More to come on the legend himself: Kanye A.K.A Altered Ego.
The fire cut! (Some NSFW language. It's Trap so if it's not your thing, continue on).
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=znC5HaU87us
Alright, that was pretty aggro, but I love that song. Here's a nice modular dubstep folk tune to calm things down.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=SnKzbAlt0Ww
Here is the primer I wrote before the trip. Shout out r/spikes for putting me through the wringer. The feedback is always great to help vet a new idea. That being said, please read the rules and sidebar before posting if you decide to do so in the future. It exists for a reason.
https://www.reddit.com/r/spikes/comments/4ephyc/standard_bants_etb_ego_introduction/
Quick shout out to Ricky for starting the whole transformation from the old list to the new. His recommendation of Ojutai's Command lead to some hard reevaluation. Huge thanks to Alejo Traba for running over me with GW Humans. Fire build by the way. My buddy Adam has been instrumental as his observation that I was trying to do too much helped to narrow it down. Visionaries were added and things went from there. My homies Evan and Khalid showed me the power of Evo leap through testing and wow, it kicks it up a notch out of the board. Huge shout out to Lewis for having the visionaries on hand! With that out of the way, lets get into it.
So I've learned a lot here at the GP. My original build was trying to do too much and wasn't focused. It's been getting progressively better and even though I've had lackluster results so far, I'm more excited than ever.
Enter Awaken. With Tidecaller you can recur awaken spells from your graveyard on ETB. Caller also gives your creature lands flying. Sweet. The spells to recur are either roil or coastal. You can time walk loop for a little while generating 4/4 lands that turn to 6/6 with advocate or more for each copy. Coastal let's you do the same thing except instead of time walking you're drawing 2 cards. And the lands will be flying so that's nice. Lumbering falls loves tidecaller.
The second loop is out of the sideboard with evolutionary leap and reclaim. With the leap trigger on the stack you can decide to reclaim any creature in your yard based in board state, including the creature you just sacked. You can also use reclaim then plus nissa if she's flipped.
And lastly, the mana base had too many tapped lands and was stifling early games against human varients. Adam helped me with it since that's his forte, and we dropped two Evolving Wilds and a shadow land to add 2 yavimaya coast. He also recommended cutting a land since I was at 25 and the curve is low. So I did, but he wants a fourth reflector while I decided to go the woodland route as that can get out of hand with the new creature land awaken theme. 10 am standard is the true test for the list but I'll admit I'm not a great pilot of this yet and I'm exhausted. No excuses though. I'll try and report back on my tournament report.
I had one of the most fun games against a BW midrange deck. Game 3 lasted about 45 minutes alone as we were in 8 man's and they weren't timing it. I dealt with 3 Ormendals and a Sorin, but I sided out two altered egos because of the lack of creatures and that was my downfall. Also, I went all in on an eerie interlude into crush of tentacles but because he was able to tap down my 3 attackers every combat with a displacer because we had so much mana, i wasn't able to swing in. He awakened his ruinous path and took down my nissa that was close to ulting. He killed the kraken before my ego and the team could get back on board so ego hit the bin.
Evolutionary leap proved it's worth to the fullest, and if I just had a reclaim I could have started to pick what I flipped. Anyways, we'll see how this goes.
If you're reading this from starcity, to be fair to Ari, coastal and reclaim weren't in the list yet.
Cheers,
-Ballin
