Damia, Sage of Stone

"Ask your query and be on your way. Just don't look her in the eye."

Damia, Sage of Stone is a tri-colored General that creates massive card advantage.

She has the colors of mana-ramp, control and attrition. Her ability to fully replenish your hand during each of your upkeeps is remarkable, but her true power stems from two very implicit effects:

1) The faster and more aggressively you play, the more Damia will reward you.

2) Her card-drawing effect also works as a very potent delving ability.

First, since you will be recovering your hand during each of your upkeeps, there is no reason why you should not hold back using your resources. Usually, control players have to think a lot before spending some precious tutor, sweeper or winning condition with the risk of losing it and be left with nothing. Damia gives you back your deck, anyway, so she lets you play like crazy red, but without losing your hand immediately. Also, since you will be drawing so much cards, this general is very appropriate for combo decks that need to search for certain cards constantly to work adequately.

Now, this deck is not exactly a combo deck. Were most people choose Damia to build reanimator or beatdown decks with some card advantage, my friend Carlos managed to build a Damia deck that exploits her true potential as a card-drawing-delving-recurring engine.

MANA RAMP

This deck is surprisingly fast. As soon as you hit ten mana, you can easily start a loop that will almost always win you the game. Damia is a heavy seven mana, tri-colored general, but she is also green, the color of mana-ramp, and blue, the color of card-drawing and endless resources. You will play a land every turn, and with all the mana artifacts you will have those ten mana probably before turn 6:

You also get to use classic green ramp:

 Azusa, Lost but Seeking and Exploration will drop every land card that you draw from Damia and all the other card-drawing tools that I will discuss later.

You want lands that produce 'double' mana because of this:

Mana Reflection and Vorinclex, Voice of Hunger will help you to get to that 10 mana threshold really fast. The lands mentioned above will work wonders with Mana Reflection because they will yield 4 mana, instead of just the 3 mana that most mana doublers offer. You will probably have to spend a tutor to search for the enchantment as well as the 'combo' pieces; that's why we have 'six' tutors in this deck:

TUTORS

I write 'six' tutors because we actually have more than that. Increasing Ambition is actually THREE tutors in one, and Demonic Collusion has Buyback, and ability that has no major negative repercussions in this deck because your hand will almost always will be full. In a way, you will always have a tutor to search for the right card.

The very special Riftsweeper is a pseudo-tutor that lets you recover precious exiled spells, like Praetor's Counsel and Restock:

There is also Archmage Ascension:

This ridiculously powerful Enchantment goes well with the several card-drawing engines that we have:

CARD DRAWING

As I said, this deck generates an incredible amount of card advantage. You need that because you will be delving your deck for the loop or combo that you are trying to pull off and because of Demonic Collusion's Buyback cost. Damia is mana-heavy and she will not always be there in time, so you need some smaller card-drawing dorks to help you on the early game:

Now, Tomorrow, Azami's Familiar and Archmage Ascension are not card-drawing engines, but they are actually something better; they make your card-drawing engines into scryers and tutors!

Azami, Lady of Scrolls only works with Wizards, but this deck packs several useful wizards, including Damia herself. Besides, you can tap her too to draw a card. We will see the other wizards in a minute.

EXTRA TURNS

We have already covered the smaller aspects of this deck. Now we uncover the aforementioned 'loop' that we are trying to pull-off. The combo or loop consist on getting a LOT of turns, so naturally you will need spells that give you extra turns and that can be recycled by recursion spells, which will be discussed afterwards:

You really have only five effective extra-turn spells. Lighthouse Chronologist doesn't work for the loop that you are trying to build. Still, it is amazing in multiplayer games, like Commander, so we are including it anyway.

