I recently rocked up to a Cockatrice pub after a bit of a break, and ended up steamrolling a mana screwed
Nikara/
Yannik with a clockwork turn seven Feather "
Zada Hoof". Smelling the opportunity for Daxos to get a rare pub walk, I stuck around for another game. A new player joined, was greeted with a message of jank. "I don't do jank, but this is my least horrible,"
Uril lands. In a three-man pod, two players on kinda crappy decks. Uh oh.
Things pick up quite a bit around turn five. Uril deploys their commander and sticks a
Keen Sense on him, while Nikara/Yannik has managed to assemble
Winding Constrictor and
Cathars' Crusade. By contrast, my turn five was drawing an extra off
Phyrexian Arena, tickling Uril with
Sword of Rampant Growth, and keeping up
Alseid. Jeez
Abzan counters slams into me to
gain some life, which brings me down to 25. I use this as a negotiation point to letting me poke them for three to get another land, drop
Song of the Worldsoul and pass with Alseid up again. This turns out to once again be the least impactful of the turn sixes, as Uril revs up to 16 power and flies into me for whatever reason, which gets followed by Abzan's
Branching Evolution and a creature. Quadruple counter anthem! Ouch! I'm beyond irrelevant and regretting my deck choice quite a bit at this point. Abzan sees the monstrous voltron, chooses to stay back on defence and not finish me off, and I get to have a turn seven. Yay?
Time to start working Soul a bit, I guess. I make my first spirit of the game, slam
Aura of Silence and pass to Uril with three mana up, holding up the Alseid and a
Brought Back. This gives me a good level of interaction shall I need it, and the Song will make another spirit fall out when I crack the recursion spell. Uril spots the intense value Abzan has going on, deploys
Runes of the Deus (which I handily remind them costs 2 extra) and sends a 21/21 flampling double striker at their face. Abzan tries to get me to kill the flying with the Aura, as they've got enough ground gum to chump to survival, but I choose not to. Not having to worry about big lifelink dudes being incentivised to come over and heal off my face seems beneficial to me. I untap and rip an
Extinguish All Hope off the top. I choose not to cast it yet, as I don't feel I have enough spirit presence to close out quite yet. I make two extra bodies off a
Wayfarer's Bauble and a
Ghostly Prison and pass, fully leaning into my "control looking to stabilise" role. The prior interaction line gets augmented with an emergency
Utter End if need be too. Uril doesn't get to experience any of it as for whatever crazy reason they choose to drop a completely superfluous
Xenagod, rendering them unable to pay the Prison. I sink the interaction mana into spirits and am sitting on 35 swingable power, which is honestly pretty decent. I crack the Extinguish, tanking Uril and all his auras, rip Aura on a land enchantment, and bring back Daxos and the Aura. Quite disgusting. Uril's not quite dead yet, but hangs up the hat after eating the 35 and failing to topdeck anything of note. Inspecting the Cockatrice replay revealed that the potential Alseid staved off Uril's
Song of the Dryads. Neat.
All in all, the game's a great demonstration of the sacrifice the friendly branch made. Had I windmilled
Rule of Law turn four, Uril's aura stack would have taken quite a bit longer to assemble and even Abzan counters would have been slowed down a bit. Instead I spent turn six deploying a do-nothing enchantment, which did end up offering me twelve mana's worth of value before the game ended. So not bad, but not where you want to be with this sort of pacing. Not sure if Daxos belongs in this sort of pacing anyway, but Rule of Laws give the deck more reach against stronger opposition. Song is still fun as hell in the shell, mind you - in the longer games of my playgroup, the synergies mentioned in earlier posts really get to shine, and those scenarios are a blast.
Flickering Ward and
Mesa Enchantress become "
WW: Make a dude, gain an experience counter, draw a card."
Bolas Rock and
Top become "Pay 1 life: Make a dude, draw a card." It also offers some level of Daxos robustness to spot removal, which is nice too. But is it objectively better than punching above your weight class with the Rule of Laws? No. Nevertheless, in a world where people are nice to each other and Rule of Laws are no go, Song feels like the best alternate direction you can take Daxos in. It's not quite the powerhouse that things like
Skybind/
Sphere of Safety/
True Conviction are, but it is still very nice. It runs loops around
Sigil of the Empty Throne by doubling its target range.
Every now and then I have a game in my group where I gut myself pretty hard with the life-to-draw things and fail to accomplish anything of note. I was perturbed by it, but eventually I realised that I have ten effective sources of lifegain in the deck at this point. Might be time to further refine the mental tutor roadmap and put more pressure on
True Conviction/
Vault of the Archangel plus a bit of wide. And if given no opportunity to do anything meaningful, leading to an overzealous
Necropotence demise, that happens too. Variance is a thing, and it's not unheard of to clunk out and fail to find impactful things like big mana, tutors or haymakers. In those instances, the game would have likely been lost anyway due to overall lack of impact.