I just spent like.... over an hour responding and then accidentally closed the tab. Well.... take two I guess. I probably won't be as detailed as I was going to be because wow.... that sucked.
EonAon wrote: ↑3 years ago
I think we have wildly different metas we play in
. I can say with all honesty that there are usually 3 wraths per deck where I play on average. So cumulative things like soul warden and other things that count on my opponents doing a specific thing just aren't as viable. Also Lurrus would be picked off over and over unless there is a larger threat.
I get that your trying to get many cumulative lifegain triggers on your opponents turns so that Thune, Heliod, and Karlov trigger as many times as possible while also hopefully triggering the Aerie, Accord, Harbinger, and Resplendent. As your meta has apparently enough tokens that such plans can work, my meta would force me to actually play the larger lifelinks alongside more general beats.
Also while it may be blasphemous, I do believe you have over tutored this deck.
Things like Kaya work better in my meta I imagine since overall yards would be fuller and some players recycle/place more combo parts there.
Sadly you a lot of the times get either a flyer that makes ground pounders or a ground pounder that makes flyers(I.E.
Geist-Honored Monk ). It usually for balance reasons.
I thought about mentioning Liesa, but I realized that unless she is the commander she is too much a target or aggro draw. People hate that type of effect and will remove it from the field as much as possible. Its also the reason I don't play true conviction in lifegain decks. Theoretically it sounds good, in practice once the card comes out you tend to get aggressive responses that hopefully your board state can handle. So overall it acts as a win more card when its not truly.
For the chain draw people
Underworld Dreams would be my suggestion but triple black would be a issue.
Which leads into
Agadeem's Awakening // Agadeem, the Undercrypt I think people forget and or misinterpret this card in what it does. If x = 1 you only get one 1cc creature. If x=2 your choice is a 2cc and a 1cc and so on and so forth. In a low curve deck that has multiple low cc creatures if you lowball x your not getting much value out of Awakening since Lurrus hits the same cc revival mark more often. Granted Lurrus is not mass revival but 5cc to bring back only 3cc of creatures seems iffy, 6cc to bring back 6cc is a bit better overall but that is only a three, two and one drop respectively. I'm unsure that is truly a economical enough play to use it. Its way more likely in this deck to be used as a land rather than the spell because of cc variance is not as wide.
Metas - Every meta is a bit different. Mine is a wierd combination of things but in short its a lot of decks that do sort of haymaker one turn kill effects. I tend to play a bit more defensive to try not to die to these on average on any deck that isn't fast and proactive. There are a few decks that poke for damage but its dwarfed by the number of decks that plan for one big all in move or comboish thing. The majority of combos are non infinites but that doesn't mean that nobody does anything infinite. I would say that a lot of the decks that I play against try to hit really hard in a way that is hard to use blocking defense to stop. Most of the decks I encounter tend to be more proactive rather than controlling pushing harder on card draw.
Soul Wardens - I think a big thing in making them not be a huge liability is just having sufficient draw. I have played a lot of low to the ground low curve decks and the biggest thing in my experience is just having sufficient draw.
Necropotence is pure insanity when you cast 4-6 cards a turn and keep repeating it. I have played a few other decks like say Edgar Markov and it gets into some of your questioning if I am over tutoring but I think that some of the strongest draw this deck is capable of is something that the 4th, 5th, and 6th best card draw can't come anywhere close to being as good as.
Necropotence,
Skullclamp, and
Bolas's Citadel are likely the best draw I can come across for this deck and I do have tutors for them because a lot of the draw options I had options to run weren't as good. I agree that they aren't exciting to recast with Lurrus but keep in mind that if we have better things to recur then that is what we will do. I plan to try and make the Soul Wardens work and if they are just miserable and terrible I will cut them then. I haven't tested them yet so I plan to run them until they prove to me to be a problem.
