An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works
Surprise! It's chapter 14 of Steel and Oil! Where Atraxa is very normal and no freak shit happens. This chapter marks the three year anniversary of me starting Steel and Oil! I challenged myself to write this in time for that, which was p fun! Read and leave a comment if u enjoyed!
Happy one-year anniversary for Steel and Oil by @chefwhatnot featuring a slowburn between the most patient woman in the multiverse and her extremely catholic eight-foot-tall roommate with mommy issues ♡
Honestly, though, it's been a delight reading about Jaxis and Atraxa growing to trust each other, I'm always looking forward to more!
so close to blorbofying jaxis the troublemaker... Imagine her boxing style. Super fast hurricane of blows that'd be tough to beat on her own, except she also has shadows around her throwing their own punches in, to make it nigh impossible to predict or defend against.
I love all the colors, but as far as gameplay go, the one I tend to play the least is red. But for some reason, I often end up loving the mono-red commander decks I built, and this one maybe more than all others to this point.
Let me present you the latest of my decks I absolutely adore, Jaxis, ergo the Fair Mirror Breaker. She’s here to kick teeth and bring home a lot of value. As it turns out, teeth sell for a surprising amount.
She’s the star of the show, the deck is built around her, though if she’s absent the deck feature a few assistants that can do a decent impression. From her old mentor Kiki-Jiki, to his fabled cousin and of course Delina, the exchange student from another Multiverse. Jaxis might not look as good as Kiki-Jiki, and she isn’t, she won’t win you the game instantly with a combo (she can mind you, it just takes one more piece and is not included in this deck). Her ability has THREE more restrictions, you need to discard, pay mana and can only use it at sorcery speed. With that said, she’s also MUCH less scary and much more likely to stick around for a turn or two and not make yourself the archenemy until you’re ready to handle it.
With that said, whenever you activate her, you get the full value out of a creature. You get its enter the battlefield abilities, its attack abilities, its damage, and finally, its death triggers, which means Jaxis has access to an incredible range of creatures to do pretty much everything she wants, and you’ll be attacking while doing it and progressing the game towards an end.
She can ramp you, though this is probably her least used mode, this deck has a heavy top end. There’s plenty of mana rocks and a few creatures to ramp you or make treasures for you. The deck generally can make use of as much mana as you can throw at it, and you’ll often find yourself counting your mana every turn towards the end of a game to see what abilities you can use, in what order, and how many times. The most noticeable absence here are Dockside Extortionist and maybe Sol Ring, but I just don’t play those for the sake of people I play with.
She can draw you cards. Her own discard is not really one, it’s a rummage because the copy is Blitzed and will draw you a card on death. This inherently will allow you to filter through your deck, but beyond that it also means any way to copy the ability will actively generate card advantage, and many creatures in the deck will draw you an extra card or more when they enter or die. In practice, this deck tends to have between 0 and 3 cards cards in hand at all time, but keep chugging and drawing as many cards as it plays anyway.
She can remove threats, and not just by removing their players. A Red deck will, of course, mostly have damage based removal for creatures and artifact destruction, but some colorless help allows us to answer even problematic enchantments. The deck could probably use a bit more land destruction, but people get cranky at repeatable land destruction for some reason. And you get to play Flametongue Kavu!
And finally, she can win you the game, generally by attacking people in the face with giant creatures while ALSO blasting them for damage repeatedly. There’s no fancy combos or anything, but a couple Terror of the Peaks or Phyrexian Triniforms tends to close games pretty quick.
All the while doing artifact shenanigans as well because we’re in red and we need them. Shoutouts to Goblin Engineer being an MVP in the deck, finding us boots for haste and protection, Sundial of the Infinite to keep our tokens around, Cursed Mirror to loop with the Engineer to get extra value out of everything, Skullclamp to keep a hand full with out blitzed tokens for one more mana, or simply dumping a Phyrexian Triniform into our graveyard to Encore when it’s getting late and the game needs to end.
If you want a deck that generates a lot of value in non-traditional colors all the while progressing the game, I encourage you to give her a try! And there’s plenty more creatures that didn’t fit in the deck, the cuts were grueling and it’s fairly easy to make the deck under a much tighter budget. The core of the deck can be made to fit in $50 or less if someone wanted to, I just happened to have a lot of the pieces already.
