Legends Legends - Nebuchadnezzar
Nebuchadnezzar by Richard Kane Ferguson
Hello, and welcome back to Legends Legends, our weekly passage into the fabled land of 1994, when Magic was young and legendary creatures were nigh-unplayable. This week we're building a discard-themed deck around the great king of ancient Babylon, Nebuchadnezzar.
Nebuchadnezzar has just under 300 decks logged on EDHrec, many of which also use a discard theme. He's in the best colors to force our opponents to discard from their hand, so this one should be rather easy, right? Right?
General Thoughts
Nebuchadnezzar is a five-mana 3/3 Dimir legend with a unique tap ability. 'Chad allows you to pay X, name a card, and tap him to force an opponent to reveal X random cards from their hand. If any of those are the named card, they discard them. This ability is rather swingy: we need to know what's in our opponents hands to be sure anything is discarded. That means running lots of hand-revealing effects and memorizing what we see in our opponents' hands after we hit them with a Distress.
One of the bigger problems with a Nebuchadnezzar Commander deck is the singleton nature of the format. Neb will only hit one nonbasic land card with his ability each time. Fortunately, his ability doesn't require you to name a nonland card. Once we've removed our opponents' spells from their hands, we can use Neb to dump the rest of their Plains or Forests into the graveyard, leaving them with an empty hand and no new mana! This is a punishing strategy, but it takes some skill to perfect. Let's dive in!
Seeing is Believing
First things first, before we can name anything in our opponents' hands, we need to know what's in there. For this, there's nothing better than Telepathy. This one-mana enchantment is a sleeper for a turn-one game-ender. I've had opponents scoop immediately in response to my Telepathy coming down turn one! Granted, that guy's concession included a rant about how Telepathy's hand-revealing just lets everyone backseat-game their opponents' decks until the table "solves" the pod and someone points out someone else's victory on the board (even if they don't realize it). He then proceeded to pack up his cards and playmat, wander the LGS for a few moments, then return and backseat-game our table until he discovered someone's win condition and coached them into it. Then he asked if we wanted to run to game two. This story doesn't have a moral, I just like telling it.
Our second permanent-hand-revealer is a lot worse and a lot more fun in my humble opinion. Most folks haven't heard of Zur's Weirding, which makes sense, as it's almost never optimal to run this card in your deck. More often than not, opponents will absolutely pay the two life to keep you off of Megrim and Aclazotz, Deepest Betrayal, but we'll also pay the two life to keep them off of anything we can't discard with our other spells. Commander's nature as a 40-life format means there'll be quite a few turns of forced discards around the pod before anyone starts to feel the pressure.
Seer's Vision is the third and final enchantment that'll reveal our opponents' hands. I like that it has the option to sacrifice it for a discard if we draw into our Telepathy or Zur's Weirding after we've already played it.
Three artifacts give us a glimpse into what our opponents will draw into, giving us that much more information about what's in their hands. Lantern of Insight reveals the top cards of the entire pod's library, and Wand of Denial lets us take a peek and possibly mill away any cards we don't like. Glasses of Urza is the most basic way to achieve this, and it gives us one peek per turn with its activated ability.
Thoughtcutter Agent is another rarely seen card that can peek at one opponent's hand and ping them for some damage for two mana. Mostly a last-resort option, it's still valuable and can be activated at instant speed.
Finally, Peek and Gitaxian Probe are the best ways to take a quick look at an opponent's hand before committing to a Nebuchadnezzar activation. Cantripping into another card is nice, too. Spy Network does all that and has some extra play against that Kadena, Slinking Sorcerer deck.
Discard As Control
I'm a big believer in the denial of resources as the best way to control your opponents' board states. Why bother trying to counter their spells and destroy their permanents when we could just remove them preemptively from their hand?
Famous discard sorceries Thoughtseize, Inquisition of Kozilek, and Hymn to Tourach are some of our best options for forcing discards. Grief, the arch-villain of Modern, makes for some good insurance on our Thoughtseize.
Pulse of the Dross grants some consistency to a deck that runs the risk of running out of discard spells.
Finally, some specific card-type discarders fill out our sorcery-speed spells: Distress, Divest, and Appetite for Brains are all fine discard spells on their own, but get better when we can target an opponent we know has the spell we're searching for.
Syphon Mind and Amnesia are our two most expensive spells, but their value is undeniable. Nothing punishes the guy who Blue Sun's Zenith'd for 30 cards like taking all 30 and putting them into the graveyard.
Sometimes, we'll have missed our opportunity to discard a spell and our opponents will end up casting that stupid Etali, Primal Storm. Lucky for us, our main permanent removal looks like Unsummon, Boomerang, and Recoil, bouncing those spells back to their hand where they'll be ready to be removed next turn.
