TL;DR: I'm trying to find a creative/off-beat way of winning with
Lavinia, Azorius Renegade without going full stax and using the standard combo with her and
Omen Machine and/or
Knowledge Pool.
I hate stax. I don't like playing it, and I
despise playing against it. When I sit down to play Magic, I want to play the game. Stax says, "Well, you can't, and if you do, it costs more, comes in tapped, might cause you to lose resources, and oh, by the way, you can only cast one thing and draw one card per turn, if you can play at all."
Similarly, I hate playing in an environment where I feel like I
have to play stax to stay competitive or have a chance at winning. The group of friends I have that I spend the most time with is the same group that got me into magic in the first place, but they tend to play faster/higher-powered than I like. For example, one guy has a Krark/Sakashima deck and had a Muldrotha reanimator deck; one had a Meren deck that turned into Kokusho, a
Maelstrom Wanderer deck that started as cEDH and he tuned down some, and brewed a Pantlaza
flicker deck as soon as the card was spoiled (before it dominated in tournaments a couple weekends ago); and the last guy has an
Eldrazi tribal deck, a cascade-oriented
Jodah, Archmage Eternal deck, and insists on playing
Mana Crypt and Moxes in every deck he builds. The other friend in the group who quit playing a couple years ago had OG Kaalia, Azusa, and Azami as three of his commanders.
All that being said, when
Lavinia, Azorius Renegade got printed, I was so excited. She was
the commander I'd wanted that could help shut down some of the more degenerate stuff that I didn't like playing against - free spells, fast mana, cheated costs on giant spells or creatures, etc. I'd then run things like
Containment Priest to prevent creatures from being cheated into play for free,
Grafdigger's Cage and
Soulless Jailer to stop animation of some disgusting or huge creature just Entombed, and
Void Mirror (which all but completely singlehandedly shuts down a colorless
Eldrazi deck).
The problem is that, unless you play her full stax, there's really no clear or reliable win condition. She requires so much protection that I
could go voltron, but that requires too much additional support for something that's only a 2/2. I thought about Human or Soldier tribal synergies, but then I'd just be better off playing
Harbin, Vanguard Aviator. I threw together a rough draft of what I'd like the deck to look like (didn't do anything special with the lands), but I can't figure out a reliable way to win with it beside the
Knowledge Pool or
Omen Machine combo with Lavinia that hard locks people out of the game - or a way to do it fast enough that I don't have to play hardcore stax - or what of my "play fair" cards I have to sacrifice to get a win condition in the deck. The idea is just to force people to "play fair," not to keep them from playing at all.
Any ideas? Apologies for maybeboard size; that's just a side effect of how I build decks.
https://deckstats.net/decks/115144/3295960-no-funny-business