I’ve gotten a little down on MTG: Arena lately, so I needed to inject some variety into my Wednesday streams.
And what better salve for that is there than a session of Slay the Spire. This time, we’ll play as the Ironclad.
I don’t have much more to add beyond my previous post, but I hope you enjoy watching me agonize over choices and then make the wrong ones.
In Magic the Gathering, one of the smartest things one can do is wait until the last possible second to make a move. By being patience, and playing reactively, we can give ourselves the freedom to amend our plans as the situation changes. In addition, we ensure that our spells and abilities are played at the point where they are most effective.
For this reason, I opted to go back to Simic Flash once more. We played this deck once during the Core 2020 season, and though we lost some cards in the rotation to Eldraine, we also gained enough new tricks that the strategy is still viable.
You can check out the decklist here.
Just like before, our ideal is to ensure enough land drops that we can pay UUGG for our most valuable cards, Frilled Mystic and Nightpack Ambusher. Both of these four drops are close to the top of our curve, and each of them are still as valuable for the reason I described in my previous Simic Flash video.
And while we’re lost critical pieces from the previous list like Merfolk Trickster, that were key for both tempo and board presence, we make up for that in other ways. Mainly, in both Brazen Borrower and Wildborn Preserver. Being able to bounce anything with Brazen Borrower allows us quite a bit of versatility, both in forcing our opponent to recast key pieces so they can be vulnerable to counter-magic, or removing key blockers to make our swings safe.
In addition, with the loss of Essence Scatter, we’ve ditched both it and Negate in favor of the more universal Quench. Artificially adding an additional two mana to a spell’s cost can be effectively even in the late game, forcing our opponents off followup plays if not stopping them in their tracks outright. We’ve also thrown in Growth Spiral as a potential early play if we don’t need the mana for anything else, that can help sift through our deck ever so slightly.
And while I like this deck, I can’t help but wonder why it runs Nissa, Who Shakes the World in it’s mainboard. In theory, it seems like it wants to use Nissa’s mana doubling effect in conjunction with her +1 to keep mana open for the hordes of instant speed 2-drops we have access to. However, this isn’t really the kind of deck that wants something that high on the curve, and I almost always found myself gravitating towards a better option. If it works for you, by all means, but I’m likely to change her out for some more counterspells or other tricks.
Being able to wait for our opponent gives us much leeway in how we respond to their plays. The deck does suffer slightly in this meta due to the threat of Teferi, Time Raveler. Most decks play him specifically to avoid being spammed by counter magic, so our first priority will always be keeping him off the board. If we can do that though, our effects way not be powerful, but they can force our adversaries off balance and give us the openings we need to finish them off.
Apex Legends
Thanks to Bloodstained, I have the distinction of being one of the people whose first Castlevania game isn’t actually a Castlevania game. Produced by Koji Igarashi himself, even a newbie like me has enough familiarity with the source material that I can feel the Castlevania DNA in this game, and it runs deep.
It takes a special kind of allure to get me interested in an Early Access title. Normally, I stay as far away from work-in-progress games as I possibly can. For Supergiant Games, I can make an exception. The makers of Bastion, Transistor, and Pyre have thus far always managed to strike gold, so I was willing to trust their judgment that if they’re releasing a game early, it’s in a solid enough state to play.
Where The Outer Worlds creates a template for RPGs heavily inspired by the games that came before it, Disco Elysium dares to take the genre in a new direction that I found unbelievably refreshing.
There is… a lot to unpack with Death Stranding. For better or worse, Hideo Kojima is at it again, this time with a new IP. This is one of those games that will absolutely belong on the other list I publish every year, but we’ll save that for when we get to it.
Last year, I played my first ever Pokémon game with Let’s Go Eevee, which is a bit of pseudo sequel/remake of Red/Blue with a partner Eevee and a Pokémon Go-esque catch system in lieu of encountering and battling Pokémon in the wild. While I was no stranger to the franchise, watching a ton of the anime growing up, that was my first direct exposure to the games.
