”The shapeshifter mimics with a twin's esteem and a mirror's cruelty."
When I started my quest for a commander in each of the possible color identities, I was really looking forward to seeing what I could do with URG. My first attempt was to run Intet, the Dreamer with a “top of the deck matters” theme that featured cards like Future Sight, Lurking Predators, Call of the Wild, and Djinn of Wishes. It was a lot of fun and unpredictable, but relatively clunky, slow, and unfocused.
At some point, I switched over to playing Maelstrom Wanderer with the same overall theme, but much more streamlined. The deck was performing better, but overall it still suffered from the same issues. One of many takeaways from that deck however was to realize just how good Riku is when he is paired up with a ton of mana ramp cards (of which I was running a ton to get up to the 8 mana required to cast Maelstrom Wanderer), and that all the resources I was putting into manipulating the top of my library were all much better spent accelerating out threats.
4/5/2017:
-1 Treasure Cruise, +1 Panharmonicon - Panharminicon is ridiculous and Treasure Cruise is unnecessary and interferes with some of my recursion.
5/3/2017:
-1 Temur Ascendancy: The deck has gravitated away from 4+ power creatures, so this doesn't get triggered enough.
-1 Krosan Tusker: I can't copy anything when this cycles.
-1 Island: Needed room
-1 Forest: Needed room
+1 Flametongue Kavu: The deck needed more removal.
+1 Mystic Confluence: The deck needed a little more interaction, plus this is a card draw spell in a pinch.
+1 Riptide Laboratory: The deck has just enough Wizards to make this good enough to run.
+1 High Market: I needed a cheap sac outlet for stuff stolen by Sower and to get a little value out of tokens from Kiki-Jiki or Reflector.
2/25/2018:
+1 Growing Rites of Itlimoc
+1 Riverwise Augur
+1 Venser, Shaper Savant
+1 Timestream Navigator
-1 Explosive Vegetation - pulled for Growing Rites; I have plenty of ramp and I figured pulling my worst one was appropriate
-1 Prime Speaker Zegana - Zegana never really fit here, but it was in the deck as a source of card advantage. It seemed like a natural pull for Riverwise Augur.
-1 Rashmi, Eternities Crafter - Rashmi is just a good-stuff card in this deck and although it is fantastic at what it does it needed to go.
-1 Wonder - as much as I like having the Survival package in the deck, I rarely got to the point where I needed to get Wonder in order to win.
Overall, the biggest problem isn’t finding cards that work well in the deck; the biggest problem is more trying to figure out what to cut from the seemingly endless possibilities. In the end, I knew that I wanted to focus more on copying creatures than copying spells, as my Wort, the Raidmother deck already does a good job of copying spells. This deck still copies ramp spells and the occasional removal or draw spell, but the primary focus is on finding creatures with the best abilities to copy.
After that, it became apparent to me that the deck could easily evolve into a very similar theme to my Brago, King Eternal deck that focused on blinking creatures. At that point is where I focused more on the copying creatures with tokens theme. I also pulled out almost all the countermagic in the deck in order to give it as much of its own identity as possible.
In addition to Riku, the deck also runs the first 4 cards to specifically copy the various creatures in the deck. Parallel Lives is an obvious synergy card that doubles up the copying, and I’m always looking at what I can cut to add in a Doubling Season. Rite of Replication is also one of the best finisher spells the deck can run, and I have often said that having Riku and 11 lands out is about as much fun as you can have in a game of Magic.
These are the best creatures that bring along an army of friends. These allow you to “go wide” against opponents that might have 1-2 good blockers to try and stop you, plus they are ridiculous when copied or when Parallel Lives is in play.
There are tons of ways to gain card advantage in the deck, so it’s really a matter of preference as to what cards to run. The draw spells are all cheap enough to be copied by Riku, but they are chosen to occupy the spot on your curve above your ramp.
Another form of card advantage is recurring stuff from the graveyard, and this deck has a mini-recursion package to help the deck against high-attrition decks or in the late game when most decks run out of gas. The deck really wants to run a Squee, Goblin Nabob and/or a Fauna Shaman to help out with the Survival package, but there is only so much room.
