I haven’t played EDH in a very long time. I don’t even remember when was the last time I played, although I do have some idea. If I remember correctly, at least I went out on a high note by kicking ass with [scryfall]Liliana, Heretical Healer[/scryfall], a card I had sort of waited on for a while before playing her. I even have the SDCC version of her (actually, I have all the SDCC versions of her).

That was maybe six months ago, but, even if I don’t play much these days (although I do play other formats some), Magic is much more than the actual act of playing. Simply planning and designing decks, thinking about interactions and so forth has its own merit and rewards as a creative outlet. So, I was going through my favorite decks from years past and decided to update them a bit. First one being Zegana. I have two versions of the deck, so I’ll write about each of them, especially since the approach seems to be different from what I’ve seen from other people.

This first one goes all in on flickering and bouncing.

Note that I don’t design my decks to be competitive. I design them to be fun foremost and hopefully adhere to an unspoken set of rules (sometimes pretty outspoken, but not official) in the Guilds group. When I play, I do my best to win though, so I do want to give myself at least a chance to do so.

So, [scryfall]Prime Speaker Zegana[/scryfall] is a card drawing engine on its own, but does still need a bit of help from other sources. So where to start?

Zegana isn’t cheap. She’s six mana and we want to play certain cards over and over again, so some ramp would be great. Since this is all about flickering, I want all the ramp to be creature-based.

I don’t think that’s enough, but let’s try to make due.

Than, we need ways to flicker and bounce.

That’s quite a few. Probably too many, but let’s go with this.

Next, we need other creatures that do something when they or something else hits the battlefield.

[scryfall]Snapcaster Mage[/scryfall] would be a good choice, if we had more things to recast.

… and some ways to copy these to get us some flexibility.

We also need some ways to dig through our deck for creatures.

Finally, some general utility stuff:

… which leaves room for 40 lands.

Which leaves enough room for 13 Forests and 10 Islands.

Next time, I’ll return with a different approach to Zenaga. One I’ve enjoyed much more