Commander Overview
Strixhaven week continues with a true Boros legend, Aziza a card that I took a lot of time to build, I wanted to lean into the true nature of Boros and focus heavily on Aziza’s ability to copy some awesome spells, based on all of that I decided on a Boros token shell allowing us to copy some of our best token generating spells like Hop to It and Call the Coppercoats as well as cards like Mana Geyser and Battle Hymn. This is a token deck through and through and has all of the cards you would expect for a Boros token deck, cards like Mondrak, Glory Dominus and Arabella, Abandoned Doll. Aziza’s role in this deck is a bit of a mixed bag. We want them on the field as much as possible, and we would love them to be there for nearly the entire game. Still, that isn’t realistic, truthfully. Opponents realize quite quickly that our board can build when Aziza is out. The reason it’s a mixed bag is that. In contrast, we love them on the field; we don’t actually need Azisa for the game plan to work. We are just a good token deck on our own. Aziza is a different take on a token deck and has been a blast to play and test.
EDH BRACKET
The average current preconstructed deck.
- No Mass Land Denial
- No Chaining Extra Turns
- No 2-Card Infinite Combos
- No Game Changers
- Few Tutors
How to Play the Deck
This Aziza deck plays like pretty much every other token deck, overwhelm the the board with the high amount of tokens we create and use effects like You see a pair of goblins double casted with Aziza can give our creatures +4/+0 which can be crazy when we have a huge amount of tokens on the board which is extremely common in this deck. This deck is good for a player with a few games under their belt. I wouldn’t give this one to a brand-new player, but overall, this is a deck that a lot of players at varying skill levels can play.
Synergy’s in the deck
The main synergy in our deck is our tokens; they are the primary part of our deck and the main thing we do. Aziza is technically a synergy within our deck since we use her with cards like Mana Geyser or Battle Hymn to produce a ton of mana. One of our biggest token synergies is our token doublers like Mondrak, Glory Dominus and Exalted Sunborn. When combined with Aziza’s copy ability, it allows us to go insane, casting something like Hop to it twice with our doublers is truly insane. Prosperous Partnership is another card that synergizes extremely well with our deck and is great to use at the end of all of your opponents’ turns before your turn starts. We have a lot of synergy with our overall game plan.
Phases of the Game
Early-Game: The early-game is pretty great for us. While we aren’t super aggressive, we can move quickly. Aziza only costs 2 mana, so we can get them down and have their ability ready quite easily. A lot of our cheap token spells can give us the ability to copy our spells in the very early game, and we can begin to be quite aggressive while our opponents are still setting up.
Mid-Game: The mid-game is also good for us, our overall gameplan doesn’t change at all but our opponents do get bigger and better, still we continue to go wide as much as we can, we won’t make bad attacks and swing wildly and we certainly pick our battles at this stage of the game while trying to do as much damage as we possibly can.
Late-Game: As a deck that primarily fills the board up with small creatures, we don’t really want the game to go super long, so our aggressiveness in the early/mid game is quite important for us. If we do make it to the late-game, doing everything we can to survive is critical. We sometimes have to maximize and sacrifice our board. It’s all situational, but being able to pick our battles and use Aziza’s ability effectively is key.
Card Breakdowns
Ramp
We don’t ramp really at all in this deck. Still, we do have a very low overall cost with the primary mana cost in our deck being three, so ramping isn’t really a problem. A starting hand with two or three lands is great for us and allows us to execute our game plan as expected. We are running 33 lands, as I found that was a good number for consistency. While we don’t ramp a lot, it certainly doesn’t mean that we can’t execute our game plan exactly how we want to.
Card Draw/Card Advantage
Card draw is ok within this deck, we mostly have red draw spells like Big Score, Unexpected Windfall, and Seize the Spoils, being able to copy with Aziza and getting extra draws and treasures at the cost of a couple cards is absolutely worth it for our deck. By far our best source of card draw within our deck is Skullclamp. Since we have so many 1/1 tokens within the deck, we can easily draw a ton of cards for very little mana investment. Another interesting source of draw in our deck is Tempt with Bunnies, which is a true best of both worlds for our deck since we get card draw and token production, and can even copy it with Aziza to do it again! While we certainly don’t draw as many cards as a blue deck, we do have a decent amount of card draw in the deck, and Aziza assists a lot of that.