Kaya / Planeswalkers In General - I think its important to ask yourself how many turns it takes before you are happy with a planeswalker. I generally speaking only run planeswalkers myself if the answer is between 1 and 2 turns unless my deck is incredibly defensive. Planeswalkers are so easy to attack down and even if you have defenses for them its possible that someone might disrupt your defenses to attack your planeswalkers because its sort of a 2 for 1 to disrupt your defense and kill a walker. When it comes to
Kaya, Orzhov Usurper my return on investment question tends to be that I would want to activate her at a minimum of three times on her + ability or activate her -5 ability to feel like I got my mana back from her. I am not saying that her -1 ability is bad, but I feel like it would depend a lot on the situation of what turn and where we are at if that has any value at all. If you can play her on turn 3 and kill a sol ring I think she still hasn't quite added up but any time later in the game I feel like her -1 ability is probably not that great. So, in a nutshell my thoughts towards Kaya is somewhere around 3-4+ turns in play for me to feel happy about what she is doing. Given that she isn't recurrable with Lurrus I could for example play
Crypt Incursion which could gain me a lot of life and deprive graveyard abuse instead but that isn't a card I felt strongly enough to justify running in my build so far. The think its also important to ask how well your deck defends walkers. I plan to use my lifegain to some extent as my defending capability from flyers, tramplers, and other evasion types so my thoughts is I probably don't defend a planeswalker in this deck all that well.
Liesa, Shroud of Dusk - I had her in my list until I cut the last 5-8ish cards from my list. Ultimately I cut her because one instance of gaining life in a turn is worse in my mind than multiple. I think her shock per cast is decent but I agree I like her more as a commander than I do in the 99 of most decks. I think for now I am going to hold off on trying to punish people for casting / drawing a bunch of cards and seeing how the deck functions first and foremost before I try to be cute and make something make the cut that doesn't quite feel like it fits.
True Conviction - I have played it in a few other decks. What I really like about it is the immediate impact of the card. Its true that someone could have a Naturalize and zap it right there but the fact that I can play it and in the same turn have a huge attacking force is powerful. It often does get answered soon after but in a lot of cases unless someone is keeping the mana up to play something that generically answers anything like a
Beast Within I often get away with at least the first turn of this effect and in a lot of cases that first turn can be huge. You are correct though that it draws a lot of attention though. Some of my lifegain effects trigger per instance of lifegain but a lot more of them need to continue to trigger. Its part of why I haven't moved in on this effect because I think its actually better for shipping damage than it is at triggering me to gain life.
Underworld Dreams - Similarly to
Liesa, Shroud of Dusk I think it doesn't really fit in this concept and it isn't recurrable from Lurrus so I will probably just hold off until I get some testing in.
Agadeem's Awakening // Agadeem, the Undercrypt - Don't think of this card as adding
Agadeem's Awakening to a deck. Think of it as cutting a swamp for
Agadeem, the Undercrypt that 10-20% of the time is a utility spell when drawn later. The best way to think about this card is that if you have run out of lands to play then it has become your land drop for the turn. The effect of
Agadeem's Awakening is as you said not that impressive, the thing about it though is that it can come in for a land and its sort of never a dead card to draw. If you think about
Command the Dreadhorde on the other hand if you draw it early its going to sit in your hand and do nothing. If someone has a
Relic of Progenitus /
Rest in Peace or whatever in play it can also be a liability. The strength of
Agadeem's Awakening // Agadeem, the Undercrypt is that you play it in place of a land and lower your land count and potentially have a spell if you have really good draw going or draw it late. It takes up no space and its powerful in that it doesn't really take up space. You have to tell yourself though that its a land and not try to force the spell when you shouldn't be. Its sort of like how
Cyclonic Rift is a
1U spell. In a lot of cases people get tunnel vision on overloading it but it has a lot of play as a
1U spell.
pokken wrote: ↑3 years ago
This feels like probably a
Proclamation of Rebirth deck to me
Angelic Renewal also is a really dope way to protect Lurrus that he can recur. I loved it in Alela for similar functionality (although making faeries is less good than recasting it).
