Aetherlich
This deck came about as a result of my burning desire to become a lich.
First and foremost, we need to break down the three available Lich effects and what they actually do. They’re pretty drastically different in some ways, so we need to understand their subtleties before we can get into why I chose the other cards you see in this deck to support them.
Lich Effects
Understanding the Lich effects is the most important part of learning how to play this deck. They each have their own set of characteristics that make them behave subtly different than the others in the way they interact with the other pieces of this deck.
Lich
As Lich enters the battlefield, you lose life equal to your life total.
This is the only Lich effect that changes your life total. This means we have to be pretty careful deploying it, because even if we can avoid the downside of losing the game if it leaves play, we’ll still be at 0 life.
You don't lose the game for having 0 or less life.
Important to note here that you can lose the game for other reasons – namely infect damage, commander damage, someone else winning the game (via alternate win conditions like Laboratory Maniac), loss conditions like Door to Nothingness, or drawing from an empty library.
If you would gain life, draw that many cards instead.
This is a replacement effect. Once Lich is in play and your life total is at 0, life gain effects that would modify your life total don’t modify your life total at all.
Whenever you're dealt damage, sacrifice that many nontoken permanents. If you can't, you lose the game.
This is a triggered effect. You will actually lose life and go to a negative life total if you take damage or lose life. Once you’re at 0 life, you can’t pay life for anything because you don’t have life to pay. It’s also worth noting that this only triggers on damage, not loss of life. This is going to be very important for some of the card choices later on.
When Lich is put into a graveyard from the battlefield, you lose the game.
This is a trigger that rarely resolves. State-based actions get checked before a player would get priority and before triggers go on the stack. Because Lich starts you off at 0 and allows you to lose life but doesn’t allow you to gain life, you’re usually going to be at 0 or less life when this hits the bin. The upside is that you can exile Lich or bounce it to your hand and still live if you manage to end up at a positive life total before SBAs are checked, which is possible with this list.
Nefarious Lich
Notably, Nefarious Lich doesn’t set your life total to 0 as it enters the battlefield. This means there’s a slightly smaller risk involved in rolling this one out.
If you would be dealt damage, remove that many cards in your graveyard from the game instead. If you can't, you lose the game.
You have to be really careful about this one. If you want to get more cards to your graveyard to be able to exile them, you have to do it before taking damage. You won’t get priority between taking damage and losing the game. The upside is that this actually replaces the damage, as opposed to letting the damage happen as it does with Lich. Similar to Lich, though, this only happens with damage and not with life loss.
If you would gain life, draw that many cards instead.
This is a replacement effect, identical to the OG Lich.
When Nefarious Lich leaves the battlefield, you lose the game.
This one is a trigger, but its condition cares about leaving the battlefield as opposed to hitting the graveyard like with Lich. This one is tougher to work around, but you likely won’t be at a negative life total when the trigger condition is satisfied so you’ll at least get a chance to respond to the trigger.
Finally, Nefarious Lich is the only Lich effect out of the three that doesn’t prevent you from losing the game in some form or fashion. If your opponents can get you to 0 life via life loss or setting your life total to 0 somehow (like, uh, Tree of Perdition and Turn to Frog, I guess?) then you will still lose the game.
Lich’s Mastery
Hexproof
This one word makes Lich’s Mastery worth the extra 2 mana. Yowza. This drastically reduces the number of cards that can deal with Lich’s Mastery once it’s on the battlefield. If you watched Episode 3 of The Spike Feeders, you’ll know exactly what one of those cards is.
You can't lose the game.
Can’t lose. Full stop. This opens up a huge list of cards that Lich’s Mastery combos with.
Whenever you gain life, draw that many cards.
This is a trigger, not a replacement effect! This is extremely important when it comes to a few key cards in this list.
Whenever you lose life, for each 1 life you lost, exile a permanent you control or a card from your hand or graveyard.
Also a trigger. This one gives you a ton of flexibility when it comes to keeping Lich’s Mastery in play. It also gives you an opportunity to respond to this trigger, as well as the trigger that causes you to lose the game (provided you’re at a positive life total when this hits the graveyard), which is super important for certain win conditions in this deck. Important to note that this triggers on life loss and not damage.
When Lich's Mastery leaves the battlefield, you lose the game.
Because both the life loss and life gain effects are triggers, you might be at a negative life total or not after Lich’s Mastery leaves the game. If you are, the SBA will kill you unless you’ve got another effect that prevents you from losing. If you aren’t, you’ll have an opportunity to respond to the trigger.
