After having to cancel our Commander night for 2 weeks now due to scheduling conflicts, my playgroup was finally able to get together for a night of Magic: The Gathering.

But before we get to the EDH games, we started by doing an event that we had been planning for a while: Gatewatch Oathbreaker. For those unaware, Oathbreaker is a relatively new format where players build a singleton deck using a Planeswalker as a commander, and a signature spell for the Planeswalker.

The idea was simple, take all current and former members of the Gatewatch, and assign one at random to be the build-around for each player. Then, we’d just play an Oathbreaker game with the decks we built.

The Oathbreaker I was given was Liliana, and I built a deck the uses Liliana, Untouched by Death to recur zombies out of my graveyard in a pseudo-Aristocrats type of build. The other players in attendance used Gideon of the Trials, with Gideon’s Triumph as the signature spell, and Jace, Wielder of Mysteries, with Paradigm Shift in the signature spell slot.

Unfortunately, much of my strategy with Liliana went out the window the moment Rest in Peace his board since I didn’t have a way of dealing with it and so many cards in my deck hinge on the premise that I can recur cards from my graveyard. The opening from Rest in Peace was enough to give the Gideon player the win in one game, but the fact that Jace didn’t have a graveyard made it easy for him to clean up the second of our 2 rounds, both of which had a Turn 2 Rest in Peace.

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To help me alleviate some of the salt from my ignoble defeat, we transitioned to playing our usual $300 Budget Commander games. This time, I had brought a deck built around one of my old favorites from the days of the Magic Arena closed beta: The Scarab God. As one might expect, it was a Zombie Tribal deck, that aimed to take advantage of my commander by creating a token of tokens and eternalizing choice cards from every players’ graveyard. My opponents ran Rankle, Master of Prankles, and Roon of the Hidden Realm as their generals respectively.

And as far as starts go, I had one of the best starts I’ve ever had in a Commander game. On my first turn, I played a Swamp into a Sol Ring into a Talisman of Dominance, putting me miles ahead of the other players.

Low on land drops, the Rankle player opened with Urborg, Tomb of Yawgmoth. This was something I was able to take advantage of quickly, because when I played Liliana, Death’s Majesty on Turn 2, I manage to use her +1 to dump my Crypt Ghast from my deck to my graveyard, which I resurrected on Turn 3.

Liliana later ate a removal spell, but by that time she had already gone more than enough work. Rankle was never able to properly setup and by the time Roon hit the board, I had a Shriekmaw waiting to send it back to the Command Zone. And with my mana acceleration, I was able to combine Scarab God’s upkeep trigger with Endless Ranks of the Dead to lock the game down.

There are few experiences in Magic that compare to generating a mass of tokens, and then Scrying 9 cards deep before drawing for turn. The life loss combined with my ability to so finely tune the top of my deck made it no contest.

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I kept on Scarab God and the Roon player stayed consistent for the next match, but the Rankle player swapped out for Chulane, Teller of Tales. Though my opening was less explosive than the last round, I was able to still put up a strong start, getting consistent land drops and casting Scarab God on time.

That said, it was clear that I was about to start running out of cards in hand. Fortunately, I had lucked into a Necropotence that I was able to force onto the top of my deck with Scarab God’s trigger ability. Unfortunately, Roon has a counter spell waiting in the wings that denied me my card advantage.

It was then that I realized that the nature of both of my opponent’s decks could be turned to my favor. Both Roon and Chulane are Bant commanders than rely on easy to recur ETB effects. Using my general’s activated ability, I could exile creatures for their graveyards (or my own) to create copies of them and gain those powerful ETBs for myself. For example, creating a 4/4 copy of Roon’s Eternal Witness, which I used to reclaim my Necropotence. Even if Chulane was able to destroy it immediately afterwards with a Reclamation Sage he tutored for using Eladamri’s Call, I was still able to pay enough life and acquire enough cards to get a second wind.

Combined with the host of lords I had out, my horde was able to quickly overwhelm the board and win me the game, both with Scarab God’s ability and with combat.

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It was getting late, but we decided we had time for one more round. This time, Chulane and Roon decided to keep consistent, but since Scarab God had already proven itself a bit stronger than I wanted it to be, I decided to use that as an excuse to try a quirky deck I had been tinkering with, in a color combination I usually don’t play.

