Building a Control Deck in Commander that Wins! Kamiz, Obscura Oculus Deck Tech

Since my branching out into other formats (i.e 60 card formats on Arena), I have become pretty infatuated with Blue-White Control decks. Even when I first got into Magic & my friend would counter every thing I did - I thoroughly enjoyed both learning to play around counterspells (although a bystander of our games might not think so) and of course playing with them.

Since my primary format at the moment is commander, I wanted to find a fun & powerful way to play control in commander. I think the answer here lies in slightly changing how control is defined. My definition for it would be: Control in commander is not about preventing your opponents from playing the game, but preventing your opponents from doing anything about you winning.

How to go about doing this? This may not make sense for a control deck, but hear me out - the wincon is just combat damage. This is because Kamiz makes unblockable creatures (i.e my opponents can’t do anything about getting hit). By filling up the rest of the deck with removal, counterspells and protection; we obtain a nice, well-rounded deck that essentially will prevent our opponents from interacting with us.

As a preface, I’m somewhat new to the game of Magic (~2 years of playing), and therefore this may not be representative of traditional “control” decks. However, I find the deck very fun to pilot, and is not “so control-ly” that it makes the game unplayable for everyone else (they can still kill each other ;)).

For reference, the decklist can be found here

Control!

I started building the deck with the plan of ~30 control ‘pieces’. I use the phrase ‘pieces’ here as I’m not necessarily just talking about counterspells. I’m also referencing removal & protection spells. The final decklist currently includes:

• 12 Counterspells
• 12 Removal Spells
• 2 Protection Spells

In total, this is 26 ‘control pieces’. This provides us with ample resources to deal with our opponents’ threats, and protect our own. Typically, you’ll want to hold up counterspells for spells which threaten to actively damage your boardstate, and removal for when an opponent gets a bit too strong. Ghostly Prison & Propaganda should protect us from lots of attacks.

I’ve also tried to include some ‘repeatable’ removal, such as Cephalid Constable or Throat Slitter. This removes the “feels-bad” of using a entire card to just remove a single threat.

The Core Gameplan

Kamiz is okay to come down on turn 4. The typical gameplan is turn 2: ramp, turn 3: creature with combat damage trigger, turn 4: Kamiz & attack with other creature. As such, I’ve added 14 creatures with a combat damage trigger that can come down on turn 3 after ramping. This provides us with a 89% chance of having one of these after 1 mulligan - high enough!

After that, just simply let your creatures get bigger as your opponents kill each other! This deck does rely on bluffing a fair bit, so make sure to keep mana open to bluff that removal spell, even if you don’t have it.

To make this a higher powered deck, I’d add more ramp in order to have more spare mana to cast our protection spells earlier.

Playing @ Flash Speed

Since the deck is designed to consistently have the threat of casting counterspells, typically you’ll always want to leave 2 mana open to cast that counterspell (this is also why the decks mana curve is low). However, what if your opponent does nothing that you need to counter? What then?

Since there aren’t many creatures with combat damage triggers & flash (this is probably a bit too busted, the only one is Malcolm, Alluring Scoundrel), we need to add some flash enablers. I’ve added both Leyline of Anticipation and Vedalken Orrery.

Having one of these cards out is really going to propel you forward in the game, as it makes it so much easier to bluff a counterspell with these out.

Depending on the quality of the playgroup, you’ll want to either draw attention to the open blue mana (if you’re playing with newer players) or keep it hidden (if you’re playing with more experienced players).

Recursion

Since Kamiz has a connive ability stapled to him, we do want to have a little recursion in our deck to get back any creatures we discard. As such, we have 6 pieces of recursion, including 3 repeatable recursion pieces. We won’t typically need a lot of recursion, since we have a lot of hand-sculpting with Kamiz, but this allows us to get back any big creatures we discarded early.

Wincons

The decks only wincon is combat damage. We need a couple of ways to speed this up. I’ve added some infect with Tainted Strike, Phyresis & Grafted Exoskeleton. This allows us to kill our opponents a lot quicker, and is a nice way to finish the game. Giving our creatures double strike can also help, since we can give the unblockable creature double strike. This really speeds up the game.

We also have cards like Westgate Regent and Necropolis Regent which get insanely big, insanely fast.

Final Remarks

I love this deck! It’s fun to play; it annoys your opponents; you get to play at flash speed; and you get to win with combat damage. The perfect combination in my opinion.

There are of course upgrades you can make, as there are more powerful creatures that trigger on combat damage that you could add. This scryfall search should give you a good idea of what you could add.

I will keep updating this post as new sets come out, if better payoffs / spells come out with those sets.

If you have any comments / questions, please reach out to me on X “the everything app” - find me here.