So you like fast paced games? You like drawing more cards than you could ever hope to cast? You like gaining a lot of life as well? How about flashing in huge creatures that are indestructible and have hexproof to both protect your life total and more importantly kill your opponents as soon as the turn gets back to you? Well, this deck has it all :)
Selvala, Explorer Returned is a commander that seemingly has it all: Card draw, ramp and lifegain. Admittedly, it also draws these cards for your opponents but this simply means that we need to make sure that we can profit from this ability more than anybody else on the table. At the same time, the group-huggy card draw mechanic of Selvala could also mean that nobody wants to get rid of it immediately until it is too late. And with what this deck brings to the table, it may be too late as soon as turn 5. So let's see what this deck wants to do.
Early game plan
The first goal is to bring out our commander Selvala, Explorer Returned as fast as possible. With the 1-drop mana dorks this deck includes, this should normally happen in turn 2 so that we can start to use the Parley ability from turn 3 onwards. Your typical opening hand should contain 2 to 3 lands and ideally one of the 1-drop mana dorks to be realize this early goal. From then on, we will draw a lot of additional cards, so as long as we can get to Selvala, even non-ideal hands are often playable.
Midgame
Selvala's Value Engine
Once our commander has hit the board, we want to make sure to use her ability as much as possible to draw a lot of cards and most importantly: Get a lot of mana to cast the things that we are drawing. For this reason, there is a lot in this deck that lets us untap creatures so we can parley several times per turn. The best cards that allow us to really get the value engine going are Seedborn Muse and Quest for Renewal which will let us parley also during our opponents turns. To really abuse this, we also want to get Vedalken Orrery or Yeva, Nature's Herald which will allow us to use all that many and cast all these nice creatures we are drawing even during our opponent's turns. If we can establish this, we essentially have 4 turns in one rotation.
Protecting the Value Engine
Needless to say, nobody will ignore a Seedborn Muse when it hits the table. In order to protect our sweet board state, there are many pieces in this deck that make it as difficult as possible to get rid of our permanents. Heroic Intervention, Veil of Summer, Autumn's Veil and Teferi's Protection help ward off most attempts to set us back. While Wirewood Symbiote is mostly used to untap our commander, we can also use it to bump her back to our hand as a last resort if something nasty would happen to her. Once we have a bit more mana available, we can put more permanent protection in place in the form of
- Dawnglade Regent: Hexproof and card draw, nice :)
- Sigarda, Host of Herons: Fills a gap in our protection against sacrifice effects.
- Avacyn, Angel of Hope: Makes all our creatures indestructible. We need to get her though.
- Shalai, Voice of Plenty: Hexproof for all our creatures (except himself) for only ? Sign me up for that. It also provides a place to spend mana if you cannot spend it on something else in the opponent's turn.
- Dragonlord Dromoka: Probably not as important as in many other decks, but this can protect our attackers from shenanigans and limit the opponent's defenses at the same time.
- Linvala, Keeper of Silence: I cannot understate how good this card is for us. This will protect us from opponent combos - don't forget we help everyone to draw their important pieces. This shuts down a lot of winning game plans from our opponents.
Finishing it off
Once we have established a board state that is not so easy to get rid off, we can bring out our biggest and badest creatures to finish off our opponents: Blightsteel Colossus, Kozilek, Butcher of Truth and Craterhoof Behemoth can bring down our opponents very quickly. Finale of Devastation very often kills immediately with the amount of mana we have available. And if somebody is hard to attack, there is still the option of sniping with Aetherflux Reservoir.
Now, this deck is not combo-centric in any way, but I could not resist to add the Mirror Entity + Wirewood Symbiote
combo which will allow us to draw our whole deck via parley while generating a lot of green mana at the same time. Funny thing to remark here: If anyone at the table has fewer cards in his deck than we have, he will already die to this. Anybody who is still left once we hold our deck in hand will most likely die to any of the above finishers (we should have enough life from parleying our complete deck to shoot at least two people with Aetherflux Reservoir)
Remarks
I will put some notes here on little details I found while playing this deck I think are worthwhile to mention...
29.05.2014 Selvala’s parley ability is a mana ability. It doesn’t use the stack and can’t be responded to.
