All is dust (Eldrazi tribal) (EDH / Commander)

WIP: need to update for the new precon cards which almost all of them are making it in

Outside of precons, Ulamog was my first EDH deck that i built on my own. I have reworked and re-tuned this deck over the course of 6 years and have enjoyed it immensely due to the limits of colorless as well as the strength of playing large creatures with unique effects and a diverse toolbox of colorless lands/artifacts/creatures.

The reason for building Ulamog was pretty simple, it was a gift from my friend who had been playing longer than I had and he knew how much I liked the Eldrazi and he just so happened to know someone who he could trade it for. Kozilek in general can be better due to putting draw + annihilator or draw + counterspells into the command zone but I've grown to appreciate the ability to ramp up to 10 mana and having a double exile built into the command zone. That, and the ability to remove the opponents deck on attack can really throw off your opponents game plan as they generally cannot recover their exiled cards. Due to this I never pivoted to any of the other titans, however in general you should be fine with any of them in the command zone.

Gameplan:

Your opening hand is rather important due to the fact that the mana curve is high and EDH can move really quickly, as such digging for a decent amount of lands (3-4) alongside some early ramp or the few low cost creatures in the deck is important. Once people understand you are just ramping to slam large creatures per turn you cannot rely on "looking" like you have the least developed board when you have 6 lands and 5 cards in hand. As such being able to deploy something early and quickly is vital.

Following up from this you are essentially wanting to try and play passively as your ramp and try and get as much value out of whatever you can play and topdeck, since Eldrazi decks generally play 1 card per full round making sure that whatever you play is not a "kill on sight" in the early game is important and working the table politics to look towards another player is pivotal to surviving the first 3-5 rounds with more than 20 life. Look towards dropping mirrage mirror, chaos wand, low cost mana rocks, reality smasher, thought-knot seer, stonecoil serpent or the like and keep your defenses up.

Due to your limited removal you can lose quickly to aggressive boards or combo pieces for the most part you have to hope you can either cast Ulamog, the ceaseless hunger, cast titan's presence with a good enough creature in hand, karn liberated, ugin the spirit dragon, ugin the ineffable, all is dust or scour from existence or warping vail. Each of these have benefits and drawbacks, mostly all of them are too expensive to be practical. All is dust, ugin the spirit dragon and karn liberated will 100% turn the entire board against you even if you stop someone from winning and warping vail only hits sorceries. Because of this you are very reliant on your playgroup to be good at board assessment and having good removal in their own decks because you are playing a selfish playstyle focused only on development and presence. Other removal in the deck can include oblivion stone which is often too slow to be practical, nevinyrral's disk often works better but requires a rotation to be used. Lastly steel hellkite can work but I've personally never been able to make good use of it in the playgroups i am in.

Other than these points I will again reitterate you are aiming for an endgame board that lets you slam large creatures per turn and swing with a strong enough force that you either kill or beat someone with attrition through annihilator/chunks of damage per turn. Everything else is simply adapting the deck to your playstyle and working with the diverse toolbox that you have access to. The deck can theoretically do anything that it wants due to the versitility of all colorless cards in the game but it will always be slower than a more focused strategy. Hopefully this writeup serves as a good entry into colorless Eldrazi and that more people can enjoy piloting a similar deck one day.

Notable cards:

This section will not include notes on all notable cards as colorless does so much, however this will hopefully point out some cool things for people.

Mirage mirror is a beautiful card, it can often do nothing but in so many situations its ability to copy almost any permanent on the field can give you a powerful attacker, surprise blocker, an amazing passive effect through copying enchantments, utility creatures, artifacts and lands. You can use someone else's cabal coffers if they have urborg, tomb of yawgmoth. The list goes on. Its primary limit for this deck is that you are always hungry for mana and keeping 2 mana up can be a very difficult decision as its never going to be "keep 2 mana up" its instead "not spending 6 mana on the one card in hand" and keeping that 6 mana up instead which might not be useful.

Chaos wand is an unreliable but fantastic utility card, with group/archetype knowledge you can use it to dig for some really useful sorceries that can swing the game in your favour. In my meta i often use it to dig for ramp, board wipes and large splashy spells. It can also technically be used to remove problematic spells, if you get something that you want to cast but you know your opponent can get from the graveyard the card is guaranteed to go to the bottom of the deck, which can often be a major plus as well.

Shadowspear, Commander's plate, loxodon warhammer are great equipments that are all very useful. Shadowspear and loxodon both are important for their lifelink which the deck sorely lacks otherwise and commander's plate is essentially protection from everything except colorless. This is all fantastic and there is not a lot else to say, it helps with low health and often you get trample/evasiveness as a bonus.

Eldrazi temple, Eye of ugin, shrine of the forsaken gods, ancient tomb are good lands for quickly developing as they all benefit Eldrazi deployment and paying their massive costs.

If you are playing a more artifact focused version of this deck and money is not an issue metalworker does a lot of heavy lifting when it survives, especially if you have untap methods.

Treasure keeper and matter reshaper are good for trying to dig for more ramp and low cost things in your deck. Treasure keeper is way more consistent and generally fetches a good artifact or mana rock.

Crawlspace, torpor orb, cursed totem, ward of bones all serve 1 purpose. Slow the game down, if you want to play a more stax heavy version of this deck include these cards to shut down a lot of strategies that are not important to you and generally force the game to play by your rules, you want big battlecruiser fights that you are practically guaranteed to win, especially with ward of bones you can shut down a diverse set of strategies, especially enchantment strategies since we have none.

Tormods crypt, relic of progenitus, silent gravestone, soulless jailer and all other cards with similar text on them serve one purpose. Remove the graveyard so that graveyard strategies cannot run rampant, in general these strategies can move really quickly so having a couple of these if you play against them a bunch can really help, especially since you only have 1 form of recurssion in artisan of kozilek.

Void Winnover is one of the most hated cards in this deck, people do not like having half of all cmc's shut out of their hands but thats just how it is, this card can win you the game out of nowhere since it can shut some poeple out of the game.

Classic infinite:

rings of the brighthearth + basalt monolith generates infinite colorless mana by paying for the cards + 2 additional colorless. You do this through having both in play, tap basalt monolith, put the untap trigger on the stack, pay 2 mana to copy it, with both untap triggers on the stack you resolve the first one, tap the basalt monolith again, resolve the second untap and tap again. You now have 6 mana which is enough to tap, untap, pay for the copy effect and coming out with 1 additional mana per cycle.