Sakiko, Mother of Summer Stax (EDH / Commander)

Random Commander Challenge Redux: Day 1.

The premise of this challenge is making a deck each day/week/whatever (I haven't decided) based around a commander chosen by EDHREC's Random Commander feature. We are skipping commanders that are banned, are impossible to build around (e.g. vanilla Legends commanders), or are in the top 100 commanders on EDHREC. Each deck must be built such that a) its chosen commander is the best commander for the deck and b) it is different enough from the most common method of building its deck that this is not simply a refining of an existing formula.

Today's commander, Sakiko, Mother of Summer, is a green Neheb the Eternal.

Sakiko, Mother of Summer rewards you for getting in as much damage as possible each turn. Because this deck is mono-green, there aren't easy ways to cheese her effect, either through additional combat steps or through additional turns, so if we want to get the most out of her, we need to focus on being as resilient as possible. Sakiko is not good unless we already have a board state that makes it reasonable to get at least 7+ damage in on an attack without losing 7 mana of value. In other words, in order for Sakiko to work, we need to be able to do at least one of four things:

1. End the game before our opponents are able to wipe the board.
2. Prevent our opponents from having the resources to wipe the board.
3. Be able to rebuild within a turn of being wiped.
4. Win the game the turn Sakiko is down.

Option 1 is completely unfeasible in a 4-player 40-life match when 4-mana wraths, let alone 3-mana ones, exist. Option 4 is difficult to do consistently, seeing as she only generates mana after combat damage is dealt. Option 3 is more plausible, but with such a creature-based strategy, we always need our board to last a turn cycle before we can use it. Therefore, we must turn to Option 2: preventing a wrath from happening.

Looking at Sakiko's EDHREC page, the deck Sakiko is commonly seen in seems to be a very, very slow one. There are a lot of ways of generating value (turning creatures into cards, ramp, etc.,) but there doesn't really seem to be any defense against wraths. In today's 50% world, it's unlikely any of those decks would get very far.
However, there is another EDHREC page, one that often goes overlooked by Neheb players and Sakiko players alike: Derevi, Empyrial Tactitian.

Sakiko is basically the mono-green Derevi, losing the ability to tap your opponents' permanents but gaining the ability to generate obscene amounts of mana off of fatties connecting instead of being pushed into a weenie-style strategy. Instead of using Sakiko as a winmore card, let's use Sakiko as a way to break parity, and try to deny all our opponents as many resources as possible.

Winter Orb, Static Orb, and Null Rod are all mainstays of decks like these, but unlike Derevi decks, we also get to run an anti-green hate card: Juntu Stakes. Because we're focused on mana-producing fatties, we don't need to worry about untapping small creatures; as long as we have a 5/5 connecting every turn we're pretty good on mana. Although we still run plenty of mana dorks to power out Sakiko and our rocks faster, we also turn to some of the larger mana-producing creatures like Llanowar Tribe both to dodge Juntu Stakes and to get around Static Orb.

Because our deck already relies on combat damage to break parity, it naturally makes sense to rely on combat damage as our win condition. Because of this, we want to focus on vigilance, trample, and mana production on our creatures - vigilance because it avoids us having to untap them, trample because it gets around blockers, and mana production in case Sakiko gets Gilded Drake'd or becomes too expensive to cast. Spawnwrithe acts as pseudo-vigilance since it makes copies on connecting. Vivien, Champion of the Wilds gives our creatures vigilance and allows us to wait until before damage to cast Sakiko.

The deck wins the same way it survives - by controlling the board and other players' resources, denying opponents tempo, and connecting face with Sakiko on the board. It is made to be at about a 75% power level, since usually people playing at
sub 50% aren't too keen on stax decks. It is heavily teched against other powerful strategies, but still remains weak to mono-white board clears, and until Wizards prints some more artifact stax pieces or land destruction in green, it is unlikely that any cEDH form of this deck could exist, as the more powerful forms of this deck would switch to Seton given the necessity of Druid ramp to the deck's game plan.