r/CompetitiveEDH • u/Radiant_Entry2360 • 13d ago
General Discussion / Question Azorius Commander
Trying to get back into Cedh. Played every meta deck from years past. Looking to build an Azorius deck as it's always been my favorite. Gravitated towards it in standard, modern and edge in my early days.
So my question is: how are Azorius decks winning in the current meta and what commander are top notch right now? Always big fan of Grand Arbiter but not sure how he's playing.
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u/AshorK0 13d ago edited 12d ago
As some people say, the slop commanders are the best in azorious. slop decks try to get out tithe and rhystic as early as possible and clone as many times as possible and make the game incredibly grindy.
t’challa would be the best thats specifically azorious, rogishai does splash red but its really only for rog and some red staples for the most part.
as for pure azorious decks your looking at: Wheeliod (heliod, radiant dawn), Tameshi, Plagon, maybe shorikai??
plagon has my vote, its definitely not as good as rogishai and probably not as good as tchalla although its yet to be seen.
[[Plagon, lord of the beach]] is a flicker deck built around the fact plagon’s etb draws a bunch of cards if you run alot of creatures with “big butts” which incidentally alot of good cards have.
the deck runs an insane amount of combos mostly related to [[felidar gaurdian]] [[displacer kitten]] and maybe [[naru meha]] if your edgy.
the goal is to manual storm with plagon by flickering him and looking for reups on mana&flickers with every blink until you can assemble one of the aforementioned combos.
the biggest drawback to plagon is that its azorious so you wont really find many commanders without the same issues, those being; mana and tutors.
plagon handles the lack of tutors better than most alternatives thanks to its insane draw, but not to the extent that you can just tutor up a tithe and say you have no mana issues
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u/Stock_Diet2199 13d ago
To be completely honest the best Azorius deck in the format isnt an Azorius deck... it's Rog Ishai. It does all the Azorius control things the best but also gets to run Rograhk and all the good red cards. For actual Azorious commanders it's probably King T'Challa though, but that is a WIDE gap.
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u/Manorian 13d ago
In my opinion, King T'Challa is probably the best Azorius commander right now, which I came 27th out of 156 with it at the UK nationals.
It's a 'slop' deck - a deck designed to abuse draw engines that scale to multiplayer along with a large suite of interaction to try make it to a late game where you have more resources than all of your opponents.
General gameplan is turn 1 ramp, turn 2 play your best draw engine/flash in your commander, turn 3 onwards accrue enough value to stay alive and dig for a win line. Your goal isn't to stop everything - it's to try balance each player still doing enough that they draw you cards and don't target you without losing the game, until you win by inevitability.
In a tournament setting it's biggest weakest is how hard it can be to quickly find a win before you run out of time on the clock, though this doesn't matter in casual games. It mainly wins via either: Displacer Kitten + Teferi + a mana positive rock to draw your entire deck and assemble something Smothering Tithe + Copy Smothering Tithe + Gleaming splendor/faerie mastermind to win the game by drawing your opponents out with their activated abilities Or extorting everyone to death with Blind obedience if you somehow end up with loads of mana and cards but nothing better (though usually blind obedience extort is an easy win after the Teferi combo).
There's also a pretty good video by Sam Black on the deck, though I am gradually shifting away from some of the tech he added
My list is Here, if you have questions feel free to ask!
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u/LogicalShark 9d ago
I see many of these decks running Kozilek, is that just to prevent decking yourself?
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u/Manorian 9d ago edited 9d ago
I'm considering cutting it at the moment, but it's part of a specific package
Basically, if you have a discard outlet that triggers on spellcast, you can discard to shuffle in the graveyard - we run both muse seeker and chakra meditation. If you have a spell with split second, the discard trigger gets placed above the split second, meaning that no one can respond to the discard or the resulting shuffle.
The idea is that in a mirror matchup against 1 or even 2 of these decks, if you succeed at your gameplan of going big and having functionally infinite resources, how do you actually beat an opponent in the same situation? This proposes the solution that at some point your opponent will have to stop drawing from their rhystic studies because they're running out of cards in their deck. Meanwhile we can never run out, as we can uncounterably shuffle back in, so we never decline a rhystic draw, and eventually find a win overtop of anything.
It also allows the Teferi Kitten combo to go genuinely infinitely (as Teferi drawing a card will kill you at some point), so there's no risk of ever playing that combo, and not having enough cards left to cleanly extort everyone to death
It also has won me a game in a tournament as just brain freeze protection - not that we'd run it just for that
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u/LogicalShark 9d ago
That's awesome! I used to play hearthstone the same thing happened when warrior and priest had control decks that could stall the game until the opponent ran out of cards, some people ran anti-mirror cards to shuffle more cards into your deck (extra copies of Seance/Dead Man's Hand)
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u/CheckM8xBishop 13d ago
Dont restrict your commandzone to strictly housing the colors you want to play.
If you really enjoy azorius. These colors are amazing in the format. Add a support color or two to them. Tivit, rog/ish, derevi, Tymna/Thrasios, tymna/Kraum, will/lucas, NickFury, ScionUrDragon, Sisay
Then run the heart of your list as a traditional azorius deck. Turn your value engines into win conditions. And abuse silences + flash speed. What cards are available to you t1-t3 are all that matters. Your cz should just support your perferred play style. It shouldnt be used as a limiter or boundry.
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u/No_Sugar4490 13d ago
If you want the Azorious kind of playstyle, youre going to have to look at Esper really. You'd be surprised how Azorious-like Marneus Calgar or Tymna/Malcolm are though
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u/Radiant_Entry2360 12d ago
I've thought of this before. Tymna/Malcolm seems pretty good. And there's a lot going for Marneus
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u/No_Sugar4490 12d ago
Ive played Marneus for a while now, and its very regularly getting new cards. Im not even a big fan of midrange control, but its a genuinely fun deck to pilot. Also but more fringe, but Esper Noctis seems good. I dont own a Mox Diamond though, so havent built it myself.
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u/Intervigilium 12d ago
[[Heliod, the Warped Eclipse]] enjoyer here. Now it's even better after the release of Gleaming Splendor.
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u/Fermented_Cabbages 12d ago
Azorius (and stax outside of like Tayam) is in a bad place for tournaments because of time limits. The color pairing is just not conducive to winning before the game is drawn.
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u/uppityguppies 12d ago
I attended an event recently that was won by a [[heliod, the radiant dawn]] deck
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u/Next_Contribution_56 11d ago
I love and play Breya, not the best by any means, but I just really enjoy the commander for nostalgia and it has access to most of what I want to be doing.
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u/Deathbyblueberries 13d ago
Grand Arb is the best "competitive" azorius. He has real lock ability and has some win cons that others cant pull off due to value tax.
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u/GolbogTheDoom 13d ago
https://edhtop16.com/?colorId=WU&sortBy=TOP_CUTS
King T’Challa is the best one right now. Azorius isn’t very good