Inniaz / zɐıuuI (includes primer) (EDH / Commander)

The basics of this deck:

Inniaz has a very unique ability. What sold me on creating the deck was that you choose what becomes shuffled, which bypasses shroud and hexproof. Many of my other decks are of a voltron nature that are always seeking to protect their commander from being targeted - seeing that I could lose my commander would be Inniaz in the crosshairs immediately. The difference between targeting a permanent and choosing a permanent is a strange one to me, and this deck will certainly have pedagogical value for others unaware of this distinction.

There are two main strategies for an Inniaz deck that I can see. One is a combo route which focuses on Inniazs' activated ability, while the control route focuses on her triggered ability.

• Simply put, the combo route generates infinite mana so you can pump your flyers to have lethal combat damage. Because your creatures can be any size, making a lot of cheap tokens is germane to this strategy so as to go wide beyond what the opponent can block with. Make use of the expanded counterspells available to Azorius.

• The control route seeks to play with Inniaz's triggered ability to muck the game up as your creatures fly in for the kill. Because the triggered ability requires flying creatures, you will have evasion in this case as well. Then you make use of the counterspells available to Azorius to hold the control. Inniazs' ability is extremely powerful in a game where people build their entire decks around their commander - losing control of it and forcing them to use resources to kill their own commander to retrieve and recast it is quite brutal. In a deck that only plays the commander for the colors, of course this is not as strong. Because the Inniaz player has to give something away as well, it is possible to look for bad gifts to give other players, or cards that can be "retrieved" immediately such as the Pendant of Prosperity or the Coveted Jewel. This opens for some unique cards to be seen that otherwise won't come up!

Because flying creatures are necessary for both routes, Inniaz decks seek to synergize cards that empower this keyword. Sephara, Sky's Blade is right at home here, and ways to generate flying tokens are often shared between strategies.

My spin on it and how it's different than what I see:

My deck went the control route so I could play ridiculous crap that no one would see otherwise such as Nine Lives, Transcendence, Illusions of Grandeur and Lich's Tomb. I don't look to use Inniazs' activated ability at all, but it's there if I want it. For my fliers, I have a mix of "lord" type creatures to strengthen the army, cost reducers for fliers, and hatebears to slow our opponents down a bit while we try to grasp for control. There isn't too much that's unique to my deck, except I took some cues from the mega reddit post I linked to in the Concerns section.

Galepowder Mage serves an important function. Because Inniazs' ability is quite powerful, you may not want to have your friends totally hate the deck or feel crappy if all they have to give is their commander, or if you are in a truce situation. This allows you to order the activations to swap stuff, while the Galepowder then returns their creature back to them. This allows for political plays. It also allows us to retrieve something of ours that we really don't want to give, but have to.

The hatebears work quite well because we have no ETB effects, so unfortunately we cannot take advantage of flickering Azor, the Lawbringer with the mage or any other big flicker target.

Exotic Orchard is also funny in that we use it in case we take something from someone that requires a color of mana we don't play. We can't sac all our tokens to it, but stealing an Attrition and sacrificing a bird token to it seems powerful to me.

We're hoping that all our puny fliers end up getting us some card draw through cards like Reconnaissance Mission, Coastal Piracy and Bident of Thassa. We even have a Windreader Sphinx in here, looking forward to seeing how it performs.

Don't discount the Moorland Haunt for making flying tokens for yourself. I won a game 7/23/22 purely from its ability to help make use of dead stuff to keep Inniaz triggering.

Spicy Fun:

Elesh Norn, Grand Cenobite is here to help with our go-wide strategy. Pairing her with Dovescape makes for a nice lockdown. Speaking of which,

Dovescape on its own is pretty great as Inniaz can pump our creatures to be bigger than our opponents birds, as well as our lord effects to keep them happy to block.

Coveted Jewel interaction: curving after Inniaz herself, play the Jewel and draw 3. Tap the jewel for some mana, maybe do something with it. After attacks are declared and the game moves to the declaration of blockers, Inniaz triggers, which allows us to give the jewel to the player on our left. If there are no blocks to at least one flyer, Coveted Jewel's ability triggers and we regain control of it again, drawing another 3 and untapping it to make use of in the second main phase. Draw 6 for 6 and makes the game more interesting for other players to get the big rock.

Give Lich's Tomb to someone that you can do a lot of damage to in the same turn. They can choose to sacrifice the Tomb to itself, but it's still pretty devastating to have to sacrifice that many resources unless they are running a creature-wide deck such as tokens.

Transcendence and Nine Lives can outright kill someone under the right circumstances.

Statecraft is a cool card that can help us stay defensive, or neuter an opponent's creatures.

Check the land art on the islands and plains. Zendikar rising has art featuring spinning. Flavor win.

Concerns:

I'm concerned that you won't read this 6,600 word essay on why Inniaz is a cool commander.

There is no single target creature removal in this build. Heliod's Intervention only gets to stay because it's amazing. The rest of our "removal" is made up of counterspells for non-permanents that would interfere with us, and the cool azorius board wipes Time Wipe and Supreme Verdict. For all other problems, we seek to use Inniaz to move them around. This is an all-in strategy that may not work as well as we hope, since Inniaz requires some setup and costs 5.

Sidequests:

• Give someone the Lich's Mirror and have them get "killed" 10 times or so. This is extreme memery and I salute you. I removed this card for Transcendence currently.

• Get Elesh Norn, Grand Cenobite and Dovescape in play and eat some opponent bird tokens.

• Gift someone Transcendence for a kill while remaining alive afterwards...

• Piss Kevin off a lot by having Linvala, Keeper of Silence in play while he plays his Marath, Will of the Wild deck.

Why 102 cards?

Because dragon shield sleeves often come with 102 sleeves, and I won't tell my friends I have two extra cards if you don't.