MTG Salvation

I was checking my Twitter feed earlier and saw MTGStocks reporting that Words of Waste was starting to rise in price, and it immediately clicked that it had to be because of Yawgmoth. I ordered one to try out because I think it could be a potentially great card against control decks. What do y'all think about this? It reminded me of another card - Graveborn Muse that I used to run alongside Words of Waste way back in the Onslaught Standard days. Tempted to try it as well with how it can scale with a lot of the cards in the deck.

I've been working on a Yawgmoth build of my own, and this deck is tons of fun. I took a bit of inspiration from the list in the main post here, but only went so far due to availability (I don't have too much invested in MTGO to test these as much).

Here's my list and my thoughts on it, at the moment:

• So, first things first: I'm missing a chunk of the potential ramp for the deck. I need to pick up Crypt Ghast, Nirkana Revenant, Jet Medallion, Gauntlet of Power and Bubbling Muck. Chances that I'll ever pick up a Mana Crypt or Grim Monolith are extremely low given it's current price range. However, I've still been able to ramp pretty well with what I *do* have, so I'm excited to acquire what I can. I had been tempted to get a Chrome Mox with some store credit but it was either that or Liliana, the Last Hope and Liliana was a much more important inclusion.
• Crypt of Agadeem is about to be replaced with something else because the deck needs to ramp up ASAP and it's worse than a Swamp for most of the game I've had it.
• I won a game with a Torment of Hailfire for 30 just off of the land ramp when I wasn't drawing into anything else. I'm pretty confident in leaving this and Exsanguinate in my build finishers to build towards if Yawgmoth is hated off of the table too much to stay on the Proliferate plan. The problem with this game wasn't Yawgmoth being targeted, though. It was actually that I had no card draw outside of Yawgmoth and only ever drew into Bloodghast that game for recurrable draw. I think there's a weakness in trying to depend too heavily on Yawgmoth sticking or for sac fodder to use him and not having any other draw. There's so much mana ramp potential here, but if the sac fodder doesn't come, the deck feels like it falls flat, especially when you want to hold a good chunk of your deck for a big turn (PWers).
• Phyrexian Scriptures was surprisingly good. I originally added it for flavor reasons (the same is true of Avatar of Woe; it's a pet card because I have a PT one signed by rk post and casting it for BB with Endrek Sahr, Master Breeder out is SO good). In my last game last night I had quite a play:
• I had used Command the Dreadhorde and stolen Garruk, Primal Hunter, Niv-Mizzet, Parun and Veteran Explorer. Then I cast my Horobi, Death's Wail and used -3 on Garruk to draw 5 cards and get 5 Niv-Mizzet triggers. I blew up a few targets (Liliana, Heretical Healer, Nicol Bolas, the Ravager, a 21/21 Consuming Abberation, the Veteran Explorer to ramp up Cabal Stronghold some more and something else). Well, at the end of turn the Grixis player cast Thrilling Encore and got it alllll back, and then some.
• I had a ton of mana because of Cabal Stronghold and some heavy land ramp earlier. So I cast Yawgmoth. Wasn't countered, so I should be good. Cast Kalitas, Traitor of Ghet. Yes, yes. It resolved. Cast Phyrexian Scriptures and put the +1/+1 counter on Yawgmoth and turned him into an Artifact creature. Finally cast Grey Merchant of Asphodel to offset the life loss from Command the Dreadhorde last turn. Mostly, I needed a sac target so I could sacrifice him to Yawgmoth to Proliferate the Phyrexian Scriptures to Chapter II and wipe the board other than Yawgmoth. I did so, destroyed everything but Yawgmoth, got 14 Zombies from Kalitas and was on my merry way. It was gorious.
• I'm feeling the same about Archfiend of Ifnir in it being too slow. I've had it in my hand multiple times but never really wanted to cast it over anything else. I'm still giving it some more time, though.
• I've been pretty happy with Call to the Grave in the games where I get my recurrable sac fodder and it's kept the board clear early on and let me play some of my Planeswalkers and start ticking them up without having to hold them in my hand for a while. Keep in mind since I'm still missing key ramp cards and probably won't have access to Grim Monolith/Mana Crypt, as I had mentioned earlier.
• I thought Illusionist's Bracers may be too slow, but the couple times I've had it on Yawgmoth it was incredible.
• With the sudden availability of snow lands, I'm trying Dead of Winter in place of Toxic Deluge. While it's true that you're still winning until the last point of life is gone, I've found that I go through it at a dangerous rate, especially with some of the Spellslinger decks in my various play groups. I haven't run into anything this hasn't been able to kill, yet. The appeal of Toxic Deluge is having a flexible answer for 2B, but so far this has done just as well!
• Psychosis Crawler is another decent alternate win con that won me a game, and I was pretty happy to see it. It gave me a place to put my -1/-1 counters for Nest of Scarabs to get that combo started and is a win condition once you have the Yawgmoth's Bargain combo set up with Nest.

Anyway, that's about it for my testing with the deck so far. I know my build is quite different at the moment, though I aim for a similar path once I can acquire the appropriate cards