Hi everyone! Ever since Kaldheim came out I've been fascinated with [[Sarulf, Realm Eater]] just generally as a card in Standard but also as a potential cEDH commander. I've noticed the cEDH meta recently shift away from blazing fast wins and more towards setting up card advantage engines or stax pieces. Sarulf's Pernicious Deed-like ability seemed like a good way to counter this type of play. So I decided to finally put it together.

The general idea behind this deck is to get out Sarulf as soon as possible and stick one or two stax pieces (such as [[Collector Ouphe]], [[Root Maze]], or [[Thorn of Amethyst]]) as soon as possible to stop your opponents from going off. You then want to cast Sarulf either turn 2 or 3 so he can start building his 1/ 1 counters. Between fetchlands and treasure tokens from Dockside, I've found it is pretty easy to get Sarulf to 1 or 2 counters, which is usually enough to wipe most of the board.

After wiping most of the board, your next step is to either use mass land removal (like [[Smallpox]], [[Pox]], [[Tsunami]], [[Desolation]], and [[Kudzu]]) or single target land removal to control what your opponents can play. With only access to land sources for mana, the two most threatening win cons are [[Ad Nauseum]] and [[Thassa's Oracle]]. The latter is fairly easy to prevent: focus on blowing up double Islands. As for Ad Naus decks, it gets a bit harder because they can make a ton of mana at once, but you just have to rely on them using it early in the game to set up and forcing them to be in top-deck mode which renders them fairly useless. I also don't think that this playstyle can really beat Gitrog decks, but I haven't seen many of them recently.

The deck itself wins through a fairly convoluted [[Razaketh]] line that I detail in the primer here: https://www.moxfield.com/decks/C-FtHty1MUap0J0WRwJfeQ. I chose not to copy and paste the line because it's 17 steps lol but I can just edit this post if people would rather not go through moxfield.

So, my question to you all is: Is this competitively viable? I haven't really seen this style of stax anywhere else and I think that in this new meta it can pose a decent threat to the surplus of Thrasios/Tymna/Kraum decks that I've been seeing. My worry is that it is extremely difficult to police the land bases of three different decks, but I think that even getting some decks to just 2 lands on the battlefield will almost entirely neuter them.

I love stax so I'm always looking for new ways to improve my gameplay and decks and will be happy to answer any other questions :))