Heavily inspired by the awesome Painful Gifts deck by fallatus but my own spin.
Based around turning the downsides of
Hunted Phantasm
,
Swan Song
,
Forbidden Orchard
,
Mercy Killing
and
Rapid Hybridization
(your opponents get given tokens) into all upside. This is done via
Suture Priest
and
Illness in the Ranks
.
The first change I made away from Painful Gifts was to replace the array of token hate/removal with
Illness in the Ranks
. The majority of tokens "gifted" your opponent are 1/1s so this card completely nullifies and advantage to your opponent from tapping
Forbidden Orchard
or having
Hunted Phantasm
ETB. The tokens still enter the battlefield triggering
Suture Priest
but they then immediately die.
The more consistent token-death made the inclusion of
Twilight Drover
prudent. Although it's activated ability is made considerably less useful by
Illness in the Ranks
, it is bound to get big pretty fast providing you with a decent blocker or attacker.
The synergy with tokens dying made me consider
Akroan Horse
and
Genesis Chamber
.
Hunted Phantasm
's evasion means that the
Akroan Horse
is of no real advantage to my opponent but they will loose a life for the privilege. The soldiers given to me will die immediately, but their entrance and exit provide me with 1 life and a counter on
Twilight Drover
respectively. I decided that this was not sufficient to justify the 4 CMC except in multiplayer situations where the ability to give all-but-one of my opponents a token (and therefore a life-loss) each turn is pretty useful.
Genesis Chamber
is sweet as it doubles the life gained from flickering my creatures and doubles the damage lost when my opponent(s) play a creature. It also means more counters for
Twilight Drover
.
The original deck ran
Cloudshift
s to flicker
Hunted Phantasm
causing the targetted opponent to loose 5 life for each
Suture Priest
on the field. I decided to run a full playset of
Cloudshift
and add
Turn to Mist
to do double duty as counters to targeted removal against the deck's key creatures.
Turn to Mist
does triple-duty as it can also removal any token permanently from play.
Realising that flickering
Twilight Drover
to protect it was not ideal I looked at other ways of protecting the deck's key creatures. Seeing how I was playing 6 spirits already I decided to utilise the almighty power of
Drogskol Captain
and also added 2
Wall of Reverence
s since they would synergize nicely with the size of
Twilight Drover
and also comfortably block the Bird and Spirit tokens I would be "gifting" to my opponent(s).
Mercy Killing
is a side against decks with fatties.
Intangible Virtue
is a side against the mirror :P . More seriously, it could be interesting in multi-player combined with
Akroan Horse
as you get a 1/1 soldier each turn for every horse in play, but your opponents do not.
