The Metaworker: Teferi Tax/Lockdown and Symmetry Part 1

Radiophage writes…

I’m running into a wall in my cEDH meta, and I’m hoping you can help.

I run a semi-budget Teferi, Temporal Archmage lockdown deck. About the only thing I’m missing from the absolute top-tier lists are an SDT/fetchland package and a more optimized mana base.

My meta consists of the following decks:

Zur Doomsday

Two Food Chain decks, Prossh and Tazri

Boonweaver Karador

Kaalia Gonna Kaalia

Azami Control

Brago Stax

Selvala Stax

Alesha Stax

… and the wall I keep bashing my head into, Nin Combo.

It feels like I have plenty of game against the rest of the meta — especially with all the other stax present, half the time my deck’s job is being done for me — but victory against Nin keeps eluding me.

The Nin list is extremely low to the ground, running almost exclusively mana rocks, draw spells, and instant-speed interaction. If I don’t get a stax piece down, Nin wins T4-6. If I do get a stax piece down, Nin waits patiently and sculpts their hand, disrupts everyone else (including me), and then goes for the win when the coast is clear.

Another difficulty is that Nin ignores several of my stax pieces. I have some meta inclusions specifically to help combat Nin — among them, Imi Statue and Tomorrow — but since Nin gets most of their mana from rocks, all of my stax that taps down lands only hits about 10% of Nin’s available mana each turn.

What do?

Metaworker disclaimer: This submission is asking for help in a competitive meta. Competitive decks are designed to win, and this article’s recommendations will not be an analysis of the flavour, budget, or “fun factor” of playing EDH. Radiophage already knows that he should be running Sensei’s Divining Top and a blue fetchland package, so I won’t be discussing those either.

There’s so much to talk about here. This week I’m going to analyze the deck, set out some goals for improvement, and tune up the mana base. In the next episode we’ll dive into the meat of the deck – the lockdown package and support for the lockdown package.

Let’s talk about wincons

The deck wins by having both Teferi, Temporal Archmage and The Chain Veil in play, along with 3 permanents that produce a total of:

1) At least 4 mana if we have enough to recast Teferi once from the command zone

If Teferi has 5 loyalty counters, its -1 ability allows us to untap 4 permanents: The Chain Veil and 3 other permanents. Those 3 permanents allow us to activate The Chain Veil for no net mana gain. After completing the cycle 5 times (and sending Teferi to the command zone with the 5th activation), we recast Teferi. Because of the way The Chain Veil works, this new Teferi has 5 activations “in the bank”, so to speak. This is due to The Chain Veil’s second ruling:

With 5 activations in the bank, it’s not too difficult to start floating huge amounts of mana, activate Teferi’s first ability a few times and wait to draw into another permanent that taps for more than one mana. At that point we proceed to step 2.

2) At least 5 mana if we don’t have enough mana on board to recast Teferi

This is essentially the same as step 1, but with the key difference that we get to float 1 mana with each Chain Veil activation.

Quite often you’re not going infinite immediately, and you might have to go through a few manual iterations before you have enough mana on board to truly demonstrate a repeatable loop with no net mana loss. Once you go infinite, you’re able to use Teferi’s first ability as many times as you want to “draw” your deck. I say “draw” because the ability does not actually draw cards (which means you don’t lose the game if you activate it while your library is empty).

Some lists run a backup combo of Rings of Brighthearth / Basalt Monolith or Grim Monolith / Power Artifact to make infinite mana which they dump into an X-spell.

Stalling for Time

The deck isn’t fast enough to race the fastest decks in competitive EDH (the Food Chains and Ad Nauseams), so – rather than trying to race, it assembles a miserable team of lockdown pieces to prevent people from getting set up or going for their win.

Breaking Symmetry

This deck runs a package of cards that illustrate the topic of this article perfectly:

Where do we start with tuning this deck up?

With any cEDH deck, I like to start with the mana base. Radiophage mentioned that he’s not quite ready to sink the money into a competitive mana base just yet, but I’d like to talk about what a competitive mana base might look like for this kind of a deck so we can prioritize some upgrades he might want to make in the future. The great part about this deck being monoblue is that we can come up with a pretty good manabase while having essentially no information about what’s being run in the rest of the deck.

Normally I wouldn’t include Worn Powerstone or Hedron Archive in a competitive mana rock package. In multicolour decks these would generally be slots for Talismans and Signets. If it weren’t for Teferi’s ability to untap permanents, I wouldn’t even be thinking about Worn Powerstone. If I were building this deck for myself, I would test the hell out of this card. My prediction is that casting it on T1 is probably fine because it means you’re untapping with 6+ mana. Casting it on T2 probably feels terrible. Casting it after Teferi is out is probably fine, and it helps contribute to the number of 2+ mana permanents that we need for the Chain Veil Combo. Realistically, I think we run Worn Powerstone but in the event that we ever end up with a Candelabra of Tawnos it’s the first card on the chopping block and we never look back.

Khalni Gem is one that I’ve discussed with people on the CompetitiveEDH subreddit quite a bit. Coloured mana is important, and if we draw this later in the game on a High Tide turn, we can tap 2 islands for UUUU, cast Khalni Gem, return the two tapped islands to hand, and play 1 of them for turn.

The lands are all pretty solid. I like the idea of tossing Boseiju and Ancient Tomb in here because the opportunity cost is pretty low, but otherwise I’m leaving the non-basics the same. Given that we’re playing High Tide we want to be very careful to make sure that the Island count doesn’t drop too low. With an increase in the number of net positive mana rocks I’d say this list could probably afford to cut 2 basic islands to bring the land total down to 32.