MTG Salvation

So my best friend currently has a Damia deck that was built on the old Tooth and Nail engine. Everyone has since realized how to play around Damia and his combo and it's no longer as effective any more.

So, in an effort to revitalize Damia as a deck idea and bring it forward into the new cEDH metagame, I've created this list. The main focus of the deck is to ramp HARD and create infinite mana, with Damia serving as the primary card advantage engine. In total honesty, this list might be better served as a Thrasios/X Paradox Scepter deck, but Damia has a lot of nostalgia for myself and Deathdiamond, hence this list.


The infinite combos present in the deck both create infinite mana (Dramatic Reversal + Isochron Scepter and Freed from the Real + Bloom Tender/Incubation Druid). Once infinite mana is achieved, you proceed to draw your deck with either Thrasios, Triton Hero, Pull from Tomorrow, or Blue Sun's Zenith. If infinite mana is achieved via Dramatic Scepter, then you can draw your deck with Sensei's Divining Top. Then take all the turns with Nexus of Fate and turn Damia sideways until everyone has died from Commander damage. There's also the cEDH Timetwister Combo special where you loop any number of spells you want as many times as you want once infinite mana and draw is achieved; Beast Within, Reality Shift, and Swan Song can all serve as win conditions at that point.

There's also a fun way to take infinite turns with Isochron Scepter + Mystical Tutor and enough permanents to generate mana for Nexus of Fate. Ideally, you'll cast Damia at some point so that you can draw cards and consistently chew through your deck to deterministically close the game.

And Notion Thief + Timetwister/Windfall as a mini-combo to win at your leisure.

Lastly, you can double up on Dramatic Scepter with Copy Artifact so that you can put another spell under another Scepter and win the game that way. Putting in an Assassin's Trophy will leave your opponents boards cleared for the rest of the game while you kill them via combat damage or Commander damage.

EDIT: I removed the Paradox Engine on 3/16/2019 in favor of an extra turns package. Extra turns allows me to see more cards with Damia's trigger should she stay alive.

I may be missing something but I think the way this is constructed the deck is probably just worse than Tasigur, isn't it? I guess you can play fewer draw engines and cantrips but I'm not sure it's better to be eschewing the cantrip suite. Hard to tell.

One thing I would consider is whether Words of Waste would be a reasonable win con - Damia + words is basically mind twisting everyone every turn and creates a hard lock pretty quickly at a minimum investment.

Maybe a little less focus on making infinite mana and a little more on untapping with Damia would make the deck uniquely different than a Tasigur list?

Apologies if that's not helpful, I mostly follow CEDH from an academic standpoint.

I've really tried to like Damia, but even as part of the 99 her effect is just too much of a magnet. The problem with her in the CZ ends up being whether she is worth the 9 mana second time around when you've in the domain of board wipes if the game isn't already over.

As Pokken has said, this seems like it'd be better for Tasigur to helm the deck. Not knocking the card, but her mana cost is just horrendous for her effect.

Quote from Pokken »

I may be missing something but I think the way this is constructed the deck is probably just worse than Tasigur, isn't it? I guess you can play fewer draw engines and cantrips but I'm not sure it's better to be eschewing the cantrip suite. Hard to tell.

One thing I would consider is whether Words of Waste would be a reasonable win con - Damia + words is basically mind twisting everyone every turn and creates a hard lock pretty quickly at a minimum investment.

Maybe a little less focus on making infinite mana and a little more on untapping with Damia would make the deck uniquely different than a Tasigur list?

Apologies if that's not helpful, I mostly follow CEDH from an academic standpoint.

No worries! following something from an "academic" is the first step to becoming a true convert to cEDH, haha.

My friend has a lot of extra turn effects in his deck in order to maximize the velocity and card advantage you can accrue from Damia and I seriously thought about cutting Ad Nauseam for some more extra turn effects. Nauseam and Extra Turn cards compete with each other in the deck and it's really just a decision of how I want the deck synergy to play out; does the one-shot awesomeness of Nauseam outperform the extra turn effects that COULD draw a significant number of cards with Damia's trigger? I'm honestly not sure. I'm still not completely decided on the current configuration of this list (which I suppose I'll have to actually test at some point) and extra turn cards could easily come back in, since they have a natural synergy with Damia's trigger. But Nauseam is just SO good that it's hard to pass up.

Words of Waste seems too mana intensive and just not quite effective enough for how I imagine a game would go. As a thought experiment, suppose that I have Words of Waste and Damia out at the same time and I activate Words a few times in order to generate a mass amount of discard. The problem I have with this situation is that I'm also hindering my OWN draw capability for a turn in order to deprive my opponents of resources. Words, in that sense, is actually a little too symmetrical of an effect for my liking. I readily acknowledge its power with Damia's trigger as an easy way to Mind Shatter each opponent for a relatively small mana investment but it also slows the deck down. In the end, I think Damia favors speed and efficiency over a true control strategy, hence the massively high mana count for the deck.

Quote from Turn30Win »

I've really tried to like Damia, but even as part of the 99 her effect is just too much of a magnet. The problem with her in the CZ ends up being whether she is worth the 9 mana second time around when you've in the domain of board wipes if the game isn't already over.

As Pokken has said, this seems like it'd be better for Tasigur to helm the deck. Not knocking the card, but her mana cost is just horrendous for her effect.

Nope, I definitely agree with yours and Pokken's thoughts. Damia costing 7 CMC for the initial cast is VERY difficult to achieve in the early game as is and she gets even more expensive as she keeps dying. I acknowledge that this list is definitely better helmed by either Tasigur or Thrasios/x because both of those Commanders are more effective at utilizing infinite mana.