Despite how much he let me down during out Pre-Con night, I decided that Sevinne, the Chronoclasm deserved a second chance, in a deck that could hopefully take better advantage of him.

Sadly, by the time I was ready to start playing the game with my God-Eternal Kefnet, Sevinne, and an Approach of the Second Sun sitting on top of my deck thanks to an earlier Brainstorm, Roon had already lucked into an Avenger of Zendikar and Craterhoof Behemoth combo that won them the game. I feel like there’s something to Sevinne, but I’ll need to experiment further with him.

All in all, it was a very fruitful night, and despite my earlier saltiness at the way our Oathbreaker games went down, I had a fun time. Everyone won at least one game and/or got to see their deck “do their thing” at least once, and that’s best a playgroup can ask for.

The Marvelous Duo finds ourselves in the jungles of Wakanda, on a hunt for the Winter Soldier and the Infinity Stone he took from MODOC. What perils await our two heroes, both Acharky and myself, and their Marvelous team!? Tune in and find out.

As absolutely dumb as Thane’s decision to hand over the Infinity Stones is, for a variety of reasons, it’s difficult to fault the game for choosing to take that route. After all, that kind of plot thread is fairly standard of a comic book story, and it serves as an adequate reason to teleport us off to Hel/Asgard while giving Thanos the Infinity Stones for our final confrontation.

And tempted as I am to fault the game for not teaching me how to order my teammates to combo attack with me… I don’t know how much I can blame it for that one. Acharky pointed out that the initial tutorial in the prison cell tells the player how to do it, and I had no trouble then, but it never occurred to me to do that at any other point. Perhaps the game could’ve hammered it in a bit more, or shown me in the context of those chests, but it’s difficult to say how much of that would have actually helped.

I’m torn about this section of the game, because while some of the mooks, like the Hel Guardians and the Snipers in Wakanda, are genuinely either threatening or troublesome. However, once Acharky and I adjusted our tactics, they didn’t pose too much of a threat. And likewise, only one of the bosses posed a genuine threat. To that end, it’s hard to call the game difficult. After that spike in the Dark Dimension, this is a welcome reprieve, but it’s also incredibly underwhelming…

Next time, we’ll finally finish this.

I haven’t thought up or seen any new deck tech in Magic Arena recently, so I’ve decided to take a break from it until Throne of Eldraine is released. The new set looks really interesting, and I’ve already started to get some ideas for directions I want to go.

With that in mind, I decided to play another card-based video game instead. As someone who plays a lot of roguelikes, I figured it was time to play Slay the Spire on camera.

Watch as I’m exposed as a fraud who can’t play video games!

Slay the Spire combines two of my favorite types of games: roguelikes and deckbuilders.

Essentially, the goal is to advance to the top of the spire, defeating the entity the serves as the source of all the dangers the player has to confront. They are given an initial deck of cards and a passive skill, depending on their choice of character, which they be able to modify and add to as the game progresses.

In fact, doing so is an important part of progressing through the game. Mark Brown over at Game Maker’s Toolkit talked about it in his episode on Synergy. Synergies are the key to staying ahead of the curve in Slay the Spire. A pile of good cards can only get you so far, and only a deck whose cards combine their effects in powerful ways can make it to the end.

For example, one of my best runs as The Silent, my preferred character, had me combine the twin powers of A Thousand Cuts and After Image, with many of the cards that generate 0-cost Shivs, to inflict a lot of damage and block incidentally as a result of just playing numerous tiny cards. All of these are good on their own, but together they create even stronger effects.

In addition, the developers realized the importance of removing cards from the deck, or being able to decline to take a card when the player is offered one. As any card game player will say, the smaller a deck can be, the more powerful and consistent it is likely to be as well. So being able to get rid of the cards from your starter that aren’t too effective, or don’t synergize with the rest of the deck, and go a long way to improving its combat ability.

If you liked what you saw here, or think you can play better, I encourage you to give Slay the Spire a shot. It’s a fun game that’s more than worth your time and money.

It’s another Marvelous recording session, as the Alliance grows stronger and stronger to stand against the impending threat of Thanos and his Black Order.

