Queza, Augur of Agonies is a perfect commander for focusing on card advantage via draw, as your trigger will cause you to be inflicting life loss and gaining life yourself off your draw. This also means you can sacrifice life as a resource, especially for card draw, to recover.
Drawing cards is good, especially in bracket world, where tutors are limited and linked to deck power. It’s a pretty good design decision. As much as I’ve ragged on the current iteration of the bracket system, the idea of limiting tutors is an important one.
In a world where tutoring is limited or verboten, then the next best thing is just straight up card advantage. The most straightforward way is card draw, but there’s plenty of types of card selection. Regular draw, put-in-hand, mill, impulse draw, search draw (effectively land tutoring), even effects like cascade are effectively a form of card draw because they let you see and use more of your deck to create a resource advantage.
Fortunately, there are commanders that either cause draw, or else benefit heavily from it, and Queza, Augur of Agonies is pretty well positioned in Esper colors and with a nice trigger:
Whenever you draw a card, target opponent loses 1 life and you gain 1 life.
This basically is turning your thirst for more cards and more resources into a win condition. In Esper colors you also get access to a ton of cheap, powerful utility effects, and very solid control, which you can afford to use because your deck is centered around drawing tons of cards.
There are also several game ending combos that allow you to close out the game:
Queza, Augur of Agonies + Drogskol Reaver will end the game, unless you deck yourself. At a total of 4 + 6 mana = 10, nobody can really complain that this is a “cheap” two card combo.
Queza, Augur of Agonies + Marina Vendrell’s Grimoire is effectively the same combo and also clocks in at 10 mana.
Queza, Augur of Agonies + Oloro, Ageless Ascetic + Skirge Familiar comes in at 11 mana and 3 cards, thankfully this combo won’t force deck you.
Queza, Augur of Agonies + Oloro, Ageless Ascetic + Blood Celebrant + K’rrik, Son of Yawgmoth, for a grant total of 18 mana (though you can pay a lot of it with life.
The rest of the deck is just regular synergy with card draw, and ways to draw more cards, usually at the expense of life, but also a lot of “when a player casts/plays their second spell draw a card”.
Other card draw includes:
- Esper Sentinel
- Sygg, River Cutthroat
- Scrawling Crawler
- Night’s Whisper
- Sign in Blood
- Dark Deal
- Windfall
- Black Market Connections
- Phyrexian Arena
- Smuggler’s Share
- Frantic Search
- Brainstorm
- Read the Bones
There’s also a ton of ramp in this deck, 13 2-cost rocks, and various ways to turbo out lands. You absolutely want to get your Cabal Coffers + Urborg, Tomb of Yawgmoth combo if at all possible. This can generate huge amounts of mana for you, which you’ll need to get out something like K’rrik, Son of Yawgmoth or Drogskol Reaver.
You also have to be a bit careful, as a couple of these combos can potentially kill you. If you find that happening, you can blow up your own combo pieces after killing one or two people, or start running Eldrazi titans that you can discard to force a reshuffle.
Your interaction package is robust – the Esper good stuff that isn’t a game changer, effectively. Additionally it’s a lot of special lands, a lot of fetches and DFCs so that you can draw what lands you need but turn the rest into spells.
There’s definitely other ways to build around this commander, and one would be the old Exquisite Blood combo, where there are a number of other cards such as Vito, Thorn of the Dusk Rose to turn that into an infinite life drain combo. Bloodthirsty Conqueror means this combo has some redundancy, and powerful draw and life drain effects will give you some sustain even if you become table enemy. But that’s another article entirely.
If your combos get shut down you should be largely okay. This isn’t a swing for the fences deck because you should be drawing a lot and gaining a lot of life and causing a lot of life loss, so if a game goes to a long attrition state you should be able to sustain.
To start the game off you want at least two lands, and some kind of card draw. Generally a 3rd land is nice and a more draw are the other things you look for.
If you’re looking to substitute cards, be wary of adding cards that don’t technically cause card draw, like Dark Confidant, Bob seems like a natural addition to the deck, except that he doesn’t actually cause draw, but rather puts a card into your hand, which won’t set off Queza’s triggers.
Here is the deck list for Queza Bloody Draw. It’s technically a bracket 2 deck, but I think this will largely run right over most precons and should really be in bracket 3.
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