Posted in: Card Games, Games, Magic: The Gathering, Tabletop, Wizards of the Coast | Tagged: Brawl, card games, commander, deck tech, EDH, magic, Magic: The Gathering, MTG, Tabletop, wizards of the coast, WotC

"God-Eternal Kefnet" Deck Tech – "Magic: The Gathering"

Of all of the innovations in Magic: The Gathering, there is none so insidious as the ones which force other players to sit and do nothing while you get to play and win. These sorts of cards are tough to deal with and frustrate many a player on a regular basis. The very worst offenders among cards that facilitate such a board state may well be the ones that provide players extra turns of play.

With that preamble, I'd like to introduce the other commander for my Magic: The Gathering deck techs today: the corrupted version of Kefnet the Mindful, the powerful legendary creature known as God-Eternal Kefnet.

The goal of a deck revolving around God-Eternal Kefnet is often to capitalize on cards which are great duplicated and cast at a discount. For us, extra turn cards specifically are what we want to exploit completely. We have a great many cards in our arsenal to allow us to do this and they often cost a large amount of mana but they're nearly always well worth the payment.

The deck to be discussed in this article can be found here.

Notable Inclusions

Extra-turn cards – Cards such as these have been the mainstay since the very beginning of Magic. There's a reason why Time Walk is in the illustriously-broken list of base set cards called the Power Nine (as it's banned in Commander, though, you won't see it in here!). Extra-turn cards were always causing extreme controversy in this game. The original Time Walk had to be reworded, legend says, from "You opponent loses their next turn" to "Take an extra turn after this one" in order to avoid confusion and unintentional game loss for a mere two mana (still, two mana is too cheap for any extra turn effect!).

So, in lieu of Time Walk, we have many other substitutions, all exploitable for much less mana with God-Eternal Kefnet. For example, Time Warp, Temporal Manipulation, and Capture of Jingzhou (all of which do the same as Time Walk for the same cost of five mana… or as low as three!), Temporal Mastery (which can function as a Time Walk without Kefnet ever getting involved), and the much-maligned former bane of Standard, Nexus of Fate, are all necessary in this deck for what we need, which is a glut of time.

Plus, most mindful players will scoop instantly to a resolved Expropriate.

Scroll Rack – This card is the lynchpin of the deck. Without it, there's a problem in that your extra turn cards are finite. With it, you can infinitely loop your extra-turn cards to the ends of victory. To do so, use the Scroll Rack to put an extra-turn card on top of your deck to draw next turn with Kefnet, then draw it and copy it with Kefnet on your next available turn with an untapped Scroll Rack in tow. With the copy cast and the original in hand, do it again to win on your terms and your terms alone.

Counterspells – Sometimes, if not always, this deck will infuriate players who can't handle a control element well enough. To this end, they will – they will – try to disrupt your plan. Use these to disrupt said disruption, be it their attempts to remove Kefnet or your Scroll Rack, or their own feeble counterspells. These are pretty self-explanatory and you can find literally all of them in the Instants section of the decklist.

In Conclusion

But wait, how do you win? The best way to assure a win is to see the rest of the table forfeit, but otherwise, you're likely to defeat opponents through commander damage with God-Eternal Kefnet. This strategy is shakier than I care to normally admit but it should work just fine all the same.

What do you think? Is this deck scarier than my earlier decklist for Kefnet the Mindful? Which do you think would win? Let us know!

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