Back when they were still in the business of making good JRPGs, Tri-Ace were the proud developers of the Valkyrie Profile series. Inspired heavily by Norse mythology, one of the most unique aspects of that franchise is the combat system, which had each of the four characters of the player’s party assigned to a face button on the controller. By timing the inputs, they could combo each characters’ moves into one another to create a more effect attack, each hit building up the damage multiplier for successive strikes.
After spending the summer of last year getting completely caught up on the Yakuza franchise, no one should be surprised that I was eager to return to the mean streets of Kamurocho once more once Judgment came out here in the US. When I heard it was also a detective game starring a disgraced defense attorney in the Japanese legal system, I was even more invested.
I have a confession to make: Although I have obviously heard about the Ace Attorney games, I had never played them up until the remake of the original trilogy came out on Switch and PC earlier this year.
Man of Medan, from Supermassive Games, was one of the two games I played with my friend Acharky on stream this year, and just as an excuse to hang out with a buddy, this was a highlight for me.
Finally, after working with Sam for years on the primer series, in order to prepare ourselves for it, Kingdom Hearts 3 actually came out.
It’s no secret that I have an appreciation for the Souls games and the mechanics they employ. Like it’s own vampiric cast, Code Vein taps into that vein and leeches many of its core mechanics that you are undoubtedly already familiar with yourself. All one has to do is substitute bonfires for “Mistle” and souls for “Haze” and the formula is there.
Well, that’s a bit of a mood whiplash after talking about blood souls. This is another game that I wrote about twice this year.
Medievil takes me back to a very specific period of my life, when I was a kid. My aunt actually introduced me to this game, so I have memories of playing this over at her house during Thanksgiving and Christmas parties that come back every time I replay it.
This was the other game that Acharky and I streamed together, since we had done so for the previous Ultimate Alliance titles.
Fire Emblem: Three Houses is an excellent tactical RPG, but almost nobody actually cares about that part of the game and I am no exception.
Sir Daniel Fortesque has, at long last, defeated Zarok, resting in the eternal piece of his crypt. For us, that means it’s time to move onto a new adventure.
What better excuse than this would there be to go back to an old, nostalgic game from the PlayStation, and my childhood. A game that I have replayed time and time again, and was remastered for newer consoles merely one year ago.
It’s time to meet hot Dragon Daddies in the Dragon Realms, for we’re playing Spyro the Dragon.
What blows my mind even now, playing the Reignited Trilogy version for the third time, is how much the core gameplay holds up in a modern context. One might expect that a video game that was originally release in 1998 would need something more than “just” a complete graphics overhaul. Which, to be clear, was clearly a major passion project with a ton of care put into it, judging from what I see.
And while that’s not entirely true because right stick camera control functionality and “gem radar” were added to the game, in general the original skeleton is perfectly preserved in all of it’s glory. The hallmarks of an PS1-era platformer, including tons of collectibles and short, yet discreet and sectioned off levels, are here in spades. Yet, it slots perfectly in a modern day context.
The list of verbs never grows beyond the ones we start with, at least in this first Spyro game. They are, and will always be:
In addition, all of these moves are easy to pull off, requiring no more than a few button presses. Ten minutes in the tutorial level should familiarize players well enough with the mechanics that they can take on any given level. Jump over small steps, glide across distances, charge small creature, and flame large ones or ones with metal armor.
However, this does not mean that there’s no sense of escalating challenge. Rather than increase the number of moves we have access to, and the complexity of our control scheme, the challenge comes from increasing complexity in the level geometry. Where the Artisan world had a ton of easy to handle enemies and basic traversal challenges, Peace Keepers introduced more precarious an obtuse glides/terrain, which required more thinking to perform, if not technical ability.