Minimizing and Avoiding the Downsides
Lich effects tend to be really difficult to work around. In broad strokes, these are the pieces I've devoted to doing so:
Not Losing
Well this is the obvious one, right? Running this many effects that lose you the game makes me nervous, and it should make you nervous, too. This package is devoted to not just flat out losing:
Platinum Angel
Angel's Grace
Stifle
Trickbind
Summary Dismissal
Teferi's Protection
Stifle and Trickbind, and Summary Dismissal are really useful for dealing with "lose the game" triggers that Lich and Lich's Mastery have. This means you can get rid of them via Auratog, Faith Healer, or Righteous Confluence. You can also counter the ability that triggers on life loss if you want to avoid having to sacrifice permanents or exile things.
Angel's Grace is a little more situational. Because Lich sets you to 0 life, it won't actually prevent you from losing life and going to negative values. Angel's Grace is worded to replace any damage that would take you from a life total greater than 1 to a life total below 1. Damage that would take you from below 1 to a life total lower than that happen as usual, so they'll still cause the effects that happen when you take damage or lose life. The upside here is that there's additional "can't lose the game" text that will give you until the end of your turn to close the game out.
Finally, we've got Sundial of the Infinite. No discussion about mitigating triggered downsides is complete without including our trusty Sundial. This lets you either avoid the discard/exile clauses from the various Lich effects or lets you avoid the "lose the game" triggers. Note that this doesn't work with Nefarious Lich because losing the game happens as a result of the damage you take and can't be responded to.
Preventing Damage
Ideally, if the game's going our way we won't have to deal with the "lose the game" situations that these Lich effects can create. We do this by including a package of cards that are designed to prevent their damage and life loss effects from occurring at all.
Delaying Shield
Solitary Confinement
Phyrexian Unlife
Worship
Island Sanctuary
Transcendence
Sundial of the Infinite
Delaying Shield is probably the best card to fill this role. It just straight up converts damage to life loss, avoiding the downsides or both Lich and Nefarious Lich. Lich's Mastery's downside triggers on life loss, but at least this gives us a bit of time and a way to pay mana to avoid exiling a few things. Delaying Shield also interacts favourably with Solemnity, as Solemnity prevents the counters from being placed so there's nothing to pay for on your upkeep. If you take a lot of damage but don't have Solemnity out and you don't want to lose life on your upkeep, you can also sacrifice Delaying Shield to Auratog or Faith Healer before the upkeep trigger happens.
Solitary Confinement is great with all three Lich effects because it straight up prevents all damage that would be dealt to you. Once a Lich effect is in play, it's usually not a problem satisfying the discard on upkeep, and skipping your draw step doesn't really matter.
Phyrexian Unlife's role in the deck is twofold. First, it changes the result of damage from life loss to poison counters, which avoids the downside of Lich's Mastery. Lich's Mastery also prevents you from losing the game due to having 10 or more poison counters, so it's a match made in heaven. Phyrexian Unlife also combos with Solemnity as a soft lock that will hold your life total where it is as soon as you dip below zero.
Island Sanctuary is simply in the deck as a pillowfort piece that prevents us from taking incidental combat damage if we need to stall a little bit. Peacekeeper could also fill this role very effectively.
Transcendence is in a bit of an odd place. I play it because it's a really weird card but it doesn't really interact as favourably as the other pieces in this section. The main problem is that OG Lich is the only one of the three that will reasonably keep you below 20 life due to the fact that it sets you to 0 as it enters the battlefield. Transcendence doesn't work with Nefarious Lich because Nefarious Lich prevents damage from occurring, meaning Transcendence's trigger condition won't occur either. Transcendence also doesn't really work with Lich's Mastery at all, due to the fact that Lich's Mastery's life gain effect is a trigger and not a replacement. Next, Transcendence's ability is a trigger and not a replacement effect. The only upside is that when you're playing with Lich, for each damage you take you sacrifice a permanent and draw 2 cards. If this is your turn it's usually fine, because you can generally get more permanents in play if you're consistently drawing cards. If it's not your turn, though, your only hope is to draw into one of the stifle effects listed in the previous section.
Burst Life Gain, Burst Card Draw
Children of Korlis
Gray Merchant of Asphodel
Martyr of Sands
Vizkopa Guildmage
Righteous Confluence
Eternity Vessel
Tainted Sigil
Words of Worship
There are a lot of ways to gain big chunks of life, but I had to be pretty picky because this deck tries to do a lot of different things. Children of Korlis and Tainted Sigil are probably the best pieces here - especially since they work really well with OG Lich. Lich sets your life total to zero, and you can immediately activate either of these effects to gain back whatever life you had before Lich took it all away, often resulting in a few dozen cards drawn.
