I'm working on another build of Ephara based on
Watcher for Tomorrow and
Fleeting Spirit as engines that can just really get you churning through cards at a rate. Higher individual card quality, less synergy, no combos. The goal is to just go ahead and try to close it out with combat damage. This may be..ambitious.
I am not 100% sure this deck is alright. It feels...alright. But at least it is definitely an
Ephara, God of the Polis deck.
I felt for a long time that this deck was just becoming a bad version of another deck (sometimes blink.dec, sometimes artifacts.dec, sometimes combo.dec). This deck is a UW control deck that tries to use Ephara's ability with as little mana investment as possible. No spamming away at
Whitemane Lion, etc.
The downside is that sometimes Ephara is merely an indestructible
Phyrexian Arena. The upside is we're spending our mana better and our card quality is higher.
There's some more UW goodstuff in here to fill out curves and make sure we have some more ways to draw cards independent on Ephara, but our goal is definitely to crank out cards with Ephara and start to kill people primarily with token producers.
I'm debating whether we need to add
Akroma's Will; the main issue with it is that it doesn't protect
Sacred Mesa from sweepers and such.
We'll see how this does; honestly it's probably my last attempt to make this deck playable in casual metas. The combo builds were just both 1) way too good, and 2) crappy copies of Urza or Tivit or Tymna, depending.
We now have an Ephara deck again, so hopefully it works
"one card engines"
Bit of an asterisk on
Cartographer's Hawk,
Stenn, Paranoid Partisan and
Spellseeker but they should both generate quite a bit of CA (and Seeker can find a tutor for
Rhystic Study yeah I know super interesting gameplay:P
Our goal is to find one of these and ride it to card advantage town independently of other cards for the most part.
We are somewhat reliant on fetchlands for a lot of our shenanigans, but we have a decent number of ways to recur/abuse them.
Urza's Saga is really interesting in this deck; with
Crucible of Worlds or
Brought Back (et al) we can potentially make quite an army of dudes, but we can also find
Field of the Dead with
Expedition Map so that's nice.
I added in some of the traditional artifact ramp again, thinking that with my higher density of sweepers that can avoid it that it might be OK.
I have no idea if this deck is going to be OK, or if the fetchland support for
Felidar Retreat is good enough. Heretofore, people have actually removed
Field of the Dead two of the times I've played it.
I think I may find
Winds of Abandon too slow for this deck, and need to fetch something like
Devastating Mastery, but I like that Winds and
Farewell stuff
Heroic Intervention which is one of the most played counter-sweeper cards I've seen in a while.
Wish me luck
A lot of the old pieces will go to make my Esper blink
Tivit, Seller of Secrets deck I think.