All fine cards for certain builds, but a little high-costed for reward in my deck. The neat thing is that Greven is a combo commander. He can always always kill an opponent in two attacks. One attack with some cards.
So the need for alternative win conditions like a Kiki-Jiki + Zealous Conscripts combo win is not necessary. Now
Zealous Conscripts is good on it's own as it represents a steal card which is good with Greven sacrifice ability. So trust me I have eyed it up.
Then
Kiki-Jiki, Mirror-Breaker is also fine to copy a creature for recurring value to sacrifice to Greven each turn. But if you look at my build more closely a lot of the creatures are "sacrifice at end of turn", meaning that Kiki copying them is useless.
It's not often that I have multiple creatures in play at the start of my turn. The play pattern is cast a creature pre-combat main phase to then sacrifice that creature to Greven. Kiki-Jiki basically requires taking a whole turn to cast him, to hopefully get use out of him the following turn.
What I'm trying to point out is that he is a little inefficient in my deck despite his upper power level.
Mikaeus, the Unhallowed again has a great upper power level, but just too expensive for the deck. and most importantly does not provide undying for Greven who is a human. If Greven had lost all of his humanity literally becoming some "minion horror" or the likes then I'd consider it. But even then often the best way to look at creatures is "would you sacrifice the creature to Greven for draw?" I find myself constantly having to do this and so even the utility creatures like
Neheb, the Eternal and
Treasonous Ogre get sacrifice in games where you have no other options and are behind.
If you look at some of the changes I've made for this exact reason I've cut some utility creatures in;
Godo, Bandit Warlord,
Ilharg, the Raze-Boar,
K'rrik, Son of Yawgmoth, because I found myself needing to sacrifice them at some stage to truly get ahead, and they don't represent the best in mana-to-draw ratios with Greven.
It's just the way it shakes out a lot of the time.
If you read my "Playing the Deck" section, another play pattern is that I'm not often casting creatures post-combat, for the reason of running into board wipes. Cards like
Mikaeus, the Unhallowed and
Kiki-Jiki, Mirror Breaker represent cards that you'd probably cast post combat, which means that often you are exposed to mass creature removal more.
If you have
Mikaeus, the Unhallowed and Greven as your creatures and a player casts
Damnation, they both still die, none of them have undying.
Cauldron of Souls is similar in that it's a long term investment, and this deck is actually killing really quickly. A player every 1-2 turns once he is on the board. Taking a turn off for a
Cauldron of Souls is a luxury that your giving your opponents and not yourself.
Plus the persist doesn't work at all with the 1 toughness creatures,
Lightning Skelemental,
Ball Lightning,
Arc Runner,
Impetuous Devils,
Vindictive Lich.
Hope that makes sense, the deck is very play pattern efficient and believe it or not these cards just don't fit in with the general speed of the deck.
Zacama
