Tayam, Counter Master (Toolbox/Combo) (EDH / Commander) [Revision 7]

Welcome to Tayam's Rave, featuring guest artist Ghave, Guru of Spores! What exactly makes it a rave? Tayam brings the wild lights, Ghave has the weird plants, and the screams of your enemies create a stirring soundtrack! This deck is intended to be a mid-high power combo control deck with plenty of room to grow to even greater heights.

Tayam, Luminous Enigma is sort of a jack of all trades in the Abzan archetype. As a commander he gives you mill and recursion all in one for a considerably low activation cost for his ability, and a lower CMC than Ghave. On top of that, he even gives entering creatures you control a vigilance counter which puts you 1/3 of the way to meeting the counter part of the ability cost. As you might expect this sets up an enormous amount of combo potential; however, it does take a bit to get everything in place to go off. You need to have all the pieces you want in your yard, deck, or field, depending on the piece, and based on shuffle that can take some time; of course your opponents will be trying to stop you with everything from removal to counterspells to grave hate during this time. You have 2 options to combat this, and running both at once is recommended:

1) Make your approach to a win stealthy until the last moment. This one can be tricky because you'll need tons of mana to cast win condition spells direct from your hand and/or activate Tayam. As an option you can have soft win conditions to set up the actual win as spells to cast from hand, and plenty of harmless-looking fodder in the graveyard to work with when you engage your soft condition. Nethroi, Apex of Death is a good example of this; by itself, it's simple creature recursion, but you can get more than enough creatures to trigger an infinite combo with it. A good example is bringing back Luminous Broodmoth followed by Weaponcraft Enthusiast with Ashnod's Altar either on the field or in your yard (and 3 mana untapped if in your yard). 2 token engines in Tayam and Broodmoth plus the Enthusiast creating 2 tokens gives you 6 tokens per recursion, and Ashnod's Altar will get you to infinite colorless mana at instant speed. Broodmoth automatically returns the Enthusiast and tokens, giving you infinite tokens as well. From there you just need a mana outlet or some other win con you can pull from your yard.

2) Slow grind with stax enchantments and removal spells to slow everyone else down until you get everything you need set up. This one's easy. All you need is mill and some low CMC removal enchantments like Grasp of Fate. Instants are recommended of course, but you'll need some recursion to get them from the graveyard and a bit of draw to get them from your deck. You can also run things like Deafening Silence, Aura of Silence, and Grand Abolisher to provide some ways to slow down your opponents. I recommend Aven Mindcensor and Leonin Arbiter (though they're not in this list yet) for some serious stax grind.

Problems:

1) Grave Hate. Obviously. Anything that exiles your yard is really, really bad for you. Rest in Peace in particular is a huge concern and you need to make sure you've got removal on hand for it. I recommend holding up Tayam activations if you suspect someone else may be planning grave hate on your turn or theirs so you can grab your most essential stuff out before your yard gets exiled.

2) Commander Removal. Once people see what Tayam can do, like Najeela, the Blade-Blossom he tends to draw hate pretty fast. If you're not careful you can get him removed several times, leading to high command tax which basically deletes you from the game. The easiest way to beat this is to hold Tayam out as long as you can and use other cards to generate counters/mill yourself, then put him in when you're close to winning out (in true Abzan style, we stay under the radar until the critical moment). Another solution is protection instants like Veil of Summer or Heroic Intervention, but if you don't want to give up spell slots for those you can swap a land for Command Beacon. Tayam can bring it back into play any time you want it and it lets you dodge command tax, plus beats things like Drannith Magistrate that lockout commanders.

3) Salt. Stax and removal draws salt, and we're running enough to neutralize entire board states repeatedly. Be careful and sometimes political in choosing your removal targets, we want to avoid players directing all their salt at us while also establishing that our own board state and life total are not to be touched. Getting smashed for 15 damage by some huge creature "bEcAusE yoU WoNt bLocK" isn't cool, obviously let it rip if that happens.

"With this mill party, how do I avoid going too hard and milling myself out?"

Easy! Run 1 or 2 cards that shuffle your graveyard into your library. A good pick for this is Gaea's Blessing. It's cheap to buy and doesn't do much of anything to play, but if it hits your yard you get a free reshuffle, so in infinite mill scenarios like you'll hit with Tayam you don't just lose. I'd recommend running at least that and maybe 1 more, since grave hate is a thing that exists. You can run anything, from Eldrazi titans like Ulamog to cheaper cards, as long as you get that graveyard reset effect.

This deck is best played with techno music, and there are nearly limitless ways to combo out. You can sneeze at this thing and new combos will fall out of it. Experiment and find what you like!