Anafenza, the Foremost, dipping my toes into hate and stax.

[Trox085]

This is my first attempt at a hatebear or a stax deck.  The main thing I would like to know is if it would be too slow for you to play against.  I tried to keep it fairly casual with an overall goal of slowing others while I make larger creatures and swing in for the kill.  The maybe board consists of the cards I had on my list before narrowing it down to 100.

https://deckstats.net/decks/140138/1790158-anafenza

[Slyvester12]

Your list is a bit confusing. Stax is about breaking parity with your opponents, so typically a stax deck will have a game plan that's either mostly or completely unaffected by its own stax. You have multiple cards that shut down aspects of your game plan.

Two examples are Solemnity and Gaddock Teeg. Your entire strategy revolves around giving your creatures +1/+1 counters. Solemnity is a silver bullet against your deck, but your opponents don't even need to run it because you already are. Same with Gaddock Teeg. You have several noncreature spells at cmc 4 or higher, including ramp, stax, recursion, and wipes.

You should narrow your stax to effects that don't hinder you, or at least hinder you less, and maybe change your strategy to something more conducive to a stax deck. Big Stompy is not a typical stax strategy. They usually go more for combos or hard locks into incremental damage.

[Trox085]

My thought with Solemnity is that I hold on to it until after I have counters on things.  It would allow more counters, but also wouldn't remove the ones I already have on creatures.

I kept Gaddock because I narrowed down more of the selection to minimize the 4+ CMC items I had and figured it would be more of a problem for my opponents than myself.  I still have 2 main, 1 offense, 1 mana fixing, 1 stax, and 3 removal items that would be stopped by him.  That's 8/100 cards, or 8/64 playable cards if you ignore land.  Having 1/8th of the deck shutdown is troublesome.  Actually calculating it makes it seem more likely to be a hindrance than when I was narrowing the cards. 

[Trox085]

I have moved Gaddock, Solemnity, and 1 Plains to the sideboard.  Replaced them with Revenge of Ravens, Dragon Throne of Tarkir, and 1 Swamp.