Unlocking Hedron Archive's Maximum Potential | Kozilek, the Great Distortion | Commander Abridged Gameplay
As is tradition, I asked my YouTube community to choose which commander they'd like to see me play for stream and Kozilek, the Great Distortion won by a landslide. People really wanted to see me play the Big Eldrazi Menace ... or so I thought.
But if you look at the comments section you'll see the real reason why everyone ended up voting for Kozilek:
It turns out everyone just wants to see me play the card that will forever haunt me: Hedron Archive
For those who are blissfully unaware, a while back I made a video on why Hedron Archive is overrated. In this video that few actually watched but many have strong opinions about, I mention that Kozilek, the Great Distortion is one of the few decks where the Archive is actually good in, something I've repeated many times since. So when Kozilek showed up on a poll, you all jumped at a chance to make me play the card that has now become my legacy.
So fine. I'll give you what you want. You jackals. You fiends. You want a Hedron Archive deck? You'll get a Hedron Archive deck!
Leading our meme dream is Kozilek, the Great Distortion. Kozilek is an absolute powerhouse, refilling your hand when cast, discarding cards to counter spells, and 2-shotting opponents with commander damage which is made even easier thanks to menace. Kozilek gives you all the tools you need to secure victory, making him a worthy payoff for the hoops you need to jump through to play him as your commander.
The hoops are no joke: since Kozilek is colorless we must build a colorless deck around him, meaning we have the smallest pool of cards to work with. And as powerful as he is, our commander costs a whopping 10 mana to cast, making him one of the most mana-hungry commanders in the format.
In order to get this bad boy on to the battlefield, we're going load up the deck with a ton of mana. I'm not kidding: at least 30 cards in our deck act as ramp to cast Kozilek as quickly as possible. The ramp package is a mix of mana rocks like Everflowing Chalice, Thran Dynamo, and yes, Hedron Archive, along with more unique sources like Blinkmoth Urn and Forsaken Monument which both generate an obscene amount of colorless mana in this deck, or Geode Golem, whose combat trigger lets us cast our 10 mana commander for free.
So the plan with this deck is to ramp hard and fast, cast Kozilek as quickly as possible, and then send our opponents to a tentacle-filled doom. Even though our deck is basically just a pile of mana, we're not worried about getting empty-handed since Kozilek refills our hand when cast, and we're not worried about flooding out because any excess ramp can be used as ammo for Kozilek's countermagic. It's a beautiful synergy.
Here's the list. It's definitely way above my usual budget range, but I did hold back on the priciest cards such as Mana Crypt and Mishra's Workshop.
