Staxing Addicts
What is this article?
I have been considering an article like this for a while, but there is no better time than the present. Keegan a while back curated a stax deck around Alela, Artful Provocateur. If you are on this website and reading this and do not know what “stax” is, you most likely play with Canadians. In a short description, it is the concept of taxing other players through mana, casting constraints, attacking constraints, any way that they can squeeze others on resources. It often will attempt to lock other players out of the game, and make it so that the “taxer” is the only person able to play magic. Associated with it are long grindy games that people scooping early or combo early. So how does a deck built around elongating games fit into a league where the largest constraint is time? That is what this article is about. I am here to explain from a commissioner (and lover of stax), why this deck is allowed in the league when from the surface it is the exact opposite of what we are trying to do.
Stax Pieces
I am going to jump into this deck head first and start piecing out some of the stax pieces. I most likely will not cover all of them, but I will try my best to piece them out.
- Protection: Cunning Rhetoric, Propaganda, Ghostly Prison
- Tax: Aura of Silence, Rhystic Study, Spelltithe Enforcer
- Slow Play: Authority of Consuls, Frozen Aether, Smokestack
- Spot Support: Tainted Remedy, Dictate of Erebos, Opposition Agent
So let us kick it off with protection. This is a key component of setting up a board, or just giving support into the late game against aggro decks. Propaganda and Ghostly Prison double dip into the tax category, but highly dissuade players from attacking due to lack of mana that aggro decks have in most cases. Cunning Rhetoric is less oppressive, but snagging spells off opponents decks is something many hate. The protection is key in setting up a combo in his deck or building out an oppressive and overwhelming board state.
Tax is next up on the list, and is the key to the hate of the archetype. These are cards that make spells more expensive most of the time. Truly, tax could be any of the cards listed above since they are over costing resource, be it mana, creatures, or other permanents. Rhystic Study is the best well known, and is a card drawing machine in most games of EDH. This taxes mana if you pay the one, but it also taxes the cost of spells by loading up an opponents hand with gas. Aura of Silence is an OG and a great early game disruptor, and Spelltithe Enforcer is just a savage tax creature I felt compelled to include. These cards are meant to make opponents feel pressured and squeezed on resources even when they are abundant.
A league killer for us is slow play, so having permanents that enable and encourage this can be detrimental. Authority of Consuls is a T1 drop that gains Alela’s controller life and forces all creatures to enter the battlefield tapped. This destroys aggro decks that are trying to haste their way to the win, along with the fact that it is also gaining someone life. Lifegain is the hidden bane of our league, but that is a discussion for another day. Frozen Aether is an expensive spell, but it makes everyone else essentially play a turn behind everyone else. Forcing lands, artifacts, and creatures to enter tapped is the same as time walking in most cases. Smokestacks was tough to categorize, but this can often slow games down by forcing lands to get sacrificed. The mass destruction without discriminations can often make a game come to a crawl. All of the slow play pieces force the game to move at a slower pace, or do not allow the game progress at the standard pace
Last on my list were spot support pieces. This is what makes Keegan’s deck so unique in my opinion. It is setup to by him to answer most archetypes that he is going to play against. In one of our league nights, he shut down our Dina and Elenda synergy with Tainted Remedy. It decimated our deck plans and we had no answers for it. Even though the game continued on after that, we lost the second that card resolved. Dictate of Erebos destroys any aristocrat or force sacrifice decks. Opposition Agent shuts down decks that rely on tutor for combos, or decks like Alex’s Korvold that relies on fetchlands to fuel the deck. This category is very unique to the commander and deck build, and is essentially a sideboard when paired with the deck tutors.
Win Conditions
Win conditions is why Alela is allowed to stay in the league. She herself is a win condition due to her making faeries off of artifact and enchantments being CAST (not even fuckin etb, cast). If her controller is able to get her out and keep her out, that ability will often win a game through a mass collection of 2/1 fliers. Supporting this win condition are both Helm of the Host and Anointed Procession by accelerating the tokens she makes and making tokens of herself. This in my opinion is why she is able to exist within the meta of the league. Yes she slows the game down with her stax pieces, but she also creates one of her win conditions off of this. And this is what sets her apart from most other stax commanders. I am not here to debate whether or not she is the most powerful, that is not the point of this article. I am saying she is the perfect stax commander for a league that has a large time constraint.
