Hello and welcome to Daily Commander!

Today we are going to be looking at Lavinia, Azorius Renegade!

Today we delve into an archetype that I would definitely is not my strongest, and that is control, since Lavinia prevents your opponent’s from casting noncreature spells if their mana value is greater than the number of lands they control and punishes spells that were cast with no mana.

Now control is a divisive archetype, especially in Commander, so the question for this deck is how hard of a control deck do we want to make?

Let’s start things off and make a somewhat decent control deck with a quirky win condition. Before we get to that win condition, lets get ready to be a problem.

We are going to have some stax effects, which will depend heavily on the kind of budget that you are looking for.

Ghostly Prison is a good way to make sure that no one comes after you, Leonin Arbiter to tax your opponent from searching their libraries, Narset, Parter of Veils to limit your opponents to one draw per turn, or Smothering Tithe to benefit you while letting your opponents draw all they want.

Now these are all fairly common stax pieces, and depending on how heavy you want to lean into that part of the archetype will vary on you and your playgroup, but I would suggest limiting it to 5-8 pieces to make things difficult but not impossible to deal with.

Another thing that makes control decks a pain to deal with is that the way to win the game is slow and can be annoying.

In order to combat this I suggest two win conditions: Azor’s Elocutors and Approach of the Second Sun.

With Azor’s Elocutors, the way to help speed up the win is to add some cards that have incidental proliferate, which has popped up some more recently, especially with a set like Phyrexia: All Will Be One.

This will speed up a win for you, be a clear target for your opponents to try and stop you, and be interactable for you to be more proactive on your part.

With Approach of the Second Sun, that is also a way to add inevitability for you winning the game, especially if you happen to have a lot of draw cards, which with you being in blue makes it much more likely.

Again, this forces your opponent to find ways to interact with you, making them spend their resources to try and beat you rather than ignoring you.

Control decks tend to be more reactive decks and having a way to win that makes you proactive is not something people typically expect from a stax deck.

Now keep in mind that these are win conditions that your opponents can interact with. Do you want an out of nowhere way to win?

Poison counters.

Completely shifting how the deck works seems like a difficult pivot, but if you have cards that can proliferate while also maintaining some stax pieces, then why not go full tilt and go with the win condition that people have been historically mad about?

Now I will stress, that this is an option that will get a regular play group every once in a while, but after that they will probably not want to you play this deck.

Which tends to be my personal issue with building control decks. I have a tendency to go too soft or go oppressive with no in between.

Lavinia is not really a major factor for this deck idea, but she does provide the utility of being a cheap control piece in the Command Zone, but other than that she doesn’t do much else.

I do think that having a few stax pieces and Azor’s Elocutors and/or Approach of the Second Sun as your primary deck and win conditions, will help you have a control deck that your play group will not mind dealing with.

If however you decide to go heavy on the stax pieces and go with the poison counters plan that could make the games be not fun.

Outcome will vary on your play group.

I really am bad at making control decks.

Anyway, thank you for reading and see you tomorrow for the next Daily Commander!

Peace,

From J.M. Casual