Sharuum, the Hegemon Deck Tech
By Luke McCandless
“Time to load up the variance cannon”
“I love this deck”
Hello and welcome to the first of many Australian Duel Commander deck tech articles. In this deck tech I will be giving an in-depth rundown on Sharuum the Hegemon as a commander, how I built the deck, how the deck works, it’s strengths/weaknesses and how to approach different types of match-ups.
Sharuum is a very interesting general in that it can generate an incredible amount of board position, card advantage and all round value in its interactions with such a large number of incredible cards from the history of magic. There are abusive combo’s, general aggro strategies and even some pretty sweet control elements to what Sharuum can do. The reason I chose Sharuum myself was that when deciding to play an artifact based strategy Sharuum stood head and shoulders above the rest of the candidates not only for it’s general synergy with artifacts but for its ability to play what could be argued to be the best three colours for this type of strategy. Black provides incredible tutor, disruption and removal. White provides additional specific tutor and even more super reliable removal. Whilst Blue provides much needed draw power, disruption and of course, Jace the Mind Sculptor.
The strategy to this deck involves playing a very high volume of mana producing artifacts (which I will refer to as mana rocks or rocks for short) to speed your way to largely unanswerable threats as quickly as possible, these threats are very often too much for your opponent to deal with early on in the game as they have not yet accumulated the answers or even the mana to cast the answers to these huge, fat creatures.
Key cards for the deck are:
Blightsteel Colossus – This guy is the definition of a one card combo, cheating him into play or quickly ramping into him is Plan A since the recent changes to infect (being set back to 10) you only need to land this guy once and the game is over. The main way you’re going to get Blightsteel Colossus into play is through the use of Kuldotha Forgemaster or Metalworker as they are the most reliable way to do this early enough to end the game.
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Mishra’s Workshop – This should be a nice obvious one but seriously, three mana for a land that has no real downside in this deck? it’s absurd how quickly games with this in your opening hand (or an expedition map to quickly retrieve it) swing in your favour.
Metalworker – Props to this little guy and the absurd stuff he pulls off, two mana for what is commonly every card in your hand, that’s big game… This little guy has an inbuilt infinite combo with Staff of Domination (plus three artifacts in hand minimum) which I’ll get to a little bit later and he has even contributed to casting two Blightsteel Colossi on turn two (one of which was a Phyrexian Metamorph copy of the first).
Kuldotha Forgemaster – Usually sacrificing himself and two used up mana rocks you haven’t paid to untap yet to go get Blightsteel Colossus (see above) or whatever other card you need at the time. Being allowed to put almost any card in your deck into play makes it very hard to not get some amount of super value out of.
Magister Sphinx – A soft combo with Entomb or any other way to get him into the graveyard (thirst for knowledge, intuition etc) makes this a quick kill paired with Sharuum. Simply reanimate, put your opponent to ten life and pass turn with ten flying power in play.
Time for a quick rundown on the decks main interactions and combo’s. The first and only infinite combo in the deck involves Metalworker and Staff of Domination. Once you have both cards in play and you have at least three artifacts in hand you can draw your entire library, gain infinite life, have infinite mana and tap/untap any number of creatures. The way this works is by tapping Metalworker to reveal the three artifacts for six mana, use three mana to untap Metalworker and one mana to untap Staff of Domination leaving two free mana in your mana pool, you can then repeat this by tapping Metalworker again, profiting two mana each time. Once you have accumulated an arbitrarily large (infinite) amount of mana you can tap the staff to draw a card and then untap it and go again. Once you have drawn your deck it’s time to “combo” off by playing a Blightsteel Colossus and Lightning Greaves, equipping them and tapping all your opponents’ blockers down. Besides that there are plenty of tutor effects to search for whatever artifact / creature you need. For almost any situation during a game there will be a big scary threat that will put your opponent on the major back foot, which is why I tend to partial mulligan away most/all of the expensive cards in my hand at the start of a game, because I know there will be plenty of opportunities to choose which one I need rather than just casting the one I kept at the start.
The strengths in this deck lie in it’s core strategies. Control decks often find it difficult to keep up with the threats you’re presenting so frequently. Aggro decks are the easier matchup in most cases as the small, efficient creatures in that strategy usually struggle to fight through a wall of Sundering Titan and co. The deck has two predominant weaknesses. The first is playing against a deck that plays too many (or draws too many) counterspells since you’re not really playing any of your own to combat them with, Sharuum can help lessen the hurt from this a little with the ability to bring back a previously countered threat but the problem lies in the decks that have the counter for Sharuum as well. And now we come to the biggest weakness of the deck and the reason for its variance involved namesake, itself. Months of tuning have allowed me to reduce this almost as much as possible but the deck is very good at drawing nothing but mana rocks or none at all. This has been the frustrating downfall of many a top 8 or even opening two rounds of a tournament.
The deck is incredibly entertaining and enjoyable to pilot and has been by far my most favourite ADC deck to date. I would highly recommend this style of deck construction and am glad to help out if anyone wanted to look at building something similar. That’s all for now but I look forward to hearing feedback from the community and can’t wait to see everyone down at the next Australian Duel Commander event.
Decklist: http://www.mtgdeckbuilder.net/decks/viewdeck/593578
Luke McCandless