I am a Rakdos player at heart. I don’t want to be dismissive of any other color combination, and I do own, build and enjoy decks with other color identities, but it looks like I’m inevitably drawn to building more Rakdos decks as new Commanders are released. The Rakdos spree started in 2017 with [[Grusilda, Monster Masher]] from Unstable – but more on that later.
When Xantcha was spoiled, it brought me back to my early days of Magic, and the lore behind the Phyrexian Invasion. Some fond memories of my teenage years, a Golden Age long gone by. The photorealistic art appealed to me, though I’m usually not a fan. The calm, stoic, sorrowful bearing of Xantcha was both majestic and unsettling in a way. Her Phyrexian augmentations made her a lethal killing machine for 3 mana. The combination of nostalgia and quirkiness struck me right where it was supposed to. Good job, R&D.
However appealing the Commander was to me, it didn’t really give a clear deckbuilding direction. All I knew was that one of my opponents would have a big beater on the board, hopefully one they wouldn’t sacrifice, and that I wanted some big mana production to get the most of her activated ability.
Part of the excitement came from the old-school Phyrexian background of the character, so I dove into my old cards. What I found were some cards I wanted mostly on the other side of the board, as well as a couple (as in « not enough ») ways to help give them to my unwilling opponents.
This also meant I probably wouldn’t have much of a board on my own, so the idea evolved into stealing opponents’ shiny cards. Red has lot of temporary stealing, which is… fine, I guess. It’s basically all I had at my disposition anyway, so might as well throw in a couple sacrifice outlets to make the most of my borrowing my unwilling partners’ creatures. Plus, [[Ashnod’s Altar]] both provided flavor and mana for Xantcha activation, right ?
In the end, the concept of the deck could be summarized in one sentence : « Here are my bad cards, can I play with yours instead ? »
As some experienced EDH players may have guessed from these few lines already, the deck didn’t prove to be very efficient. Well, just saying it was functional would be a stretch already. I generally had little to no board, made one of the opponents angry at me by giving them Xantcha, and annoyed the others by stealing and sacrificing their best thing.
After a few unsuccessful and frustrating games, I decided to shelve it, still not ready to dismantle it. The release of [[Blim, Comedic Genius]] in Commander Legends in 2020 sparked my interest in this anew, and I put my forsaken Xantcha deck back into the light, with a new Commander…
But this is a story for another day…
Bonus theme song : Don’t stay, by Linkin Park
https://archidekt.com/decks/209269#Xantcha,_Agent_of_Chaos
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