With Acharky by my side, there’s nothing the two of us can’t beat… as much as the game wants to beat us down.

One thing that I can’t help but notice with Ultimate Alliance 3 is that is does a terrible job at tutorializing itself. There are several mechanics that the game never makes mention of, but are vitally important to mastering the system in performing well in the tougher fights of the game, like the ones we faced in this episode.

Up until Acharky started exploring the menus in between recording sessions, neither one of us new about the web of upgrades in the Lab menu. In the previous recording, we both vocally wondered what we were supposed to spend all of that currency we had built up over the course of our run. As it turns out, that current is spent in that menu to permanently upgrade the whole team globally. Without those stat boosts, we likely would have had a significantly tougher time against Doctor Strange and Dormammu, and we barely survived those fights.

Additionally, I didn’t learn about how to perform those super moves, which grow stronger when activated in sync, until watching fellow streamers go through the game on a lark. It wasn’t until the spoke about the “supers being ready” and seeing them activate that I put it all together.

And when the difficulty spike in the Dark Dimension is factored in, I feel like this lack of information is important to bring up. If Acharky and I can miss elements like this, than less experienced players might also suffer the same.

The most common complaint with the game is how long it takes to defeat enemies, and I wonder how many people suffer that fate not knowing that they can use these upgrades and super moves to make their lives easier.

I had a deck planned to run for this latest Magic the Gathering: Arena, but on the day of recording there was an announcement that caused me to amend my plans. Although the next set, Throne of Eldraine, won’t be released for another few weeks, the new Brawl Pre-constructed decks, and the Brawl format itself, would be playable in Arena as part of a special event.

And so, I decided to give these decks and format a try. Out of the 4 possible deck lists available for this event, I gave two of them a shot: The Wild Bounty deck helmed by Chulane, Teller of Tales and the Savage Hunter deck with Korvold, Fae-Cursed King leading it.

Before I get into my thoughts, I should explain the Brawl format, and how it differs from Commander. Here are the rules:

• The format utilizes the same pool as the Standard rotation. Only cards that are Standard legal may be used in a Brawl deck, distinguishing it from non-rotating formats.
• One Legendary Creature OR Planeswalker is chosen to helm the deck, that exists in the Commander Zone as it would in an EDH game. Standard Commander tax applies in the same way as EDH players are used to.
• The normal color identity rules apply when building a deck, just as they would in Commander. However, instead of a 100-card singleton deck, it is only 60-cards (but still singleton).
• Players start with 25 life, and there is no concept of Commander damage, but aside from that it’s all the same.

For me, this will serve as an adequate substitute for Commander while playing on Arena specifically, but it also makes me sad that the Arena UI can’t reasonably support 3 or 4-player games. I am aware that Brawl is supposed to be a 1v1 format, but what I enjoy most about formats like this are playing with groups of people. In it’s current state, Arena can’t be expected to support that.

As far as the pre-con decks themselves are concerned, I think they show off a lot of the potential that their commanders possess, but they’re still pre-cons, much like Commander pre-cons. They play well against each other, but they’re lacking in ways that I started to feel while I was playing the decks.

There’s also the problem I was on both the giving and receiving end of where because these particular decks are so heavily reliant on their commanders, if they die then the decks are largely dead in the water. While removal is limited, there’s enough of it where a few lucky draws and easily hose an opponent, and there wasn’t enough adequate board clear to catch up when they pulled too far ahead.

Still, the new cards from Eldraine were a treat to play, and make me even more excited to get my hands on this set. Further, I am looking forward to building my own Brawl brews. Even if the format probably won’t see much play outside of Arena, it does have its appeal.

Our adventures in the world of Marvel media continue, pushing through the worlds of the MCU, including the Netflix shows and the films that have become more popular than God.

Join us, The Marvelous Duo, consisting of Acharky and myself, as we fight the forces of evil with our favorite superheroes(?) from comic book canon.

Something I want to touch on, which I didn’t in the last post, was the problems we faced with the online play. The first was simply not being able to play online until both parties have completed the opening chapter. This is one of those things that is more of a minor irritation than a genuine issue, but I enjoy running through a campaign with my friends from start to finish. When it’s time for game night, this can serve as one more in the line of issues setting up.

