General Knowledge: Dragonlord Ojutai

When I told a friend this story they told me I was a monster… I have been playing in the Arena beta and a couple weeks ago I got a pretty mediocre mulligan: 2 lands, 2 Essence Scatters, a Cancel and 1 other card. Scry a non-land to the bottom play a land and pass. Opponent plays their land passes back and at least I wasn’t already getting attacked. Turn 2 I draw a non-land I can’t play so I play my land and pass to my opponent. They play their land and a random creature into Essence Scatter. My turn 3 still no land… pass back and they play a land and cast a 3 drop creature into my second Essence Scatter… making the whole rest of the hand unplayable… but HAZZAH turn 4 I draw my third land. They cast a 4 drop, I Cancel, and they snap concede. Of course, our opponent didn’t know we couldn’t cast any other spells, and the MTGA economy encourages you to concede quickly so you can play (and win) more games, but this situation illustrates a known psychological preference amongst many MTG players: having your spells countered feels worse than having them resolve and then destroyed.

When it comes to multiplayer Commander, control is difficult… in a one vs one format, like Arena, we can trade resources somewhat easily; a card for a card, mana for mana. With typically 3 opponents in Commander we can’t really do that well; if we go and counter a spell of the player right after us the next player may cast something even worse! This challenge of managing resources leads control decks to take a “stax” approach (where they use cards like Winter Orb to slow the game down), run combos to win the game as soon as possible, and Blue/White control decks tend to be lead by Grand Arbiter Augustin IV because it slows down their opponents while speeding up their own deck. I am relatively hard-headed so when I set out to build my control deck these were all things I wanted to avoid. While I was trying to think of the new direction I wanted my control deck to go there was a pretty cool control deck in Standard called “Esper Dragons” and it used Dragonlord Ojutai as its main win-con.

So, I got thinking Dragonlord Ojutai would be pretty cool as a commander! He digs us for cards, if we can give him vigilance we can dodge targeted removal, and with counterspells and board wipes we can either keep the board clear for Dragonlord Ojutai or protect him once we are attacking. Dragonlord Ojutai being our win-con also gives us a solid way to close the game and makes us a weird Voltron.

I have shared before that I love that Commander decks carry stories. My Dragonlord Ojutai deck used to be radically different than in it is today. It started out as a Noyan Dar “Cantrip.dec”, but that was meh, then it became Ojutai Superfriends, but then Atraxa came out so all my Planeswalkers moved to that deck, and that left me with the take on the deck that we have today. I call this deck “U/W Dragon Tribal” because it turns out people don’t like when you say “Ojutai Control”… This deck is different than the other two decks I have written about for Flipside Gaming in that if you were to find me at a Commander Night at my LCS and I put down Dragonlord Ojutai this is the exact list I am playing. That means that there are older cards I haven’t gotten around to getting yet (like Leyline of Anticipation), there are some newer cards that haven’t been added to the deck, and it means that sometimes there are weird cards in the deck because they are what was convenient at the time of building. This deck will also not follow the Command Zone deck building guide that I have talked about in my other lists because this deck is trying to do something different (and again I am hard headed).

With all of that story fresh in our minds lets strike our most Jeskai pose and look to the teachings of our wise Elder Dragon.

Win Cons

Let’s start with how we win. Dragonlord Ojutai will win the game for us 99% of the time but we want our opponents to help us get there. There are a few other ways that we can win but they typically happen more as we stabilize rather than intentional wins. Earlier we talked about how the challenge of control is that it is radically hard to trade resources well against 3 opponents but one of the great things that exists in multiplayer Commander that doesn’t exist in one vs one is politics. Politics Win Game. Do you want to counter a spell? Ask the table what they think! Are you planning to wipe the board? Hide your excitement and play it off as making it so we can play for late game or setting back the player that is the biggest threat. We can protect other players with the deal of “If I do this for you, you can’t attack me next turn”. We want to get to the point in the game where it is us and one other player so that we can control the board. In terms of actual in-game win cons Luminarch Ascension and Metallurgic Summonings are our best ways to win. If we can stick a turn two Luminarch Ascension we can pretty easily ride it to a victory, or at least to a commanding board position. Luminarch Ascension also does great at “Don’t attack us because we could make a 4/4 flyer and kill your creature” which of course means we can leave up mana for counterspells and just make a 4/4 end of turn if we didn’t need to use of mana for anything else. We are also running the Academy Ruins/Mindslaver combo which we can once we get to a one vs one game or if someone is about to win we can use it politically to remove that chance.

