Even the largest creature pile starts from just one!
Art: Winota, Joiner of Forces
by Magali Villeneuve
Table of Contents
Welcome to another installment of Brewed CEDH!
Please note that since this is CEDH no budget considerations have been made!
Todays Featured Commander is:
For a very long time Boros was arguably the worst color combination in CEDH Winota has absolutely changed the Boros archetype from one of the worst to a pretty high tier commander. Winota is definitely a different kind of CEDH deck focusing a lot less on spells and a lot more on winning through the combat phase. We have a ton of creatures that enable Winota and with enough creatures we can even cycle through pretty much our entire deck!
The Deck:
Winota Stax!
Why Winota, Joiner of Forces?
The reason we chose Winota is her ability to just get a crazy amount of creatures onto the field and win a lot of games without having to cast any spells. She fits perfectly into a stax shell since we can play our stax pieces after casting a few of our cheap non-human creatures and just start the Snowballing effect of Winota’s attack trigger. Another great thing about Winota is that her ability triggers for each non-human we have attacking. While this is not a CEDH deck that casts a ton of spells it still very much has the CEDH feel!
Deck Overview:
Since we are a Stax deck we are of course packing some stax pieces like Rule of Law
, Deafening Silence
and Ethersworn Canonist
just to name a few. Since all of our non-human creatures that trigger Winota can be placed pretty early since they are cheap we can reliably play through all of our stax effects only effecting our opponents. The beauty of Winota is that we do not need to really cast any spells once we get Winota on the field, we have a few ways to protect Winota and the main goal on our deck is to have non-humans attack so we can start the free creatures and start doing a ton of damage. Some of the best non-human’s that trigger Winota are Pia and Kiran Nalaar
and even some really cheap creatures like Ornithopter
or Phyrexian Walker
, our deck is filled to the brim with small easy to cast creatures that let us get the Winota pile going! There are a lot of great humans that we want to hit with Winota including Greymond, Avacyn's Stalwart
which gives our humans buffs + a ton of abilites as well Myrel, Shield of Argive
. Rick creates great buffs and Myrel has crazy creature production. Our best token generator in our deck is Loyal Apprentice
since it creates a Winota trigger basically every turn! This is definitely an atypical CEDH deck since we are not in blue at all it definitely limits how much we can interact with the stack although we do have a few ways including Red Elemental Blast
and Deflecting Swat
. Outside of a few cards that let us interact we are just trying to cast Winota as soon as we possibly can. Since are deck has a lot of cheap / solely for Winota cards we have to mulligan pretty aggressviely to hit one to two of our artifact ramp so that we can cast Winota on turn 2 and on turn 3 begin the pile, a typical great hand would be 1-3 lands 2 non-humans and some artifact ramp. How we end the game in combat is with great game enders like Blade Historian
and Goldnight Commander
with a bunch of creatures that can trigger Winota these cards can get out of hand very quickly and end games super quickly through the combat step! The biggest downside about stax effects is that are opponents will eventually play through all of them so we absolutely cannot keep a bad hand since we need to move with efficiency. We are relatively weak to super quick storm or turbo naus style decks if we cannot land an early stax piece. The hands you keep in this deck can absolutely be very meta dependent and what you are going up against although the base guide for a Winota hand largely stays the same! Overall are deck is pretty straight forward slam Winota down as soon as we possibly can and begin the creature pile!
Strengths of the Deck:
- Can end games very quickly
- Very easy to dominate the early turns of the game
- Stax will buy us enough time to win through combat
Weaknesses of the Deck:
- Since we win through combat hard to kill all players at once
- Opponents will eventually fight through our stax pieces
- Pretty weak to Praetor’s Grasp or any card that can exile some of our main pieces
Deck Stats:
Sample Hands:
Main Win Conditions:
Our main win condition is to kill players solely through combat damage and swing for the fences although we do run one infinite combo.
Our Combo:
Winota, Joiner of Forces + Combat Celebrant
+ Rionya, Fire Dancer
With Winota and Combat Celebrant on the battlefield and a bunch of creatures to trigger Winota if we hit Rionya off of the trigger with an exerted combat celebrant we can take infinite combat steps! This is not a primary win condition but when it happens is great!
Conclusion:
In conclusion Winota is a really fun and a different take to the various spellpile decks that are in present in CEDH! It may not have a ton of interaction but is still an extremely powerful and is an absolute blast to pilot!
Thanks for Reading to the end!