Jon Arbuckle (EDH / Commander)

The basics of this deck:

I built this deck because you get to play weird stuff. There are two main strategies you can mix here: play creatures with huge downsides like Desecration Elemental and give them to your friends, or play "safe" creatures and give those away. Use your accelerated card draw to protect Jon while he works his magic, and the board state! We wouldn't want all our gifts to go to waste, now would we?

You can use Jon to simply act as a card draw engine while you move towards any Dimir win-con you can think of, but that misses the point of getting to play cards like Ebonblade Reaper or Flesh Reaver. If you're going the "bad creatures" route, this is the imagined board state: your army of ****ed up cards killed the other two players, and now they're coming for YOU. What to do? How do we actually win the game? You have to get your Homeward Path into play at some point to get all your stuff back, which can hopefully finish off the last player who has had to have been dealing with effects like Ebon Drake or Taniwha. Maybe cast River's Rebuke at him, I don't know. Or care. Can you believe this guys' name is just Jon?

To get that Homeward Path, we are looking to draw any way to tutor the Expedition Map, whether that is through a Trinket Mage, Fabricate, or even have to Solve the Equation into a Vampiric Tutor.

Also, beware of cards like Stenchskipper or Phyrexian Soulgorger. What at first may seem like awesome auto-includes, are actually potential game-enders due to rules weirdness. If you give a Stenchskipper to someone, the game locks itself trying to resolve the ability and not being able to due to Jon's "can't be sacrificed" clause. Magic Rule 726.4: If a loop contains only mandatory actions, the game is a draw.

So there are extreme weirdos out there who build Jon as a "Draw the Game" tribal. My decklist has a few creatures which can trigger this, and my playgroup has decided that if, for instance, my Shadowborn Demon is the only creature out there and would draw the game, instead it gets sacrificed.

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

This build barely has any of the safe stuff. My only "good" creature is the Ghastlord of Fugue because I had one laying around, and because it would be fun for the guy who gets to attack with it, if I decide to gift it. There's some wizard synergy here once I realized all the artifact tutoring mages were wizards, so I put Azami, Lady of Scrolls in there too. Jon is a wizard! Be sure to cast Wizard's Retort at some time.

I'm always a psycho about wanting to protect my commander, so there's a bunch of ways to protect him and ourselves in general. Hell yes there's a Polar Kraken in here, and we aren't reanimating it. That's the kind of stuff legends are made of. Extract Brain is there because it's what Jon is doing in his art and it seems like a fun interactive card, and Memory Plunder is there because I think it is cool as hell and evil.

The dream here is to have fun without necessarily having to win the game. Abyssal Persecutors are always fun, right?

Spicy Fun:

Give Asmodeus the Archfiend to someone who doesn't have black mana.

Concerns:

The last time I played this game my board state was Jon, Propaganda, and nothing. I sure had a crapload of creatures for other people though! I think if I got too annoying the other players would have just decided to kill me, but they never agreed to do so. I also played an Abyssal Persecutor that made the game really warped and screwy. One criticism of Jon decks is that they either warp the game really bad in lower power pods, or nothing the Jon deck does matters because other decks are too powerful. Whatever man.

I have an idea of putting a Triskaidekaphile in here with a Putrid Imp so we win via stupid once we're drawing a billion cards every turn, but I took it out... for now.

Sidequests:

-Give Asmodeus the Archfiend to someone who doesn't have black mana.
-Using the Soul Foundry, flood the board with Steel Golem (s). They can't kill each other.
-Actually get a win by giving a demon army to someone, then Homeward Path everything back to kill them. Is it possible?
-Use the Crystal Shard to get lots of value out of some of our tutoring mages.
-Crush someone with a Polar Kraken.

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.