EDH Deck Time: Taigam

I can work with this…

Well, clearly this is meant to fuel Delve and he has an ability similar to Delve anyhow. However, at five mana, I don’t think that’s exactly what you want to do. I mean, you can’t exactly turbo out a Zombie Fish with this and you can’t even play Tasigur. I guess this was seen as too powerful at a lower casting cost (with lower P/T as well, of course). There are a few Delve cards I would like to play here, however.

The question is, is the card selection strong enough to not need card draw? Probably, although not being able to double spell ever is going to be a disadvantage. However, we can mess with drawing. Sadly not very much, but a little bit.

Admittedly, shelling out several hundred euros for Chains isn’t exactly what I want here, and there just aren’t enough of these cards to have this be an actual theme of the deck. Subtheme maybe, but let’s forget about the Chains anyhow.

What else can we do? Flashback seems good.

There’s also various creatures with Embalm or Eternalize (basically Flashback for creatures).

The problem with these two approaches is that these cards are manaintensive. They usually cost a bit more than similar cards without those abilities and quite a bit more from the graveyard.

What else can we do with our graveyard? Well, there’s over thousand cards that mention graveyard in these colors, so there’s bound to be plenty of options. Not that all of them actually work with Taigam very well or are any good otherwise, but we’ll see.

Well, that’s over 60 cards, so plenty of cuts need to be made. I want plenty of manasources here, as I don’t ever want to miss playing Taigam on curve. That means close to 50 sources. The good thing is that we can later on choose to not take the manasources and simply put them into our graveyard, if we have enough. For this reason, I would like to keep the curve fairly low, although we can also always simply put the expensive spells into our graveyard as well.

I’ll leave certain cards in the deck I otherwise wouldn’t play in EDH. Again, if they are too situational and that situation hasn’t come up, we can just put them into the graveyard. There’s so many interesting ideas here, that I don’t actually know what to cut. I’ll cut [scryfall]Mortal Combat[/scryfall], because we don’t have enough creatures in the deck. I’ll take out [scryfall]Back from the Brink[/scryfall] because we have plenty of ways to recur our creatures anyhow. I’ll take out [scryfall]Breathstealer’s Crypt[/scryfall], because it doesn’t do enough in a format with 40 starting life total.

I’ll also take out [scryfall]Rise from the Tides[/scryfall]. As much as I would like to play it, I don’t think our graveyard will have enough spells to make it worth it, since we are planning on using them anyhow. I’ll take out [scryfall]Deep Analysis[/scryfall], because we’ll have plenty of things to do with our mana without drawing cards. I’ll take out [scryfall]Cackling Counterpart[/scryfall], because we don’t have that many creatures we want to target with it.

Although I wouldn’t want to take out any creatures, since we don’t have that many of them, I’ll take out [scryfall]Dralnu, Lich Lord[/scryfall], because it can become a liability. I’ll take out [scryfall]Snapcaster Mage[/scryfall], since I try to keep these budget. Finally, I’ll take out [scryfall]Toshiro Umezawa[/scryfall], because we don’t have enough ways to trigger him ourselves.

That leaves us with room for 47 manasources, on top of previously mentioned [scryfall]Drownyard Temple[/scryfall]. Eight artifacts and 40 lands sounds about right.

As you can see, I have emphasized things I can get into my graveyard here. We do have some ways to use them. Our handful of Delve cards if nothing else. For lands, use whatever you have available, but I would emphasize black sources quite a bit. Something like 36/24 sources would be fine. Again, you should probably use as many fetches as you can, as we can use those in the graveyard.

All-in-all, this is just a first draft of a deck I wrote down pretty much right after I saw the spoiler, so there are plenty of things I haven’t thought through here. Not many answers, for example.

3 thoughts on “EDH Deck Time: Taigam

  1. So this is interesting.

    I feel like your primary win con should be lab man, considering all of the self-mill cards that you are running. Reanimator might be interesting here – What are your thoughts on maindeck Kederekt Leviathan for the unearth ability? Things such as Rune-scarred demon, or a game plan revolving around Living Death may be interesting. Currently, I feel like the deck’s theme is too diluted – which is understandable, for this is, as you had said, a first draft. However, I would be interested if you would write a focused decklist for him.

    There are other effects such as Necropotence and Null Profusion that you can consider, the downsides of which don’t matter when Taigam is out.

    Also, What are your thoughts on the likes of Windfall? In truth, you run so many more mana sources than I’d have expected from U/B. I ran 38 lands in Damia with Exploration and Burgeoning effects, and you’ve access to neither in this deck. Could I ask the reasoning for that many mana sources, considering you don’t have many looter effects that allow you to filter excess lands from your hand?

    All in all, I like the number of cards you’ve listed that are possible choices for the deck – though I’d like to see which ones you’d select out of those options.

    Best,

    Liaeriel

    • A lot to answer here, but I’ll try…

      First, on the manasources: I never go low on lands. I want to hit all my land drops quite far into the game and that requires plenty of them. I just try to make sure I have plenty of ways to use the mana. Actually, assuming we didn’t have the artifacts and only had 47 lands, our chances of hitting the first five land drops is less than 80% and I would be happy to raise that, if I could, but I’m not quite willing to go up from that.

      Also, in this case, there is the added benefit of Taigam filtering out lands after certain point in the game.

      Null Profusion is an interesting idea. I wouldn’t play Necropotence, because I like to limit the power level of my decks and for this reason I follow the online banned list as well.

      I do have Kederekt Leviathan listed.

      Strange that I didn’t think of Laboratory Maniac when writing this, because it’s probably my favorite wincon.

      Anyhow, here’s the secret: I reserve my full deck building potential for Standard, although I don’t have much time for that these days either. For my EDH decks I have a different approach. Deckbuilding is always a game design exercise. For Standard, my goal for the design is to win (well, usually). For EDH my goal is more about the experience for everyone around the table. I feel trying to build the most effective deck for multiplayer games is pretty self-defeating, so I try to stay away from that and build something interesting to play against.

      Admittedly I’m still pretty inexperienced in this approach, and it’s not as easy as the more traditional approach, where you can rely on various more or less mathematical models, but maybe I’ll be good at it some day.

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