The two pieces listed above notify that the endgame is near, and accelerate the wincon attached to her. Another finisher with Alela that Keegan made famous is Hatred mid swing. This is most effective during 2HG, but it can knock out his closest competition before they can build (cries in Korvold). An honorable mention is Smokestack as a wincon for Alela. She can normally pump out more sac pieces than others, so getting ahead and staying ahead with 1 or 2 counters on stacks is not unreasonable.
The other way she wins is through very fast combo. The most notable of this would be the Tainted Pact and Jace, Wielder of Mysteries win condition. This one is simple, you have Jace out and cast Pact naming a card not in your deck (Graceful Antelope anyone?) to exile your deck. You then draw using Jace, cast it on your draw step, and boom you win just like that. We have seen this combo done two times to date in just league, and it can be done as a mercy kill if it is the last game of the night. This type of combo is a one of in the deck, but could be easily aided by Thassa’s Oracle or Laboratory Maniac if the desired result from the deck was quick self mill wins.
Stax Drawbacks
This archetype of decks obviously has a very large drawback of slowing down games. This can often be negated by proper tutor targets and smart sequencing, but there is always the erratic variable of other players at the table. A board wipe like Wrath of God without protection for Alela, often means that stax pieces stick around. This makes rebuilding a huge pain for a lot of people, and can mean that Alela keeps gaining advantage if something like Authority of Consuls is out. This means that the game can drag out a bit, and this was seen during Week 1 of our play when Sean playing Kami cast an overloaded Cyclonic Rift without a quick close. With most decks at the table this would be no big deal, but with Alela it meant her pieces were redeployed and back on her slow beatdown and block plan with faeries. Situations like that, last game of the night especially, can be grueling for the group at large.
The other side of Alela that could be viewed as a downside would be my favorite part of her current build: the saltiness of cards. It is the proud owner of the 6th saltiest card on EDHRec, Armageddon. Stax by nature is a salt maker for most players, but Armageddon holds a special place in many people’s hearts for salt. Sean is a big anti land destruction player, but notably gave the okay for league lmao. Wiping out everyone’s lands but your own (Teferi’s Protection), or just knowing that your artifact mana will keep you ahead is extremely demoralizing for the table. But as a whole, Alela provides salt without trying. Polluted Bonds and Wound Reflection are two notable salt pieces due to the insult to injury they give the table. I could go on for years about this, and I would love to, but I will digress. The salt Alela produces due to her build is part of the reason it is rough in a league setting, but also one of my favorite parts of her.
Game Commissioner View
So I am biased to this archetype and I want that known before I continue with my closing statements. But I will keep it honest and real, because that is what truly matters to me within the league. We are going to discuss this through the lens of our league, a league where the largest constraint is the time allocated per session.
So it is obvious that stax is viable in a league with these constraints, it just needs to be done in a manner that is conscious of what it is doing and the environment it is doing it in. If Alela’s game plan was to tutor consistently for a Stasis drop on turn 2, and have it stick around until she naturally drew into combo pieces, then we would have an issue. It would most likely just be an extremely long grindy game where Alela won 90% of the time. But there is no knowing how long these games would take, but I would guess that we would be lucky to get 2 full games in 3 hours.
Truly it boils down to building a deck that slows the game but sets up a plan to win quickly. And this concept could apply to every deck in our league. The decks need ways to win consistently, and ways to enable it. I do not build decks for league anymore that do not have at least two different paths to win, with at least 4 wincons for each, and a plethora of enablers that share between the two. It just makes the games go smoothly and means my decks have resilience and variance of play to them.
But Keegan built a deck that plays fast while it makes everyone else play slow. Yes, it will have games where it plays exceptionally slow due to Alela dying and stax pieces entering the field to just keep her pilot alive. But, most games with her, and our league reflects it, are over very swiftly through combo or just pure beats.
So to anyone looking to run a league and someone wants to play a stax build, just keep it real with them. Let them know your league constraints and tell them to build to it. I did not do that with Keegan, but before the league started I let him know I would watch the deck incase it was an issue with length. And he was super understanding and agreed it was fair to do so. Just be real with people and do not be afraid to tell them that some cards or some builds won’t fly in the league due to constraints. And if everyone is scared to build stax due to constraints, build one yourself or encourage someone else to. It is good for the league and is nice to have an “archenemy” game everyone once in a while.