This deck is a midrange strategy designed to take advantage of Journey to Eternity
to grind out high amounts of card advantage in the lategame. A fairly standard BGx package forms the early disruption suite intended to help the deck reach a stable position from which it can begin to fire all its engines, comprising Fatal Push, Collective Brutality, Thoughtseize, Abrupt Decay and Maelstrom Pulse. Awkward draws with wrong proportions of expensive and cheap cards are smoothed over by Brutality and Liliana of the Veil; Jace, the Mind Sculptor, assuming a controlled board, can also smooth the transition from mid to late game.
The high-end payoff cards in this list for Atzal, Cave of Eternity are Hornet Queen and Grave Titan. Lower along the curve are Acidic Slime, Thragtusk, Eternal Witness and Ravenous Chupacabra, which are powerful and can just be cast for value; paired later in the game with a reanimation engine, however, they can become extremely disruptive and almost impossible to deal with.
One of the traditional difficulties with attempting to set up such synergies is drawing the wrong pieces in the wrong numbers. Cards like Liliana of the Veil, Jace, the Mind Sculptor and Collective Brutality, strong enough standalone, serve the further purpose of smoothing out those draws, turning what would otherwise be dead draws into useful effects.
Kalitas, Traitor of Ghet and Courser of Kruphix provide a cost efficient board presence and recurring lifegain. These are the cards that buy the time the deck needs to catch up with faster aggressive or tempo-oriented strategies (Kalitas, incidentally, also exiles opposing creatures, a functionality not often found outside of white), and can generate enough value to win the game on their own in conjunction with the cheap interaction.
This is a very mana hungry deck. Sakura-Tribe Elder, in conjunction with Courser of Kruphix and Search for Azcanta
, ensures that the deck consistently reaches a state in which it can cast its powerful spells and set up its unending loops. Tribe Elder is also one of the easiest ways of triggering Journey into Eternity, a transformation that if successful can lead to between 6-8 mana on turn 4.
Several maindeck and sideboard slots are flexible, and will be updated as the meta shifts and new cards are released. Nonetheless, barring the printing of cards so powerful that the cards in this list are rendered obsolete, given that this deck employs a powerful strategy that leaves a lot of room for flexibility and innovation, it should always be able to come prepared with the right tools for almost any situation.