Discard as a Win Con
While removing cards from our opponents' hands can lock down the game and leave us in control of the board, it doesn't necessarily win us the game. We need some synergistic effects that'll inch us closer to victory at the same time as we use our discard spells.
Megrim, Liliana's Caress, Raiders' Wake, and their creature-shaped version, Fell Specter, each unleash a Shock on an opponent whenever they discard.
That little bit of damage each turn is pretty good, but we can go further. Several other permanents deal damage based on our opponents having few cards in hand, like Shrieking Affliction, Quest for the Nihil Stone, and Davriel, Rogue Shadowmage.
We'll use Cursed Rack, The Rack, and Locust Miser, to keep our opponents from refilling their hands too much, and Narset, Parter of Veils, to keep them off of draw spells.
Waste Not and Aclazotz, Deepest Betrayal both care about what kind of card is discarded specifically, generating different kinds of value off of whatever card it is. Both our Bat God and The Raven Man can create some useful tokens for harassing our foes.
I shouldn't have to go over why Tergrid, God of Fright is great in this deck, nor should I waste much time on Tinybones, Trinket Thief as one of the best win conditions in your discard deck.
Mindleech Mass and Wrexial, the Risen Deep are both present to take advantage of the spells in our opponents' hands, either by stealing them from their graveyard or casting them outright before they can.
Finally, once our opponents' graveyards are filled with discarded creatures, we can use either Liliana Vess's ultimate ability, Rise of the Dark Realms, or The Cruelty of Gix to grab everything out of every graveyard for an unstoppable field of our opponents' best creatures.
Mana Base
Dimir decks aren't known for their ability to ramp, and rather than find some convoluted way to execute it, we're just leaning into artifacts. In addition to our 36 lands, we've got the standard suite of Commander mana rocks. The most notable inclusion here is Thought Vessel. We'll be drawing a lot more cards than you'd expect with Geth's Grimoire, Notion Thief, and Aclazotz running around, so the hand size mitigation is important.
Strategy
Knowing when to mulligan with this Nebuchadnezzar Commander deck is paramount to your success. It's very tempting to keep a hand with lots of discard spells, but without a Megrim or Waste Not or other synergy, we're just durdling around and delaying the inevitable. Plus, we have guaranteed access to discard each turn with our commander, so we can afford to lean on Chad when we run out of Thoughtseizes.
What's most important before we cast Nebuchadnezzar is access to our opponents' hands. Telepathy, Zur's Weirding, Seer's Vision, Glasses of Urza; we need to see at least one of these from the onset or else our Commander will have a very hard time finding any cards.
If we can stick a Megrim effect to the board early, feel free to start unloading with Divests and Distresses. Sticking a repeatable discard effect, like Liliana Vess or Aclazotz, Deepest Betrayal, could also be the move at this juncture. Really, the key in the midgame is to set up a two- or three-card synergy between a repeatable discard effect, a discard damager, and your Telepathys to focus on removing exactly the cards you need from opponents' hands.
Ending the game with Nebuchadnezzar can go one of a couple ways. There are instances where the Megrim, Raiders' Wake, and Liliana's Caress alone will be enough to destroy your opponents, but sometimes that psychic damage isn't enough. In those cases, we'll use Rise of the Dark Realms, The Cruelty of Gix, or Liliana Vess's third loyalty ability to reanimate an entire board of creatures and swing in for lethal with our opponents' Blightsteel Colossus or Craterhoof Behemoth or what have you.
Budget
This Nebuchadnezzar deck works out to just about $115. That's not so bad for a complete Commander deck, but the cost is definitely driven up by a few cards. Let's take a look at some decent cuts and replacements.
Believe it or not, Tinybones, Trinket Thief is the most expensive card in this deck. He rounds out to about $11, and while he's one of our most important discard synergies, a Lazav, Dimir Mastermind can serve us similarly as a way to capitalize on our opponents' discards.
Our next most expensive card is Grief, surprisingly. At just under $10, Grief's free Thoughtseize does make it invaluable, but we could easily swap it out for a Hypnotic Specter or Blizzard Specter for another cheaper creature.
Nebuchadnezzar Decklist
Long May He Reign
King Nebuchadnezzar may be the most famous Babylonian king in history. What exactly that has to do with his appearance in Legends as a discard-themed creature remains to be seen. He's a dispenser of strict justice, a seeker of truth, and speaker of wisdom.
Whether or not his existence on Dominaria will ever have any ramifications, Nebuchadnezzar remains one of the most interesting commanders to come out of Legends. An early attempt at uniting the art of information-gathering in Magic with a mechanical effect with mixed results, and not much staying power over the course of Magic's 30-year history.
How would you build Nebuchadnezzar? What essential discard spells would you run? Let me know in the comments, or hit me up on Twitter with hate mail!
Thanks for reading!