Damia, and this particular list, simply has a ton of nostalgia for me and Deathdiamond. She was the second Commander I ever tried (RIP Vorosh) and she was really good to me in 2011 with the current understanding of the game that I had at that point, helping win a goodly number of games. I was thinking about the retired Primer that I had been hosting for Deathdiamond and thought to myself "What would Damia look like with the current cEDH meta and an updated strategy?" This list is mostly a thought exercise for what Damia should look like if I were trying to build her optimally for a cEDH meta.

She'll never be as fast or powerful as other Top Tier Commanders, but I think she can be brought forward to be a strong Tier 2 Commander, relatively similar to Arcum or Edric. I hope that makes sense!

So, if I decided to add Extra Turn effects, these are the changes that I would consider:


Actually, the land count is pretty high in the deck as is, so I'll be cutting 2 lands to bring the list down to 31 lands anyways.

So, for the current list, I'll be making the following changes:

I say go for a time run Damia. Extra turns create an advantage hard to generally interact against, and worse come to worst, they're always at least an explore. I like Ad Nauseum in decks with a quicker plan A than "Cast Damia"

Good point, TheAmericanSpirit. And there's enough mana producing permanents that Time Warp effects should definitely be more than a simple Explore.

Also, is your avatar a representation of Stephen Kind's Gunslinger?

I'm not sure. I ran "Gunslinger" through google and found a Chris Rahn picture I liked. Did enjoy what I read of the Dark Tower series though. Shame what they did with the movie really, waste of a perfectly good plot and Edris Elba.

Back on topic, I play pretty regularly against an Angus Mackenzie Time Run deck and I can attest that if he gets to five mana, he's generally going to take a series of turns and ramp into godhood. It's really only vulnerable to fast combo, storm, and maybe fast stax (currently testing this with an Adun Oakenshield build based on Phil's ancient list). Highly recommend primal amulet if you got that route, it's dumber than stupid.

Very cool. How many Time Walks does your friend run? I know that Edric, the only other cEDH caliber extra turns deck, runs about 8. Is that the same for your friend or no?

Yeah, I was so hyped for the Dark Tower movie and inwardly died inside after I watched it in theaters. They picked perfect actors for each of those roles, but I think that it tried to do too much in too short a time. 90 minutes is not nearly enough time. I wished that Matthew had been a little more deranged and maniacal, as that's how I've always pictured the Walking Dude.

Oh yeah, Primal Amulet. That's a great card, especially when there's so many instants and sorceries in the deck as is. Good look.

Pretty sure he's got all the standard ones plus a time stretch I recently convinced him to move back off the bench.

Oh, and a flip jace to flash the better ones back. Flip Jace is another nutso inclusion.

When you reference the "standard [Time Warp spells]", I assume you mean the following:

• Time Warp
• Temporal Manipulation
• Capture of Jingzhou
• Walk the Aeons
• Temporal Mastery
• Temporal Trespass
• Nexus of Fate

Is that correct? I'm still mentally adjusting the list to see how I could squeeze in more Time Warps.

Those plus karn's temporal sundering and time stretch, I believe. I can get an exact count tonight though when I go play.

In truth though, going for the time run means you can skimp a bit on single target removal and interaction because ideally you want to want to play solitaire anyway. Personally, I'd look for cuts there first.

TheAmericanSpirit, did you ever get a count for the number of Time Walks your friend is running? My instinct is saying that running anywhere between 6-9 Time Warp variants should be sufficient for the deck.

I'm loathe to cut from the removal suite, honestly. Every single one of those cards is good, and I'd sooner look at some card advantage slots or ramp slots. Having 20 ramp sources seems especially greedy, even though Damia's CMC is so high.

It was only 7 actually, the aforementioned 6 and time stretch. I underestimated how much recursion he was playing tbh. That's good news for shaving some interaction, as the recursion like regrowth, snappy boi and flippant jace gives redundancy to what counters and removal you do still have.

I personally would not advise cutting ramp. I've played many high cmc commanders, from Maelstrom Wanderer back in his partial paris heyday to Kozilek today, and getting stuck on insufficient funds is the literal worst nightmare.

Thus I try to abide by this rule to determine the value of opening hands:

If the first proactive, meaningful play for any given deck is its commander a la Selvala (and especially true for high cmc generals with CA stapled to them), good opening hands must show a tangible path towards reaching the mana necessary to cast it (or be otherwise godlike to subvert the rule).

Shaving ramp feels fine but actually it reduces the average viability of an opening hand and might force more aggressive mulligans (which Damia admittedly permits, but that depends entirely on whether you want to make that gameplay concession or not).

Edit: for cleanliness

Well, the goal of the deck is to have at least 2 mana sources, besides lands, in the opening hand and to draw a third one by T2 in order to cast a T3 Damia on average. I think the difference between 19 and 20 mana sources is negligible, especially considering that Green Sun's Zenith acts as a functional mana source 75% of the time (either a T1 Dryad Arbor or a T2 Bloom Tender). Copy Artifact can also double as a ramp piece depending on what's in play and what the opening hand needs to do.

I think the changes that I'll be making to the deck, in favor of the extra turns package, is the following:



Mission Briefing and Snapcaster Mage to help with recurring Time Warps, Extra Turns because they're good with Damia's trigger, and adding back in the fetch lands because cycling lands are bad without Life from the Loam.

EDIT: Aetherflux Reservoir might actually be redundant in this deck as a win condition. Realistically, the deck is looking to achieve infinite mana and use that as its primary mode of winning the game. Gaining infinite life can be done with Timetwister loops and Nature's Claim and I'd rather have another draw spell in that slot. I'm thinking Pull from Tomorrow, since it acts as another ramp payoff card for the deck while also being an outlet for infinite mana.