But more importantly, there’s the issue of how characters and experience are handled in network games. In previous Marvel Ultimate Alliance games, although I was hosting and largely in control of the party structure, Acharky was able to hot swap to any of the characters in the party as if they were his own. Additionally, his characters earned experience, even if the game was using my versions of them.

Here, he is limited to using a single slot, unable to swap to any of the other two since they are technically owned by me. And since they are mine, I am able to swap freely between them. The game treats him as less of a partner and more of a guest inhabiting my world. Even when he dies, he can’t swap to one of my crew on a temporary basis to revive himself. As far as experience goes, no one else of his roster is gaining experience. Likewise, I’m not getting experience for Captain America even though he’s in the party, because he’s not “mine”.

Thankfully, the ability to dump XP cores into underleveled characters to catch them up, but it’s another one of the minor irritations, and still doesn’t solve the inability to hot swap between characters.

For this weekend’s Commander night at my playgroup, we decided to lift the restriction on budget so that we could play whatever cards we wanted to in our decks.

And in doing so, I was able to play a very special deck, and another one that I had been thinking about for quite some time. As a whole, the table had a blast and we may consider going budgetless more regularly again.

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During the first game, I ran a deck that I had actually won in a raffle hosted by Dan Krause on Twitter. He participated in a Rotisserie Commander Draft at Magic Fest Vegas 2019 and held a charity raffle where the winner received the deck. I won, and promised to play at least one match with it completed unaltered, and this was that match.

My commander was Hapatra, Vizier of Poisons. My opponents were running Emrakul, the Promised End, Zedruu the Greathearted, and Azusa, Lost but Seeking.

As far as starts go, mine was fairly rough. For the longest time, I was flooded with forests but no swamps. Although I had my Golgari Signet in play for black, it was never safe to play Hapatra because I had no one that I would be able to swing into to trigger her ability. The situation only grew more dire when Emrakul’s player managed to cast Geode Golem and swing in the following turn at my empty board, since no one had the ability to kill it off, allowing her to cast Emrakul for free. Even worse, she had managed to put Akroma’s Memorial out on the table a few turns after Geode Golem.

What an adorable little *problem*!

Fortunately, my dire situation had turned to my favor because nobody saw me as a threat (and, in fairness, I wasn’t). Due to past experience, the Emrakul player took control of the Zedruu player and sought to sabotage them. It didn’t work, because Azusa’s Hall of Gemstone, which had been adversely affecting Zedruu’s playability, also interfered with that plan.

We all thought the Azusa player was basically out of the game once Emrakul directly her 13/13 Flampling might towards them, but they managed to set up a strong defense with an Emrakul of their own, along with a Vorinclex to hamper our ability to cast spells. In an act of petty revenge, a concept that I am strongly in favor of, they opted to control the Zedruu player instead of the Emrakul player, because Zedruu had used Vedalken Plotter to take their Gaea’s Cradle and Nykthos, Shrine to Nyx. In all likelihood, this cost him the game, because he was unable to stop Emrakul’s Ulamog, the Ceaseless Hunger, which destroyed his Emrakul and fulfilled the promise spoken of in their commander’s name.

Pictured: The reason people dislike Eldrazi

While all this was going on, I was mostly a passive observer, but I had finally dropped enough lands and acquired the right cards to make my move. The Zedruu player went before me though, using Gilded Drake to take control of Ulamog. She was going to take control of Emrakul, but I had chosen to forewarn her that my plan was to clear the board. Following through on that promise, I enacted my Decree of Pain.

Reciprocating my earlier forewarning, Zedruu opted to swing in at the Emrakul player with “their” Ulamog the next turn. This freed me up to finally start taking control. Using Demonic Tutor, I searched for and summoned Liliana, Dreadhorde General, using her -4 to deal with Ulamog and the other creatures that had hit the board in the time since the last turn. Although Zedruu was able to keep the aggression off of her thanks to Island Sanctuary, I was able to stay a float with a synergy between Tendershoot Dryad, Yawgmoth, and Dictate of Erebos. With the aid of Gary Asphodel, I was even able to gain back much of my lost life and kill the Zedruu player.

