Mesmeric orb needs to be played calculatingly, play it right after a wrath of god and everyone is tapped, then throw out a glacial chasm at the same time. don't play it as soon as you can on turn 2. run it as a 2-of.
Preface: This is for the 5-player circle format (where players are restricted to attacking either a planeswalker, or the the player to their left.)
As you read please keep in mind that this deck works well in the 5-player meta, and you can tailor the threat/removal cards to your meta, but I really just wanted to share what my group has found to be a really strong deck that has a lot of beautiful synergies.
I've been playing this at my kitchen table game and it has been consistently doing very well even when my friends pilot the deck. This deck works best when there are no other counter-spell decks at the table and some of your opponents are wiping the board every few turns with Wrath of God effects. If someone is doing that, and you draw some of your own disruption, you won't die to a fast deck.
You draw so many cards, play so many lands, then shuffle your instants/sorceries into your library, that you end up drawing nothing but disruption + threat cards late game, while your opponents don't keep anything on the table without your permission.
This deck reliably survives early game with all the disruption cards, but shines late game when you've drawn all the lands out of your library, and shuffled all of your threats and disruption cards back into the library. After you have godly amounts of mana, and have nothing in your library each turn but more counterspells and cyclonic rifts, you can end the game with a 23/23 inkmoth nexus+lashwrithe with haste, flying, and infect.
The deck can reliably combo reassembling skeleton with Lashwrithe and 2 Diamond valley to gain about 46 life a turn!
This deck is really built around burgeoning. Burgeoning is a very powerful card I've been playing with lately. It gives decks early and late mana ramp, and can be played turn one. Running as a 4-of is good in any deck that can play green mana untapped on turn one. But it works best when you have as many lands in your hand as the rest of the table put together. That means you need a lot of card draw, or a lot of dumping lands into the graveyard and then into your hand, or directly into your hand. Early card draw is essential in every deck though, and especially when you start the game without burgeoning (so that you can draw it!), so your card draw has to be affordable early-game, without benefiting from burgeoning's ramp.
In short, a burgeoning deck needs as much low-mana-cost card-draw as you can get.
For card-draw, nothing comes close to blue. Mystic Remora and Rhystic study are two of the best, and cheapest, card-drawing cards in the game. These both benefit from the multiple opponents playing lots of CARDS per turn, and burgeoning benefits from lots of lands being played each turn. If we know that we want enemies to play lands and cast spells, let's make our opponents draw cards!
Cyclonic Rift is beautiful with those enchantments because it gives opponents spells to re-play so that you draw more cards! If they're struggling to keep playing their threat and defense cards because of bounce spells, they usually can't afford to pay the cost for mystic remora or rhystic study. Basically it makes your card draw enchantments fill your hand faster, because people will be re-playing their expensive cards, and won't spend the additional mana to keep you from getting card-draw.
Day's Undoing has several important effects:
1) it is another card-drawing spell to help you dig through your library to draw to complete the Burgeoning + Mystic Remora Combo.
2) it messes up reanimator decks and decks that rely on the graveyard zone.
3) it protects you from milling.
4) If an opponent does play an uncounterable threat card, Cyclonic rift can bounce it, then Day's Undoing can make them shuffle it into the library, but leaves them with some lands and cards to play, meaning you will be able to play your lands, and draw cards off of their plays, and if you draw a land you'll probably be able to play it too.
5) it gives your opponents each 1 or 2 land cards to trigger your burgeoning.
6) It cycles all of your used up counterspell, bounce, and threat cards back into your library, making your next "draw a card" effect give you something powerful.
Thanks to the mana ramp, card draw, and making people replay the same spells, you get massive card advantage.
In summary, blue rocks with burgeoning thanks to the card-draw, and the your card-draw benefits from the mana-ramp, and lastly disruption from Cyclonic Rift, or Day's Undoing synergize with both, and each-other, making the whole greater that the sum of its parts.
