Hola, soy el drazi

It’s true that there’s not a lot of variety in options for truly colorless decks. As of the Fallout set (and spoilers for Modern Horizons 3), there’s 20 total possible commanders. 3 are only technically colorless, since they ask you to choose a color for them to be. Of the 17 left, 7 are Eldrazi, so it’s about half of the total options. Even with that, there’s a decent variety of ways to build/plan your deck. If I’m looking for a deck that’s not going to be as scary just from the commander, I’m either looking Kozilek, the Great Distortion or Zhulodok, Void Gorger. They’re obviously not low-power or anything, but avoiding Annihilator in the command zone gets you a brownie point or two, and people don’t like destruction or extra turns in the command zone, so that just leaves Kozilek. Of course, we’re going to play all those other cards in the deck, so they are right to fear. Just not in the command zone.

Between Kozilek and Zhulodok, it depends a lot on what you want to be doing. Both of them provide pretty massive card advantage. Kozilek stops your opponent from doing their thing, whereas Zhulodok doesn’t really care, his pedal is to the metal, which is my style. Let’s build a Zhulodok deck.

Follow along with the decklist as I talk about the card choices!

Commander

The goal with Zhulodok is to play big-ass colorless spells, which in turn become two more extra spells. Three spells for the price of one is pretty good. Of course, you don’t always know what spells you’re going to get…but we might play a few cards that can help with that.

Mana

Your goal is to consistently drop 7+ mana on a single spell, and waiting until turn 7 is not the way to do that. When considering mana options, there’s some usual sub-categories: non-creatures that make mana, creatures that make mana, playing extra lands, and temporary mana. Colorless is probably the best at non-creatures, aka mana rocks. But there’s some decent creature options too. Since I know that the top end of this deck is going to get pretty pricey, I’m going to purposefully make this section a little sub-optimal, a little cheaper, by utilizing a combination of the categories. It’ll be a pretty deep section, but again, we want to be dropping bombs early and often.

Card Draw

Luckily for us, the commander giving us “card draw” in the form of free spells means that we’re not as desperate for card draw in this deck. Of course, that doesn’t mean that we don’t play any. But again, we can afford to play a few sub-optimal choices here, so we can focus on the real power of the deck later. Then again, we can make a few smart choices here. Sensei’s Divining Top and, in a different way, Brainstone, help us plan the top of our deck for future cascades. You can also stick in some sneaky fun like Key to the City, which both draws a card, and makes your big boys unblockable.

Removal

This is going to mostly double as the “instants and sorceries” section of the decklist, since there’s not a lot of those, but a lot of them are decent to amazing removal. Some of them require you to reveal a colorless creature card from your hand. Good thing we’re going to have a lot of those. I’m skipping the artifact-based board wipes for flavor reasons, and the big Eldrazi spells that also destroy things are going in another section.

Winning the Game: Big Idiots

This is the real meat of the deck. The part that makes you feel like a cool dude/dudette/gender neutral form of “dude” that needs to be invented. We’re going to focus primarily on Eldrazi, but I’ve included a few good artifacts, and there’s no reason you couldn’t throw a Blightsteel Colossus, Platinum Angel, etc in this section. There’s also going to be a wide power disparity between some of these cards, but remember, even the lamest 7-mana Eldrazi is also two more other spells.

Misc Top 3

Not as much miscellaneous cards for this deck, but there’s still enough for the top three.

• Psychic Paper. This is part of the miscellaneous category of “make my big dudes unblockable”, which is a good way to make people be dead.
• Swashbuckler’s Whip. Yes, it’s expensive, but I’m including all the cascade and discover cards that get you more big stuff.
• Eldrazi Conscription. Double the annoying-ness of any big creature you play.

Lands

For this particular deck, I recommend keeping the mana base at least half Wastes. I’ve included a few high-synergy lands in the decklist; feel free to fill it in with whatever Wastes or utility lands you like.

Moxfield cost, based on TCG Mid: $513.97

Power Analysis: I’m not doing power level numbers. Rather, I’ll give a rundown of what you can expect when playing, and being played against. Obviously, you’re going to lose to very fast decks that can get out problems before you can start landing giant bombs. But if you can survive long enough, every big annoying spells is going to come with, at minimum, two more useful things, if not more problems. You don’t even fold to most board wipes, due to indestructible threats and having a billion mana left over to rebuild with. That being said, even the idea of big Eldrazi can make you a target, so prepare to get attacked and focused early and often.

Would I play this deck: Just because I build a deck doesn’t mean I’d play it. That being said, big idiot beatdown gets my inner Timmy super excited, so if I had all these cards on hand, I’d definitely give it a shot.

Tune in next time, when I look at the very first Magic set…that has legendary creatures in it.