You will focus on Time Stretch. Thats why I've been repeating that you need ten mana to win. You will ideally ramp a little, then search for Mana Refection and cast it, then cast Damia, Sage of Stone and a tutor to search for Time Stretch, then cast it during the following turn, along with a recursion spell that you can score with Damia's following hand replenishment, if you don't have one already. Then repeat process until you stabilize: this means having enough mana or extra turns to drop a beater and still generate the extra turns. This is not very difficult because you also have ways to take the most advantage out of the extra-turns spells:

SPELL-COPYING

You will want to copy your Time Stretch with one of these:

Your best bet is definitely Sigil Tracer. Not only it is the cheapest recurring source of spell copying, but it also works wonders with your general. You see, Damia, Sage of Stone is also a Wizard, so you can tap her and Sigil Tracer to copy your Time Stretch. That's FOUR extra turns for 12 mana. You might not get to copy your Time Stretch during your first round of the loop because of the probable lack of mana, but after your recover the sorcery again with a recursion spell, you will already have enough mana to cast AND copy your Time Stretch.

Echo Mage is only potentially better than Sigil Tracer. If you dump a lot a lot mana into him and you are lucky enough that he doesn't get removed, then you might be able to have SIX extra turns, instead of the usual four.

The other real option is Uyo, Silent Prophet, but you need to play her with Exploration or Azusa, Lost but Seeking because you might go below the required 12 mana to cast and copy Time Stretch because of the lands betting back in pairs to your hand.

Mirari will cost you 13 mana to cast and copy your big spell, but it is the most stable and reliable source of spell-copying that you have.

RECURSION

Recursion is one of the most important aspects of this commander deck. Sure, every deck wants to have some recursion, but you actually need them to pull off the chain of extra turns that you want to create. Here are the spells that you will be using for that:

Recursion is essential because you NEED to recover you spells that give you extra turns, specially Time Stretch, so you can continue to cast and double them. This is basically the loop: Get extra turns, recover them with recursion, repeat. this is not infinite since some of your best recursive spells get exiled as soon as they resolve. Also, the other smaller spells can be recovered, along with everything else, with Loaming Shaman, but nothing guarantees that you will always draw that tutor or extra-turn spell.

Other recursion spells that don't have anything to do with the loop is:

This deck doesn't have any protection against Artifacts or Enchantments, so we will be using Beacon of Unrest to revive your opponent's creatures or artifacts that can deal with such things. Also, Sheoldred is both recursion AND removal, another thing that this deck doesn't have much.

But no worries! You will not need and infinity of turns to kill your opponents. Usually, you stabilize after your third extra turn; then you drop one the following:

BEATERS 

These two creatures were meant for extra turns. They get bigger and bigger with every passing attack. Vorosh can get to the point of one-shoting a single player, and Grave Titan just keeps dropping small zombies that won't cease to get relevant chunks of life from your opponents. You can also rely on this:

You can drop him, produce around ten plants and them pump them up with Azusa, Lost but Seeking and Exploration during your following extra turn. You will not get constant extra power with this one, so make sure your plants are big enough before sending them to the red zone.

DEFENSE

Before you build your loop, you might get too much attention because of your lack of defensive permanents and big creatures. You can use one of the following to persuade or stall your opponents while you set up your board:

Great defense is always in the form of control; something that black and blue offer:

REMOVAL

Damnation and Plague Wind will be saved for situations that are completely out of control, while Dread can be dropped immediately to persuade your opponent's from attacking you.

COUNTERS

Erayo, Soratami Ascendant is so powerful that its use as a General is banned from Commander. You can still pack the soratami in your 99 card deck, so if you are lucky enough to draw him, make sure that you cast and flip this legendary and annoying piece of awesomeness.

Hinder and Spell Crumple are staple Commander counters because they can send opposing General into the bottom of their owner's library.

Voidmage Husher can negate the activation of several unique abilities, and you can bounce her back and reuse her for later threats. In other words, this is a recurring counter. It is also a Wizards that you can tap to Azami, Lady of Scrolls' effect.

OTHER

Another defensive permanent is Bojuka Bog:

It protects against other combo and reanimator decks. Just make sure they aren't used on you.

We also have the Lightning Greaves:

The little equipment is a recurring staple in most Commander decks. In our build, it will help you protect not Damian, but Sigil Tracer and friends. It can also help your Vorosh attach immediately or help your card-drawing engines tap a turn earlier.