Urborg, Tomb of Yawgmoth and Cabal Coffers would be bonkers for this deck. You can tutor the missing piece of the 2 card combo with black tutors or Expedition Map. They work well for playing big colorless, X costing spells, Cyclonic Rift, Lashwrithe, etc. Cabal coffers would also pair well with your Parallax Tide since you can use that to untap your own lands. Alternatively you can just steal someone else's cabal coffers if it gets played.
Time Spiral would combo with both the cabals, and help you avoid milling yourself
Many of your creatures have a nice "when you cast this spell" effect, so a self-bounce would be good. Evacuation perhaps?
I've been on a kick enjoying red decks lately, and one of my decks started winning often thanks to aggressive land ramp so my playgroup recently relaxed their restriction on land destruction. Now that I can blow up lands again, I wanted to revamp an old jokulhaups deck taking advantage of newer planeswalkers.
Setting up the bomb: jokulhaups and obliterate are used to wipe the board of everything except your enchantments and planeswalkers. Koth of the Hammer uses 16 "mountain" cards to ramp those expensive red sorceries out faster Land tax finds those mountains fast.
If you manage to cast obliterate or jokulhaups with mana leftover(easy, thanks to koth of the hammer and spinerock knoll), boros charm allow you to save your own permanents, give doublestrike to greater gargadon or gideon, champion of justice, or you can use it to snipe someone's planeswalker. reverberate is interesting to me: it can let you copy your own obliterate if someone else is about to use their own boros charm (this means that the copy will resolve before their boros charm), or you can copy someone else's boros charm. or just copy some other amazing sorcery/instant.
Finishers:
These finishers are for killing people after the board has been wiped, and all generate a ton of value over time, and time passes quickly when people have to spend 3-4 turns getting their board back into play.
I'm Looking for input, here are some things I'm really on the fence about:
1--most of the early mana fetchers only get basic lands (not the dual lands) so they don't fix my colors. could fix this by adding 1 plains and 1 swamp basic lands, but that adds other problems. thoughts?
2--Should I remove ~1 each of the land-fetching creatures and add forests instead?
3--is 4 sylvan primordial too many? They don't even help achieve the 7-land kill condition, so may be kinda pointless in this kind of deck. is 0,1,2,3 or 4 the right number?
4--garruk, primal hunter is probably not the best card draw for this deck. Skullclamp is banned in my group though. On the upside, his 3rd ability will be good in this deck if it ever goes off. Greater good is probably useless in this deck. What would be the next best green card draw in this type of deck? (no syphon mind allowed)
5--the lifegain is a bit awkward. Path of Bravery might be a good lifegain card in token decks, but I think beastmaster ascension doesn't work as well with path as it does with whip of erebos, ready // willing, or vault of the archangel effects that just give your 6/6 creatures all lifelink. may be smarter not to rely on lifelink as my main source of lifegain and use something like exsanguinate, Kokusho, the Evening Star, Gray merchant of asphodel, etc, but most of those are banned in my group. are there some powerful green multiplayer lifegain spells I should try?
This deck is designed for a casual 5-player circle game, suggestions welcome!
the idea is to have play beastmaster ascension and then suddenly attack with at least 7 creatures out of nowhere all on the same turn before anyone breaks your combo. If you power up the beastmaster ascension, your 7 1/1 creatures should hit for at least 6 damage each (42 damage) and kill someone in one alpha strike.
There are a few ways here to get the ascension+7 attackers: Life // Death is a fast way to get 7 untapped lands for attacking, you can either put ascension out on a prior turn or we can play the whole combo on one turn, but then we need either rofellos, llanowar emissary or a way to untap lands. ready // willing can both untap your lands and give them indestructible+lifelink.
Out of curiosity, are you opposed to Goblin Charbelcher as your win con? It's basically as good today as it was 12 years ago and it's much less convoluted than what you're currently employing. I'm not saying that your combo is necessarily some 5-6 card monstrosity (all of the cards do something inherently) but at the same time this seems much more complicated than "tap 7 mana, kill you."
