Deconstructing Nekusa

This week I'm going to take my own Nekusa deck, break it down and discuss why I've chosen to use the cards I have.

Nekusa, the Mindrazer

Let's break him down and take a closer look at exactly what he does for us.

Nekusar has a casting cost of 2UBR or a CMC of 5. Not the most expensive commander but also not the cheapest and as you'll see the idea is to try and not cast him until you're ready to make full use of him so a Nekusar deck needs lots a mana.  All the cards in the deck also have to only have Blue, Black or Red mana symbols.

Nekusar is both a Zombie and a Wizard there are cards that have definite synergies with both and often it's worth taking advantage of this, especially in a tribal or partial tribal deck.  This won't be the case here as the reason we are playing this Legendary Zombie Wizard is because of his rules text.

So let's see what does he do? His rules text breaks down into to distinct parts.

A: At the beginning of each player's draw step, that player draws an additional card.

Note: This rule is true for each player and so the turn you play him every player after your turn will get to draw an extra card.  I discussed in last week's article that this puts you at a disadvantage.

B: Whenever an opponent draws a card, Nekusar, the Mindrazer deals 1 damage to that player.

This is the the rule that really matters.  Note: It only affects your opponents. So it doesn't matter how many cards you draw what matters is how many cards they draw.

Already he'll be 'pinging' them for 2 points of damage a turn. But then they have 40 life points each.

Lastly it has a 2/4 body.  Not bad but it's not going to win many fights in Commander, luckily we don't want it getting involved in many combat situations.

So Nekusa is all about punishing your opponents for drawing cards.  So the first thing to do is to hunt down all the other cards, in Nekusa's colours, that do the same or similar.

And here they are. Fate Unraveler is a body with the same ability as Underworld Dreams. Kederekt Parasite requires you to have a red permanent before it acts in the same way and then you have the two other cards.

Spiteful visions reads a little like Nekusa but it will damage use as well as your opponents when you draw cards.

Phyrexian Tyranny goes one step further it deals 2 damage to you and your opponents for each card you draw.  Care must be taken with Phyrexian Tyranny that you don't cause yourself to draw the game or worse loose it.

All five of these are destined for the deck.  One other card that works similarly is Seizan, Perverter of Truth.

However, he lets your opponents draw 2 cards and loose 2 life.  The 2 life lost doesn't increase if your opponent draws more cards so I found him to be limited in use and he never made it past Goldfish bowling.  

Goldfish bowling is when you run the deck against a dummy opponent to see how the deck draws cards and the cards interact with each other before you test it against other decks where you pilot both before testing it against other opponents.

There is another card that deals damage to your opponents when they draw cards and it's called Molten Psyche. 

It's a useful card because it allows me to link the two sides of the deck.  We've seen how we cause your opponents pain when the draw cards, now we need to make them draw lots of cards.

Where Molten Psyche is so cool is that its Metalcraft ability deals damage to each opponent equal to the number of cards that player has drawn this turn.

That means you can hit them with damage over and above that done by your Commander or the five other cards shown above.

The way the deck works you play a card like Molten Psyche draw more cards, draw another card like Molten Psyche and repeat as much as the cards you draw and your mana allows.

So we need to look at more cards like Molten Psyche.

There are quite a few cards to pick from when looking to 'cycle' entire hands. 

There's nothing quite like Ciphering Whispering Madness to Dragon Mage for a double whammy. Other concepts such as using Windfall and then if you don't find another spell activate Jace's Achivist hopefully drawing into Winds of change and then a Molten Psyche which would probably finish off all of your opponents.

Wheel of fire is here for completeness. Dark Deal has only been released recently so that's not in my deck, yet.  I don't have a Wheel of Fortune, Winds of Change or a Time Twister.  Timetwister being one of Magic's particularly expensive cards.  But I do play all of the other cards.

There is one other card like these that I also have in my deck but it's slightly different to those listed above. That card is Wheel and Deal.