Now that we’re in the Magic Crafters world, we’re introducing more complex enemies and enemy placements, along with terrain that shifts. In addition, the supercharge is challenging us to rethink our previously established paradigms by giving us a way to allow our charge to destroy previously indestructible obstacles.
Our core gameplay remains the same, but with the addition of new tweaks, remixing, and gimmicks to force us to put more thought in how we utilize those central verbs more effectively. You notice that in my play as well, where I’m starting to take more hits and make more mistakes the farther we proceed.
This won’t hold as we move into the sequels quite as much, but we’ll enjoy it while it lasts.
In this post-Oko standard, it’s tempting to believe that Food is going the way of the dodo bird. After all, he was one of, if not the, most important card in the Simic/Sultai/Bant Food decks. However, there appears to be another formula out there for the archetype that has started to make the rounds.
Say goodbye to Oko Food… and hello to Jund Food.
The decklist I’m using comes from MTGGoldfish, but I swapped out a copy of Korvold, Fae-Cursed King for the extra Massacre Girl in the sideboard.
Like many of the current Rakdos Aristocrats decks out there, this deck’s primary goal is to establish the Cat Oven synergy. For those of you who aren’t familiar, that is the combination of Cauldron Familiar and Witch’s Oven. When the cat is ETBs, it pings the opponent for one and gives us one life. Then, using the Oven, we sacrifice the cat to create a food token… which we use to resurrect the cat with it’s ability. This can be be repeated every turn to place the opponent on a ticking clock, with enough incidental lifegain to keep us in the game longer than we’d ordinarily be able to.
Or… if we’d rather have cards than life, we could also bring out the Midnight Reaper. While it cancels out the lifegain from the Familiar, it allows us to speed through our deck to arrive at other pieces we may need to speed up our win before the opponent can catch up to us. Mayhem Devil also makes an appearance in this deck. This gets a trigger for both parts of the combo, when we sacrifice the cat to the oven, and then the food to the cat. In addition, it combines well with not only all of the sacrifice outlets we’re running… but also any sacrifices out opponents are either utilizing or forcing onto us. In a decent board state, the incidental triggers we get off both the these cards can keep our hand full and our opponent’s board clear of threats, since the Devil can deal damage to anything.
Trail of Crumbs is another one those pieces that can net us extra value almost on accident. If we fail to get the oven we need, it can get us an extra food that we can use to resurrect our cat. However, we can also using it to pay an extra mana whenever we sacrifice a food, for any reason, to take one of the top two cards in our deck into our hand as long as it’s a permanent. Since all of the cards in our deck are technically permanents, we will literally never miss, even if it’s just a choice between two lands.
Gilded Goose is another key piece to our deck. It is a consistent way for use to obtain Food, both from it’s ETB trigger and activated ability, which can be useful with a lot of our late game finisher cards, or to bring back our cat for just one more ping. In addition, like Paradise Druid, it’s a valuable way to fix and accelerate our mana, except at the cost of a a bit of Food.
As far as sacrifice outlets, it’s hard to deny that Korvold serves as one of the best at the top of our curve. If we have extra food or land lying around, we can easily trade it away for more power to him and an extra card in hand. Combined with his innate flying abilities, this can be enough to quickly close out a game in a few swings, or turn around a poor turn of events.
Vraska, Golgari Queen also serves as a key synergistic piece on the board. Like Korvold, we can sacrifice extra food or land we have on hand to her for cards and life. In addition, her negative ability is important removal, which we can use in order to get rid of our opponent’s low-cost artifacts, enchantments, or even planeswalkers in addition to creatures. There’s a lot of powerful card than Vraska can easily take care of the turn she comes out, which we might not have any qualms letting her die to take care of. While her ultimate is a long shot, it can easily be used to redirect aggression to her instead of us, god forbid we actually pull it off.