Belcher is probably better, and deserves its own deck, but it feels cheesy to me. It is much more interesting I think, to FORCE opponents into taking token creatures they don't want and then abuse the number of opponents.
Do you like the full 4 Taxes, Racks and E.Tutors? I find that the cards are rather anemic in multiples nor do I think that it's incredibly important that combo is assembled on turn 2. I understand that part of the beauty of the Rack is that "mulligans" are significantly less impactful when you can "reset your hand" so to speak but it still doesn't change the fact that your deck is full of cards that don't really do anything. I don't think that inherently wrong to field the full playset of everything but I've personally experienced more success running fewer Racks and E.Tutors and making the combo more of a midgame focus to lean on once I've taken control of the board. Tax I'll frequently run a 4-of but at the same time you don't have Chrome Moxes or Mox Diamonds to make it an especially powerful turn 1 play.
heck I've been thinking of scrapping the whole combo. this is primarily a vicious shadows deck. I agree that the deck has at least 10 "do nothing" cards after you already have your 2-card combo, but the scroll rack lets me replace the dead cards so I don't mind. Going down to fewer might be good, and would help me fix other issues. do you recommend 4 land tax, 2 scroll rack, 2 tutors, and 4 mox diamond/chrome mox?
My biggest question for you is "what happens when you don't see an Orb in your opening hand?" Is the plan to hard-mull for one and pray that you never miss? It's not a terrible tactic by any means but from where I sit this deck does actual nothing without a turn 2 Orb. It has no creatures, no relevant spells (other than a few Deeds), nothing. You either mill some fat to recur or you lose.
From another angle, how do you prevent the person on your right from killing you in 2-3 turns?
turns 1-2 this deck won't be able to handle a 20/20 creature attacking it, but turn 3 it can do a bit better. In my meta I don't have to worry about it. If your meta does have to worry about dying in turns 1 or 2, you're basically stuck playing blue counterspells and white swords to plowshares right?
Drawing an orb early is always welcome but not needed. If you find yourself without an orb, use one of your 7 creature killing cards to kill the strongest creature, then animate it. use it to draw cards/gain life.
A lot of the odd cards are there to combo:
-If you animate+rite of consumption, that's as good as getting an unblocked attack in, with spirit link. so it gets you past blockers and summoning sickness. usually that kills a player and gives you 50 life.
-the predator's rapport is there because it is lifegain, without losing your LoE. My goal is always to be last deck standing, lifegain helps me get there. I keep it as a one-of so that I can take it out of my graveyard via eternal witness, as needed.
-most of the 1-ofs are in there to give extra utility out of the graveyard, which acts as an extended hand.
-Diamond Valley doesn't need to tap for mana: you will usually want it untapped to "protect" your creature from exile/creature theft via gilded drake, and generally ward off swords to plowshares effects.
took out the goblin bombardments, I already am using ashnod's altar exclusively for my sac outlet.
added more artifact/aura mutations to power the altar early game and act as removal.
swapped wheel of fate for reforge the soul.
It would be easy to take out the tax-rack cards and replace with some early aggro/more control/other kinds of mana ramp, while still keeping the kill-combo...but I like it as-is.
Insidious Will would work well in the Metallurgic Summonings deck.
But if you're building around Metallurgic Summonings, there are blue instants like force of will and twincast. I especially recommend twincast since you would get a creature token for twincast, and the copied spell. Deflection or redirect are similar but won't give you 2 creatures.
Twincast would also work nicely with big blue miracle spells.
Temporal mastery
Devastation Tide
Vanishment
Some miracle enablers would be:
brainstorm
Mystical Tutor
Jace, the Mind Sculptor
Scroll Rack
As you read please keep in mind that this deck works well in the 5-player meta, and you can tailor the threat/removal cards to your meta, but I really just wanted to share what my group has found to be a really strong deck that has a lot of beautiful synergies.
