This is an deck designed to be played in the position of emperor in emperor games. Basically the idea is to gain a large amount of mana, creatures, and/or life, and then pull out a ton of tokens and perhaps a boardwipe or two.
The most powerful combo in the deck is Mirror Entity and Joraga Treespeaker or
Sachi, Daughter of Seshiro
. When Treespeaker is at level 5, or Sachi is out, you can pay one mana for Mirror Entity's ability, giving EVERY creature you control the ability to tap for two green mana, as they are now all both considered elves and shamans. You can then proceed to use as many creatures as you want to make all of them massive, every-type, creatures. With Intangible Virtue on the field, you can even use attacking creatures for mana to dump into the entity, which is pretty much game if your opponents have no answers for it.
Essence Warden is there for the extra lifegain on a creature that also happens to be both an elf and a shaman. For this reason, I use them over Soul Warden, since they usually end up providing some nice ramp via Joraga Treespeaker and
Sachi, Daughter of Seshiro
.
Verduran Enchantress is here beause I don't really NEED Argothian Enchantress. Though the latter would work a bit better due to its lower cost. Basically to speed the deck up since it runs plenty of enchantments to draw off of. I wish they were elves, but you can't have everything unfortunately =/
Awakening Zone is ramp and token gen, very reliable and always useful. Luminarch Ascension is also for token gen, albeit very powerful token gen. As an emperor, this card should always go off if it's played early game.
Doubling Season is obvious, but it interacts with everything from levelling up to adding counters to Luminarch Ascension.
Elspeth Tirel is for lifegain, token gen, and boardwipe as a win condition. With Doubling Season out, she can immediately use her -8, or go for -2 to spawn six soldier tokens.
Storm Herd here to make use of the life gain potential of this deck. Storm Herd can easily get 30+ pegasi out even without a Doubling Season.
Dryad Arbor is here just to up the creature count for Elspeth Tirel and give a bit of extra life from Essence Warden. I've also found it works nicely at dodging certain boardwipes, such as Elspeth's.
Martial Coup is boardwipe and token gen, as well as a pretty handy mana dump.
Eldrazi Monument and
Emmara Tandris
are token protection. Emmara is also both an elf AND a shaman, which is very convenient... And yes, I never thought I'd EVER be using Tandris, but she works here astonishingly well.
Anyway, that's the deck so far. Probably still has quite a few changes to go through before it reaches its final version though.