Liliana, Dreadhorde General is not just a powerful curve topper which can single-handedly win us the game, but she is just another synergistic piece to our ultimate game plan. Her triggered ability give us cards every time one of our creatures, like our Cauldron Familiar, dies like Midnight Reaper, but without the loss of life. In addition, she creates tokens to either build up a board or serve as sacrifice fodder to Korvold/Vraska. With her minus ability, she can kill off creatures on the opponent’s board by forcing them to make sacrifices. And while her ultimate is another long-shot like Vraska, it will be enough to end a game, since few boards can keep going when all but one land has been lost.
Lastly, as far as non-Vraska removal is concerned, we have the standard set of Murderous Riders, which you’re probably familiar with. And if the board isn’t going in our favor, we have Massacre Girl to clean up the mess.
What I like about this deck is that every piece functions so well together. Every time we sacrifice something on our board, we get something equal or greater out of it with the number of payoffs. It’s not uncommon to pop one Food token and see several triggers from multiple sources enter the stack all at once. Once the engine comes together, it’s not easy to put a stop to it.
At last, we have finished our great quest. The Kingdom of Gallowmere is safe from the evil clutches of Zarok and his undead army. Despite living life as a charlatan and fraud, utter incapable of defending himself, let alone his realm, Sir Daniel Fortesque has finally “lived” up to the legend, accomplishing in death what he failed to do in life.
Join us in recounting once more the ending of this epic adventure.
So, before we proceed, I have to issue 2 quick corrections.
And in obtaining that last Chalice, I finally show some of my favorite parts of the game. After being berated by the Gargoyles for almost all of the game, it’s such a powerful feeling to see them finally acknowledge us as a hero worthy of the title. And to commemorate our newfound status, the statue of Sir Dan has become stone, solidifying itself along with our place in the Hall of Heroes.
Should the player defeat Zarok after achieving this status, an additional scene is added to the end where Sir Dan is celebrating and frolicking with his fellows at the Hall, which you can see here:
It’s a powerful reward in the form of gratification, and a fitting end to the tale of Sir Daniel Fortesque.
As for my final thoughts, I think the team that set out to remake this game did a great job in accomplishing that task. Many of the problems that I have with the remake were problems I had with the base game with camera angles and extremely punishing platforming sections. If anything, there are improvements in that aspect with the addition of analog stick support and free moving camera in certain sections.
The updated art style and direction also does an excellent job at bringing the PS1 classic into the PS4 era. This is clearly a game aimed towards my nostalgia, and I’m not sure people unfamiliar with the PS1 game will be satisfied unless approaching it from a historical perspective. But for me, it was great to come back to one of my old favorites with a glossy new coat of paint.
Next time, we dig deeper into my nostalgia with more PS1-era platformers, with either Crash Bandicoot or Spyro the Dragon.
Standard has been broken wide open. With Oko, Thief of Crowns, Once Upon a Time, and Veil of Summer sitting comfortably on the ban list, half of the top tier competitive decks have been obliterated overnight and the field is wide open for new strategies to take over.
My plan was to bite the bullet and play Sultai Food prior to the announcement. Now that the bannings have taken effect, I figured now is the best time to give an old-school Azorius Control deck a shot. It might not seem novel, but when Veil of Summer was legal, counterspells were impossible to run, completely eliminating the strategy.
Let’s see how well we do with this decklist from MTGGoldfish.
Like any control deck, our goal is mostly to stall the game long enough for us to take over with high cost bombs and superior card draw, dealing with threats to our plans as they appear.
The easiest way to address problems, of course, is to counter them before they hit the board in the first place. To facilitate that, we have a robust suite of counter-magic. Dovin’s Veto exists to neutralize the threat of a counter war, and Absorb can help with incidental lifegain. Mystical Dispute mostly exists as an artifact of the Oko-era, where a deck like this needed a quick single-mana answer to a turn two Oko. Since this video was recorded, I swapped them out for Sinister Sabotage for both the Surveil effect and to have a counter-spell that can still function well into the late game.