It was close, with Emrakul having only 3 life remaining at the end. However, the aid of Akroma’s Memorial and the ability to take control of my turns was too much for me to bounce back from. I was a single turn away from victory, but alas. Still, it was a well-played match and I have no regrets. I’m proud that I was able to make a strong impact despite being out of it for most of the game.

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The Emrakul player had to withdraw from the second match due to other obligations, but we were able to bring in a new challenger who had shown up too late to join the first match, who brought with them a Golos, Tireless Pilgrim deck. The Zedruu player decided to replay their deck, and the Azusa player swapped over to their Kambal, Consul of Allocation deck.

As for me, I played a commander that I don’t bring out often because it tends to generate a lot of hate, and rightfully so: Vaevictis Asmadi, the Dire. The deck is designed to take advantage of both the sacrifice mandate and the ability to cheat out the top card of the deck while including cards that protect Vaevictis and give him haste to swing in as much as possible.

I had a decent, if not great start by playing a Lantern of Insight on the first turn. My plan was to it use to pseudo-control what everyone else was getting out of my future Vaevictis swings, keeping them from accidentally playing their win-cons for free. However, as the turns went on I found myself again not playing much of anything. My field consisted of Kalitas, Traitor of Ghet, Vaevictis, my Lantern, and land.

Kambal and Zedruu were doing nothing more than building up their walls. Kambal had Hissing Miasma and Norn’s Annex to stop people from swinging at him directly, and Zedruu wasn’t performing anything aggressive enough to inspire ire from the table, mostly playing reactively since they lacked proactive plays and red mana.

However, with Azusa on the board, a fetch land in the grave, and Crucible of Worlds, the Golos player was very quickly accumulating large amounts of land, with incidentally card draw due to Tatyova, Benthic Druid. However, both her board and my own were destroyed by Zedruu’s Austere Command. To further complicate the matter, she also used her only her source to play Pramikon, Sky Rampart, making me the only possible target of the Golos player.

A very powerful way to control the flow of combat in a deck that needs it.

And of course, the Golos player also quickly recovered from their board wipe and played powerful creatures like Bringer of the Red Dawn. I could deal with it using my Decree of Pain… except I was stuck at 7-mana. Even if I had the 8 mana required to recast my commander, the threat would be the Golos would use Red Dawn to take control of it and swing in, further ruining the game.

The rest of us had tried to start mounting a defense, but by the time we were able to it was far too late. Using Craterhoof Behemoth, and effects like Aminatou‘s -1 that let her bounce it over and over again, Golos succeeded at knocking each one of us down one at a time, the Sky Ramparts and Kambal’s life total stopping her from doing it all at once. I was the first to fall, followed by Kambal, and Zedruu never arrived at the board clear she needed.

A popular win condition in many decks

And a good way to keep getting its benefits

I wonder how different that game would have played out if I had managed to convince Zedruu to counter Craterhoof when it first entered the board, but there’s no use crying over spilled milk. Overall, it was a solid match that I had a ton of fun with. I think Vaevictis isn’t going to draw as much ire as I was afraid it would it I play him correctly, something to keep in mind for next time.

Once more, we return to the Arena with a new deck and new playstyle in tow. This time, we’re rocking one of the best budget decks around: Mono-Blue Tempo.

Don’t underestimate this deck. Despite the low price point, it’s a machine that can really pack a punch in the hands of a skilled pilot.

The first thing you’ll probably notice is that this deck has exactly one Rare card in the main deck, though it runs a playset of that card: Tempest Djinn. It’s both a 3-drop, and the highest cost card in our deck, which gives you an indicator that the deck aims to be more aggressive than the usual deck you see on this channel.

Though while is a powerful way to wrap up the game, it is not the linchpin. That distinction belongs to Curious Obsession. To Magic players who aren’t into Standard, this may come as a surprise because Aura spells are usually seen as bad cards. The reason for that it because if the creature it’s attached to dies, then the Aura dies with it, making it a 2-for-1 trade in terms of card advantage.

Curious Obsession typically negates this otherwise obvious downside by drawing a card when the creature attached to it inflicts combat damage. If the pilot is playing correctly, they’ll drawing at least 2 or 3 cards off of it before the creature is destroyed, meaning that they’ll break even in the worst case and gain a net card advantage in a typical case. And for the strategy we’re aiming for, a 1-mana card draw engine is a valuable tool.

