I think I've struck a reasonable line between fun and competitive (not full blown cedh but it can hold it's own amongst spendy and tuned decks in my meta) with Zedruu the Combotastic Kleptomaniac . It's fairly budget and I don't feel troubled by my manabase. I wanted a zedruu deck that could win, so I don't have any group hug. It's basically a Zedruu control deck.

There's not a lot of the 'bad santa' elements of the typical Zedruu decks. I do play the illusions cause it's a 40 point life swing most of the time. I also use [[Statecraft]] cause it forces some decks to search for a answer first before they continue their gameplan.

Instead I play some: * general hate effects like [[rest in peace]], [[aura of silence]] and [[rule of law]] (a amazing lightningrod and ruiner of hopes) * mess with the boardstate stuff like [[opalescence]], [[march of the machines]], [[cultural exchange]] and the ever amazing [[telepathy]] * a large amount of pillowfort stuff like [[fog bank]], [[opposition]] and [[windborn muse]]

It includes some edh staples that win the game like [[Insurrection]], [[Storm Herd]] or [[Rite of Replication]]

It also includes 2 infinite combos that can win the game after pillowforting.

1: [[Swan of Brynn Argoll]]+[[Chain of Plasma]]+[[Conflagrate]] (Augmented by [[Niv-Mizzet, the Firemind]] or [[Psychosis Crawler]]) 2: [[Tidespout Tyrant]]+[[Sol Ring]]+another mana neutral artifact like [[Spellbook]] or [[Pentad Prism]]. With that infinite mana you can now use conflagrate to kill the table or go really fancy and [[Mind's Desire]] your deck and chain some of the aforementioned spells like March of the Machines/Opalescence, Storm Herd and Insurrection then pick the best creature you have and [[Mirrorweave]] it.

So far I've been quite happy with it, the only upgrade I want to make is replacing the life gain lands with theros scry temples.

If you have any questions feel free to ask.