In the event that something dangerous does slip our net, we do have ways of dealing with that as well. Brazen Borrower can be played as the instant, Petty Theft, to bounce a piece back to our opponent’s hand and make it vulnerable to one of our counterspells once more. And even if we lack a counter, it can disrupt their tempo to buy us some additional time.
For spot-removal, we have Prison Realm to target creatures and, importantly, planeswalkers. On top of that, the Scry 1 allows us to filter our draws ever so slightly. In terms of board clears, we have 4 copies of Time Wipe. Not only does this deal with the threat of an aggressive opponent, it also allows us to return either Brazen Borrower or one of big bombs to our hand to use their enter-the-battlefield abilities one more time.
Teferi, Time Raveler is another key piece is this area, doing everything a control deck could want from a planeswalker short of a win condition. Not only does his passive prevent our opponent from casting any spells at all during our turn, but it shuts down all of their counterspells since they can only be played at instant speed. Even though most of our spells are already instants, his +1 also gives us much more flexibility, letting us wait before we commit to casting key spells like Time Wipe. With his -3, not only can be bounce key threats off the board for tempo, or our own pieces for reuse, but we also accumulate card draw for doing so.
And as far as card draw is concerned, both Gadwick, the Wizened and Chemister’s Insight will keep our hands as full as we need them to. Although Gadwick’s triggered ability won’t come it play too often, the fact that he’s a 3/3 body can give us a way to close a game if all other options fail by swinging in turn after turn once we’ve locked down the board. In the case of Chemister’s Insight, we can transform late game land drops we no longer need into playable cards we do. While it isn’t card draw in the strict sense, Castle Vantress serves a similar purpose with it’s repeatable Scry 2.
In terms of ways we can close the game, we have several options. Our Brazen Borrowers are one such option, but another is our Cavalier of Gales. The ability to manipulate our hand when in enters-the-battlefield is nice, but more importantly it is a 5/5 flyer that can attack for a swift kill in a few turns. If we’re feeling more… insidious, we can also use Agent of Treachery and/or Mass Manipulation to rob out opponents of their big win condition and use it against them to close out the game. The agent can also be bounced back to our hand with Time Wipe, Teferi, or our Borrower to use multiple times if we need to. Barring all of that, we can use Castle Ardenvale to create enough 1/1 Humans to end the game once we’ve established control.
Some players find control boring, but it’s one of my favorite playstyles. For that reason, I have a ton of fun playing this deck and I hope you do as well.
Our bonely friend Sir Daniel Fortesque needs our help in his quest to rid the Kingdom of Gallowmere of the evil sorcerer Zarok. And as valiant heroes in our own right, who are we to refuse the call?
And where we are, things are looking positively eldritch.
While this PS4 version of the game is a marked improvement over the original, there are still problems with the base game that can’t really be solved in an HD rerelease no matter how much polish goes into it.
The Pools of the Ancient Dead are one such example. Although have a free roaming, easier to control camera improves the quality of life, it does nothing to make the platforming in this level any easier. And since the penalty for falling is the loss on an entire life bar, any jump is instantly much more precarious than it feels like it should be. It’s even worse when collecting the items we need to beat the level also erases bridges to make moving around even more difficult.
Fortunately, now that we’ve completed both that and The Lake, we shouldn’t have too many more difficult platforming locations. That’s about as bad as it ever gets.
We’re making good progress through the game, and with luck we’ll wrap up next session. Despite my griping and salt, it’s been genuinely fun to go through this game again since it’s been so long. The development team should be proud of themselves for the work they did on this project.
Last night’s EDH session was a short, but sweet one. While 2 of our number couldn’t make it due to illness and prior obligations respectively, the remaining three of us had enough time to get in two matches that left me feeling satisfied by the end of it.
