Great to have some feedback, it's been a week or so since I could find the time to play.
What worked:
Our new suite of lands.
Lotus Field was about as awesome as I'd want, and I can't really complain about performance. I never recouped the lands from the graveyard, despite getting Sun Titan (I had to discard a lot from Land Tax, and Titan dug up a lot of those; I never really reached the bottom). Ruins of Trokair also replaced itself in an Ulamog attack. I'm not about to sleeve up Crucible of Worlds for this deck, but, part of me wonders if we should give it a try.
Batterskull: It's a new inclusion for me; the lifegain was phenomenal (I was over 90 life at one point), and the bounce ability was relevant once.
Great to hear this, I've ordered Field/Flagstones for the deck and should pick them up over the next few days.
Batterskull is pretty nuts. The only thing I struggle with is the equip cost, purely because I don't have a
Stoneforge Mystic to contribute to the list. If I did, I would though.
What did not work:
Worship: This card failed hard. Despite generating resilient boards, there is always a crack in the foundation that can be exploited. It also generated a disproportionate amount of hate; one player, once they saw Worship, was adamant that the table should somehow set me to 1, and then they could use the 'very rare' lose-life effects to put me out of the game. Only, like, that didn't matter. I died with no creatures while Worship was out. It's possible that the single player who dictated those terms had it out for me, but... I don't see it surviving a concerted effort from a player who wants you out. I had kept it in with the inclusion of Enlightened Tutor to handle some exceptions, but, I can see it will do less than I'd ever want it to.
If you're looking for data, there's a thumbs down for it here.
I'm not overly surprised, to be honest. People tend to take these sort of cards as a challenge, like 'Oh yeah, you think you can shut up shop?' Get 'im, boys'. That whole attitude. It's stupid, but there's a lot of people out there who can't assess threats for peanuts. The fact is, our deck is pretty resilient without things like
Worship or
Platinum Angel. They just make that fact more overt and push it to the forefront of people's attention, so we're best to just....keep the knowledge of our resilience to ourselves and let our actions speak for themselves.
What was kind of meh:
Bishop of Wings: Got me 8 life after a living death, and then my angels got exiled denying me the spirit tokens. This was the 'Worship game', so it's not clear that Bishop would have been better or worse for me. I died with no creatures left (if only the Angels had left spirits behind!)
Gift of Estates, Knight of the White Orchid, Tithe: I have consistently found these cards to not work well. Despite drawing and playing Lotus Field one game, I was only able to get a Knight Trigger once, post-annihilator trigger from Ulamog. For whatever reason, I find we just hit our land drops, over and over. If I were to cut one, it would be Gift of Estates; Tithe Plainscycles (and, in fact, takes a Plains slot in my deck), and Knight can at least carry a Sword of the Animist around. I think further testing is required before I axe Gift of Estates; it's no Land Tax, where when it works, it works spectacularly well.
Marshal's Anthem: I rezzed three with it. Nothing spectacular, and it prevented me from losing the game. The two damage over two turns from the anthem effect actually helped me push a player out, but, the card felt pretty bleh in the end. It may have been that I had eaten a Bojuka Bog and my juiciest reanimation targets were unavailable, but just having bodies was helpful against Liliana, Dreadhorde General. It was less of a rockstar tonight than in previous games, and I can't help but feel there is something better for this slot, but I can't seem to find it. We always seem to have the mana for it, but there are going to be games where we don't, and it'll suck in those. Is it just an overcosted Resurrection with a higher buy-in and multikicker? Should we just play Reya Dawnbringer?
I still haven't got around to properly testing
Bishop of Wings. I'd totally replace it with a 2 drop control human, but I had thought it could be ok value. I don't expect amazing things from it, but I'm still gonna give it a proper whirl before I make the cut myself - unless Eldraine gives us some stunning hatebear that must have a spot.
Knight of the White Orchid,
Gift of Estates - I find the same thing, and honestly, I can't really explain why we never have problems with land drops, but...yeah, we don't. It's hilarious how often I have more floatable mana in play than any other player at the board (and they say mono white can't ramp
) Knight can carry a
Sword of the Animist, so that's why he stays for me.
Gift of Estates has dug me out of shaky starts in the past, but it is a bit surplus to requirements at present for me. That being said, given that
Tithe is reserved list, I'll never grab a cheap copy, so it's unlikely to see a place in my list anytime soon.
Marshal's Anthem is a bit mana intensive, and the anthem is a little redundant to me. Our angels are already hefty enough, so we're really just running it for the reanimation, and we have better options. I don't feel like we need to overly replace it with subpar reanimation (I definitely consider
Reya Dawnbringer to be in this boat) either. Reya is far too expensive, and taps to reanimate, I'd just rather not myself.