Magda, Brazen Outlaw in cEDH - The Best Deck No One's Talking About

Magda, Brazen Outlaw by Slawomir Maniak
I believe Magda, Brazen Outlaw
This win came as no surprise to me. Last August, I ran a league in my condo where I tracked people's ratings in games played here and gave prizes to the best rating. Over 100 games were played at my place that month, and Gustavo won the prize there as well. His deck is fast, resilient and I know never to count him out. He's also remarkably good at playing an interactive game for a mono-red deck. So today, I'm going to cover his list and how he plays it from my observation.
Magda's basic gameplan is to play cheap Dwarves, tap them to make Treasures, and activate Magda to find whatever it needs. This can be a fairly easy infinite combo, but that can be risky, so usually Gustavo will look for a lock piece or value engine first if it looks like the table could disrupt a win. This core functionality requires Dwarves and cards to tap them so the deck plays a number of weak cards just to get Magda going:
Magda's Dwarves
This deck plays every Dwarf that costs one mana. For the most part, their text is irrelevant, but sometimes it comes up. The more expensive Dwarves are mostly chosen to be artifacts, because this deck's combo (Clock of Omens+Magda+Artifact Dwarf) requires that.
It's possible to tap your Dwarves by attacking, but it's not ideal; sometimes everyone will have creatures that can block, and, more importantly, your Dwarves have to lose summoning sickness to do that.
Tapping Dwarves Without Attacking
Clown Car
The Best Ways to Make Treasures Without Dwarves
All of the above cards exist for the sole purpose of increasing your Treasure production to activate Magda. Before we get to what we're finding with Magda, I want to cover more of the deck's core strategy. Gustavo views this as a midrange deck, and he mostly focuses on playing an interactive Stax game while keeping an eye for opportunities to try to win.
Magda's Best Stax Pieces
This deck plays cheap spells and mostly accrues value from its permanents, so it's happy with any effect that makes it harder to cast spells. Uba Mask
Grafdigger's Cage
Interactive Spells
Hellkite, Spine, and Portal are mostly options for Magda, but I'm listing them here since their purpose is to remove opponents' cards. Most of the cards you really care about are artifacts, like Weathered Runestone
With around 20 cards dedicated to interfering with your opponents' plans, you're definitely a meaningful political player at the table and can control the pace of the game. Rather than going for Clock of Omens
Since every artifact in the deck is so impactful, I want to be sure to cover them all.
Mana Artifacts
How To Turn Dwarves into Artifacts
Bear in mind that while Mycosynth Lattic
More Artifacts
Flexible utility piece, most often copies Roaming Throne
The can be tutored in response to a critical stax piece being destroyed, or can give you another Roaming Throne
If you've drawn a card you need to search for, this can be a way to find mana to cast it, but mostly this is a way to sacrifice artifacts you don't want in play anymore, such as a Torpor Orb
I love this card, and I love how critical it is to this deck, and how elegantly it solves all sorts of problems. If your Clock of Omens
This copies Magda activations, which can make it easier to find your combos; I think this is present more as a nice card to draw than as a card you frequently expect to search for, since you don't generally need to activate so many times that this is profitable to search for.
Miscellaneous Utility
This deck is built around searching for artifacts, but everyone's trying to stop you from using Magda. This is a nice option to get some of that card selection early. This typically searches for whichever stax piece is best for the table.
This card is just clearly fantastic with a cheap mono-red commander.
Monocolor Utility Lands
Because this is a mono-color deck, it gets to play a wide variety of utility lands, so the manabase is a little more interesting than it would be in a multicolor cEDH deck. Also noteworthy, this deck plays 31 lands with Ancient Tomb and Mishra's Workshop, but not City of Traitors--Magda is killed often enough that it's very important to keep making land drops and building up large amounts of mana. 31 lands is a lot for a cEDH deck with this curve, but that's because most cEDH decks get to cheat on their land count because they draw tons of cards, which this deck doesn't do, so it has to play a somewhat reasonable manabase.
When To Win With Magda
If you have the key pieces--Madga, an artifact Dwarf, and can find Clock of Omens
If players aren't familiar with this deck, it's extremely easy to overlook since you control a bunch of horrible cards, and I think some players expect this to be a turbo deck, so after you spend some time not trying to win, it's tempting to assume it must not be that scary for some reason. The thing is, opponent's can't just hope you don't draw the right pieces or something--that's not how the deck works--you don't really need to draw anything, Treasures get you everything you need, and you'll always be able to produce Treasures at some rate, which means the deck has an interesting kind of inevitability.
A Most Brazen Outlaw
I've mentioned that I think Kinnan, Bonder Prodigy
Finally, here is Gustavo's list in full:
Gustavo's Magda, Brazen Outlaw cEDH Deck
View on ArchidektCommander (1)
Instants (10)
Creatures (23)
- 1 Adaptive Automaton
- 1 Bloodfire Dwarf
- 1 Bloodline Pretender
- 1 Dockside Extortionist
- 1 Dwarven Armorer
- 1 Dwarven Grunt
- 1 Dwarven Scorcher
- 1 Dwarven Trader
- 1 Enslaved Dwarf
- 1 Gimli of the Glittering Caves
- 1 Goblin Engineer
- 1 Liberated Dwarf
- 1 Metallic Mimic
- 1 Plundering Barbarian
- 1 Professional Face-Breaker
- 1 Proteus Machine
- 1 Ragavan, Nimble Pilferer
- 1 Realm-Scorcher Hellkite
- 1 Roaming Throne
- 1 Spark Mage
- 1 Twinshot Sniper
- 1 Universal Automaton
- 1 Xorn
Lands (31)
- 1 Ancient Tomb
- 1 Barbarian Ring
- 1 Cavern of Souls
- 1 Command Beacon
- 1 Gemstone Caverns
- 1 Great Furnace
- 1 Holdout Settlement
- 1 Inventors' Fair
- 1 Mishra's Workshop
- 14 Mountain
- 1 Mutavault
- 1 Shinka, the Bloodsoaked Keep
- 1 Sokenzan, Crucible of Defiance
- 1 Survivors' Encampment
- 1 The Mycosynth Gardens
- 1 Treasure Vault
- 1 Urza's Saga
- 1 Volatile Fault
Artifacts (32)
- 1 Ashnod's Transmogrant
- 1 Chalice of the Void
- 1 Clock of Omens
- 1 Cloudstone Curio
- 1 Clown Car
- 1 Cursed Mirror
- 1 Elixir of Immortality
- 1 Grafdigger's Cage
- 1 Jeweled Lotus
- 1 Krark-Clan Ironworks
- 1 Liquimetal Torque
- 1 Mana Crypt
- 1 Mana Vault
- 1 Mirror of the Forebears
- 1 Mox Amber
- 1 Mox Opal
- 1 Mycosynth Lattice
- 1 Portal to Phyrexia
- 1 Sculpting Steel
- 1 Skysovereign, Consul Flagship
- 1 Smuggler's Copter
- 1 Sol Ring
- 1 Sphere of Resistance
- 1 Spine of Ish Sah
- 1 Springleaf Drum
- 1 Tangle Wire
- 1 The One Ring
- 1 Thorn of Amethyst
- 1 Torpor Orb
- 1 Trinisphere
- 1 Uba Mask
- 1 Unlicensed Hearse
Sorceries (2)
Planeswalkers (1)