Sometimes, your opponent’s stuff is just in your way and it needs to killed/destroyed/bounced. Voidmage Prodigy and Glen Elendra Archmage are your only counters, so save them for absolutely key spells.
The Goliath is just one of those cards that gets to absolutely epic proportions in this deck; I used to have Brawn in the deck specifically so I could give it Trample. Where Goliath is the king of “going tall”, Craterhoof is the king of “going wide” by pumping all your tokens to epic proportions. The equipment is there to make sure that you can protect Riku so that maximum shenanigans can occur.
Panharmonicon was something that I pulled relatively recently and was just reminded by someone that I never put it back in. The card is ridiculous here; Riku triggers twice for every non-token creature that enters, so you can pay UUGG to copy every creature twice. All the ETB triggers are all automatically copied, as are things like Temur Ascendancy and Minion Reflector.
So that's the deck for now. I'm looking forward to seeing what Amonkhet has to offer a deck like this.
EDIT:
So Amonkhet didn't really give this deck anything to really add, but there was still some tweaking that I wanted to do:
-1 Temur Ascendancy: The deck has gravitated away from 4+ power creatures, so this doesn't get triggered enough.
-1 Krosan Tusker: I can't copy anything when this cycles.
-1 Island: Needed room
-1 Forest: Needed room
+1 Flametongue Kavu: The deck needed more removal.
+1 Mystic Confluence: The deck needed a little more interaction, plus this is a card draw spell in a pinch.
+1 Riptide Laboratory: The deck has just enough Wizards to make this good enough to run.
+1 High Market: I needed a cheap sac outlet for stuff stolen by Sower and to get a little value out of tokens from Kiki-Jiki or Reflector.
EDIT2:
There is a lot of potential options from Hour of Devastation:
Reason//Believe - Reason is cheap enough to copy with Riku without being too painful and it can really help ensure that the top of your deck is stacked in your favor. The big payoff would be copying Believe with two creatures on top, hopefully with enough mana to also then copy the creatures as they enter the battlefield. I would need 4UUUGGGR to make that happen (presuming that I cast Believe the turn before), but I would get two copies of the best two creatures in the top 5 or 6 cards of my deck for my 11 mana. If this were still a "top of the deck matters" deck, this would go in the deck 100%. As it stands right now, I think it would have to replace something like Spitting Image to make the deck. Maybe I need to make a new "top of the deck matters" deck to find a home for this.
Neheb, the Eternal - I'm probably not running enough red for this, not to mention that I'm not copying this with Riku due to it being legendary, but it is a solid source of mana for a deck that really wants its mana. I'm probably going to try Neheb in every deck I can, but I doubt it will last long in Riku as it really doesn't mesh well with what the deck is trying to do.
Struggle//Survive - Struggle will often be big enough to kill pretty much anything and it is cheap enough to copy with Riku easily enough, but what really strikes me is that it then become some much needed graveyard control afterward.
The Locust God - This card is pretty goo no matter what deck it would be in, but I'm not sure it would work out here. The token generation plays well with Parallel Lives, but overall this seems like it would just be a goodstuff add.
Hour of Promise - I don't really have great targets for this as this is not a black deck that runs Urborg/Coffers and I'm not running Cradle in this deck either, but I'm wondering if even grabbing Ancient Tomb+Temple of the False God could be worth it. I'm also wondering how easy it would be to add in the three cycling Deserts plus Scavenger Grounds and something like Survivors' Encampment in order to also try and get the two Zombie tokens. In the end, I'm unsure that this will be any better than what I'm already running.