The first match had me bring a new Voltron/Token/Aristocrats-y deck I built, based on Grismold, the Dreadsower, after seeing it perform during the game against Hapatra from last week. My opponents were Zada, Hedron Grinder and my friend’s Uzra, Lord High Artificer deck we affectionately call “Swordbot”.
Since my commander had the lowest CMC, and nobody was drawing into enough ramp to accelerate their mana, I was the first to get my commander online, deploying him on turn 3. On turn 4, I had begun to set my engine into motion by casting Pestilence. This derailed the Zada players plans, because they had intended to use their Goblin Rabblemaster to create an arm of tokens that could be pumped using Zada’s effect. Instead, those tokens swung in harmlessly into plant tokens to pump up Grismold. And if they weren’t blocked, I would simply pay one black mana to kill them all. Even once Urza had come online by deploying their command and equipment for the construct token, things were looking good for me.
After taking a swing at Urza as a show of force and to hopefully deal with him before he snowballed into a threat, and connecting without being blocked, I thought my victory was practically guaranteed. Then, to mount a defense, they played Phyrexian Metamorph as a copy of my Grismold, which meant they could block and kill my commander when combined with their construct. Fortunately, I had a solution that would set me back slightly, but still deal with the problem: Journey to Eternity.
Though it set me back to a base 3/3 power, I could now continue to safely swing into my big opponent while taking a couple of potshots from Zada’s more resilient forces like Guttersnipe and Dreadhorde Arcanist. That’s when Urza played Akroma’s Memorial, with the intention of setting up an impregnable defense against my Grismold with my own plant tokens. The problem with a card like that, though, is that is dies to removal, specifically my Acidic Slime. And with one last Grismold swing, it was down to a 1v1 between me and Zada.
Sadly, due to both my own Pestilence and Zada’s swings, I was hurting on life. Using 4 of my remaining 6, I cleared the board one more time hoping to draw into some of my lifegain. That didn’t come to pass, and Zada managed to take me out one turn away from my victory by swinging in with their commander, a few tokens which I had intended to chump block with a few of my own, and using a few pump spells like Brute Force and Run Amok to overpower me and win the game. It was a close and well fought match which could have gone either way.
—————————————————————
Our second and final round had me switching off to the other deck I had created for the night, a Cat tribal build starring Mirri, Weatherlight Duelist. On one of the opposing corners of the table stood the partner pair of Ikra Shidiqi, the Usurper and Ludevic, Necro-Alchemist. The other corner was taken by Pretty Fly for a Sai Guy.
The game started innocently enough. Sai was the first to get anything on the board with Chief Engineer, which would set them up nicely for turns to come. Similarly, the partners would do the same with Bloom Tender. I wouldn’t get anything on the board until turn three, with Mirri.
Once Mirri was online, I could set my gameplan into motion. While I had no blockers to stop the partners’ Varchild, Betrayer of Kjeldor, I honestly didn’t want to. The Survivor tokens would come in handy when combined with Mirri. Though they couldn’t swing back at their creator, they would help me chip away at Sai. And while that process was underway, I had managed to play Smothering Tithe to help accumulate extra mana that would prove necessary for the turns to come.
If it weren’t for Mirri, I would have been in serious danger, because the partners were starting to get on board with Yidris, Maelstrom Wielder and Wasitora, Nekoru Queen. Were it not for Rogue’s Passage, I would have been unable to safely swing into their board.
And yet, the Sai player had an even more impressive board state. Using the convoke ability of Chief Engineer, Sai’s own ability, and cards like Efficient Construction and Chief of the Foundry, they had amassed a truly impressive army of thopters. Throwing in Sharding Sphinx for more thopters and Padeem, Consul of Innovation for hexproof just made the army even more formidable. Were in not for Mirri, I would have been in deep trouble. As it stood, the partners were Sai’s only real target, so they directed the majority of their aggression in that direction…
…which was exactly how I was hoping things would turn out. Once the partners had been dealt with, I set out on my own grizzly work. With no mana to spend or cards left to play for my remaining opponent, I played Austere Command to destroy their artifacts along with both Sai and the Chief Engineer. With Unbreakable Formation, I was able to both protect and enhance my board in the process, using up all of my treasures in the maneuver. In truth, I had the combo in my hand since the first turn, but since Sai was doing all the heavy lifting for me, I gladly allowed them to build up their armies.
