MTG Salvation

I've tried lantern control in the past, somewhat disastrously, with Circu (link in sig). Having decided Circu was a little too awful, I switched to phenax, god of deception. I was planning on doing oona, queen of the fae but everyone else voted phenax, so I figured I should bow to the will of the people.

Anyway I just threw this list together fairly quickly to test it out. Only got one game in - shockingly, people didn't love it when I locked the entire table out of the game except playing lands, isn't that weird? So I switched to precons for the next game by way of apology.

MVP award went to a card I've always wanted to justify including: daring thief. Stole a 49/49 thromok the insatiable along with his dragon broodmother, which milled me to a swift victory and kept me (barely) alive in the process, respectively. Second place goes to another inspired buddy, disciple of deceit, which got several clutch spells to save my bacon and would have gotten more if I'd been arsed. Third to dark confidant - had to play a little dance with death when I got low on life (1 for several turns), but he's super sweet with topdeck control.

Without the random thromok showing up, though, I think this deck is probably unnecessarily cruel. It takes forever to win and you have to constantly make people mill stuff and waste a ton of time while no one else gets to do anything. So I probably won't play it much in the future. Circu, while objectively terrible, was a lot funnier because there was no consistency. Once you have enough dudes that you can deny any relevant draws, there's not much to the game except waiting until you win. With Circu, there's a lot more tension and decision making. Is it worth using your spell in order to deny that draw? Which spells did you let him draw, again? etc. By the same token, I'm guessing Oona would be phenax-esque in that, once you've locked down the game, it's not going anywhere anytime soon. Circu is fun because of the uncertainly of his trigger, compared to the reliability of activated abilities.

Anyway, lessons learned. Here's the list.

Played a few more games, some 1v1 and one 3-player. The 1v1s went ok, first game he scooped once i had the lock (although technically he wasn't totally screwed, because he had out sylvan library, but whatever. Other 1v1 game I lost (although it's pretty stupid trying to be a T1 mana crypt into coalition relic on the play...thanks RC...).

3-player was a lot dicier than the previous multiplayer game - one guy had out top and library and landed an avenger of zendikar - kept in check thanks mostly to ophiomancer and ogre slumlord, though I did take some hits. I tried to make a sort of truce once he was down to ~15 cards and I could easily mill him out (partly because his teferi was shutting down opposing counterspells) but he just went all-in against me and I was forced to wipe him out. The other player was playing venser and hadn't done much besides try to resolve a jin-gitaxias. Thanks to some help from the dying other player, he was able to throw off my lock enough that he was able to draw a rite of replication which he then proceeded to cast 3 times targeting his commander (weren't really any great targets I guess) to bounce all my lands and throw me off for a bit. I almost ended up dying to my mana crypt, and had to do some fancy footwork to stay alive vs a faerie artisans using the discard on trading post (again!), but he made some really bad misplays that cost him the game and eventually he scooped.

That game was interesting and the deck can be very skill intensive. That said, I think I'm done with it for now. I don't think it's fun to play against, which Circu seemed to be.

Damn! I never thought of using Daring Thief with Phenax! Good call!