So even though I tried a few things, eventually there was nothing to add from Amonkhet block or C17. Ixalan block though has proven to have some interesting options worth exploring and eventually staying in the deck: Ixalan Growing Rites of Itlimoc - Everyone know this card is great, but I only wanted to include it in decks where it made the most sense. In a deck with 35 creatures, a deck that copies those creatures, and a deck that makes tokens, this card will hit enough on the front end and flip often enough to make it well worthwhile. The only thing that it has going against it in this deck is that I cannot copy it with Riku, but in the end I thought this was fine for an effect this good. Prosperous Pirates - Being able to spit out some treasure tokens was nice, but in the end it has to be able to beat out other 5+ drops already in the deck in order to make it. If I was running Doubling Season then it might make the cut over something like Inferno Titan, but as it was it didn't stay in the deck for too long. River's Rebuke - This is where having this card affect only one player at a time comes in handy because I can copy it here and have it hit the two most dangerous players and turn it into a mini Cyclonic Rift. The issue is mainly that I hate that this is a Sorcery. Siren Stormtamer - So I began to look at some more ways to bring in some additional counter-magic into the deck in a way that made sense for Riku when I saw this. There are some other options out there like Daring Apprentice, Cursecatcher, or theSpiketail [card=Spiketail Drake]Trio, but this card seemed to bring a lot to the table as far as being a good option. It's cheap, hits lots of relevant spells when needed, and isn't easily played around (which is important for an on-board counter). In the end I decided to pull it and instead go with putting in a Venser, Shaper Savant. Storm Fleet Arsonist - I really liked the idea of this, but by the time I get to 7 mana an opponent can usually afford to lose a land rather than anything impactful.
Rivals of Ixalan Brass's Bounty - I really wanted this card to have a place somewhere in one of my decks, but alas it was not to be. Yes it lets you ramp up to ridiculous amounts of mana for a turn, but you are just better off using a cheaper land-fetching ramp spell and copying it for a more flexible and permanent alternative. Riverwise Augur - So Brainstorming twice when you copy this is not as exciting as it sounds unless you have a Fetchland handy, but the card is very good nonetheless and was able to replace Zegana in the deck. Release to the Wind - I like cards like this that provide some measure of defensive use while providing some nice upside when used offensively. The dream of copying this with Riku on two token-making creatures, replaying them for free and copying them on the way back is very enticing, but that scenario rarely occurs to take advantage of it that way. The Immortal Sun - So this deck is 4 for 4 when looking to take advantage of all that The Immortal Sun has to offer, with the only real drawback being that I can't copy it with Riku. In the end, I decided that this really wasn't the deck for this. Timestream Navigator - At one point, I looked at the potential for this deck to take advantage of Riku to copy Time Walk effects, but I decided against it because I really wanted to run Wormfang Manta+Torpor Orb and Torpor Orb is not something that Riku wants to see. I am having some fun with this card in the deck as it is cheap enough to run out with mana to copy it, hitting Ascend is not difficult in this deck, and because it's a Wizard there are some recursion themes in the deck that allow me to go off with infinite turns if I ever need to. I may pull this in the near future, but for now it has found a home.
So the final changes as of right now are as follows:
+1 Growing Rites of Itlimoc
+1 Riverwise Augur
+1 Venser, Shaper Savant
+1 Timestream Navigator
-1 Explosive Vegetation - pulled for Growing Rites; I have plenty of ramp and I figured pulling my worst one was appropriate
-1 Prime Speaker Zegana - Zegana never really fit here, but it was in the deck as a source of card advantage. It seemed like a natural pull for Riverwise Augur.
-1 Rashmi, Eternities Crafter - Rashmi is just a good-stuff card in this deck and although it is fantastic at what it does it needed to go.
-1 Wonder - as much as I like having the Survival package in the deck, I rarely got to the point where I needed to get Wonder in order to win.
When I started my quest for a commander in each of the possible color identities, I was really looking forward to seeing what I could do with URG. My first attempt was to run Intet, the Dreamer with a “top of the deck matters” theme that featured cards like Future Sight, Lurking Predators, Call of the Wild, and Djinn of Wishes. It was a lot of fun and unpredictable, but relatively clunky, slow, and unfocused.
