Happy holidays and welcome to Daily Commander!

Today we are going to be talking about Zedruu the Greathearted!

Zedruu is a four mana 2/4 that at the beginning of your upkeep you gain X life and draw X cards, where X is the number of permanents you own that your opponent’s control and for red, white, and blue you can give an opponent a permanent you control.

Since today is Christmas, I have had a deck idea brewing for a while that uses the gift giving Commander to lead the way, and what’s better as that we are going to be playing the deck in a unique way.

Our goal is not to win, but give our opponents the tools so that they can win the game. We will not attack or do damage inherently, we give ways for our opponents to win that the others have to kill them to make them not win.

They can kill us as an option, but we have ways to make sure that we don’t lose.

As another special gift for the holidays, I’m going to be opening the budget and looking at expensive cards to use for this deck to work.

The first thing we need to look at are the variety of alternate win conditions that the game offers and how we can give them to our opponents.

We can give a player that has a lot of artifacts Hellkite Tyrant, the token deck Halo Fountain, and the card draw or mill fiend Laboratory Maniac as some of the more conventional deck archetypes.

If you have a life gain player, then you can give Felidar Sovereign, Chance Encounter for the coin flip decks, or Darksteel Reactor for the proliferate players.

There are a number of win conditions that we can give to our opponents and all we need to do is ask that they save us for last, I mean if we lose the game then all of the things that we gave them will make them lose what would make them win the game.

Then of course, we have things to give players if they happen to not follow through with their promises and as a way to protect ourselves as well.

The best way to incentivize people into attacking your opponents is to give them a way to make sure that one opponent can lose something in turn.

Lich’s Tomb is one of the weaker ways of making this happen since they can just sacrifice itself to its own ability, but Phyrexian Unlife and Nine Lives incentivize your opponents into attacking each other as a way to race for another player to lose rather then them to win.

This also serves as a way to get the heat off of you when things are look dire and an opponent decides that it’s better for them to win by beating you.

While this will not always work, playing into people’s psychology a bit by working their competitive nature in wanting to win the game can certainly make things a little more interesting.

Now what else can we do to make sure that we don’t lose until we are the last one standing?

If no one wants to play along with what you’re going for, then we can easily take everything away.

Brand is an instant that can give us control of all of our permanents so if anyone is getting close to a win, then you can just take everything away.

Lich’s Mirror is a way for you to get everything back when you are about to lose via any way, so if you steal a Nine Lives back that is close to its last counter we just shuffle our things and take away any remaining ways of our opponents winning the game.

And if we really want to show the holiday spirit of peace, good will, and everyone winning, then we can play Divine Intervention as a way to make sure that in no one winning, everyone wins.

Again, we are not trying to win, we are aiming for second place with this deck. It is janky, weird and not very cohesive, but it is also a fun way for the mad scientist deck builders to get creative in making everyone else go after each other, and saving you for last.

Giving gifts sometimes has unintended consequences.

Thank you for reading, see you tomorrow on the next Daily Commander!

Happy Holidays!

From, J.M. Casual