What makes a good PDH commander  

I have 3 copies of Zada in my favorite 60 card pioneer(?) deck, Boros prowess. a [Clever Lumimancer] loves it when Zada copies a 1-drop to make everyone flying say 3 times (that's +8/+8 +flying for her) ([Leonin Lightscribe] too!) Sadly, the lumimancer is uncommon, and the leonin rare, I believe, so not great in this format.

@@TheDerpyDeed I have toyed around with Zada and Mage craft. It goes crazy really quick!

That sounded really interesting so I found your list on Moxfield. I like commanders like this that are an army in a can and that it compensates for white being notoriously slow at winning by having room for ALL the removal. I was not expecting such a low creature count but I love it! How does it play? I imagine that it’s mana hungry but having so many instants helps with that?

@@lobbert8 nice, I'm glad you went to look for it! The deck plays the control long game without many sources for card advantage, so you have to pick your battles. I run a somewhat high density of rocks to make sure I can cast tiller with protection asap, and start using control elements to shut down the biggest threats when needed. The deck plays a draw-go style, and if before the turn is passed to you you still have mana open, you can always hatch some pods and already swing with them on your turn, also dodging sorcery speed wipes. Pods can also be popped as chumpblockers if needed. The all that glitters downshift was huge, and you should fetch it with the two aura tutors when you want to apply pressure. Overall the deck plays the long game, and usually when it wins I'm hatching 10 pods and killing everyone. Since they aren't creatures at first, people tend to not give them as much importance. It's at its weakest weakly on, as it's really mana started, but if you draw into rocks it picks up pace well enough. Overall a pretty nice experience if you want to try mono white control!

I like that the deckbuilding cost of the commander is to include evasive attackers but in competitive, attacking to win the game with creatures from the 99 has struggled to get more than a 25% win rate and there are strategies out there getting more than their share of wins (combo). I'd call it high power.

@lobbert8 very interesting thanks for the info!

I have not seen Disciple of Deceit in any of the cPDH games I've ever played but there's a player that took it to a 1k last year and is still testing the deck. They claim some pretty consistent turn 4 combos so it still sounds good to me. In my competitive pods, I feel like people will let threats live and only try to interact when an actual combo is presented or they'll just remove a combo piece on an end step so I think it's actually pretty safe. Edicts would be my first removal concern

Yep! In PDH any uncommon creature can be your commander so Monastery Swiftspear could be your commander! Each player's life total starts at 30 and 16 commander damage is lethal.