Liliana's Contract (EDH / Commander)

This is a homebrew deck I made during a Dominaria commanders deckbuilding challenge and have since adapted with further inclusions as newer sets came along.

The major theme of the deck is Demon tribal, and this theme extends to the non-demon cards in the deck too. What the Demonic theme in Magic means to me is all about the demonic contract - you get more value than you pay for at a cost. This theme contains the following mechanics and engines:

• Sacrifice (you and your opponent)
• Lifegain and Lifeloss
• Draw
• Ramp
• Tutoring
• Reanimation

As you will see, every card in the deck, whether a demon or not, is fully committed to this theme.

Besides the theme, another guiding principle behind this brew was around Belzenlok's ability. Since he allows you to keep drawing cards as long as they are CMC 4 or higher, you want to be able to draw some cards, but not too many as to deal too much damage to us. For this reason, we have plenty of cards below CMC 4 to control this, but as you can see, the average mana cost is pretty high at 4.7.

We do not run cards that extend our maximum hand size because we actually want to be discarding cards when we can so that they can be reanimated later.

Because there are so many reanimation spells in the deck, we will often sacrifice and allow our commander to go to the graveyard, only to be reanimated later for more value.

We pack a lot of removal, though much of it is in the form of edicts or boardwipes, but given our resilience and recursion, we will be the player who rebuilds fastest more often than not.

In terms of matchups, we're very strong against creature focused decks, and particularly against tokens, graveyard hate can be painful to us, but the deck isn't all in to the graveyard, given that we have so many resources in terms of ramp and value.

Out of all the brews I have made with deckbuilding restrictions, this is by far my favourite and most powerful. I hope everyone else enjoys it too.

Here are some stats I have collected on the deck:

Removal: 15
of which; single-targeted: 4
; single-nontargeted: 4
; boardwipes: 7
Draw: 11
Creatures: 32
of which; Demons: 18
Ramp: 18
Lands: 34
Tutors: 11