See the Testing Notes section for updates for the time being. I won't be slamming the changelog with changes while I go through a new round of testing with HOU out. The deck will be in flux until I work out how to get it back on track.
Random note: Thanks everyone who's been viewing and upvoting the deck, extra thanks to those who felt it was worth adding to their own folders! The deck's hit 1k views already :O I'll keep working on it and try to make it as good as possible without breaking the wallet.
This deck is rotation-proof and contains no cards which will rotate out when Ixalan is released.
Bear in mind that because of the budget, a lot of cards such as Fatal Push and Metallic Mimic have been omitted, but that isn't to say they wouldn't work. The build might be slightly different with them, but they are very valid choices for the deck.
The deck operates in the aggro-midrange territory, utilising its hand disruption and removal toolkit to keep the opponent on their toes, and hopefully letting you pull ahead or outright ruin their tempo. You don't really want to try going wide, instead relying on using 2-3 creatures on the board at a time because it's hard pressed to recover if you get swept.
It has a tendency towards lower power creatures with the only real power creep being a
Syndicate Trafficker
that survives and gets big by eating Servo Schematic and servo tokens. It also suffers from a lack of on demand draw power. As I've already said, it doesn't really go wide, nor does it want to try. You're trying to sacrifice artifacts to
Syndicate Trafficker
and anything expendable to Bontu the Glorified to get your clear threat in, while using others to just push whatever you can.
Midnight Entourage and Glint-Sleeve Siphoner give you some draw power, though you could just replace the Midnight Entourage with draw spells like Live Fast if you preferred. In fact, it might work better at this stage with
Demon of Dark Schemes
on the main.
The aforementioned Bontu the Glorified also exists to give you a better clock when you resolve her. She can easily eat through an opponent's life total when combined with the deathtouch chump blocks and removal suite to prevent your opponent from blocking her constantly.
Gonti, Lord of Luxury is a key player in the deck, allowing you to hopefully steal a key component of your opponent's deck off the top, or perhaps just a good answer to a potential problem. There are times when he'll whiff, but that's why you have 3.
Never
is a flexible removal spell that doesn't have any drawbacks other than sorcery speed. For the effect - killing either a planeswalker or creature - I feel that the mana cost is perfectly reasonable. The aftermath is also good for fueling Bontu the Glorified while removing cards your opponent needs in the grave for a Torrential Gearhulk or Delirium or really just any reason to have them there. If there's no particular card they need in the grave, just remove something of your choice, get a 2/2 zombie to either feed to Bontu the Glorified or swing with next turn.
In an ideal world, you would have Fatal Push instead of
Never
but we just can't afford it on a budget.
Skysovereign, Consul Flagship
is a backup plan for when Bontu the Glorified has nothing to eat or you just have a
Syndicate Trafficker
or Midnight Entourage to go over with. It's not ideal now that Abrade exists, but it's a risk we have to take because there's no other super good 5 drops which help us and won't rotate.
The deck's primary concern isn't actually control but "go-wide" token decks like Hapatra, Vizier of Poisons and Oketra's Monument decks which are difficult to deal with. Control decks give you problems, but you can carefully bait/overwhelm their removal suite to give yourself an opening to cast something you need to stick. As for token decks,
Demon of Dark Schemes
is a decent finisher and it helps blow up tokens if they haven't hit every servo lord in existence.
The secondary concern that I run into fairly frequently is
Approach of the Second Sun
. If they resolve one, you're hard pushed to finish them off before they can reach the second. The only way you can really beat them is with a well timed Gonti, Lord of Luxury to steal their
Approach of the Second Sun
as it comes into the top 4, or by using Lost Legacy game 2/3 to remove that win-con entirely.
Yahenni's Expertise is for sweeping away smaller creatures. The deck has a tendency to shred its own board down to 1-2 creatures, so you need a way to fix that problem.
Demon of Dark Schemes
was tested but is too slow.
Dispossess removes any key artifacts your opponent might have. This is great for stripping Torrential Gearhulk as the most likely example.
Lost Legacy eliminates planeswalkers and other key cards. I'm really unsure I can change this out any time soon because there are decks where one of my only ways to beat them is to remove their win-cons.
Trespasser's Curse ruins aggressive decks that throw creatures down quickly, giving you either an advantage on life or less of a gap if you fall behind.
Liliana's Defeat as a one of to help butcher PW control decks if they show up in your local.
Doomfall is a good switch in vs red decks which are heavy on Abrade which makes Aethersphere Harvester a 3 mana liability. It's also generally a decent 3 mana modal spell.
Hour of Glory
is for handling god decks if they persist in being a problem. It can also be used to tackle Archangel Avacyn
and other flash threats. It's a flexible slot which can be given to Yahenni's Expertise if you need the sweeper more often than a spot exile.
Rush of Vitality was unable to outperform Lay Bare the Heart. Deck was updated to reflect the HOU changes that filled the hole in the side after Lay Bare the Heart was shifted back to the main for the umpteenth time. You can still run Bontu's Monument if you like to play the drain game, but it doesn't feel as impactful as having the extra removal and removing cards from the opponent's hand. The deck does still struggle against Turbo-Fog/
Approach of the Second Sun
decks because they just lock you out. Chances are if you haven't won by Turn 10, you're in a bad spot/lost already and you should go to game 2 if you aren't on the cusp of winning. Game 2 you can side in Lost Legacy and remove their primary win-con. There are some who run Torrential Gearhulk as a secondary, so Dispossess might be worth siding in too just to be safe. At worst, you bluff with it.