MISCELANEOUS

Rite of Replication is a winning condition that needs to be in this Damia build. You will always want to cast with the kicker to target Rune-Scarred Demon, Avenger of Zendikar, Eternal Witness, even Echo Mage or Sigil Tracer! And these are only the creatures that you have access to. You can always copy a green creature that removes other permanents, like Artifacts and Enchantments, for which you don't have much answers.

LANDS

Finally, the mana base. I will skip the lands that I already presented at the beginning of this entry.

We want Reliquary Tower because we are drawing so many cards:

Having this land out early is pretty important. You don't want to waste a tutor on it; it is better to tutor for a Praetor's Counsel, for example, but you can always search the land with Primeval Titan.

The remainder of the lands are just the 'Snow-Covered' basics (because of possible opposing Extraplanar Lens from monocolored Commander decks). We want 8x Snow-Covered Forest, 2x Snow-Covered Swamp, and 11x Snow-Covered Island:

Now, the full suite of multicolored lands (remember, we already presented some of them earlier):

I'm not including Grand Coliseum because you don't need to fix your mana base that quickly. The General costs seven mana, so you will have some time to muster the necessary colors without having to stress painful stuff like Grand Colisseum or City of Brass.

Here is a complete deck list for your reference:

General

1x Damia, Sage of Stone

Creatures (25)

            1x Fertilid

            1x Sigil Tracer

            1x Dread

            1x Vorosh, the Hunter

            1x Voidmage Husher

            1x Loaming Shaman

            1x Tomorrow, Azami's Familiar

            1x Azami, Lady of Scrolls

            1x Azusa, Lost but Seeking

            1x Sakura-Tribe Elder

            1x Uyo, Silent Prophet

            1x Solemn Simulacrum

            1x Arcanis the Omnipotent

            1x Yavimaya Elder

            1x Archivist

            1x Erayo, Soratami Ascendant

            1x Avenger of Zendikar

            1x Mnemonic Wall

            1x Lighthouse Chronologist

            1x Echo Mage

            1x Grave Titan

            1x Riftsweeper

            1x Sheoldred, Whispering One

            1x Vorinclex, Voice of Hunger

            1x Rune-Scarred Demon

Enchantments (3)

            1x Exploration

            1x Mana Reflection

            1x Archmage Ascension

Lands (40)

            1x Dreadship Reef

            8x Snow-Covered Forest

            11x Snow-Covered Island

            2x Snow-Covered Swamp

            1x Simic Growth Chamber

            1x Dimir Aqueduct

            1x Golgari Rot Farm

            1x Temple of the False God

            1x Llanowar Wastes

            1x Yavimaya Coast

            1x Reflecting Pool

            1x Underground River

            1x Sunken Ruins

            1x Flooded Grove

            1x Twilight Mire

            1x Reliquary Tower

            1x Rupture Spire

            1x Drowned Catacomb

            1x Bojuka Bog

            1x Command Tower

            1x Hinterland Harbor

            1x Woodland Cemetery

Instants (4)

            1x Overwhelming Intellect

            1x Hinder

            1x Noxious Revival

            1x Spell Crumple

Sorcery (18)

            1x Damnation

            1x Demonic Collusion

            1x Recollect

            1x Beacon of Tomorrows

            1x Beacon of Unrest

            1x Diabolic Tutor

            1x Time Stretch

            1x Restock

            1x Time Warp

            1x Temporal Manipulation

            1x Capture of Jingzhou

            1x Demonic Tutor

            1x Regrowth

            1x Beseech the Queen

            1x Rite of Replication

            1x Call to Mind
            1x Plague Wind

            1x Praetor's Counsel

            1x Increasing Ambition

Artifacts (9)

            1x Mirari

            1x Simic Signet

            1x Dimir Signet

            1x Golgari Signet

            1x Darksteel Ingot

            1x Lightning Greaves

            1x Thran Dynamo

1x Sol Ring

Walk the eons!