Karazikar's Crazy Carnival (EDH / Commander)

The basics of this deck

Karazikar, the Eye Tyrant does two things for us: goads and card draws. Goading can make for some awesome interactions - depending on how many goads we have going (hopefully at some point three shadow / evasive creatures attacking everyone), we can either open up pathways for the goaded creatures to deal damage to opponents, or set up bad blocks for them. Pretty much all the decks I see have all the Dauthi Dudes to make these triggers happen easily. It's sort of a Rakdos group hug, everyone draws cards, but it comes at the price of forced combat, which is very delicious to watch if you've never had a friend be forced into a bad combat. Teach them the value of transience / impermanence - they'll really be feeling the Mono no aware in no time.

Because goad is useless 1v1, and our card draw only triggers when opponents attack, we should try to take lots of opponents out simultaneously, which is fun for everyone - we all get to stay in the game until the bitter end.

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

I leaned really heavily into relying on Karazikar's abilities to fuel the pain. Because of his importance, my list has stuff that's purely defensive like Champion's Helm, netherborn altar, even mirror shield to get big K on the field and staying there to goad as much as possible. No indestructibility equipment, just hexproof stuff, as my pod definitely subscribes to single target stuff being exile-centric. One other difference I went for were a few discard cards to keep our opponent's advantage a bit lower, like Pain Magnification, Words of Waste, Syphon Mind, and even Scythe Specter.

I did not include any of the impetuses or the vows to force the goads. They seem really fun, but I prefer to have my creatures triggering the goads more strategically than one creature being locked down indefinitely- opponents could play around the vowed / impetused creature. Shiny Impetus was the best of these cards to me, and it offers so much advantage that my opponents would do anything they could to stop me from getting too much value off of it. I imagine, anyway...

I tried for myriad! that Banshee of the Dread Choir seems great, I want to try it out - you attack the person that can't handle it with the banshee, and the others have to deal with the tokens. Blade of Selves is an option, I ended up cutting it because its very expensive and not all of our creatures can safely make use of it due to the legend rule. It would sure make for some big blowouts though, like with the Port Razer.

My deck does not run Frontier Warmonger. I don't want our goaded creatures to get through and deal damage - I want them to smash into other creatures, thus eliminating opponent resources, of which we are handing out with each goad. GALAXY BRAIN

Spicy Fun

One spicy bit of tech that I found was to put Horobi, Death's Wail into the deck - we blow up anything we target with the goad trigger from Karazikar.

Almost all of the deck lists I see have a Vorpal Sword to put on our shadow dudes (or the fliers), but not all of them go for the Quietus Spike, and I went insane with the Scytheclaw. Any of that with Wound Reflection will threaten the win, or finish off the last straggler once our goads don't matter.

Total War and Heat Stroke are killers. I don't see all the deck lists being aware of Heat Stroke - it makes all our puny shadow dudes deadly to attack into, and makes our goads crazy.

Fevered Suspicion is a flavor call. I don't know if it's good. Seems fun though.

Elbrus, the Binding Blade is pretty great with all our shadow dorks to trigger it. Are you crazy enough to run it and summon the demon?

I ended up cutting it, but i absolutely loved that I saw someone with Phage the Untouchable in their list. We aren't making our creatures evasive somehow, they already are, so I hope whoever runs Phage gets her through with all the goad nonsense going on.

Concerns:

Because I really love making very commander-centric decks, we aren't running any card draw like Night's Whisper, Ancient Craving / Price of Ambition, Succumb to Temptation, Phyrexian Arena, relying very heavily on Karazikar's ability for getting us card draw. This could be totally wrong of me. Maybe we need something like a Baleful Force in there. Perhaps too much hexproof / protective cards? He is expensive!

Why 102 cards?

Because the box of sleeves I have came with that many, and my friends won't notice if you don't tell them.

In this deck, this lets us play Fevered Suspicion and Scytheclaw.