Proclamation of Rebirth - You have no idea how much I love and want to make this spell work. Sadly, I think its still not a viable spell here. Shadowborn Apostle decks might be one of the few places in this format that it might be playable and even then I think its still kind of weak in the light that there are many ways to recur all appostles to play at the same time like
Immortal Servitude.
Angelic Renewal - I thought about it but honestly it just feels too situational. It has a little better play if you expect a lot of wraths as your opponents interaction but I think its a little narrow to try to defend Lurrus. He only costs three mana to cast so recasting him isn't the end of the world. Like, what if I just screwed around with a Wayfarer's Bauble instead and ramped instead of trying to set up a situational means of keeping him in play. I think its better to just accept that my stuff will die on occasion and not add more weird graveyard dependent stuff to my list.
I did a bit of digging into the 1-2 mana artifact / enchantments just because I wanted a bit of a deeper dive on that stuff than I initially did for this list. I came up with the below as sort of the highlights:
1 Mana Artifacts
- Executioner's Capsule - reusable spot removal. Nonblack kind of sucks though.
- Pithing Needle - I do really love pithing when works. I generally only run these effects when I have some incentive to though such as having looting effects or an artifact synergy. I do have the ability to rebuy it but I think that probably isn't quite enough.
- Renegade Map - I guess its nice that its cheap and recursive way to get more lands. Its possible that I could lower my land count if I included something like this. I don't know how I feel about it in comparison to something like Expedition Map or Wayfarer's Bauble though.
- Scroll of Avacyn - I have something like 5 angel / angel enablers but I guess the interesting part of this is that most of the things that would care about me gaining larger amounts of life make angel tokens as well. I think all of my effects that care about 4-5 life gained all make angel tokens so I feel like it might actually be really good here. 2/3 of the angel token makers are angels themselves but all of them also make angels if I can gain that much life in a turn. This might be a good way to repeatedly make angels on opponents turns and it draws a card and is still a cheap cantrip if I am not gaining the life.
- Shadowspear - Well, it does a number of things. I guess my questioning on it is just that a lot of my creatures are kind of small by default so the trample / lifegain seem a little weak when you staple it onto 1/1-4/4 level of creatures.
- Sunbeam Spellbomb - Both modes are ok, but I don't know that either of them are strong enough to be honest. The five life on an opponents turn could be useful but really only if I have one of the three cards that make angels. I think its probably a little weak especially when I look at what Scroll of Avacyn theoretically could do for me instead.
- Wayfarer's Bauble - its cheap reusable ramp. Three mana per turn is kind of expensive though and it requires Lurrus too.
- Witch's Oven - hmmmm I don't hate anything that this is doing. I doubt I could really justify Cauldron Familiar even if I did run this just because the Familiar without this is TERRIBLE but the oven itself could be kind of amusing. Food aren't amazing but lifegain on opponents turns can be useful and its a sac outlet that Lurrus can recur too. Its... not bad. I doubt I would really need a lot of sac outlets that can churn through multiple creatures in a turn given that Lurrus can only recover one a turn.
2 Mana Artifacts
- Altar of Dementia - Its a good sac outlet and milling myself could give me more resources for Lurrus. The problem is that a lot of the creatures I run aren't great stat wise and I really don't want to mass sac them.
- Arcane Signet - Reasonable two mana ramp.
- Damping Sphere - It would screw with some really nice lands like coffers / cradle and also disrupt some of the decks that have been chaining draw a little. Its not really on theme at all but I can recur it and it does a number of reasonable hate effects. Being a low curve deck myself it probably would disrupt me some.
- Defense Grid - Counter hate. I guess I would have to also consider Grand Abolisher. I usually find these sort of effects to be kind of narrow. Running a low curve / recursive will already make it hard for counter magic / spot removal.
- Endless Atlas - Draw I suppose. I tend to consider it more in mono color though.
- Mesmeric Orb - Milling gives me targets for Lurrus. It also can punish ramp hard decks but also gives resources to others. We do have a few mass graveyard hate effects though.
