Sift Through Sands - Damia and Queza

Psychic Possession

| Art by Mark Tedin

Take a Look at These Hands

Welcome back to Sift Through Sands, everybody! Hope that Streets of New Capenna is treating everyone well; it keeps blowing my mind with all the neat stuff in it. If this is your first time, in this article series, we focus on two different deck builds, looking at how they're played and what makes them successful. After we examine both decklists, we'll highlight the card package in both that makes them successful, and how those cards can play well together across the board.

Our Picks

With that out of the way, let's look at our legendaries for today's article: Damia, Sage of Stone

Both our nonhuman ladies here are pretty straightforward. Damia offers us significant card advantage to bolster us late-game. Her color identity gives us access to a lot of great synergy with her draw ability. With black, blue, and green, Damia can look into draw, discard, and reanimation synergy, depending on how she's built. Queza, a new face in town, resembles Niv-Mizzet, the Firemind

Both Damia and Queza are fairly costed, and their relative simplicity gives them both the wiggle room for a variety of builds. They're both less exciting than other Sultai and Esper Obscura commanders, but they're versatile enough to be powerful, underrated choices. Let's take a look at our Damia list first.

Playing Damia

This Damia deck has a theme: Maro

Early game, in addition to ramping with Signets and spells, we want to get some of our low-mana-value creatures that draw off combat damage, using Cold-Eyed Selkie

Most of our Maro creatures are five mana, and they each have important applications in the deck. Sturmgeist

Ending the game can come in a variety of ways, but in particular, using Greater Good

Damia is carried by cards that reward us for having many cards in hand, for drawing them, and ones that generate significant advantage on their own. Our planeswalkers, Mordenkainen

Antagonizing with the Agonizer

Queza, Augur of Agonies

Playing Queza

She's not the most exciting Obscura commander, but Queza scratches the colorshift itch that so many Commander players (myself included) really enjoy, and she lets us play some weird cards to boot. The deck is based around card draw, but Queza's ability lets us lean into some lifegain and drain triggers as well, letting us turn one draw into multiple life lost and gained around the table.

In the early game, we want to get out some of our low-cost cards that become bigger threats later on. Kami of the Crescent Moon

Our draw spells all are flexible here, with low-cost spells helping us dig in the early game, or serving as easy life loss with Queza. Some of our static draw pieces, like Teferi's Puzzle Box

Drawing lots of cards will get us to our extra lifegain triggers, with Cliffhaven Vampire

Package Delivered

Both of these decks were a blast to build, and I was extremely pleased with both how they turned out, and how janky they became, with Damia becoming a Kamigawa tribute deck and Queza getting to run unique cards like Lich's Mastery

As these decks care about having a large hand and drawing the cards to get us there, the above cards all work well to let this happen. While Teferi's Ageless Insight

Recent commanders, like Tameshi, Reality Architect

Do you use any of the cards here? Are you a fan of Maro creatures, or have you built around Lich's Mastery