I am not exactly an authority when it comes to EDH decks, but I come to be a big fan of playing different decks and evaluating them. Not in a playskill or min-max sort of way, but in a personal preference way.
I never really got around to evaluating Urza, Lord Protector because, well, I never really could put it together in a way I liked in the first place! As much as the theoretical strategy equivalent to an NBA isolation play appealed to me, the cards are either non-existent, or they aren’t good enough to warrant playing over playing an actual good deck. While I definitely subscribe to EDH being played in any way the player sees fit, I personally would much rather my cards and decks do something powerful, regardless of what my deck’s relative power level is. I need my cards to make sense in the context of the decks goal. I just cannot play bad cards intentionally, unless it does something uniquely powerful within the deck.
Which brings me to my current deck…
Anje Falkenrath is an extremely linear and fragile, but very fast and redundant combo deck, utilizing, you guessed it, the Madness mechanic. Your deck is filled with cards that are very bad. Like, very very bad. However, these very bad cards have the text Madness on them. You need to cram your deck with as many Madness spells as you possibly can in order to get to the cards that give you a strong payoff for using Anje’s ability as many times as possible. In formats like cEDH, one of the payoffs is almost always some form of combo involving Worldgorger Dragon and infinite mana. Could be anything with X in its cost, anything that enters the battlefield, you get the idea.
The hardest part about this deck isn’t playing it, or playing around potential hate, or even going third or fourth. It’s not the win condition or even building it.
It’s how to tune it for non-cEDH tables.
See, the biggest issue with Anje is the way she wants you to play. You are heavily encouraged to churn through your deck as quickly as possible, without nonsense or frills, and get to your win condition, whatever that may be. There are a lot of win conditions to choose from, but almost all of them involve killing the table on the spot, or setting it up for the turn after. This creates a clash with a typical casual EDH crowd. If you wipe the table, then the perception is that you aren’t doing anything different from a cEDH deck, even if the combo isn’t the most efficient. If you run a non-combo win condition, you’re shooting yourself in the foot, since almost any other commander would be better for whatever you’re trying to do off of it. The best middle ground is Living Death, as you are effectively telling the table “You have one turn to react or I start killing you, one by one”.
This presents a whole new problem in the entire pacing of your deck if there’s any impedance at all. What if your opponent is playing something like elves or tokens and has a ton of blockers? What if you just get your board wiped? You add a layer of delay, a layer of fragility, and a layer of transparency to the table. When you try to do it all, you could very well wind up doing nothing. I do not know what the solution is, as I am currently on Living Death for the foreseeable future, but it’s possible that a pretty tough to assemble four card combo may work. I flirted with the idea of Dockside Extortionist and Cloudstone Curio, but that may be an issue with the table itself. A three-card combo is, in my experience, too close to the line. More experimenting needs to be done.
I have a lot of fun with Anje Falkenrath, and I want to explore more when I get the time, but another deck has my eye. Something much different from the Madness machine, and something much more customizable:
Anthony Lowry (they/he) is a seasoned TCG, MMORPG, and FPS veteran. They are extensively knowledgeable on the intricacies of many competitive outlets, and are always looking for a new challenge in the gaming sphere.