How can I deal with indestructible shrouded slivers?

Question

So, here's the thing. My dad plays Slivers for his Commander deck with Sliver Overlord as his commander. When he plays this deck, he always seems to get out Sliver Hivelord and Crystalline Sliver, thus making it impossible for my Green/Elves Commander deck (base deck is the Guided by Nature 2014 Commander but it has been pretty intensively editted) to be able to beat him from that point on.

Is there a green or colorless card that I could incorporate into my deck in order to beat this combo, or is my deck just not going to be able to counter this?

Answer 1

Depending on how far you want to go to tune your deck for this specific scenario you have a few options. If dealing with this combo is more important then staying mono-green looking at a black splash will open up a lot of the cards ideal for this match up.

General advice, Exile and negative toughness effects will still remove indestructible creatures, and Edicts (sacrifice effects that target the other player) will get around shroud as well.

Assuming that we are staying mono-green, Some specific Cards:

• Perilous Vault will get around both by exiling everything, I recommend saving it to both play and activate in the same turn to avoid getting it destroyed
• All is Dust will act as a board wipe
• Ugin, the Spirit Dragon another board wipe
• Aligned Hedron Network can deal with the Hive Lord
• Arcane Lighthouse remove shroud
• Bonds of Mortality will remove the indestructible
• Sword of Kaldra will exile something it deals damage to, this could be used with a lure to force blocks
• Pithing Needle or Phyrexian Revoker naming Sliver Overlord will stop the activated abilities on the Commander.
• Song of the Dryads,Lignify on the Overlord can slow down searching up the combo.
• Jester's Cap can remove the problem cards from his Library
• Damping Matrix can shut down the activated abilities of the commander
• Bind can counter one activation of search to buy time
• Triumph of the Hordes would also be a good answer to just go over in a green deck

Additionally you can look at some infect / wither for some creatures which will place -1/-1 counters which get around indestructible, or annihilator which will require sacrifice.

Answer 2

First off, it may be far easier to keep him from getting to that point than it is to deal with it once he gets there.

Elves should be able to be pretty fast, and getting all five colors of mana to cast his commander should take some time. Deal enough damage fast enough, and even if he manages to get a couple indestructible blockers close to the end won't matter.

If he's relying on artifacts to help fix his colors, green definitely has ways to slow him down there. Naturalize is probably the canonical example, but there's plenty more. (Reclamation Sage is even an elf!)

You might be able to slow him down further by killing his commander before he can tutor for the other slivers he wants. Green's main way of doing that is fighting (think Savage Punch), which may take some work to set up, but if you have any big green creatures along with those elves it might work. And of course, if you're playing multiplayer, there's a good chance someone playing more removal-heavy colors will be happy to help out and destroy his commander.

If this really doesn't ever work out, you might want to ask whether the decks are really on the same power level. If he's got ridiculous mana fixing (fetch lands and dual lands and all) and you can't ever win anywhere near fast enough, it might mean that he needs to tone down his deck a bit or you need to push yours.

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All that said, to answer your actual question... as you've noticed, green doesn't really have anything. It doesn't have much simple targeted removal, and it has even less that'll wipe the board. There's Ezuri's Predation from Commander 2015 (make 4/4s to fight everything) and a few things like Hurricane that deal damage to all creatures with flying, but not really anything that'll get past indestructible.

So if you really want to deal with this, you probably need the few colorless options:

• All is Dust
• Perilous Vault
• Ugin, the Spirit Dragon

But again, it might be better to try to overwhelm him before he can get going than to count on finding one of a small number of cards in your deck.

Answer 3

All Is Dust Seems to fit the bill perfectly.

Of course, the real answer to this sort of weird shenanigans (man, I love that word) is to just kill them before they pull it off. Overrun effects paired with large numbers of creatures would fit this strategy quite well.

Answer 4

In a deck of 99 cards, a few cards here and there won't effectively combat an interaction that is only resource dependent. Once the opposing deck has the mana to cast the Sliver Overlord and use its activated abilities, it is going to work. Unless you field a Commander that directly combats the combo, you'll need a general response within the deck that you can readily draw into against the deck, while not crippling your deck against others.

Attack the Overlord

Shut down the combination by crippling the shortcut; without the Commander, your opponent has to draw into the win condition. Beyond the aforementioned Pithing Needle or Phyrexian Revoker, there are cheap affects readily available in green that can target the Commander while still be useful in other situations: Deathtouch and Fight. Target the Commander extensively, driving up it's casting cost.

Answer 5

You'll want an untargetted exile or sacrifice effect. Off the top of my head, Perilous Vault would do the job. It would get your own guys, but you might have to just bite the bullet.

A new card might be able to help you: Bonds of Mortality. It doesn't get rid of shroud, but it makes them destroyable.

Answer 6

I'm guessing there are 4 players in the game. If it's 4 player commander, make everyone very aware of the danger of his commander entering the battlefield. Build an alliance against him to keep him in check. It hurts to be on the receiving end of everyone ganging up on us, but he is inviting such tactics by using a turtle strategy.

EDIT: I know you want green solutions, but I'd do this myself. Make a cheap red land destruction deck. Target the lands he is hurting for in that game.

Answer 7

Reduce his life total to zero. Yes, that sounds cheesy, but it's Green's best weapon against unknown threats: deploy big creatures, especially those with trample; turn them sideways; remove player and all his Slivers from the game. Then remove them from the removed-from-game zone and put them into the absolutely-removed-from-the-freaking-game-forever zone. Then remove them from THAT zone and put them in a brand new zone that Unstable will hopefully invent for us.

As others have said, just race him. Every time you reduce his life total, you bring all his slivers (those on the battlefield and those not yet deployed) closer to irrelevance.

So with that strategy in mind, how should you adjust your deck? The simplest answer is: Trample. It's unassuming and not going to paint a target on your back, but it'll help you get past indestructible hexproof things, as long as they're not too big.