I've been playing this at my kitchen table game and it has been consistently doing very well even when my friends pilot the deck. This deck works best when there are no other counter-spell decks at the table and some of your opponents are wiping the board every few turns with Wrath of God effects. If someone is doing that, and you draw some of your own disruption, you won't die to a fast deck.
You draw so many cards, play so many lands, then shuffle your instants/sorceries into your library, that you end up drawing nothing but disruption + threat cards late game, while your opponents don't keep anything on the table without your permission.
This deck reliably survives early game with all the disruption cards, but shines late game when you've drawn all the lands out of your library, and shuffled all of your threats and disruption cards back into the library. After you have godly amounts of mana, and have nothing in your library each turn but more counterspells and cyclonic rifts, you can end the game with a 23/23 inkmoth nexus+lashwrithe with haste, flying, and infect.
The deck can reliably combo reassembling skeleton with Lashwrithe and 2 Diamond valley to gain about 46 life a turn!
4 burgeoning
4 mystic remora
4 day's undoing
4 rhystic study
disruption:
4 cyclonic rift
3 force of will
2 Time Stop
2 lashwrithe
1 riftsweeper
1 emrakul, the aeons torn
1 reassembling skeleton
1 glistening oil
utility lands and land fetchers:
2 sylvan scrying
2 diamond valley
2 inkmoth nexus
1 urborg, tomb of yawgmoth
3 cabal coffers
1 ghost quarter
lands with color:
2 vesuva
4 Botanical Sanctum
4 Simic Growth Chamber
4 Hinterland Harbor
4 Breeding Pool
This deck is really built around burgeoning.
Burgeoning is a very powerful card I've been playing with lately. It gives decks early and late mana ramp, and can be played turn one. Running as a 4-of is good in any deck that can play green mana untapped on turn one. But it works best when you have as many lands in your hand as the rest of the table put together. That means you need a lot of card draw, or a lot of dumping lands into the graveyard and then into your hand, or directly into your hand. Early card draw is essential in every deck though, and especially when you start the game without burgeoning (so that you can draw it!), so your card draw has to be affordable early-game, without benefiting from burgeoning's ramp.
In short, a burgeoning deck needs as much low-mana-cost card-draw as you can get.
For card-draw, nothing comes close to blue.
Mystic Remora and Rhystic study are two of the best, and cheapest, card-drawing cards in the game. These both benefit from the multiple opponents playing lots of CARDS per turn, and burgeoning benefits from lots of lands being played each turn. If we know that we want enemies to play lands and cast spells, let's make our opponents draw cards!
Cyclonic Rift is beautiful with those enchantments because it gives opponents spells to re-play so that you draw more cards! If they're struggling to keep playing their threat and defense cards because of bounce spells, they usually can't afford to pay the cost for mystic remora or rhystic study. Basically it makes your card draw enchantments fill your hand faster, because people will be re-playing their expensive cards, and won't spend the additional mana to keep you from getting card-draw.
Day's Undoing has several important effects:
1) it is another card-drawing spell to help you dig through your library to draw to complete the Burgeoning + Mystic Remora Combo.
2) it messes up reanimator decks and decks that rely on the graveyard zone.
3) it protects you from milling.
4) If an opponent does play an uncounterable threat card, Cyclonic rift can bounce it, then Day's Undoing can make them shuffle it into the library, but leaves them with some lands and cards to play, meaning you will be able to play your lands, and draw cards off of their plays, and if you draw a land you'll probably be able to play it too.
5) it gives your opponents each 1 or 2 land cards to trigger your burgeoning.
6) It cycles all of your used up counterspell, bounce, and threat cards back into your library, making your next "draw a card" effect give you something powerful.