Planning to test Endless Sands at 2 copies as a means of reusing Gonti, Lord of Luxury or saving key players from exile effects. Also considering siding Liliana's Defeat assuming it hits any planeswalker with black mana in their cost, because it's looking like people might start building Grixis Control with Nicol Bolas, God-Pharaoh
15/7/17: Deck needs to go through another round of testing. The advent of Abrade might mean there's too much artifact hate floating around to sideboard Aethersphere Harvester and
Skysovereign, Consul Flagship
. Servo Schematic is fine because you'll still get a fresh servo out of it. Servos are fine because it means they're burning removal for tokens. Might just have to side more hate cards and even get rid of Crook of Condemnation. The current choices of cards to consider siding instead of the artifacts are Liliana, Death's Majesty, Liliana's Defeat and Yahenni's Expertise.
16/7/17 Update: Testing so far is showing that Liliana's Defeat doesn't get sided in that often. Crook of Condemnation might be good for the first ability rather than the exile all. If it's on the table, Torrential Gearhulk can suddenly lose its target in the grave for the low cost of 1 mana. Aethersphere Harvester is still too valuable. It can go over control sideboards which bring in cards like Thing in the Ice
and helps keep you healthy.
Skysovereign, Consul Flagship
is too difficult to crew in this deck, and paying 5 mana to be neutered by an Abrade just sucks for any deck, so sadly it loses its spot. Currently trying out Midnight Entourage as a bandaid fix for the generally low power of the deck.
Skysovereign, Consul Flagship
is much easier to crew with Midnight Entourage in the deck now, and might not be terrible as a 2 of in the side. You'd have to play carefully around R/x/y decks which will likely main/side a playset of abrade, but if you can resolve it, it's now easier to crew. As a cost to run Midnight Entourage, the deck is a slightly higher average CMC, putting it more in line with probably a transformative midrange than an aggro deck. 24 lands should still be fine since it's mono-colour and I'm not often suffering for mana.
Testing of Ifnir Deadlands and Sunscorched Desert proved them to be exceptionally useful if you had to play a control game instead of being the aggressor. Unfortunately, it also starved the mana base, resulting in only one main cast per turn at best instead of being able to accelerate as the game progressed. Ifnir Deadlands might be better for a control deck than this. At best, you could maybe run Sunscorched Desert as a 1 damage ping to help push your opponent down a little faster.
Lay Bare the Heart still relegated to sideboard filler status. Might never be in the 75 again at this rate. Doomfall being modal AND exile is nice to have. The flexibility is wonderful. Yes, giving your opponent choice sucks on the board removal, but it still removes a problematic body.
Yahenni, Undying Partisan
, no matter how much I love the card, was underperforming so badly that I removed her entirely. Put in the 2
Demon of Dark Schemes
as a late-game beater, went up to 25 Swamps just to help consistently hit those land drops.
Initial testing of
Demon of Dark Schemes
has been good. It's a solid finisher for when your opponents go wide, combined with Bontu the Glorified already on the table, it's a pretty vicious way to clean up shop then push through some damage. The 25 lands are helping to meet the mana requirements where you often need to treat Bontu as a 5 CMC off the bat just to get your scry, and then after that you're "refueling" her with 2-3 CMC cards.
Testing showed Midnight Entourage was more frequently used as a salt kill (opponent burns it to kill you with the 1 damage) than it was useful. Shortly after making the change, I remembered that Prophetic Prism exists and synergises better with the deck.
1/7/17: Made small changes to mainboard including the removal of Live Fast, the addition of
Vengeful Rebel
and some number tweaks. Fidgeted with sideboard.
2/7/17: Squeezed in 2 Bontu the Glorified since she gives the deck a nice 5 turn clock if you get her down. Also got hold of Metalspinner's Puzzleknot to give a shot instead of maybe the Supernatural Stamina though it would hurt to lose combos like Bontu eating Gonti to attack, SuperStam Gonti and get his ETB again.
Pushed the Lay Bare the Heart to the side, fitted the deck with Servo Schematic for
Syndicate Trafficker
to eat. Could probably be better to run Metalspinner's Puzzleknot because it never sits dead. You can manually sac it for draw if needed.
Turns out that the deck runs pretty well without Metalspinner's Puzzleknot but it still lacked a real top end to do anything of value and it was easy to stonewall so I'm trying out 1 copy of
Skysovereign, Consul Flagship
. Testing of the W/B variant proved...inconclusive. It's nice to have Cast Out, but that's about all you splash white for except sideboard.
7/7/17: Moved
Never
to the main, along with 2
Vengeful Rebel
. Toyed with Midnight Entourage but still don't like it. Aetherborn strike me as a pseudo-aristocrats style tribe, so having a lord that forces you to take 1 to draw 1 every time one of your Aetherborn dies just puts you on a short plank over a choppy sea. The
Skysovereign, Consul Flagship
s were handy but the combination of factors required to efficiently use them made it less valuable to carry them than
Never
for hitting planeswalkers. In game 2, you're better off siding out
Yahenni, Undying Partisan
if they have nothing for Yahenni to grow off. That way you can just side into an aggro-control build to remove threats before they ever touch the board via Lost Legacy.
16/7/17: For the time being, look to the Testing Notes for changes. The deck is in flux thanks to HOU.