- Smuggler's Copter - I am not really excited about it but looting is ok.
- Sorcerous Spyglass - Another Pithing Needle. I like the effects but I like them a lot more when I have more synergy with artifacts.
- Thorn of Amethyst - Hate for chaining spells. It kind of hits me a bit harder than I would want though.
- Thought Vessel - Reasonable Ramp.
1 Mana Enchants
- Bloodchief Ascension - So...... 99% of the time I think this card is terrible. I still think its a bit questionable here but my usual concerns are due to three things, 1) Its slow to spin up 2) The effect when active is not immediately impressive, its an over time effect. 3) It draws a lot of attention and usually dies before doing much. Given that this deck can recur it easily and the triggers would give me lifegain triggers it might be more appealing than usual. Its still slow as all get out to get counters but I think the value of the lifegain triggers make it more interesting to me than usual.
- Deafening Silence - Probably not a great idea but the fact that I could recur it is a bit tempting. I also have a decent number of creatures but.... probably not.
- Legion's Landing - Its ramp and the token making is ok but I think its probably not a high enough impact card later and its not that likely that I would ever recur it.
- Phyrexian Reclamation - I am often a bit wishy washy on this effect but being a lifegain deck and having the ability to recast this from my graveyard.... Well I think it could be decent recursion. Needing to recast the creatures is offset a bit by my low curve of this deck as well. I am just a bit hesitant to go deep on more graveyard effects.
- Reconnaissance - It lets me poke, avoid bad blocks, and have vigilance. Its not bad but I don't think it really fits my deck all that much.
2 Mana Enchants
- Arguel's Blood Fast - Its ok card draw but I feel like it would be better to just tutor for better draw.
- Carnival of Souls - Ehhh probably not but its interesting.
- Dance of the Dead - Similar to Animate Dead but with an upkeep cost. Its not bad.
- Heliod's Punishment - I have played it in my Sram deck before and the disruption to a commander is SUPER high. The difference between this and Reprobation can be similar but the fact that they can't block attacks can actually make killing a commander harder. Its an option but I don't know.
- Luminarch Ascension - This effect brings a lot of hate down on itself and the player who plays it. It often gets answered before it can go off on top of having a bunch of people punch you in the face but with the ability to recast it.... well its something to think about I guess.
- Rune of Mortality - Generally speaking deathtouch is a keyword to pair with first strike or trample. I also don't have a bunch of big creatures which makes it a bit weird for this deck. It does draw a deck though.
- Rune of Sustenance - I care about gaining life and it draws a card. It might be something to consider I just don't feel like I run a ton of creatures I would want to attack with that lack lifelink.
- Sanctimony - Ohhhhh man this effect would be SOOOOOOOOOO good if I can line it up. It seems extremely situational though. Even one player on red could be enough but it relies on people being heavier on red or having really good lands.
- Serenity - I feel like I would want to build into this if I were to run it. It doesn't fit my current list but it does seem like it would be amusing to just loop the hell out of this.
- Tymaret, Chosen from Death - Lifegain with grave hate. Its not cheap activations and the lifegain isn't big or frequent given the cost to activate.
- Yawgmoth's Edict - Ok, its kind of a bad effect but its lifegain so I looked at it briefly.
Well, I guess I have some changes to the list after looking at more cards as well as some of the comments from this thread.
DECK CHANGES:
- Kaya's Ghostform → Ratchet Bomb I suppose my concern with Ghostform is a little bit that it doesn't hit all of my concerns as to what could happen to Lurrus and it also puts me vulnerable to removal in response to casting it. Someone stealing or transforming Lurrus is something this doesn't cover and I think Cyclonic Rift might be one of the more played sweepers in my meta and it does nothing to help me against that. Ratchet Bomb seems like good removal for tokens and it can tick up as needed even if it isn't great at that. I am going to keep an eye on Plague Engineer but I expect Ratchet Bomb to be way better offhand. Its possible I might move Plague Engineer over to being Engineered Explosives but I want to do a little testing first.