Aside from these two cards, our deck can be broadly classified into two components: Creatures that can reliably ping the opponent, and disruption. Cards like Siren Stormtamer and Spectral Sailor are excellent Turn 1 plays, which make for powerful Turn 2 targets for Curious Obsession to quickly swing in and start drawing cards. In addition, they have powerful activated abilities that can be used to counter spells and draw cards respectively. Along with Pteramander, these cards are valuable because our aim to swing in quickly and often. Despite the card draw, we don’t perform all that well if the game goes too long.

But more than swing, we also need to keep enough mana open to keep our disruption pieces online. Spell Pierce, along with many of the other counterspells in the deck, can be used to shut down powerful creatures and spells before that can wipe out our board and unduly strain our resources in hand. Spell Pierce in particular is deceptive strong because it forces the opponent to play off-curve. They can’t play a 5-drop like Teferi on Turn 5 because then they won’t be able to protect it.

Our other forms of Disruption include pieces like Dive Down and Merfolk Trickster. Both of these cards accomplish that, but in different ways. Dive Down’s effect and instant speed give it several effective uses. The most common purpose is to give our creatures Hexproof in response to a removal spell being cast, protecting it reactively. However, it’s other purpose is to fool opponents into making unfavorable blocks again some of our bigger creatures, making a once favorable trade a losing one. In the footage, there were a few times where I used Dive Down to save one of my creatures from otherwise lethal damage.

The Trickster is another extremely valuable card. It’s a 2/2 for 2 mana that has Flash, which means even if our opponent doesn’t do anything we want to counter, we can at least use our free mana to play a creature and gain an advantage. In addition, it taps down a creature and removes its text, which can turn a difficult to block or kill creature into an easy one to take care of in the right situation. Alternatively, we can use it to tap down a blocker our opponent controls so that we can freely swing in on the next turn… while still putting another body onto the table.

As you can see, the deck requires experience to pilot it, and I make a number of fatal mistakes in several matches, but it’s also cheap to build and effective once the user masters it. It’s a shame that it basically won’t exist post-rotation, since almost every card the deck uses comes from either Dominaria or Ixalan.

A long time ago, in an age before THE QUIET MAN, Acharky and I used to stream together more frequently. Although the footage from those streams is long gone, we had a series we called “The Marvelous Duo”, where we played through the Marvel: Ultimate Alliance games together.

We thought after beating MUA2 that there would never be another game in the franchise. Much of both of our surprises and delights, a third game was announced, exclusive to the Nintendo Switch. Just as I was about to approach him to see if he had an interest in reviving our old series, he actually brought the subject up on his own.

Thus! THE MARVELOUS DUO HAS RETURNED!

For better or worse, this is exactly what I expected from an Ultimate Alliance game developed in the era of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. It’s so strange to go through a game like this now, because back when the originals were released, Marvel comics were big, but had yet to reach the broad, mainstream appeal that they do in today’s world. Before the movie, most people would be hard-pressed to identify the Guardians of the Galaxy, but now they’re household names.

And after going through levels themed on the Guardians/Captain Marvel, Spider-man, and Jessica Jones respective, combined with a plot to defeat Thanos and collect the Infinity Stone, it’s not hard to see the MCU influence, among others like Spider-Verse, Venom and the Netflix shows. That said, it’s also clear that the game is taking a more comic book inspiration when it comes to the cast’s personalities and designs. In addition, one should not overlook the inclusion of Wolverine from the X-Men, and Kamala Khan aka Ms. Marvel. While they aren’t popular movie picks, both of them are fan favorites from the comics.

Though I’ve never been much of a comic book reader, Marvel lore has always held my interest. As a longtime fan, it’s fun to playthrough all of these set pieces and explore them, seeing what references exist and where they choose to pull from. While I don’t expect the script to ever become a masterpiece, I look forward to seeing what else they pull from and how they tie it all together.

Magic players who know we personally know that I enjoy removing killing creatures and clearing boards of creatures. In my EDH playgroup, I’m known as the guy who tends to have the removal options needed to take out big threats.

