Marchesa, the Black Rose

note: this is a duel commander deck using the duel commander banlist. the goal of this deck is pretty simple: attack with small, difficult to block, creatures with powerful effects such as draw, discard, infect, etc. we pay optional health costs for spells to reduce our health in order to put at least one dethrone trigger to each of our creatures. this helps us to survive boardwipes as well as other removal, thanks to marchesas ability. linear boardwipes like damnation, become much less linear with marchesa in play. we have a hard time defeating spells like parallax wave (and other mass-exile), so we play a few inexpensive counters, as well as dystopia, chaos warp, and vampire hexmage, but ultimately we often must scoop to a resolved parallax wave if we cant find one. we need to use our counters and removal only on cards that we lose to, as we dont have many ways to respond and our strategy isnt typically aggro enough to defeat our opponents before theyve attempted to resolve a bomb or combo. proliferate is a very strong effect, but is typically too expensive for this deck to afford at the point on the game where we need it (turns 5-6) so we settle for a few very inexpensive proliferate options, thrummingbird and tezzerets gambit. these are great at increasing our own strength and also increasing poison on our opponent. paying life is great and often games are finished with us being in a clearly superiour board-state but with much less life than our opponent before the final swing. any advice on strategy or card choice is super appreciated!