So I've been thinking a lot about what defines Ephara for me, after 10 years of this deck. Early on I think I spent a lot of energy thinking about the card advantage mechanism, and even more later during the
Whitemane Lion /
Soulherder phase of the deck.
Where I am at now is I think that there're three major things that define Ephara:
1) She's not a creature most of the time.
2) She's indestructible
3) She provides card advantage passively as you make creatures, particuarly at instant speed
So when thinking about Ephara as a deck I think that the first two points actually are more important. There are a ton of UW commanders who can generate card advantage from creatures now--there were not at the time. But now we have a huge raft of partner pairs and a lot of different signpost commanders that can do kind of similar things.
Even back in the day I think I overindexed on the card advantage engine and really a lot of the power of my deck was finding combos with
Recruiter of the Guard and
Spellseeker that sort of hid the fact that the creature part of the strategy was so bad--basically I could have played the same deck with a more generic draw engine and putting
Rhystic Study (et. al.) in place of
Whitemane Lion and had a fundamentally very similar deck.
My thought was, at the time, that the board state was the distinguishing feature but eventually I started to see that the board state was just an illusion - most of the bodies didn't matter except as chump blockers.
So with the rebuild/redesign, I focused really hard on:
1. synergies with Ephara not being a creature --> stuff like
Vanquish the Horde and
Farewell, and
Elspeth, Sun's Champion
2. synergies with Ephara being indestructibe →
Hour of Revelation and
Devastating Mastery
3. playing fewer but more powerful things that make up for the weaknesses of the original "play a buncha crappy duides" strategy, and instead build an actual board state. cards like
Nadir Kraken,
The Watcher in the Water and especially
Field of the Dead and
Felidar Retreat.
The new draw enabler strategy focuses harder on:
- mana efficiency; 1W is not a good enough rate to draw a card. We want to present something like
Field of the Dead that will draw 1-2 cards a turn with no mana investment. This was an initial focus of the deck but got diluted over time as I was having fun doing
Whitemane Lion tricks that were not really mana efficient enough. Cards like
Fleeting Spirit get the nod over
Whitemane Lion hever because they create massive velocity for no mana.
- present an actual credible threat, e.g.
Illustrious Wanderglyph that threatens to create an army of 3/3s and draw an overwhelming stream of cards by itself. or
Luminarch Ascension.
Note, I have actually cut
Sacred Mesa again as the need to sacrifice a pegasus and the lack of lethality made it not good enough most of the time.
As a bit of a nod to the fact that I don't quite have enough actual army-in-a-can threats, I included a few raw card advantage elements to fill in the gaps -- a game ending bomb in
Sea Gate Restoration // Sea Gate, Reborn and also
Trouble in Pairs (which was previously
Rhystic Study but proved to be too powerful for how dumb people are).
And finally, I have spent an absolute ton of time thinking about the ramp strategy. I've concluded over time that it is OK to just cast Ephara on turn 4 all the time. Ephara is not impactul enough to go down a card to put her out a turn early, so cards like
Azorius Signet are finally completely out.
Additionally,
Jeweled Lotus /
Mana Crypt /
Trinket Mage package is cut due to power level being too high (while a turn 3 Ephara isn't that great, a turn 1 Ephara is overwhelming). This play pattern is both really random and too powerful for the people I play with.
Ancient Tomb is cut similarly but the life loss really adds up if you're aiming for a 12 turn game :D
The remaining ramp package is carefully assembled from cards that are pretty strong at various phases of the game, with very few being poor topdecks.
The "can put Ephara out early" package:
Of these, only Stenn/Familiar/Sol ring are all that consistent, with others requiring on circumstance (DGT requires someone else to fetch, Atlas requires 4 lands with the right tap profile, Knight requires someone else to Farseek, Brought back requires a fetch).
I've talked about
Stenn, Paranoid Partisan quite a bit; this card is one of the best overall cards in Ephara. It can slow burn, it can let you play
Sensei's Divining Top for free, it can cut your enchantment costs, it can survive sweepers and put you ahead. Really great card, criminally underplayed in Ephara builds. It's not even in the top 50 creatures people play which is insane to me. Similar issues with
Stormscape Familiar.
Then after that we have mid game ramp spells with random utility
Scholar of New Horizons I've talked about a bit but it has a lot of random synergy with planeswalker counters,
Urza's Saga,
Invasion of Segovia // Caetus, Sea Tyrant of Segovia,
Flesh Duplicate,
Nadir Kraken,
The Watcher in the Water, .etc. This card will catch you up to parity and also draws cards even if you aren't behind. It also fetches
Mistveil Plains which is nice.
Cartographer's Hawk is a slow derpy dude, but it can catch you up to parity and also generate a slow card advantage with Ephara. I think it's correct to play in this kind of medium power build because of how consistent it is.
Cosmic Intervention is a combo win condition with sweepers, it has a discount ability, and it can also combo with sandbagged fetchlands and
Field of the Dead /
Felidar Retreat. Its ability to put you +4 lands in the mid game and lock out an overwhelming mana advantage and also synergize with sweepers *while also beating graveyard hate* is truly absurd. It has made me consider adding
Second Sunrise to the deck tbh. Finally combos with
Scorched Ruins effects too which is nice.
Sun Titan doubles as a wincondition, particularly with the
Flesh Duplicate /
Phantasmal Image strategy.
Invasion of Segovia // Caetus, Sea Tyrant of Segovia - I haven't seen this card yet but it reads really well. We have a lot of noncreatures and a lot of instants, and this both makes bodies and flips meaningfully. The likelihood of you being able to flip it is high I think.
Archaeomancer's Map fixes bad hands, delivers you to mid game land parity and has card advantage. It's a really good card. It's unfortunate that it's a 3, but it curves well into Ephara. That you can get it with
Enlightened Tutor to dig you out of a mana stall is really great.
--
I think I'm getting close to being able to write a new primer for Ephara Control and shelve this one, but I need to get some more games in, so I'm going to try to just suck it up and deal with the feelbads :D People struggle with slow games these days.