But what I like even more than that is killing my own creatures and gaining benefits from their deaths. More commonly known as an Aristocrats strategy, it’s a deck type that I’ve always found interesting, and that I love trying to build and pilot.

My decklist is here.

However, I was also credit Strictly Better MTG for this deck, because the fundamental core of it comes from his YouTube video where he discusses his version of the build. This may be my own spin on it, but I’d be wrong not to attribute him credit where it is due.

There are 3 things that an Aristocrats deck needs in order to perform that way it is intended to:

• Either a swarm of cheap creatures that can replace themselves or be otherwise recurred.
• Cards that have triggered abilities that activate when the aforementioned fodder dies.
• Ways to sacrifice or kill off those creatures.

And this deck has all 3 of those. 10 of the cards in this deck costs 1 mana, and all of them are creatures. Hunted Witness is an obvious include, because it has a death trigger that produces token that we can also use as a sacrifice. And even though it doesn’t replace itself, Footlight Fiend‘s 1 damage on death can serve as that extra bit of reach we may need in a pinch.

We also have a full set of Gutterbones. The reason I run this instead of Reassembling Skeleton is because it only costs 1-mana to play initially, even if it comes out tapped. Early on, when mana is hard to come by, that’s significant. And later on, when the need to recast Gutterbones will make it overall more expensive, I found that I had enough mana where it didn’t matter.

On top of all those 1-drops, we have Hero of Precinct One as a token generator. While it’s removal bait in the worse case, we have enough multicolored spells in the deck that there’s a potential to create a lot of tokens with her ability. And since they’re just 1/1 Humans with no abilities to speak of, we’ll feel nothing when they too die.

As for cards that have death triggers, we have Cruel Celebrant and Corpse Knight as our two key pieces, which will often be what close the game off. Of the two, the Knight seems less obvious because it’s technically not a death trigger, but rather an enter-the-battlefield effect. However, it still fits in this deck because our strategy necessitates summon a ton of smaller bodies, which will add up if Corpse Knight is allowed to survive. And when something like Hunted Witness dies, this effectively becomes a death trigger because a token will be generated.

Our other payoff creature is Midnight Reaper. The biggest problem a deck like this can have is that it can run out of cards quickly, and this will help us avoid that. While it doesn’t activate when a token dies, and it does cost us life, which can kill us since it’s not a “may” ability, it’s worth it to avoid burning out prematurely.

The sacrifice outlet we run is also there to help us in that respect, and a few others: Priest of Forgotten Gods. One of the best early play lines we can hope for it is to play her on Turn 2, and then play two of our fodder creatures on Turn 3 to immediate sacrifice them to her ability. The value of her ability cannot be overstated, because one we start activating it, our opponents often have difficulty keeping up. She does everything this deck could want by letting us sacrifice creatures will removing pieces from our opponent, scratching them a bit while drawing us cards and producing mana. Conveniently, the mana she generated is exactly enough to pay the cost of returning Gutterbones to our hand and the life loss is enough to allow us to activate it, making it easier to maintain our loop.

But despite not having another card to sacrifice creatures to, we have another obvious way of killing off our force: COMBAT! Once we’re online, opponents having extremely tough times breaking through our front line. This is depicted a couple of times in the games I recorded for this post. Our opponents had boards with big trampling bodies, but the moment they attacked I just blocked and let my horde die, ending the game with a stack of Cruel Celebrant triggers. Conversely, I had games where I managed to whittle my opponent to a point where I could swing in an kill them even if they block.

Lastly, there are a couple of cards that were include as part of a support package. Mortify and Despark exist purely for removal purposes. I include them because both because hit enchantments and that are multicolored, which triggers Hero of Precinct One.

The new Teysa Karlov card exists purely because it synergies well with our strategy, often making the difference in tight spots by doubling our death trigger output. And finally, we arrive at Sorin, Vengeful Bloodlord. His +2 puts opponents one the clock, letting us close out the game in a stalled board. The passive ability synergies with Midnight Reaper, canceling out the damage it deals to us while encouraging us to make swings when we are able. And as a deck that sacrifices its creatures, the -X ability gives us a way to bring back either fodder or one of our key pieces like the Celebrant or the Priest.

There’s a lot of moving parts to this deck, but you can’t beat the feeling of a well-constructed machine coming together.