I realise I'm a little bit late to the party on this thread, but I wanted to talk about
Tevesh Szat, Doom of Fools so this seems like the right place.
I've fallen in love with
Tevesh Szat, Doom of Fools.
I don't usually go in for Planeswalkers but I pulled a Tevesh out of a pack so thought I'd give it a go. Originally I partnered him with
Ishai, Ojutai Dragonspeaker and built and esper proliferate deck, focusing on Tevesh's ultimate. Turns out, the ultimate is actually pretty underwhelming. I don't want to say it's bad because it's obviously a very powerful effect, but it's extremely fickle and how effective it is is hugely dependent on what your opponents are playing. I managed to ultimate Tevesh twice in one game and still lose. I mean, there is a strong chance that I just suck, but controlling other peoples commander for the sake of controlling other peoples commander isn't actually all that useful. People aren't idiots. They build decks with interaction and redundancies, so stealing their commander is usually just a minor setback rather than a game winning action.
Back to the drawing board then.
I have a pet deck that's just mono black "cards I like". It's not a good deck, but it makes me happy. I had been using
Morinfen as the commander because
Morinfen has, in my opinion, the best art out of all the mono black legends.
I decided to run it with Tevesh and Rograkh, just for fun, and boy are they a fun pair. That's when I came to an important realisation:
Tevesh Szat, Doom of Fools is the closest thing to
Skullclamp that it's possible to have in your command zone.
If you just ignore the ultimate, Tevesh is an absolute blast. Just killing stuff, drawing cards, making thrulls. It's bliss.
Paired with Rograkh, he's incredible. You get to draw three cards the turn you play him.
Three.
And I can only assume the same person who designed Tevesh also designed Oko because his "sac to draw two" ticks him up, not down. Why is that an uptick? And he has partner? Card is fantastic. I still run it as basically mono black, but even just having Rograkh as partner means I get extra free cards and I can run
rakdos signet and
talisman of indulgence instead of some sub par 2 or 3 mana rocks you can often find yourself running in a budget mono colour edh deck. Might even stick a
faithless looting in the deck as a treat.
If you made it all the way down here without getting bored by my ramblings, thanks for reading. If you like killing your own stuff for value, give Tevesh Szat a go. It's basically a
skullclamp that you can always access and I love it.