I find the fact that I get to draw one card instead of seven can be useful if Phyrexian Tyranny is in play.

On top of these I play a suite of seven cards that, in various way, let me replay most of these once I have cast them.

There are any number of cards like these but these are the ones I own and use and I think they provide me with a varied selection. In a deck like Nekusa that also runs mass removal, targeted removal, anti-artifact and counter spell cards then these can all prove to be worth their weight in god.

There are some cards that give sorceries and instants in your graveyard Flashback.  Although useful I'm running two cards with Overload which provides the cards with an alternative casting cost. As alternative casting costs cannot be paid with Flashback I decided against using cards that grant flashback to my graveyard cards.

Speaking of Overload cards, one of the the to two is among my anti-artifact suite of cards.

Deepfire Elemental is useful as targetted removal as wheel as artifact hate.  It doubles up in this role in my deck and I run five other cards that I use for targeted removal as well.

I admit Evil Twin is in there as an experiment and a bit of fun, Mind Control because who says my stealing your card is not removal, of a kind. Phyrexian Ingester is a bomb because it eats, sorry Exiles, my opponents bomb. Red Sun's Zenith tucks back into the library so can see play more than once especially in this deck. Lastly Comet Storm is both targeted removal and can also be used like a sweeper.  

Similarly to the above I run a further five creature sweepers.

 

As you may have noticed I like to run cards that do the job I require them to but do it in different ways, this makes the games more interesting, my play less predictable but still keeps the a certain amount of consistency in the deck.

I run six counter spells in the deck which can also be thought of as blue's answer to targeted removal. I'm playing all of these cards because I need to keep my opponents in check while I get read to setup my big splash play.  

  

The only surprise there is probably Essence Backlash and I'm just running that as a surprise card but it will probably get replaced at some point. Hinder and Spell Crumple are particularly useful both can 'tuck' my opponent's commander at the bottom of their library making it much harder for them to get their commander into play.

In many Commander decks people will tutor for the cards they need often to set up combos etc. In this deck I took a slightly different approach and loaded up with cards that let me draw more cards every turn.

 

These six represent a decent selection of some of the most useful 'draw' permanents in the game. If you want to know more about these read last week's article. Any Commander deck can find itself running out of gas if all it can draw is one card per turn, being able to draw many cards per turn gives you options and means you can enact your battle-plan more quickly and more often.

You may, by now, have realise that the deck was built around a factor of six.  6 sweepers, 6 counterspells etc. There's no hard and fast rule why I chose this except that in general I start with 60 cards and 40 lands and 60 is nicely divided by 6.

Most decks will have a way of protecting their commander, if he or she does not already have protection built in, and this deck is no different. It runs the full suite of four artifacts that do the job.

Most commander decks will make use of at least 3 if not all 4 of these cards. Some, usually where the commander is chosen for it's colours rather than it's abilities, may opt not to run them but they are useful in any deck running important creatures.

The rest of the artifacts in the deck are either mana rocks (artifacts that tap to produce mana) or they fetch lands for me.

 

A quick word about Sol Ring and Solemn Simulacrum, I've yet to build a Commander deck that doesn't run both of them. Sol Ring certainly is the first card on any list and for me the Simulacrum is always next.

Finally there are three other cards that make up the deck.

The Electromancer and the Familiar are both useful for making the hand cycling spells easier to cast and Baleful Strix is just a useful deterrent to have flying on the battlefield.

So, with the exception of the land choices, the bulk of which are derived from the 2013 Commander deck Mind Seize, these are the cards I've chosen to make up my deck. In some cases the choices are made for you. Cards that deal damage when my opponents draw cards for example are part of the decks main focus. The artifacts I chose for the deck, however, are all personal choices and I would expect to see very different artifacts in other decks that also use Nekusa as their commander.

I hope you found this interesting.

Next time I'm going to take a look at a recent cycle of cards and give my observations about their usefulness in Commander decks.

Phil