Ertai Resurrected
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Legality

Format Legality
1v1 Commander Legal
Alchemy Legal
Archenemy Legal
Arena Legal
Block Constructed Legal
Brawl Legal
Canadian Highlander Legal
Casual Legal
Commander / EDH Legal
Commander: Rule 0 Legal
Custom Legal
Duel Commander Legal
Gladiator Legal
Highlander Legal
Historic Legal
Legacy Legal
Leviathan Legal
Limited Legal
Modern Legal
Oathbreaker Legal
Pioneer Legal
Planechase Legal
Pre-release Legal
Quest Magic Legal
Standard Legal
Vanguard Legal
Vintage Legal

Ertai Resurrected

Legendary Creature — Phyrexian Human Wizard

Flash

When Ertai Resurrected enters the battlefield, choose up to one —

  • Counter target spell, activated ability, or triggered ability. Its controller draws a card.
  • Destroy another target creature or planeswalker. Its controller draws a card.

Recommendations View more recommendations

rckclimber777 on Build a Deck with Me …

1 week ago

Sometimes when I'm deckbuilding, I focus less on the commander and more on an interesting concept/combo that I want to use or exploit. This is the case with one of my favorite decks in my profile and actually one of the first commander decks I ever built. This deck began years ago when Magic finally started caring about the EDH format. It was a more simple time then, Rhystic study was $1.27 (exactly the price I paid for mine over 10 years ago), Cyclonic Rift was a bulk rare, and demonic tutor could be found for $10.

The combo that I was interested in was Palinchron and Deadeye Navigator. The latter was my favorite card at the time and is still one of my favorites. It was a great tool and with all the ETB effects that were out around then it was an underrated and uber powerful card. In fact, the entire blink mechanic was and is a very powerful strategy.

When I built this deck, I played a few times in shops and was quickly told that edh is a casual format and interaction of any kind is not fair (was told this by a land destruction deck...) So this deck is definitely more on the competitive side, but it would be the distant fringe of cedh. Alright with that let's get into it.

Initial thoughts

So we have a combo that we like Palinchron and Deadeye Navigator, but we don't even have a commander yet and going mono-blue seems not great, so we want to figure out what color(s) to add and what commander to choose. In a combo deck, there are generally three things that I like to make sure I include beyond the normal ramp, and card draw. That is redundancy, the ability to tutor up my combo pieces, and ways to protect my combo. So when thinking about tutoring up my combo pieces, I generally like to have the best tutors. Those are in black. So things like Wishclaw Talisman, Demonic Tutor, Vampiric Tutor and Imperial Seal (if you have money to burn or your playgroup is fine with you proxying the best cards so you can obliterate their precons j/k I proxy all my expensive cards and put them in a binder in case someone has an issue).

So we have Blue and Black and we can certainly add another color if we wanted to, but at the time I liked Dralnu, Lich Lord because Snapcaster Mage was in standard and flashback was cool. So I stuck with it when I revamped it, but decided that I wanted something that could ensure I can protect my combo from any threat and then also use it to win if I wanted to. The answer came in the form of Ertai Resurrected. He can counter basically anything from spells to activated abilities (which will come in handy) or he can take a threat on the field at the cost of letting your opponent draw a card.

So now that we have our commander, how to build the deck?

Redundancy

Combo decks need redundancy. If you don't get your two cards or one of them gets exiled, you need a backup plan, or scooping is your only option. Fortunately, there are some great redundancies here. We have Ghostly Flicker and Displace. Both of these will blink your creatures (ghostly flicker will also blink artifacts). Displacer Kitten can be helpful too, but I don't own it and it is a little more chaotic than I need it to be. Palinchron is great because you can return it to your hand and potentially play it again and create infinite mana through the use of High Tide, but a similar combo that has added benefits is Peregrine Drake, Archaeomancer, and Ghostly Flicker. This bounces both the drake and the archaeomancer untapping 5 lands, and returning ghostly flicker to your hand. Rinse and repeat for infinite mana. Archaeomancer also will help in returning key counterspells and tutors to your hand. Nothing like doing double duty. Mnemonic Wall and Great Whale also fit here. The great thing about this combo is that each component is useful in and of itself. Bring out your Great Whale early untap some lands and do some other stuff or play out the rest of your combo with the untapped lands. Cast Archaeomancer to grab a used tutor for another combo piece.