Metallurgic Summonings is like our “Plan Z” when it goes to winning the game. It is a great value card that will sometimes just knock someone out but sense we are only running a couple high converted mana cost instants and sorceries but we are primarily using Metallurgic Summonings as added value for our counterspells or for the second effect of buying back our spells from the graveyard.

Counterspells

          

Speaking of counterspells let’s talk about our role players in this deck. Something I have learned as I have played this deck is that while many people don’t like having they like having someone there to counter stuff that shuts their deck down (POLITICS WIN GAMES!). Graveyard based decks don’t want that Rest in Peace to resolve or will make a deal so we won’t counter that Naturalize or Return to Dust. We are running a handful of counterspells that will exile the card instead of just putting it into the graveyard. With Muldrotha being crazy hyped from Dominaria, and being the latest in a long line of strong graveyard value decks, permanent answers are extremely valuable. Faerie Trickery, Dissipate, Void Shatter, and Syncopate are all solid ways to answer troublesome spells while many of our other counters, like Exclude and Ojutai’s Command, will replace themselves.  We are also running Spell Swindle because you know… sometimes we get to counter The Ur-Dragon with it (hypothetically of course).

Board Wipes

        

The easiest way for us to stay on parity as a control deck is to be able to DESTROY ALL THE THINGS. If an opponent casts a spell but we are already looking at casting Wrath of God next turn down waste that counterspell or Path to Exile. One of our greatest tools as a control deck (besides politics, which if you haven’t heard WIN GAMES!) is fear and the threat of resetting the board is a great way to do that. It is important to remember that we want to be able to rebuild before our opponents and that means it can be best to save a board wipe for when we can cast Dragonlord Ojutai as a follow up even if that means taking a hit or two. Tragic Arrogance is great in our deck because lets us save the best of our stuff but it also lets up play politics on what to destroy of our opponents’ permanents. Rout also wipes the board before we take our turn which is great and while the majority of our board wipes hit only creatures Hour of Revelation and Austere Command also hit non-creatures. I also really like Descend upon the Sinful and Martial Coup because they leave us with some bodies after we wipe the board and Descend upon the Sinful exiles our opponents’ stuff.

Enhancers and Equipment

For sake of time I am not going to dig through all of the other categories of cards but I do really want to highlight some of the other cards in the deck. Sphere of Safety and Propaganda are great at deterring our opponents from attacking us while Thalia, Heretic Cathar shuts down hasty threats and slows down our opponents’ mana bases. Ring of Thune, Sword of Vengeance, and Fireshrieker all help us make Dragonlord Ojutai a bigger threat. Clever Impersonator is one of my favorite cards because it is the best card on the field. Doubling up Sphere of Safely or taking an opponent’s Planeswalker feels good (especially if we can destroy the original Planeswalker afterwards).

Closing Thoughts

As I mentioned at the top this is my exact list for my Dragonlord Ojutai deck so there are cards that I need to add that I just haven’t gotten to or I won’t be getting till they rotate out of Standard (I don’t buy cards for Commander that only see play in Standard if they cost more than $10). Tefari, Hero of Dominaria, Urza’s Ruinous Blast, Azor’s Gateway, and Thaumatic Compass all should have a place in this deck. I need to find my copy of Darksteel Mutation also and get it into the deck. I would really like to get this deck back to its Planeswalker subtheme with cards like Elspeth, Sun’s Champion acting as a board wipe, Tamiyo, the Moon Sage tapping our opponents’ stuff, and the previously mentioned Teferi, Hero of Dominaria doing all the amazing things.

Dragonlord Ojutai is a fantastic deck that I have really enjoyed playing. The dragon master is a really fun take on control decks and, when played right, gives us a huge threat and political power.