Gray Merchant is a really nice piece because of how many black pips you're likely to have in play when you go off. Even just having Lich or Nefarious Lich in play is enough to give you 6 devotion to black when Gary hits the field, which is good for 18 cards drawn if you have 3 opponents. You can actually put both Gray Merchant and your Lich effect of choice directly into play by sacrificing Academy Rector to Eldritch Evolution.
Righteous Confluence just straight up draws you 15 cards if you have a Lich effect in play. If you've got a Stifle effect to play alongside it you can draw 10, exile your own Lich effect, and Stifle the "lose the game" trigger. This can be a pretty nice line for when you need to ditch the Lich before you can win.
Eternity Vessel is absolutely absurd with fetchlands. Late in the game, I generally like to play my fetches but wait to crack them just in case I draw into it.
Words of Worship basically just reads "1: Draw 5 cards" and you can activate it whenever you draw a card. This is one of the most impactful cards you can draw in this deck in the mid- to late-game.
Finishers
There are multiple ways to leverage our Lich effects to win the game.
Vizkopa Guildmage
Psychosis Crawler
Aetherflux Reservoir
Vizkopa Guildmage pulls dual duty as a way to draw cards off your Liches as well as a way to finish people off once you're able to make a ton of mana or gain a ton of life. If you're not familiar with the card, you can activate its first ability more than once, and the activations stack. Pumping 12 mana into this guy and gaining 10 life is enough to win at most tables.
Psychosis Crawler finishes the game really effectively once you've got a Lich effect out alongside one of the burst life gain options listed above. Remember that OG Lich sets your life to 0, so if you were at 30 life before, Tainted Sigil or Children of Korlis will draw you 30 cards alongside a Lich effect, which will cause Psychosis Crawler to deal 30 damage to each of your opponents.
Aetherflux Reservoir is probably one of the coolest ways to win the game in this deck. The life gain trigger off of casting spells draws us cards. If you're going off with Lich's Mastery, you'll actually gain the life, which is great if you intend to activate Aetherflux Reservoir to kill people. With the other two Lich effects it's a little trickier. Generally speaking, you can play it like a regular storm turn but you'll have to sandbag as many instants as you can until you've gotten the storm count up to 14 or 15. At that point, you can get rid of your Lich (either by a sac outlet or spot removal), and respond to the "lose the game" trigger by casting your instants to gain life. Once you've gained enough life to activate the Aetherflux Reservoir, you can gun down your opponents before the "lose the game" trigger resolves.
If you can't get rid of your Lich for whatever reason and you're going off with Lich's Mastery, you can sometimes deal with the life loss trigger by creating burst life gain to offset it. As an example, if you're activating Aetherflux Reservoir (which would require you to exile 50 cards from your hand/board/graveyard), you can activate Children of Korlis in response to the Lich's Mastery trigger to draw 50 cards in response, giving you enough cards to discard.
I can't get into all of the different lines, but if you have a good concept of which effects are replacements and which are triggers, and have a good concept of the order they'll occur, you can usually cobble together a winning line giving the cards available to you.
The Mana Base
This is a budgetless deck, but you'll probably notice that there are very few shocks in the landbase. I tried to strike a reasonable balance between being able to satisfy my coloured mana requirements at all points in the game, and not relying too heavily on lands that will cause damage and trigger the Lich downsides unnecessarily. The fetches are an exception to this, because - even though this is mostly white and black - it's still a 4-colour deck and we have to try to fix as well as we can. They also have the really positive synergy with Eternity Vessel, so it's an easy trade-off.
I dealt with this by focusing mostly on black, white, and green. Green exists in the landbase to help me hit mana dorks in the early game. The deck has a hard white skew to take advantage of the enchantment suite to generate big mana via Serra's Sanctum. The black requirements are generally satisfied by some combination of Cabal Coffers, Urborg, Tomb of Yawgmoth, and Dark Ritual.
I also only had room for a few pieces of mana acceleration, so I focused on the talismans and signets that would give me consistent access to black and white, and green wherever possible.
Conclusion
This is - far and away - my favourite deck to play. It's weird, complex, challenging, and it can hold its own in decently tuned metas. It rides a really fine line between winning and losing, and it's got a whole load of decisions
to make that reward rules knowledge and encourages taking calculated risks.
