Vilis on a Tight Budget (EDH / Commander)

Price as of August 30 2019: R$107 or approximately US$27.53

My take on the very interesting Vilis, Broker of Blood as a commander on a tight budget of 115 reais (not including shipping), which is about 30 US dollars for the entire deck. Prices were calculated using TCG Player's "market price".

In this deck we basically use our life as resource pool, as any true black player. We try to get Vilis out as fast as possible (which can be done as fast as turn 4 if you get lucky), although it's better to wait for some protection first. After that, we abuse our life total and get so much card advantage that we won't know what do do with it.

Actually, we do. Volrath's Dungeon for example will let us make our opponents put their entire hands on top of their libraries if we drawed a ton of cards we can discard. Bolas's Citadel can let you buy half your deck or even more if you have some mana up to draw lands with Vilis. And we can drain all our opponents for 10 life if we have 10 nonland permanents to sac (not that hard in this deck).

But what do we actually wanna draw? Repay in Kind coupled with some sort of life drain such as Gray Merchant of Asphodel will finish off our enemies like flies.

This is an initial build that needs lots of playtesting, though. My games has been very successeful so far, but I think there's room to improve.

Update 1 (august 2nd): Did a complete deck overhaul. The last version proved quite inconsistent in getting Vilis out quickly. So now I've dedicated a whoping 22 cards to ramp and 12 to protect him once we get him out. This plus 36 lands will make our starting hand have 3.5 lands and 1.5 ramp cards on average which is very nice. Of course, with such a big package of ramp and protection I had to ditch a lot of card advantage cards. But they're not that needed, since we have a lot of life outlets and Vilis to take care of us.

I'm now also calculating prices based on the cards' price in my country, Brazil, which makes much more sense since I won't be importing them if I actually buy this deck.