Jodah, The Ultimate Stax Controller (EDH / Commander)

This is my most favourite deck at the moment!

> > > This deck solves the problem that all Big Mana decks that rely on Jodah have: relying on Jodah, The Glasscannon(!). Your opponents see Jodah, know that big creatures are comming and they snipe Jodah immediately. So how to solve this problem? < < <

General Idea:

The idea of this deck is that you will fly under the radar as a minor annoyance until you reach a critical amount of mana needed to take your chance at the right moment to take full control of the game.
This deck plays in the upper EDH level and can even participate at very low cEDH tables (but not necesarily recommended). Why should you play this deck?

Pros:

• You like big creatures, that do something after being cast
• You like low CMC creatures, that impact the playing field
• You like Stax cards
• You like being the lowest threat on the table, but still being annoying to some of the players
• You accept that this deck doesn't combo off, and you have to start beating your opponents down (although that never happened to me, because your opponents will give up, after you took control of the game)
• OMG, you always wanted to use Jodah's alternative cost ability!
• You like all 5 colors
• You like to drag out the game a bit (but not as crazy long as those other Stax Decks #sayNoToGrandArbiter)

Cons:

• If you can't acccept a critical amount of points from the above

Strategy:

This Jodah deck relies heavily on mostly low-mana Stax cards, which you can play in combination with a lot of ramp in the early game. The taxation cards will impact some opponents, but not all of them, so they create an imbalance, but don't annoy the whole table, so not everyone turns on you immediately.

You are pretty safe in the early stages of the game, because your opponents see that you don't play a Big Mana deck (in addition it usually helps if you also tell them!). Your opponents threat assessment of you is pretty low and are more likely to go at each others threats. So you can either ramp your way to 7-12 mana easily or even play Jodah relative safely, because your opponents threat assessment of you is pretty low and in a lot of cases will Jodah let live.

You can then play the really big creatures and with the incredibly high card draw, draw all the Stax cards needed to utterly block your opponents game plans and steamroll over them with your big creatures (e.g. the Eldrazi).
The only combo in this deck is Omniscience, which in combination with sufficient card draw, will immediately end the game in your favour.

Even if you don't win the game you will be the one having a hell of a lot of fun, because your creatures will take big part in shaping the playing field, so the other players have to react to those effects or work around them and you will always get the feeling of being meaningful to actions on the table (for better or worse).
I think the biggest challenge is to decide when to play which Stax card, to not annoy the wrong players. Have fun with this deck and comment your criticism.

Experience with Ramp:

1. I started out with 37 lands and 18 ramp spells and it was too much.
2. I cut down to 34 lands and 17 ramp spells (it works great, but after a while you will still draw too many lands).
3. I cut down to 32 lands and 17 ramp spells and switched a few mana dorks for better actual ramp spells (still in trial - played a number of games and it works perfectly).
4. (after much playtesting) It's better to play with 34 Lands!

Cultivate & Kodama's Reach is ok for this deck since it plays relatively slow. Cards like Exploration or Azusa are not very well fit for this deck. Only with a very unlikely starting hand you can make use of those cards. I added a couple more mana dorks (CMC 1) for a faster start, but then relied on more fetch-spells in order to ramp, so you keep your mana after a board wipe. CMC 2 dorks like seem to be too slow and unrealibly for this deck. Especially Bloom Tender seems to be of no use, because you won't have many creatures on the field and the only creature with multiple colors is Jodah and he won't stick around vor long - at least not when people see Jodah + Bloom Tender.

Final Remarks:

1. My #1 card in this deck is Myojin of Night's Reach. I only once played this card, activated it's abilities and lost the game afterwards (because I didn't draw any draw spells and my Hand was also empty...).
2. This deck shares some similarities with my Kenrith deck https://deckstats.net/decks/131397/1509040-kenrith-the-assassination-of-h/de. The Kenrith deck's gameplan is more of an active unbalancing the game and killing your opponents out of nowhere.