At some point, I switched over to playing Maelstrom Wanderer with the same overall theme, but much more streamlined. The deck was performing better, but overall it still suffered from the same issues. One of many takeaways from that deck however was to realize just how good Riku is when he is paired up with a ton of mana ramp cards (of which I was running a ton to get up to the 8 mana required to cast Maelstrom Wanderer), and that all the resources I was putting into manipulating the top of my library were all much better spent accelerating out threats.
Updated 2/25/2018 through Rivals of Ixalan
1 Riku of Two Reflections
Creatures - 36
2 Sakura-Tribe Elder
2 Coiling Oracle
2 Voidmage Prodigy
2 Timestream Navigator
3 Yavimaya Elder
3 Wood Elves
3 Farhaven Elf
3 Yavimaya Dryad
3 Eternal Witness
3 Fierce Empath
4 Solemn Simulacrum
4 Oracle of Mul Daya
4 Glen Elendra Archmage
4 Anger
4 Riverwise Augur
4 Venser, Shaper Savant
4 Sower of Temptation
4 Archaeomancer
4 Fathom Mage
4 Flametongue Kavu
5 Genesis
5 Kiki-Jiki, Mirror Breaker
5 Mulldrifter
5 Deranged Hermit
5 Acidic Slime
6 Inferno Titan
6 Duplicant
6 Progenitor Mimic
7 Hamletback Goliath
7 Avenger of Zendikar
7 Myr Battlesphere
7 Hornet Queen
7 Precursor Golem
8 Craterhoof Behemoth
8 Woodfall Primus
8 Maelstrom Wanderer
2 Cyclonic Rift
3 Chaos Warp
3 Beast Within
3 Capsize
4 Fact or Fiction
5 Mystic Confluence
Sorceries - 11
2 Rampant Growth
2 Farseek
2 Nature's Lore
3 Cultivate
3 Kodama's Reach
4 Skyshroud Claim
4 Rite of Replication
4 Concentrate
4 Harmonize
5 Urban Evolution
6 Spitting Image
Enchantments - 3
2 Survival of the Fittest
3 Growing Rites if Itlimoc
4 Parallel Lives
Artifacts - 7
0 Mana Crypt
1 Sol Ring
2 Lightning Greaves
2 Swiftfoot Boots
4 Birthing Pod
4 Panharmonicon
5 Minion Reflector
Lands – 36
1 Tropical Island
1 Volcanic Island
1 Taiga
1 Breeding Pool
1 Steam Vents
1 Stomping Ground
1 Misty Rainforest
1 Scalding Tarn
1 Wooded Foothills
1 Hinterland Harbor
1 Sulfur Falls
1 Rootbound Crag
1 Fire-Lit Thicket
1 Cascade Bluffs
1 Flooded Grove
1 Command Tower
1 Ancient Tomb
1 Temple of the False God
1 Riptide Laboratory
1 High Market
1 Reliquary Tower
8 Forest
5 Island
2 Mountain
4/5/2017:
-1 Treasure Cruise, +1 Panharmonicon - Panharminicon is ridiculous and Treasure Cruise is unnecessary and interferes with some of my recursion.
5/3/2017:
-1 Temur Ascendancy: The deck has gravitated away from 4+ power creatures, so this doesn't get triggered enough.
-1 Krosan Tusker: I can't copy anything when this cycles.
-1 Island: Needed room
-1 Forest: Needed room
+1 Flametongue Kavu: The deck needed more removal.
+1 Mystic Confluence: The deck needed a little more interaction, plus this is a card draw spell in a pinch.
+1 Riptide Laboratory: The deck has just enough Wizards to make this good enough to run.
+1 High Market: I needed a cheap sac outlet for stuff stolen by Sower and to get a little value out of tokens from Kiki-Jiki or Reflector.
2/25/2018:
+1 Growing Rites of Itlimoc
+1 Riverwise Augur
+1 Venser, Shaper Savant
+1 Timestream Navigator
-1 Explosive Vegetation - pulled for Growing Rites; I have plenty of ramp and I figured pulling my worst one was appropriate
-1 Prime Speaker Zegana - Zegana never really fit here, but it was in the deck as a source of card advantage. It seemed like a natural pull for Riverwise Augur.
