Random Commander Challenge Day 3: Medomai the Ageless (EDH / Commander)

Each week, or day, or however long I feel like, I will use the Random Commander function on EDHREC until I find a commander that is not too popular and is not from Legends. While decks do not have to be built entirely around the commander, they have to be built such that their commander is essential to the identity of the deck; they must be worse if you swapped their commander for another, better one in the same color identity. Finally, each deck must be different at their core than the 'normal' or 'standard' deck that that commander uses; while any commander that isn't in the top 30 is allowed, I am not allowed to build them the way they are normally built.

This day/month/week/year, we're going to be building around Medomai the Ageless, a 4/4 for 6 that gives you an extra turn when it connects, but which can't attack during extra turns. The EDHREC page for this commander strangely includes cards like Temporal Mastery, Nexus of Fate, and so on, as well as the standard Voltron evasion equipment/auras. We will instead be building him as a return to old-school Battlecruiser Magic-style Commander, the type of play one would find back when it was still called EDH, using Medomai's ability to double your turns to enable strategies normally far too slow in today's much more competitive meta.

First and foremost, Medomai is very, very good with incremental effects like Thopter Spy Network and Doomed Artisan. Doubling up on the amount of tokens you generate from these effects, or the amount of planes walker abilities you get to fire off, is of course incredibly strong, but even stronger is the ability to immediately get their payoffs on your second turn. World Queller is an incredibly strong control tool in a deck where it gets to activate immediately, without having to wait an entire turn cycle to work. Another perk of playing Medomai is that you get to play a lot of these slow, incremental effects, which are not very immediately threatening, and the more powerful ones (e.g. Patient Rebuilding) can often bait removal that should have been saved for Medomai.

Commander, though, is above all else a game of politics, and it's important to take that into account when building your deck. Effects like Patient Rebuilding are great and all, and have an incredibly high ceiling, but they can also put a massive target on your back; Tamiyo's Journal has been excluded from this list chiefly because it tends to be a 5 mana do nothing card in a meta that's played against you more than once. The ideal EDH deck is composed entirely of threats, yet none of those threats are threatening enough to draw your opponents' removal, and so we want our threats to work subtly.

It is in choosing your tap abilities that makes or breaks a good Medomai deck, and you want to make sure that yours both support getting your plan online and are worth doing so. Thus, we have included a suite of removal options that are both cheap and rely on tap effects; cards like Intrepid Hero and Razorfin Abolisher can bait removal for Medomai, act as removal for problematic permanents, and help stabilize the board post-Medomai.

Finally, the standard suite of mana rocks and removal spells are rounded out with basic value cards like Archaeomancer and Strionic Resonator. We exploit the prevalence of Humans in basic value creatures by running Devout Chaplain and Gallows at Willow Hill, two incredibly powerful recursive removal options that syngergize very well with the amount of Humans in your deck. The traditional 'wincons' of this deck are limited to Luminarch Ascension and Mirror-Sigil Sergeant, as this deck is intended to reflect the early pre-Commander EDH metas, and thus is focused much more on value than on winning the game.