from play (sacrifice)
from hand (discard)
from deck (mill)
from exile (?)
from the stack (...countering your own spells?)
from the command zone (........?)
from ante (ok I'll stop)
From play is boring. From deck seems inconsistent - I'd love to see someone try, but it won't be me. The other options aren't real afaik. So that leaves discard. Of course there are many cheap discard outlets which could be activated every turn, but we need fodder to fuel them.
So how do we get as many creatures as possible to discard?
While we could just rely on drawing cards naturally, considering the low impact of most discard outlets it seems like we'd likely run out of gas. There are a decent number of creatures that can self-recur to hand, but most of them cost enough that you'd be better off just playing more draw.
Except for one little cycle that everyone forgot ever existed: the eidolon cycle. Damn do I like finding uses for old junk cards.
Okay, neat, but just having a few cards that self-recycle isn't exactly a huge payoff for having to fill the deck with gold cards. We need a way to set it up. Luckily in esper, we have two amazing setup cards: Buried Alive and Intuition. Now we're cooking.
So here's the plan:
1) Get Sefris out.
2) Cast intuition/buried alive to get the eidolons.
3) Get a discard outlet.
4) Play multicolor spells to fuel discard and trigger Sefris every single turn for "free"
I see a few risks for this deck.
1) It might end up being pretty dependent on getting one of the key tutors, which we have good but not guaranteed odds on getting, without running a lot of mediocre tutors. Hopefully the generally-high-quality of multicolor cards makes this less of a risk.
2) It might be a bit slow to get going.
3) It might not have enough payoff. I chose not to lean heavily on the reanimation trigger from Sefris, so there aren't any super exciting targets. I'm hoping to win via a lot of small value off dungeons, which may not be bursty enough to reliably get there.
Anyway, here's the decklist:
I will confess I didn't go very thoroughly through my mono-color boxes, so there's probably some useful stuff I missed there. I think there's a solid chance the deck might end up with an excessive number of multicolor spells to where it's kind of redundant, so there's probably an argument to be made for including more monocolor and artifacts - but I think I want to run the deck a couple times first.