Riftsweeper is there because you pretty much can always benefit from bringing back one of your exiled creatures, time stop, day's undoing, or a Mystic Remora that you pitched to cast force of will.
Thanks to the mana ramp, card draw, and making people replay the same spells, you get massive card advantage.
In summary, blue rocks with burgeoning thanks to the card-draw, and the your card-draw benefits from the mana-ramp, and lastly disruption from Cyclonic Rift, or Day's Undoing synergize with both, and each-other, making the whole greater that the sum of its parts.
Just include a graveyard->library shuffle card such as Elixir of immortality, Day's undoing, or Emrakul, the Aeons Torn, or 2 Gaea's Blessing.
Urborg, Tomb of Yawgmoth and Cabal Coffers would be bonkers for this deck. You can tutor the missing piece of the 2 card combo with black tutors or Expedition Map. They work well for playing big colorless, X costing spells, Cyclonic Rift, Lashwrithe, etc. Cabal coffers would also pair well with your Parallax Tide since you can use that to untap your own lands. Alternatively you can just steal someone else's cabal coffers if it gets played.
Time Spiral would combo with both the cabals, and help you avoid milling yourself
Many of your creatures have a nice "when you cast this spell" effect, so a self-bounce would be good. Evacuation perhaps?
3 Jokulhaups
2 obliterate
Finishers (13)
1 Ajani Steadfast
4 greater gargadon
2 vicious shadows
2 Assemble the Legion
4 academy rector
2 land tax
4 scroll rack
1 Koth of the Hammer
3 Mana Geyser
Utility (9)
4 boros charm
1 reverberate
2 oblivion ring
2 relic of progenitus
4 spinerock knoll
4 Sacred Foundry
4 boros garrison
2 Madblind Mountain
Basic lands for land tax to find (9)
1 plains
8 mountain
Wild fire allows me to use artifacts more safely but makes boros charm less useful. Here's another version with more wildfire and artifacts.
4 Wildfire
1 obliterate
Finishers (13)
1 exquisite blood
4 greater gargadon
2 vicious shadows
2 Assemble the Legion
4 academy rector
4 land tax
4 Mox Diamond
4 scroll rack
4 Mana Geyser
Utility (6)
2 enlightened tutor
2 oblivion ring
2 relic of progenitus
4 spinerock knoll
4 Nomad Outpost
2 sacred foundry
Basic lands for land tax to find (10)
4 plains
2 swamp
4 mountain
http://www.mtgsalvation.com/forums/the-game/casual-related-formats/multiplayer/653354-tax-rack-vicious-shadows-alliance-of-arms
but I like that the land destruction makes it harder for people to break the scroll rack+land tax combo, a major problem in multiplayer. Also solves the problem of how to keep people from emptying their hands to avoid damage...without lands, people keep cards in hand.
Setting up the bomb:
jokulhaups and obliterate are used to wipe the board of everything except your enchantments and planeswalkers.
Koth of the Hammer uses 16 "mountain" cards to ramp those expensive red sorceries out faster
Land tax finds those mountains fast.
If you manage to cast obliterate or jokulhaups with mana leftover(easy, thanks to koth of the hammer and spinerock knoll), boros charm allow you to save your own permanents, give doublestrike to greater gargadon or gideon, champion of justice, or you can use it to snipe someone's planeswalker.
reverberate is interesting to me: it can let you copy your own obliterate if someone else is about to use their own boros charm (this means that the copy will resolve before their boros charm), or you can copy someone else's boros charm. or just copy some other amazing sorcery/instant.
Finishers:
These finishers are for killing people after the board has been wiped, and all generate a ton of value over time, and time passes quickly when people have to spend 3-4 turns getting their board back into play.
