Life and Taxes
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Adding to the ranks of two card combos from the commander zone, now we have Heliod, Sun-Crowned + Walking Ballista or Triskelion as a way to deal infinite damage and gain infinite life.
However after thinking about the various ways to assemble the combo via additional tutors and ways to protect it, I realized that I still had a lot of deck to figure out what to do with.
So I wanted to focus on Heliod, Sun-Crowned abilities in a more aggressive manner. I wanted to push a weenie/mid-range creature base and then use life-gain to bolster them so that they can pressure opponents in meaningful manner with the additional +1/+1 counters.
I've found hate-bear mono-white decks in the past to usually come up short of winning. The reason is that although they can slow-down what opponents can do, they don't really have the ability to finish the game in a timely manner before at least one opponent assembles what they want to do. Sure the hate-bear deck might muster up enough damage to kill at least one opponent, but finishing all the rest of the table more often than not just falls a little short.
However I now feel with a solid distribution of +1/+1 counters each and every turn via Heliod, Sun-Crowned and lots of ways to gain life, these hate-bear style creatures can actually provide enough pressure to finish off opponents.
Then to top it off there is a limited time-clock that opponents have to work against, as you can at any stage assemble the Walking Ballista combo.
There are some cards that can be used to search for Walking Ballista so you can find it fairly quickly; Enlightened Tutor, Recruiter of the Guard, Ranger of Eos, Ranger-Captain of Eos, Scrapyard Recombiner.
The main idea of the deck is to get a number of your life-gain and hate-bear creatures, and then you can give them lifelink via Heliod, Sun-Crowned ability when attacking, and this way you can give +1/+1 counters divided as you wish among your creatures.
You could literally just keep putting the counters on each of your creatures, or you might stack them up onto a few of them so that they are more threatening in the face of larger blockers.
I think you want to divide the counters as evenly as possible however, so that targeted removal becomes less effective for your opponents.
Because of the nature of hate-bear and prision strategies you will encounter cards that conflict with each other in some manner.
Walking Ballista/Triskelion and Well of Lost Dreams unfortunately gets shut down by Stony Silence and Null Rod.
But with the focus of the deck being taxes and aggression and not really combo, you are very happy to trade off shutting down a lot of your opponents decks.
Return to the Ranks and Rest in Peace/Scavenger Grounds is a nonbo as well, but with literally only one card that looks to use your graveyard I feel this is fine to run the clash.
The hate-bears that prevent ETB effects (Hushbringer, Hushwing Gryff) will mean that some of the "soul sister" life-gain creatures will fail to trigger and also the search library creatures. However this is a fine trade-off against other decks that look to use ETB in much more disruptive/value ways.
This is a first draft, so as always if you have any ideas on how to improve on the deck or just combos I've clearly missed, I'm all ears.
If you wanted a build that is aimed around getting the Walking Ballista combo faster/more consistant then I've thought about what sort of changes I would make.
It would involve removing the artifact hate cards Null Rod and Stony Silence and then using Inventors' Fair as an additional way to search for Walking Ballista/Triskelion.
You need 3 artifacts on the battlefield for it to work, so there needs to be additional artifacts to support this idea.
Zacama