-1 Rashmi, Eternities Crafter - Rashmi is just a good-stuff card in this deck and although it is fantastic at what it does it needed to go.
-1 Wonder - as much as I like having the Survival package in the deck, I rarely got to the point where I needed to get Wonder in order to win.
2 Artifact Mutation
2 Fauna Shaman
2 Counterspell
3 Voidslime
3 Æther Adept
4 Master Biomancer
5 Siege-Gang Commander
5 Doubling Season
6 Brutalizer Exarch
6 Consecrated Sphinx
1 Alchemist’s Refuge
1 Rattleclaw Mystic
1 Surrak Dragon Claw
1 Zealous Conscripts
Card Choice Explanation
Overall, the biggest problem isn’t finding cards that work well in the deck; the biggest problem is more trying to figure out what to cut from the seemingly endless possibilities. In the end, I knew that I wanted to focus more on copying creatures than copying spells, as my Wort, the Raidmother deck already does a good job of copying spells. This deck still copies ramp spells and the occasional removal or draw spell, but the primary focus is on finding creatures with the best abilities to copy.
After that, it became apparent to me that the deck could easily evolve into a very similar theme to my Brago, King Eternal deck that focused on blinking creatures. At that point is where I focused more on the copying creatures with tokens theme. I also pulled out almost all the countermagic in the deck in order to give it as much of its own identity as possible.
Creature Copiers
In addition to Riku, the deck also runs the first 4 cards to specifically copy the various creatures in the deck. Parallel Lives is an obvious synergy card that doubles up the copying, and I’m always looking at what I can cut to add in a Doubling Season. Rite of Replication is also one of the best finisher spells the deck can run, and I have often said that having Riku and 11 lands out is about as much fun as you can have in a game of Magic.
Ramp
Krosan TuskerThe deck wants tons of mana, so it makes sense to run as much of the green ramp that can fit. Note that a lot of the ramps spells can only fetch basics (Sakura-Tribe Elder, Farhaven Elf, Solemn Simulacrum, Rampant Growth, Cultivate, Kodama's Reach, Explosive Vegetation, Yavimaya Elder, Krosan Tusker), so you need to make sure that your mana base has enough lands of the appropriate types to be searched. Ramp spells that fetch “Forest cards” or look only for a basic land type (Wood Elves, Yavimaya Dryad, Farseek, Nature's Lore, Skyshroud Claim) should almost always be fetching the appropriate ABU or Ravnica Dual land.
Token Makers
These are the best creatures that bring along an army of friends. These allow you to “go wide” against opponents that might have 1-2 good blockers to try and stop you, plus they are ridiculous when copied or when Parallel Lives is in play.
Card Advantage
Temur AscendancyThere are tons of ways to gain card advantage in the deck, so it’s really a matter of preference as to what cards to run. The draw spells are all cheap enough to be copied by Riku, but they are chosen to occupy the spot on your curve above your ramp.
Recursion
Another form of card advantage is recurring stuff from the graveyard, and this deck has a mini-recursion package to help the deck against high-attrition decks or in the late game when most decks run out of gas. The deck really wants to run a Squee, Goblin Nabob and/or a Fauna Shaman to help out with the Survival package, but there is only so much room.
Removal
Sometimes, your opponent’s stuff is just in your way and it needs to killed/destroyed/bounced. Voidmage Prodigy and Glen Elendra Archmage are your only counters, so save them for absolutely key spells.
Going Big
The Goliath is just one of those cards that gets to absolutely epic proportions in this deck; I used to have Brawn in the deck specifically so I could give it Trample. Where Goliath is the king of “going tall”, Craterhoof is the king of “going wide” by pumping all your tokens to epic proportions. The equipment is there to make sure that you can protect Riku so that maximum shenanigans can occur.
Panharmonicon was something that I pulled relatively recently and was just reminded by someone that I never put it back in. The card is ridiculous here; Riku triggers twice for every non-token creature that enters, so you can pay UUGG to copy every creature twice. All the ETB triggers are all automatically copied, as are things like Temur Ascendancy and Minion Reflector.