- 2 gideon, champion of justice
- 1 Ajani Vengeant
- 1 Ajani Steadfast
- 2 chandra, flamecaller
- 2 luminarch ascension
- 4 greater gargadon
Scroll rack:scroll rack is another critical card in this deck. Red usually is terrible at mana ramp and card draw, scroll rack+land tax makes you draw 4 cards a turn instead of 1 and helps you hit all your land drops. If you want to see new cards instead of drawing the same cards again, you have 10 cards to do that with: 2 land tax and 2 Madblind Mountain to shuffle, or use 3 spinerock knoll/2 chandra, flamecaller/1 Abbot of Keral Keep to move cards out of the way.
Spinerock knoll is broken in multiplayer, but red usually doesn't have a way to control what cards you are going to hideaway. scroll rack lets you choose Spinerock knoll's "hideaway", making it something expensive like obliterate or chandra, flamecaller etc.
scroll rack also sets up Abbot of Keral Keep's ability for maximum utility
3 jokulhaups
2 obliterate
Finishers (12)
2 gideon, champion of justice
1 Ajani Vengeant
1 Ajani Steadfast
2 chandra, flamecaller
2 luminarch ascension
4 greater gargadon
2 land tax
4 scroll rack
4 Koth of the Hammer
Utility (10)
1 Abbot of Keral Keep
3 boros charm
1 reverberate
3 oblivion ring
2 relic of progenitus
3 spinerock knoll
4 Sacred Foundry
4 boros garrison
2 Madblind Mountain
Basic lands for land tax to find (10)
1 plains
9 mountain
Mana Geyser is another great card for ramping out your other cards quickly but is useless after a boom goes off, so koth of the hammer may be better. but I could see someone run ~3 of each instead of 4 koth. gets better with reverberate.
Citadel of Pain and Mana Geyser work great together.
Razia's Purification is probably weaker than jokulhaups but you could go with either to fit budget/meta/how mean you want to be to people.
Decree of Annihilation is great but expensive.
Reiterate could replace reverberate but letting people know that it is in your hands seems like a bad play
elixir of immortality, Tajic, Blade of the Legion, assemble the legion
glacial chasm could protect you after your boom, or before it, but not both...unless you use boros garrison.
adding these 3 cards together may work really nicely: academy rector, vicious shadows, and either Elspeth, Knight-Errant, or Elspeth, Sun's Champion but that may not be good for the mana curve, though the rector could easily be sacrificed to greater gargadon.
other thoughts:
the 10 "Utility cards" are easily swapped out while keeping the core concept of the deck intact, to meet the threats present in your meta.
reverberate is probably better than boros charm in counterspell heavy metas, but if you are worried about counterspells it would be easy to swap 2 of your jokulhaups for 2 more obliterate.
greater gargadon doesn't always work with boros charm+ jokulhaups
luminarch ascension doesn't like losing all the lands.
greater gargadon and gideon, champion of justice are both vulnerable to swords to plowshares and unsummon effects, even after a boom goes off.
scroll rack gets broken by your own boom cards
1--most of the early mana fetchers only get basic lands (not the dual lands) so they don't fix my colors. could fix this by adding 1 plains and 1 swamp basic lands, but that adds other problems. thoughts?
2--Should I remove ~1 each of the land-fetching creatures and add forests instead?
3--is 4 sylvan primordial too many? They don't even help achieve the 7-land kill condition, so may be kinda pointless in this kind of deck. is 0,1,2,3 or 4 the right number?
4--garruk, primal hunter is probably not the best card draw for this deck. Skullclamp is banned in my group though. On the upside, his 3rd ability will be good in this deck if it ever goes off. Greater good is probably useless in this deck. What would be the next best green card draw in this type of deck? (no syphon mind allowed)
5--the lifegain is a bit awkward. Path of Bravery might be a good lifegain card in token decks, but I think beastmaster ascension doesn't work as well with path as it does with whip of erebos, ready // willing, or vault of the archangel effects that just give your 6/6 creatures all lifelink. may be smarter not to rely on lifelink as my main source of lifegain and use something like exsanguinate, Kokusho, the Evening Star, Gray merchant of asphodel, etc, but most of those are banned in my group. are there some powerful green multiplayer lifegain spells I should try?
the idea is to have play beastmaster ascension and then suddenly attack with at least 7 creatures out of nowhere all on the same turn before anyone breaks your combo. If you power up the beastmaster ascension, your 7 1/1 creatures should hit for at least 6 damage each (42 damage) and kill someone in one alpha strike.
