I haven't yet had a chance to test Cephalid Coliseum , unfortunately.

card:Sensei's Divining Top works well. I can't imagine the player who says it doesn't. Especially at the high level of competition, where Damia is usually an insta-win if she survives, Top allows me to stabilize on the first few turns. With nine fetches and plenty of tutors, Top is even more useful. I can sift through a lot of cards per turn to find the best ones available in the given situation.

I think a lot of the players who don't like Top are probably not using Damia in a hypercompetitive environment. They are likely used to Damia sticking around and not winning the game immediately, so they find Top to be obsolete once she's up and running.

I completely understand. In what I'm playing I'm only seeing Damia live to the end of a turn if I'm lucky, so I end up resorting to flashing her in on the end of an opponent's turn.

That's typically what I do. I don't tie up seven mana in her if I can't flashcast her. It's a waste of mana that could be left open for countermagic.

I completely agree. At least I know I'm doing it right. Ha.

about the cephalid coleseum, take back what i said about the getting to the threshold, it is actually quite easy with this deck i found out!

why card:Nature's Lore? isn't Farseek better?

Farseek can find any of my duals, but it forces whatever I fetch to come in tapped.

oh, didn't realize that natures lore is untapped.

Yep, same as Skyshroud Claim . That's why they're so good in EDH. They can find duals and bring them in untapped so you still have mana to work with after casting a ramp spell. It's especially useful to find a UG dual so you can ramp directly into countermagic for the turn cycle.

Also, the only duals that card:Nature's Lore/Skyshroud Claim can't fetch are Watery Grave and Underground Sea and they aren't ALL that important when you can fetch the others.

like always, you have each card planned out; amazing! have you ever wanted to tutor for Underground Sea /Watery Grave but couldn't with card:Nature's Lore/Skyshroud Claim ?

Maybe once or twice, but I typically need only BG or maybe BGG in the early half of the game. The fetches make it easy to find U/X duals to satisfy those color needs, and I most often get Tropical Island or Breeding Pool with card:Nature's Lore.

have you thought about putting in a Standstill? its a great political card and can draw you three cards which for 1U is pretty good.

I'm not really impressed by Standstill . This deck is meant to actively ramp in the early turns, then combo out at the end. Standstill would force me to play slower, especially against draw-go turtle decks.

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I wish there was an EDH tourney coming up. If anyone knows of anything in the Delmarva tristate (or even in Jersey/south PA), let me know. I'd love to get this deck back into the brackets.

I still need to acquire the Chromatic Lantern , card:Nature's Claim, Cavern of Souls , and Cephalid Coliseum for this list. Perhaps I'll use some holiday money on that.

Sorry, i'm from Los angeles so i wouldn't know :(. Just out of curiosity, who is the co-designer?

Death Diamond from MTGS. I know him personally, and we have plenty of playtesting experience in the mirror and in local tourneys.

I know things happen in NY from time to time and down here in DC an amazing store has started doing EDH leagues which are mini pod tournaments. So my question is, why card:Nature's Claim instead of something like Krosan Grip ? Is it honestly all about mana cost? Because when I was running lesser removal, well it'd be countered. Split second is a wonderful thing though.

Krosan Grip is certainly a powerful card, but it's far too mana intensive. I constantly found K-Grip hogging the mana that I needed for counterspells, and it was a consistent problem for me, especially during control matchups. Even though K-Grip has a clear advantage with split second, it's hard to beat a 1-drop relic breaker.

this might seem crazy but in a multiplayer setting wouldn't exsanguinate (scars of mirrodin, uncommon) be really good

it would only serve as an infinite win con and not very flexible (i think that was epochs reasoning).

@JGreen13: Exsanguinate was initially in the list, but I dropped it for the reason m12fox recalls. It's good as a win condition, but it isn't really good for anything else. It's a dead draw until I get a combo going, and I can win with several utility cards that serve as both support and win conditions. I decided the redundancy and extra out just weren't worth the limited applicability.

How often do you use Bribery in your meta? With as few creatures as you say you experience going up against and the higher mana cost, it almost makes sense to swap it for something else.

Maybe something lime card:Mirri's Guile?

I thought about dropping Bribery a few times, but it often allows me to steal key creatures. Taking an opponent's Seedborn Muse or Consecrated Sphinx is a hard kick to the nether regions.

card:Mirri's Guile is good, but it isn't as flexible as card:Sensei's Divining Top, and I'm not convinced the redundancy is worth giving something else up for.

I've been playing with the deck a lot lately, and I have to say, what happens if someone takes out your combo? I know you are supposed to wait until you have a situation that is impossible to break your combo, but I had to spill my combo out a couple turns early because my opponent's combo was going to blow up the turn after...and I was unlucky enough not to have a counterspell or tutor in hand...