One note here, if you get Peregrine Drake (or one of the other two) paired with Deadeye Navigator and you generate infinite mana you can now draw your deck with Ertai as commander: Step 1: Bounce Deadeye, when he enters don't soulbond with anyone.
Step 2: Cast Ertai, don't choose anything or if you want kill one of your opponent's creatures. It doesn't matter.
Step 3: Soulbond ertai and deadeye. Step 4: Bounce Deadeye and while that is on the stack bounce Ertai. Step 5: Ertai enters the battlefield counter the Deadeye bounce on the stack Draw a card Step 6: Soulbond ertai and deadeye again rinse and repeat. Draw as many cards as you need. Which means draw until you find your wincon.

Wincon

Since this is an infinite mana combo we need something to use all that mana. Obviously the activated ability on deadeye is great, but we need something to actually win with. I went with Commander's Insight and Blue Sun's Zenith. Both of these cards are useful even when they aren't being used to force your opponents to draw their cards. Blue Sun's Zenith works nicely because once you cast it goes back into your deck, which I showed above you can draw as many cards as you need so you cast it once, put it in your library draw again until you find it, cast it again on the next opponent, then again. You can also tutor them up or bring them back from the graveyard with the tutors or the archaeomancer/mnemonic wall from earlier. I like this more than straight damage, because if you don't have infinite mana these cards will still draw you cards.

Tutors

This is a fairly simple step, we need some good tutors. There are a number of good choices in black so I won't belabor that too much. I don't have some of the standard ones and feel like the deck performs fine with the ones it currently has. I do have a Tribute Mage in the deck because nearly all my mana rocks are 2 mana and so is Wishclaw Talisman. I found that the consistency with the deck is vastly improved by being able to tutor up my ramp. Also with deadeye I can bounce it multiple times and get more rocks or the talisman.

Protecting the combo

So I needed to figure out how to protect my combo and do so in a way that is flexible or can be used as needed. So Counterspell. Honestly, this part was fairly simple, most blue counter magic is here. Only reason Fierce Guardianship isn't here is because I don't have it. Other than that we have the typical cards here Force of Will, Mana Drain, Cyclonic Rift, Force of Negation, Pact of Negation, etc.

I also have a couple other standouts. Venser, Shaper Savant is great here as it can be bounced with Deadeye Navigator to essentially boomerang my opponent's board and all their spells. Ertai Resurrected also protects the combo and with deadeye becomes a nice repeatable counter/removal spell.

glen_elandra_archmage can be bounced when she has her -1/-1 counter allowing her to be used again and again to counter noncreature spells.

Typical stuff

There is a lot of ramp in the deck, so Mana Crypt, Sol Ring, and other mana rocks including some larger ones like Gilded Lotus and Basalt Monolith to really get the ramp going, the sooner you can get to 7-8 mana the sooner you can combo out.

For card draw some key performers here are Rhystic Study, Black Market Connections, Phyrexian Arena, The One Ring. Mystic Remora. In my initial hand I want to have 3 lands, and one of these/tutor to find one or I typically mulligan.

Special notes

A couple other cards deserve mention here. Time Stretch and Time Warp. These are both repeatable with Archaeomancer and Mnemonic Wall and I can honestly say that if I'm able to resolve either of these, it is unlikely that I'm going to lose, especially Time Stretch. With the ramp in the deck or a well timed Dark Ritual/High Tide I can play this fairly early and get a huge advantage.

Lands

Since this deck tends to be fast, you don't want lands that come into play tapped, so this deck uses fetch lands, shock lands, and duals that have the ability to come in untapped. (there are a couple that come into play tapped, but they are fetchable so I fetch them only when I know that I'm not going to be able to use the mana and only on an opponent's turn.)

I've had this deck for a while and it performs far better than any of my other decks. It always presents interesting lines that if followed will lead to surprising victories. As always let me know what you think in the comments and if you have a commander in mind that you want to see me build put it in the chat.

Here is the final decklist: Unlimited Power!

DemonDragonJ on March of the Machine

1 year ago

Hi_diddly_ho_neighbor, I definitely plan to put a faerie mastermind in my Nekusar, the Mindrazer deck (which also includes a copy of Ertai Resurrected, incidentally).

Hi_diddly_ho_neighbor on March of the Machine

1 year ago

So far the most exciting thing for me is that we are getting Planechase reprints. Those are surprising hard to find these days.

Faerie Mastermind looks like a new blue powerhouse. I will definitely need to pick one up for my Ertai Resurrected deck.