There are a few ways here to get the ascension+7 attackers:
Life // Death is a fast way to get 7 untapped lands for attacking, you can either put ascension out on a prior turn or we can play the whole combo on one turn, but then we need either rofellos, llanowar emissary or a way to untap lands. ready // willing can both untap your lands and give them indestructible+lifelink.
3 beastmaster ascension
4 Life // Death
untap creatures to help the combo start
3 ready // willing
land fetchers
4 sakura-tribe elder
4 sylvan primordial
4 yavimaya elder
2 nissa, vastwood seer
3 rofellos, llanowar emissary
2 freyalise, llanowar's fury
recursion for end-game
2 eternal witness
1 genesis
1 whip of erebos
other stuff
2 garruk, primal hunter
1 emrakul, the aeons torn
2 aura mutation
2 beacon of creation
land (20)
1 gaea's cradle
1 vault of the archangel
10 forest
4 temple garden
4 overgrown tomb
--ready // willing is part of a neat combo:
Belcher is probably better, and deserves its own deck, but it feels cheesy to me. It is much more interesting I think, to FORCE opponents into taking token creatures they don't want and then abuse the number of opponents.
heck I've been thinking of scrapping the whole combo. this is primarily a vicious shadows deck. I agree that the deck has at least 10 "do nothing" cards after you already have your 2-card combo, but the scroll rack lets me replace the dead cards so I don't mind. Going down to fewer might be good, and would help me fix other issues. do you recommend 4 land tax, 2 scroll rack, 2 tutors, and 4 mox diamond/chrome mox?
turns 1-2 this deck won't be able to handle a 20/20 creature attacking it, but turn 3 it can do a bit better. In my meta I don't have to worry about it. If your meta does have to worry about dying in turns 1 or 2, you're basically stuck playing blue counterspells and white swords to plowshares right?
A lot of the odd cards are there to combo:
-If you animate+rite of consumption, that's as good as getting an unblocked attack in, with spirit link. so it gets you past blockers and summoning sickness. usually that kills a player and gives you 50 life.
-the predator's rapport is there because it is lifegain, without losing your LoE. My goal is always to be last deck standing, lifegain helps me get there. I keep it as a one-of so that I can take it out of my graveyard via eternal witness, as needed.
-most of the 1-ofs are in there to give extra utility out of the graveyard, which acts as an extended hand.
-Diamond Valley doesn't need to tap for mana: you will usually want it untapped to "protect" your creature from exile/creature theft via gilded drake, and generally ward off swords to plowshares effects.
4 scroll rack
4 land tax
4 enlightened tutor
The kill card (2)
2 Vicious Shadows
fixes opponents having 0 cards (1)
1 reforge the soul
play vicious shadows cheap (6)
3 academy rector
3 Ashnod's Altar
2 Alliance of Arms
removal + other token makers (4)
3 artifact mutation
3 aura mutation
straight removal (10)
4 march of souls
2 Slice and Dice
2 pyrohemia
lifegain (2)
2 Tamanoa
3 Spinerock Knoll
1 mountain
1 forest
6 plains
2 boros garrison
2 selesnya sanctuary
4 Forbidden Orchard
2 mistveil plains
took out the goblin bombardments, I already am using ashnod's altar exclusively for my sac outlet.
added more artifact/aura mutations to power the altar early game and act as removal.
swapped wheel of fate for reforge the soul.
It would be easy to take out the tax-rack cards and replace with some early aggro/more control/other kinds of mana ramp, while still keeping the kill-combo...but I like it as-is.