So that's the deck for now. I'm looking forward to seeing what Amonkhet has to offer a deck like this.
EDIT:
So Amonkhet didn't really give this deck anything to really add, but there was still some tweaking that I wanted to do:
-1 Temur Ascendancy: The deck has gravitated away from 4+ power creatures, so this doesn't get triggered enough.
-1 Krosan Tusker: I can't copy anything when this cycles.
-1 Island: Needed room
-1 Forest: Needed room
+1 Flametongue Kavu: The deck needed more removal.
+1 Mystic Confluence: The deck needed a little more interaction, plus this is a card draw spell in a pinch.
+1 Riptide Laboratory: The deck has just enough Wizards to make this good enough to run.
+1 High Market: I needed a cheap sac outlet for stuff stolen by Sower and to get a little value out of tokens from Kiki-Jiki or Reflector.
EDIT2:
There is a lot of potential options from Hour of Devastation:
Reason//Believe - Reason is cheap enough to copy with Riku without being too painful and it can really help ensure that the top of your deck is stacked in your favor. The big payoff would be copying Believe with two creatures on top, hopefully with enough mana to also then copy the creatures as they enter the battlefield. I would need 4UUUGGGR to make that happen (presuming that I cast Believe the turn before), but I would get two copies of the best two creatures in the top 5 or 6 cards of my deck for my 11 mana. If this were still a "top of the deck matters" deck, this would go in the deck 100%. As it stands right now, I think it would have to replace something like Spitting Image to make the deck. Maybe I need to make a new "top of the deck matters" deck to find a home for this.
Neheb, the Eternal - I'm probably not running enough red for this, not to mention that I'm not copying this with Riku due to it being legendary, but it is a solid source of mana for a deck that really wants its mana. I'm probably going to try Neheb in every deck I can, but I doubt it will last long in Riku as it really doesn't mesh well with what the deck is trying to do.
Struggle//Survive - Struggle will often be big enough to kill pretty much anything and it is cheap enough to copy with Riku easily enough, but what really strikes me is that it then become some much needed graveyard control afterward.
The Locust God - This card is pretty goo no matter what deck it would be in, but I'm not sure it would work out here. The token generation plays well with Parallel Lives, but overall this seems like it would just be a goodstuff add.
Hour of Promise - I don't really have great targets for this as this is not a black deck that runs Urborg/Coffers and I'm not running Cradle in this deck either, but I'm wondering if even grabbing Ancient Tomb+Temple of the False God could be worth it. I'm also wondering how easy it would be to add in the three cycling Deserts plus Scavenger Grounds and something like Survivors' Encampment in order to also try and get the two Zombie tokens. In the end, I'm unsure that this will be any better than what I'm already running.
Jalira, Master Polymorphist | Endrek Sahr, Master Breeder | Bosh, Iron Golem | Ezuri, Renegade Leader
Brago, King Eternal | Oona, Queen of the Fae | Wort, Boggart Auntie | Wort, the Raidmother
Captain Sisay | Rhys, the Redeemed | Trostani, Selesnya's Voice | Jarad, Golgari Lich Lord
Gisela, Blade of Goldnight | Obzedat, Ghost Council | Niv-Mizzet, the Firemind | Vorel of the Hull Clade
Uril, the Miststalker | Prossh, Skyraider of Kher | Nicol Bolas | Progenitus
Ghave, Guru of Spores | Zedruu the Greathearted | Damia, Sage of Stone | Riku of Two Reflections
Ixalan
Growing Rites of Itlimoc - Everyone know this card is great, but I only wanted to include it in decks where it made the most sense. In a deck with 35 creatures, a deck that copies those creatures, and a deck that makes tokens, this card will hit enough on the front end and flip often enough to make it well worthwhile. The only thing that it has going against it in this deck is that I cannot copy it with Riku, but in the end I thought this was fine for an effect this good.
