[Bracket 4] Jodah, the Unifier
Decklist
Credit: JeffGirten
Primer
https://archidekt.com/decks/3361540/jodah_the_unifier_5color_legendary_human_tribal_high_power_edh
Description
This is a midrange deck that leans heavily into human tribal and legends-matter support cards with some light stax to round out the package. While this is definitely not a cEDH deck, it runs enough fast mana that I feel comfortable saying it’s definitively a high-powered deck. I also think the combination of Jodah’s pseudo-Cascade ability and the sheer number of humans that play a light, stax-y game could rub some opponents the wrong way, so it’s worth making sure your playgroup is adequately prepared.
The deck is designed for you to try to ramp to Jodah relatively quickly, so you’ll want to keep hands that allow you to accelerate on colored mana while also starting to build out your army of humans. You could absolutely optimize this manabase to be better, but I wanted to try to make it functional without being exclusively fetches and duals to keep the power level and price down a bit. As such, you do need to be careful about getting the right mix of colored pips in your mana so you can reliably cast your humans in every color.
Aside from the ramp creatures, there are a few creatures that you’ll want to keep your eye out for: Esper Sentinel, Jhoira, Reki, Rona and Tymna all allow you a huge amount of card advantage / selection. In general, I find that having any of these allows me enough card draw (other sources like Dihada, Mystic Remora, and Temur Ascendancy help too) to start to spiral out of control.
Once you’re up to five mana, you’ll want to start thinking about casting Jodah. Depending on the board state, you can either cast Jodah as soon as possible, or wait for protection / another human to immediately cast to get a cascade trigger. If you’re able to get a cascade for 2+, you have pretty good odds to get some form of protection for Jodah from his free cascade ability fin the form of cards like Flowering of the White Tree, Hajar, 2-Mana Jirina or 2-Mana Thalia. Being able to untap with Jodah in play lets things quickly spiral out of control.
Over time, I’ve noticed that if you can cast a 4 or 5-Mana Human with Jodah in play, it’ll often result in so much value that your opponents will be banking on a board wipe to reset things. If you can cast two legendary humans in a turn? Look out! When you can cascade into two creatures, plus the two creatures you’ve cast, Jodah will be buffing your entire team by at least +5/+5, and many of the humans in the deck will be giving additional bonuses or keywords to the team too.
When the time comes to close the game out, Jodah is obviously a huge win con by himself. That being said, sometime you need to punch through with a little bit of extra damage of other effect. Kyler is great for further buffing your team, Najeela and Eomer can give you an extra combat step(s), Surrak gives your team trample and can’t be countered, Saskia lets you copy the damage you deal to one opponent and do it to another, and there are loads of Haste-enablers to make sure your humans can attack the turn they hit the battlefield.
One thing the deck could certainly use more of is lifelink. Its manabase is a little painful and without the ability to quickly recover, your lifetotal could be dwindling quickly.