Today I want to show and discuss with you my Kaalia of the Vast deck.
If you want to run a deck full of Demons, Dragons and Angles with high mana costs than Kaalia of the Vast is your girl.
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I was lucky enough to open a Kaalia as my boxtopper and started building a deck around her a while back.
So far the deck performs well. It works very well in 1 vs 1 or a 3 player game but it gets a lot harder to close games in a normal 4 player game.
The reason is simple. If thinks go your way, you are start building a scary looking board on turn 3 and normally we have not this many options to protect our board by this stage in the game while you become the center of attention.
While we can close games early, we can`t really win consistently on turn 2 or 3 and with no access to blue we do not run counterspells to interact with our opponents combos so if you are looking for a cEDH deck you should probably keep looking.
Priorities
I split the gameplan in different priorites and stages as it makes it pretty clear what the purpose of the different cards are. The more a card does for us the more valuable I consider it. Fe some cards help us to keep Kaalia save but can also pretty much close the game usually in combination with another card. I am trying to include cards which are good on their own or in combination with several cards but there is one combo included I think the deck would be stronger without but I just like it.
Stage 0 : General Gameplan
Stage 1 : Getting Kaalia on the battelfield as quickly as possible
Stage 2 : Protect Kaalia
Stage 3 : Beatdown
Stage 4 : ???
Stage 4 : Be humble after your victory
Stage 0
The general gameplan is pretty simple. We want to out tempo our opponents, cheating out creatures with a lot of stats and effects which puts us more ahead and/or slow down our opponents.
We run 2 combos to kill the whole table in one turn but they are not always necessary to win as we should have a strong board relatively early in the game and we run some cards to make it very hard if not impossible for the other players to catch up.
More on this later.
Stage 1
We want to tempo out our opponents and get Kaalia onto the battlefield as quickly as possible. To raise our odds we have the necessary mana in the right colors as soon as possible, we are running all signets and talisman in the needed colors as well as "Arcane Signet" and "Mind "Stone".
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Also a Mox Opal and a Chrome Mox found a home in this deck but I found myself questioning the Chrome Mox a couple of times. More on this under "Weakness".
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In addition I run a Mana Crypto and a Sol Ring as I think those cards are so strong and I put them into every deck I build.
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A Lotus Pedal often was the needed piece to fix my colors and a turn 2 Kaalia is much stronger than a turn 3 Kaalia. Also sometimes it was the needed Artifact to actiavte Metalcraft of the Mox Opal.
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Lands we run the usual. If you can afford them or your playgroup is ok with proxies we want to run the old dual lands, we want the shock and fetchlands. Short we want lands which come into play untapped and fix our mana.
Of course we run a "Command Tower" but also Mana Confluence is helping us a lot.
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As we do not really need mana after Stage 1 I run less lands than usual. I am trying 30 at the moment but here I am still experimenting.
Stage 2
Kaalia is on the board and if your opponents know what you are trying to do, she will have a big bounty on her head.
She is only a 2/2 and we only get value out of her if she is attacking which means often she will sit there for a turn just being a target.
If we can get her haste we will have value right away but she can still be removed pretty easy. I do not run many cards which give our creatures haste as I think our priority should be protecting our board.
We will not win by summoning our expensive creatures the normal, honest way. We win by cheating out a 7 mana creature on turn 3 and snowball from there.
Our biggest weakness is getting our board whipped
No board = no damage = no win
If they have answers to Kaalia, Kaalia dies anyway with or without haste
Still we run Dragon Tempest as we have quite a few dragons in our deck and some extra damage is pretty nice or just pinging off a mana dork or chump blocker can be very useful
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There are 2 cards which helps us with both though
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We run "Enlightend Tutor" and "Stoneforge Mystic" so we can get them a bit easier.
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"Stoneforge Mystic" lets us tutor also for "Sunforger" which I consider very strong in this deck, especially when our opponents get going and have more answers to our threats.
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While the + 4 power is nice the real kicker is the tutor effect.
We can give our creatures indestructible and if needed we can even exile them for 1 turn or till the end of the turn to counter cards which do not care about indestructible like "Toxic Deluge" fe.
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The exile effect is pretty nice as we benefit from our enter the battle field effects again.
Cards we can tutor via "Sunforger"
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But it can also be instant removal with "Swords to Plowshares" or "Path to Exile"
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to be continued.....
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