Back to Basics against a pod of various four-color piles lists will be game warping, but if deployed against a pod consisting of Godo, Bandit Warlord, Blue Farm, and Codie, Vociferous Codex and you just might end up handing Godo the game. Rather, the trickiness comes into the issue of which decks you sit down to play against. Some lists can do this to great effect, like Shorikai, Genesis Engine or Grand Arbiter Augustin IV. The only way around this? Play basic lands, and a lot of them. As written, the card impacts each player equivalently. This is because most stax effects are symmetric, and it is up to the deck to navigate proper deployment so as to be as unaffected as possible.Īn excellent example of this is Back to Basics. Whereas each game action of a turbo or midrange list seldom directly advances the plans of any particular opponent, a missequencing of stax effects can and will hand your opponents the game. With layering out of the way, we've come to the next key component of a stax deck - the problem of parity. In short, paying the one becomes a much more appealing counter to effects such as Esper Sentinel in stax lists, as opposed to its base appeal in other strategies. While card draw is certainly incredibly important, Esper Sentinel 's alternative effect - a cost increase placed upon the first noncreature spell each opponent casts each turn - gains an increase in value across stax, as the emphasis on disruption via stalled early game development becomes crucial to the overall stax plan. Whereas with rituals density leads to chains of explosivity, stax effect density leads to multi-layered constrictions, providing one safeguard after another.Ī similar effect can be observed with Esper Sentinel, a ubiquitous card advantage effect found across all manner of White cEDH lists. This is because - just like with rituals effects in turbo lists - there is a real power to be had in effect density, so much so that deploying an umpteenth restriction on your opponents' gameplans can sufficiently allow you to move on with your secondary goal of actually winning the game. Rather than being an incidental stax piece, Collector Ouphe becomes a primary step in the overall gameplan. When Collector Ouphe pops up in a stax list, however, things change substantially. You likely won't be seeing Ad Nauseam pop up in a deck that isn't built to abuse it, but you just might see Collector Ouphe regardless of the primary strategy. The result of this disparity is that Collector Ouphe, despite being a key stax piece, is not relegated solely to stax lists in the same way that other archetype-specific cards (like Eidolon of Rhetoric ) may be. Like most stax pieces, however, Collector Ouphe functions within a specific range that is, it is uniquely effective against non-green lists and artifact centric combos. Whether it is shutting off combos courtesy of Lion's Eye Diamond or simply early-game rocks, Collector Ouphe is a powerful stax effect. Let's take a look at a couple of examples.įirst off, Collector Ouphe. This crux - the breaking point between winning and not losing - separates stax lists from the rest of the field not only in terms of overall strategy, but also in the individual roles of cards within a stax list. Defensive interaction may be lower for these lists, as their mantra is that of win before your opponents can set up.Ī classic stax commander Stax: Density and Layering Whether it is repeatedly sacrificing their Commander, blitzing away their own life total, or pitching card after card from their hand in the pursuit of mana, the plan is to and and win as fast as possible. Turbo is aggressive a game of cEDH is a race, and turbo decks will burn through any resource at their disposal to outpace their opponents. Each of these three groups certainly feels different, primarily due to their usage of time. While this article won't delve deeply into the first two categories, attempting to break down stax in a vacuum is a fool's errand, so it is important for us to open with an acknowledgement of its counterparts. Whether you revel in it or despise it is irrelevant, the strategy persists all the same - these are the stax-locked games.Īsk anyone familiar with cEDH lingo to give you an overview of the format, and chances are that their opening explanation will eventually lead to the umbrella breakdown of, turbo, midrange, and stax. We've all had those games the ones where every single turn is a grind, where you can't accomplish anything, when the player enforcing that grip on the table struggles to actually close out the game. Ethersworn Canonist by Izzy What is Stax?
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