Removal
We are not great at removal; we are very much a selfish deck, and our preferred way of interacting with our opponents is through combat. We have cards like Blasphemous Act, which is a nice board wipe if we fall behind, and if we need to, we can copy it with Aziza to deal twenty-six damage, which is pretty good and will take out pretty much everything. Cards like Erode and Swords to Plowshares round out our small removal package as cheap and easy ways to deal with opponents’ threats. While we don’t have a lot of removal, we can deal with the biggest threats on the table.
Protection
Protection is by far the weakest aspect of our deck; cards like Moogles' Valor provide a ton of token production and make our creatures indestructible until the end of the turn, which can be strong in the face of an opponent’s board wipe. We really don’t have a lot of protection in this deck because our stuff is mostly expandable; we really don’t care if any of our stuff dies.
Utility / Support
Let’s highlight some of my favorite cards in the deck. I love our whole suite of damage dealers like Impact Tremors, Molten Gatekeeper and Weftstalker Ardent all of these are great ways to ping down our opponents and make our damage non-combat and not have to swing into their big boards, the best option of our non-combat damage cards is by far Purphoros, God of the Forge a card that can output a ridiculous amount of damage especially when we have some huge spells like Song of Totentanz and Secure the Wastes. Since we have so many tokens in the deck, it is criminally easy to play out City On Fire, which makes us a true nightmare to deal with for our non-combat damage and our combat damage. Another great option for our non-combat damage is Throne of the God-Pharaoh, which is a huge synergy with Aziza and can allow us to hurt our opponents quite a bit. Lastly, I want to highlight Massive Raid, which is a huge damage spell and a great way to kill an opponent straight up.
Mana Base
We have a very uninteresting mana base, some Boros Dual lands, and Command Tower make up the nonbasics and we have mostly Plains and Mountains within the deck. We are only running thirty-three lands. I did test a version with thirty-two, but after jamming over ten games, I found that thirty-three was the best number for the deck.
Win Conditions
We have two primary win conditions, our main win con for the deck is our combat damage and going wide with all of our tokens but with cards like Purphoros, God of the Forge and Impact Tremors as well as a few other sources in the deck we are easily able to kill our opponents with non-combat damage as well although it is a little common.
Strengths of the Deck
We are great at going wide and simply going around our opponents with the size of our board.
Because of our big board, we are tough to attack into since we have legions of creatures to chump block with.
Weaknesses of the Deck
It’s quite tough for us to rebuild after being fully stopped; all of our tokens cease to exist.
We have a rough time dealing with stompy decks; they tend to go pretty wide and have bigger/better creatures than us.
Deck Testing/Matchups
I tested this deck against three different decks
Game 1: Vs Sun Quan, Lord of Wu. Matchup Record: 2-2
This matchup is truly a race. If they drop Sun Quan, we aren’t able to block any of their stuff, and they can start dishing out some crazy damage. Luckily, we are pretty quick as well, so going fast is our best option. If we can kill their commander, we can hurt them quite a bit as well. Just go fast!
Cards that worked really well in this matchup:
Erode, Swords to Plowshares and Weftstalker Ardent.
Game 2: Vs Tibor and Lumia. Matchup Record: 0-3
Tibor and Lumia are great against us; they are truly set up to beat us. They ruin our board constantly, and in my testing games, I struggled heavily with this matchup.
This was miserable to play against. They are a hard counter for our deck.
Cards that worked really well in this matchup:
Assemble the Legion, Skullclamp and Drumbellower.
Game 3: Vs Elder Arthur Maxson. Matchup Record: 3-1
A true token vs token matchup, being in red really helps us here and makes it so we go wider while they go bigger, just go hard and lean on our non-combat damage dealers to win.
Cards that worked really well in this matchup:
Song of Totentanz, Release the Dogs and Agate Instigator.
Conclusion
Thanks so much for reading to the end! I hope you all enjoyed. While Aziza has a lot of the same problems that many Boros decks face, overall, it is a very fun deck to pilot. If you love tokens, this is a bit of a different take and is an absolute blast to play. Boros for the win!
