MTG Salvation

Thada Adel seems like a commander that's way more interesting to play than build. How she works will depend entirely on your opponents - maybe she'll be a powerful voltron, or maybe she'll steal a bunch of powerful ramp, or maybe she'll just play a bunch of big bomby artifact creatures. Either way, she doesn't really seem like she benefits hugely from synergies - I considered putting in etherium sculptor until I realized that, with just 1 artifact stolen per turn, I may as well play mind stone. Same for vedalken archmage and archivist. Her synergy with artifact just doesn't seem that strong or worth it.

Nor is her synergy as a voltron. Beating someone to death with Thada seems a bit counterproductive - firstly because she's a grey ogre, and second because once they're dead, they're taking back all their stuff you stole. Lame.

So rather than do either of those things, I'm going with more of a slow, grindy deck to get as much mileage out of her abilities as possible by dragging out the game a bit. Lots of control and a few stax pieces thrown it just to piss everyone off. May want more draw, but then hopefully we'll be doing alright off enemy artifacts in that regard. If I end up in a pod where there's just a bunch of sol rings and nothing else though, this deck will probably suck.

40 lands seems high. Perhaps add in a bunch of mana rocks to speed up your deck and lower that land count?

Empress Galina?

Tested it out yesterday. Lost 1 (sort of...I quit once everyone else decided that playing Zur's Weirding was an unforgivable crime and that I must die to speed up the game) and won 1 (sort of...one tryhard had a combo deck and we all decided to keep playing without them after they "won").

overall I wasn't terribly impressed. I see a few problems with Thada. One is that she does her thing via hitting people, which, you know...kills them. And then you lose all their stuff. Usually you're trying to hit the most threatening player, because you want them to die, but then once they do die, you have nothing. The second problem is that a pretty decent number of people run very few interesting artifacts. Sure, stealing sol rings is nice, but ultimately it doesn't help you very much if you just have a bunch of control spells to cast. I could go heavier into Voltron, but then problem 1 rears its ugly head higher, and she's not actually a very impressive voltron card. Plus stealing people's stuff tends to piss them off. Overall, I think something like Lu Xun, scholar General is probably just a better choice for a mono-blue value-voltron tbh, even if he's less interesting.

Quote from Tev »

40 lands seems high. Perhaps add in a bunch of mana rocks to speed up your deck and lower that land count?

Empress Galina?

Since Thada always provides me with ramp (and at least theoretically something to use that ramp on) I don't see much reason to include a lot myself. Lands ensure I can cast her on time and that I can cast the artifacts I find. I think as long as Thada reliably gives me a cool artifact every turn, being able to play a land is valuable enough to justify 40, but whether that's actually reliably the case is up to debate.

What about Empress Galina? How does she make sense in this deck?

It's in your title. Control, Stax and Theft. Empress Galina is the stealiest stealer of stealing.

The entire game revolves around a supertype that Empress Galina can steal with only 2 mana; if that doesn't control the game I don't know does.

To clarify: You keep the Legend forever, there's no EOT clause or anything. You like that Jitte? It's yours. You think Erebos is neat? It's yours. Someone dropped a Mindslaver but didn't crack it? It's yours. Someone had the audacity to play their commander? It's yours. This is especially brutal since the majority of decks aren't Commander agnostic, a lot of them revolve around having their Commander.

Quote from Tev »

It's in your title. Control, Stax and Theft. Empress Galina is the stealiest stealer of stealing.

The entire game revolves around a supertype that Empress Galina can steal with only 2 mana; if that doesn't control the game I don't know does.

To clarify: You keep the Legend forever, there's no EOT clause or anything. You like that Jitte? It's yours. You think Erebos is neat? It's yours. Someone dropped a Mindslaver but didn't crack it? It's yours. Someone had the audacity to play their commander? It's yours. This is especially brutal since the majority of decks aren't Commander agnostic, a lot of them revolve around having their Commander.

I mean, sure, I know how Empress Galina works as a card. I just don't think it makes a lot of sense in this deck. My commander is the main source of theft (and win conditions) for the deck, the other theft effects are just incidental because blue doesn't have a lot of great ways to get rid of permanents other than stealing them.

I guess she's ok as another wincon, but I'd probably run something like rite of replication or expropriate instead that has more immediate impact. The purpose of this deck, though, was to get as much value out of my commander as possible, not win with other cards. I will say that, at least thus far, winning solely with stolen artifacts from Thada hasn't been too hugely successful, or as much fun as I'd hoped, but if I'm playing other wincons then I'd probably switch to another commander and ditch this deck entirely.

Hi 2.5 Years into the future:
I think I'll give it a try, also for fun, not as a competitive one. With some shroud, some artifact thematic, some stealingg...
As for the new stuff in these last years I'll list:
Helm of the Host: Multiple Thadas means multiple steals per turn (I can see myself with 3 easily)!
Strionic Resonator: Double stealing (not a new card but for me it is).
Mechanized Production + Copy artifacts (Clever Impersonator or Phyrexian Metamorph): Steal some 4 sol rings, create some other 5, cast your own, win, lol then lol some more with the stupidest win-con. Or use rite of replication on an artifact creature. Btw with Clever Impersonator I would copy Mechanized Production to create two each turn... or copy a helm of the host. Or do many myrs/thopters. Or treat your islands as artifacts (there's many ways, but my preferred one would be Mycosynth Lattice.
Mass Manipulation: Well just because we like stealing and we may have a lot of mana if we've stolen a few sol rings and mana vaults.

I may later update on my deck list and how it goes.