The team-ups are kind of cute. That Yargle-Multani flavor text though.

marco-online on Marchesa: You say goodbye, I say hello

1 year ago

In the meantime ideas:

out Ravenous Chupacabra in Ertai Resurrected

out Sedraxis Alchemist in Aether Channeler

i roll this at the moment

Guerric on [Primer] Casting the Mythal

1 year ago

Hi everyone! I do apologize for the time away from here. Things have been busy and I've been focused on developing my Giada, Font of Hope deck as this one runs pretty flawlessly. I thought I'd respond to card suggestions with some thoughts of my own. In short, I'm holding my current deck for now. It's always tempting to swap out with each shiny new set, but in most cases I'd favor the current list. Nonetheless, let me respond individually to the suggestions.

amarthaler

I like Wizards of Thay for Lore since I am a longtime DnD player, but I don't think it really goes here. We aren't running a ton of sorceries, and this isn't a deck that benefits too much from discounting that spell type. I also kind of feel like Red Wizards should be red, even though philosophically they fit with blue, but that's just a flavor point. Vesuvan Duplimancy could help us go infinite with Naru Meha, Master Wizard and Rite of Replication, and there would probably be some other shenanigans we could do with it with Venser. I don't know that it would be terrible, but I don't think it would do what we want it to do often enough to justify cutting another piece for it though. Cool card and interesting suggestion nonetheless!

nhhale

I'm glad you are enjoying the deck! It does have a cool feel and stays a tribal deck which is nonetheless incredibly powerful and combo-y, which is unique. Omniscience is always a fun card and I very much use it as a central piece of my Tuvasa the Sunlit deck. With its high cmc I think it will just get in our way much of the time here. I used to run Clone Legion which is a similar cmc and does synergize, and it did make some memorable games but it was just too far off to make a difference. If you like it play it by all means, it's an amazing card and certainly won't be bad. For me it just would contribute to variance without helping the decks key synergies, but I am picky with that.

beastmenwarrior

Aether Channeler is definitely good and absolutely the type of card that goes in here. It's the right cmc and like AEther Adept can effectively bounce itself back (via the token copy). But it has added utility in that it can draw cards and bounce other permanent types. It definitely replaces either Merchant of Secrets or Cloudkin Seer in that it is strictly better than the former and practically better than the latter. Barrin is good because of his second ability, which I've found to be relevant. And having an extra bounce option is very good without losing the card draw piece. I'm not so sure about Ertai Resurrected though. The abilities are certainly good, but the 4cmc *five to copy) is pushing it for me. I think he's a good option, I'm just not sold yet, particularly over something with a lower cmc.

Thanks for the comments and suggestions as always! I have so many decks and primers now it is easy to miss some suggestions, and as this is my original and favorite deck I do like to keep it up to snuff. Aether Channeler will probably go in soon.

Austin_Smith_of_Cards on Traitor of Men - Sedris Graveyard Combo EDH

1 year ago

Several updates to the list since the last time I've posted, although cannot remember all the cards that got swapped out:

Baby Jace got swapped in as an cheap looter to start getting our graveyard filled up early in the game, fish for card advantage, and transform into a walker to recur a needed spell or two.

Worldgorger Dragon got added as a potential infinite combo with Animate Dead/Dance of the Dead/Necromancy and something like Gary to kill our opponents in the loop, but I found it unreliable as a wincon since a table usually identifies it as a problem in the graveyard pretty quickly, and there isn't really a way in this deck to make use of the loop aside from Gary. Is most likely going to get cut for additional interaction; the new Ertai Resurrected caught my eye.

Got lucky and cracked a Vampiric Tutor from a Commander Legends booster box and immediately got added to the list as a staple black tutor to pull our combo pieces together.

Cephalid Coliseum is a solid filtering effect stapled to a land, seemed a free enough ability to add to the list.

wallisface on Yorions gone - what cards …

1 year ago

So, this is my current thinking for this list - basically moving Thalia to the sideboard, and trimming some cards i’d rather not see multiples of. Also ditching Ephemerate:

Land (23)

Creature (31)

Artifact (6)

Sideboard (15)

legendofa on Yorions gone - what cards …

1 year ago

I assume you want to keep it . While cutting either or would get this deck closer to the 60-card level, it also loses a couple of key interactions.

My rough suggestion is to cut the Stoneforge Mystic + Swords and Batterskull, one Ertai Resurrected, two Ephemerate, and I'm not quite sure from here, but that's ten cuts.

For the last three, and this is where I start guessing, cut whichever creatures are doing the least work. I'm going to shut my eyes and say Skyclave Apparition, but I'm far from sold on that. Maybe one Apparition, one Spell Queller, and a third Ephemerate, or one of the Thalia, Guardian of Thrabens?

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