- Stitcher's Supplier → Phyrexian Reclamation I gave Stitcher's Supplier more thought and while I think that a mill six effect while being tutorable is fine, I just wasn't as excited about it as most of my other targets. Beyond that it needs to die to get half of its value in and I don't run a ton of sac outlets nor am I really that excited to Lurrus back the supplier. I think that self mill is probably ok value but I wanted a little more oomph out of this than I think I am going to get. I ordered one of the dang things for $5 which sucks as I am cutting it already but I think I am on board to cut it. Phyrexian Reclamation is nice as it gives me an alternative way to recur without Lurrus and it can be recurred from Lurrus. I still want to avoid going super deep on graveyard abuse effects as I think they can be bad when too redundant or if someone is heavily hitting on graveyards but I felt this was an acceptable target to try to shift some hate.
- Tome of Legends → Mesmeric Orb I think Tome of Legends is fine..... but the more I thought about it the more I started getting behind Mesmeric Orb. It can punish ramp and draw heavy decks in that I don't think a lot of them in my meta run a means to shuffle their deck. I also can self mill into graveyard hate and play it out from Lurrus which seems kind of great given how much of my deck Lurrus can recur for me. I guess in some world there could be a situation where I run out of deck but I think that giveen that Lurrus can recur this for me I want to give it a shot. My biggest fear offhand is just giving someone else graveyard resources but the amount of grave hate I run ideally should help me on that.
- Golden Egg → Scroll of Avacyn As I kept thinking about it I really liked the efficiency of the scroll. Its true that it won't always give me life but it cycles for less mana and a lot of the triggers that care about the quantity of life I gain are angels and will trigger for me to make an angel from the scroll.
- 1 Swamp → Agadeem's Awakening // Agadeem, the Undercrypt I think I am ok to make this swap. Its fairly minor.
So, now I want to talk about something a little more controversial that I don't know where I stand on it.
Bloodchief Ascension and
Luminarch Ascension. In 99% of decks I tend to write these two cards off for a number of reasons but I think there are a number of factors that really make me want to give these cards a bit more attention for this deck.
Bloodchief Ascension
Pros:
- Cheap - Being cheap to cast means that Lurrus can recur it and its easy to cast if and when we are drawing a bunch of cards. Anyone removing it will likely spend just as much if not more mana to remove it and again, Lurrus can bring it right back.
- Lifegain - The triggers will fire for lifegain and likely happen on opponents turns. Lifegain in numerous triggers is good.
- Punish - Its likely going to punish some of the decks I encounter that draw a ton of cards.
Cons:
- Getting Counters - Holy hell it seems like a grind to get up to three counters. It might be a full three turns and that is assuming you can manage to hit opponents. It could go faster than that but what if the board gets gummed up and people stop attacking?
- Bad Topdeck - What I mean by this is more so if I don't have good card draw this card being a cheap card that does nothing immediately can be very underwhelming.
- Doesn't affect the board - What I mean by this is that this card has no impact on what is in play. It can't defend you or attack a planeswalker. Cards that are noncreatures that deal only with gaining life or syphoning it can be really situational.
Conclusion:
I see both a lot of potential for both good situations and situations where I question why the hell I would buy and include a card like this. Some of my complaints have been decks that do a bunch of draw / ramp and set up while spinning tires. This card can give a lot of triggers of lifegain and Lurrus has recursion with it but then it comes back to the spin up time for it and even if I recur it with Lurrus I have to get the counters again for it. On the flip side it brings some heat to itself and off of Lurrus and other cards so if I have good draw I think I can accept someone burning some spot removal on it instead of something else. Its also a bit minor but I did just put
Mesmeric Orb into my list and the two would be potentially strong together.
This is already hella long so I won't go in depth on discussing
Luminarch Ascension but I think it also could maybe use some thought and discussion. I am curious as to thoughts on these two cards as I think its tough to really make a call offhand.