No cards left in hand, and their board destroyed, leaving me completely free to swing in, Sai quickly surrendered. I won with a Cat tribal deck despite only having played a single cat the whole game.
Both decks performed as well as I had hoped they would, and I’m happy to see that. I don’t usually run decks that focus so heavily on swinging in, so this was a nice change of pace.
It’s been a while since we’ve stepped foot into the Arena, and it’s looking less like a place to do battle and more like a ballroom. Then again, I suppose a duel can be thought of like a dance, both contestants moving to their own rhythm.
Join me for a tale as old as time, song as old as rhyme… Dance of the Manse.
That’s right. We’re in Esper colors, and having a ball.
You can find the decklist here.
Now that Field of the Dead has been banned in Standard, and Oko, Thief of Crowns has taken its place as the dominant force in the meta, I figured we should give some other strategies a try. And early on, when Eldraine first released, this was the deck that caught my interesting. Admittedly, there are better versions of this deck these days, better equipped to handle the Oko meta, but this is the first version of the build I saw and built up to.
This deck revolves around two key cards: Dance of the Manse, from which it gets its name, and Doom Foretold, which does a fantastic job of removing threats on the board if set up properly. As long as we have permanents to sacrifice to it, we can keep it around long enough to neutralize our opponent’s board and then take cards out of hand directly.
For the reason, we run playsets of cheap 2-drop Artifacts like Golden Egg and Guild Globe. Both of them draw us a card when we play them, which can help us to work through our deck to arrive at the key pieces we need. In addition, we can sacrifice them to fix our mana in a pinch. The Golden Egg can even be consumed for extra health if we’re in our last legs.
More importantly, we can sacrifice both of them to Doom Foretold to keep in around as it slowly eats away at the key pieces our opponent has out. Because it specifies and non-land, non-token permanent, the food tokens Oko creates won’t be able to save him from us. Once we’ve sacrificed so many of our permanents and deal with our opponent’s pieces, then we use Dance of the Manse to revive all of our artifacts and enchantments as 4/4s and end them game in a few large attacks. Oath of Kaya fits neatly into strategy as well, with a powerful ETB that doubles as both removal and lifegain while serving as a potential sacrifice to Doom Foretold.
Teferi, Time Reveler has several powerful functions in this deck as well. His passive ability prevents opponent’s from casting counterspells, or anything else during your turn, which protects your plays and makes it easier to tap out for that big Dance of the Manse. But even before we get to that point, we can use his -3 to bounce one of our artifacts, like that lone Wishclaw Talisman or Oath of Kaya, back to our hand to be replayed. And with his +1, have the flexibility of casting some of our board clears like Kaya’s Wrath and Planar Cleansing on our opponent’s turn, and choose to instead dump our mana into a Dance right before it’s our turn to suddenly swing for game.
To round it out, cards like Murderous Rider and Thought Erasure are early game removal and Dovin’s Veto can be a powerful counterspell in a pinch. Legion’s End, while a leftover from the days of Field of the Dead’s reign, can still be used to take care of tokens, but it’s smarter to replace it with another Doom Foretold or something these days.
Lastly, while the mana base isn’t much to write home about, I should point out the lone Castle Vantress, whose Scry ability and be useful on our off turns. Not necessary, but could be help in a pinch.
And that’s the deck. I like this kind of control. Unlike a more classic counter deck with tons of counterspells and removal leading to be big win-con, this deck controls the game more deliberately, by constantly forcing our opponent to make sacrifices. Give a version of this deck a shot if you’re able to, and I’m sure you’ll also adore it.