Prosperous Pirates - Being able to spit out some treasure tokens was nice, but in the end it has to be able to beat out other 5+ drops already in the deck in order to make it. If I was running Doubling Season then it might make the cut over something like Inferno Titan, but as it was it didn't stay in the deck for too long.
River's Rebuke - This is where having this card affect only one player at a time comes in handy because I can copy it here and have it hit the two most dangerous players and turn it into a mini Cyclonic Rift. The issue is mainly that I hate that this is a Sorcery.
Siren Stormtamer - So I began to look at some more ways to bring in some additional counter-magic into the deck in a way that made sense for Riku when I saw this. There are some other options out there like Daring Apprentice, Cursecatcher, or the Spiketail [card=Spiketail Drake]Trio, but this card seemed to bring a lot to the table as far as being a good option. It's cheap, hits lots of relevant spells when needed, and isn't easily played around (which is important for an on-board counter). In the end I decided to pull it and instead go with putting in a Venser, Shaper Savant.
Storm Fleet Arsonist - I really liked the idea of this, but by the time I get to 7 mana an opponent can usually afford to lose a land rather than anything impactful.
Rivals of Ixalan
Brass's Bounty - I really wanted this card to have a place somewhere in one of my decks, but alas it was not to be. Yes it lets you ramp up to ridiculous amounts of mana for a turn, but you are just better off using a cheaper land-fetching ramp spell and copying it for a more flexible and permanent alternative.
Riverwise Augur - So Brainstorming twice when you copy this is not as exciting as it sounds unless you have a Fetchland handy, but the card is very good nonetheless and was able to replace Zegana in the deck.
Release to the Wind - I like cards like this that provide some measure of defensive use while providing some nice upside when used offensively. The dream of copying this with Riku on two token-making creatures, replaying them for free and copying them on the way back is very enticing, but that scenario rarely occurs to take advantage of it that way.
The Immortal Sun - So this deck is 4 for 4 when looking to take advantage of all that The Immortal Sun has to offer, with the only real drawback being that I can't copy it with Riku. In the end, I decided that this really wasn't the deck for this.
Timestream Navigator - At one point, I looked at the potential for this deck to take advantage of Riku to copy Time Walk effects, but I decided against it because I really wanted to run Wormfang Manta+Torpor Orb and Torpor Orb is not something that Riku wants to see. I am having some fun with this card in the deck as it is cheap enough to run out with mana to copy it, hitting Ascend is not difficult in this deck, and because it's a Wizard there are some recursion themes in the deck that allow me to go off with infinite turns if I ever need to. I may pull this in the near future, but for now it has found a home.
So the final changes as of right now are as follows:
+1 Growing Rites of Itlimoc
+1 Riverwise Augur
+1 Venser, Shaper Savant
+1 Timestream Navigator
-1 Explosive Vegetation - pulled for Growing Rites; I have plenty of ramp and I figured pulling my worst one was appropriate
-1 Prime Speaker Zegana - Zegana never really fit here, but it was in the deck as a source of card advantage. It seemed like a natural pull for Riverwise Augur.
-1 Rashmi, Eternities Crafter - Rashmi is just a good-stuff card in this deck and although it is fantastic at what it does it needed to go.
-1 Wonder - as much as I like having the Survival package in the deck, I rarely got to the point where I needed to get Wonder in order to win.
Jalira, Master Polymorphist | Endrek Sahr, Master Breeder | Bosh, Iron Golem | Ezuri, Renegade Leader
Brago, King Eternal | Oona, Queen of the Fae | Wort, Boggart Auntie | Wort, the Raidmother
Captain Sisay | Rhys, the Redeemed | Trostani, Selesnya's Voice | Jarad, Golgari Lich Lord
Gisela, Blade of Goldnight | Obzedat, Ghost Council | Niv-Mizzet, the Firemind | Vorel of the Hull Clade
Uril, the Miststalker | Prossh, Skyraider of Kher | Nicol Bolas | Progenitus
Ghave, Guru of Spores | Zedruu the Greathearted | Damia, Sage of Stone | Riku of Two Reflections