MTG Salvation

So I've been playing this deck for a while now and when I started to flirt with taking it apart for an Aminatou control shell I couldn't make myself do it. I just liked it too much. It's a pretty elegant deck in my opinion, and as much as I hate a lot of things about eminence I really love the deckbuilding options Inalla, Archmage Ritualist brings to the table. Notably she lets you play essentially mono blue, UR, UB or grixis as you like.

This take on her leverages her primarily for a little bit of value and as a combo outlet that cannot be interacted with, but does not lean hard on her ability to make bad wizards good - while I think that's cool it's well trodden ground that I generally find less interesting. Her ability allows the deck to not play a lot of huge draw spells or ways to set up combos - the combos just happens naturally because they don't take a lot of pieces.

She reduces the number of bad cards you need to play (with Ashnod's altar and Crystal Shard being the only real bad ones) by more than most control decks, and her not needing to resolve basically means you've always got one combo piece on the board.

So here's the deck:



A few comments on card choices:
* I still debate on whether we need any red in this deck at all, but Shattering Pulse and Blasphemous Act in particular have been superb
* Wanderwine Prophets had a zero win rate for me - literally all 5 times I played it the target hate scooped in response. Hence it got cut.
* Reins of Power is a new card that I'm trying out, possible it'll be Spelltwine eventually
* I'm super happy with the counterspell suite so far. Pact of Negation was not superb but I may try it again.
* There is minimal ramp, because I want to mostly play the long game and just hit land drops. Just a stylistic choice - the cards are in general so efficient that it works out, but sometimes I wish I had more mana for copying wizards. It does make the deck a lot more nailbitey to play without the explosive ramp turns you get from playing more overpowered rocks, and I enjoy that.

There're two main combos in the deck:
1) bloodline Necromancer + ashnod's altar makes infinite hasted 3/2s which is pretty hard to beat.
2) Archaeomancer + time warp + crystal shard or riptide laboratory makes infinite turns. This also works with Timestream Navigator if you have ascend (which you should since it costs 8-10 mana to go off).

There're a few other pretty ridiculous synergies:
* Venser is a soft lock (bouncing himself + the spell)
* Spellseeker is basically a one card combo getting demonic tutor and vampiric tutor which gets a combo
* Timestream Navigator takes at least 3 turns in a row. Goes infinite with Shard/Riptide lab. Rare to lose.
* archaeomancer + evacuation is even grosser in this deck since you get another spell every time too. Hard to lose once this soft lock is set and you've got a counterspell backing it up.

I'd love to hear what you guys think of course, but I mostly just wanted to write a little bit about this deck that I've come to really like as part of my stable. Hope you guys enjoy it.

I got in a game with this deck recently, it was kind of a strange one. I started with a bricklord hand of 5 lands, intuition and swan song, and just played my lands out, and at the end step of turn 3 everyone was tapped out so I went for my goto intuition package of:

• Bloodline Necromancer
  
• Timestream Navigator
  
• Archaeomancer
  

Now this game was mostly some pretty decent decks just doing their early game stuff, and there were some strong starts (including a Krenko with swiftfoot boots) and so I expected quite a long grindy game.

The plan there is to give me Archaeomancer which is slow but a ridiculous engine in this deck. But a newer player gave me Bloodline Necromancer, so I untapped, drew Ashnod's Altar.

So I played my 4th land and cast ashnod's altar. I was pretty sure I would be public enemy #1 there, enough so that I announced Altar quite loudly just to be as fair as I could. I think people didn't put it together though, since everyone promptly tapped out around their turn cycles.

So my first game with a new group of players at this shop I've been to maybe 3 times, where I had introduced myself with this sequence:
Me- "Hey, you guys starting a game? Mind if a rando drops in? I'm a nice guy, I promise."
Me- "What power level are you guys at roughly?"
Them-"Oh, 7/10 or so"
Me-"Ok, I'll try my Inalla deck I guess" Then I eyeball the Krenko deck which usually are the types of decks that give me a thrashing.

And I do what this deck never does, turn 5 combo.

The next game I got thumped pretty hard

All in all though I am superbly happy with how this deck plays. Just super smooth. One of my favorites.

Wow, your land base is beautiful, my Inalla mostly runs basics and left over lands I found =)

2) Archaeomancer + time warp + crystal shard or riptide laboratory makes infinite turns. This also works with Timestream Navigator if you have ascend (which you should since it costs 8-10 mana to go off).

Lets make this less clunky...
Archaeomancer + Essence Flux + 1 Inalla Copy
Archaeomancer returns Essence Flux, copy returns Time Warp. total mana spent 4UUU (with Time Warp cast)

Spellseeker can grab Essence Flux and something else with the copy... say Entomb
Use Essence Flux on the Spellseeker to get Reanimate and something else..Flusterstorm?
Entomb Achaeomancer, Reanimate Archaeomancer and copy it to get Essence Flux and Entomb back
Entomb Time Warp, then Essence Flux Archaeomancer to start taking infinite turns.

The options with Inalla is just silly with a blink engine.

Funny thing you mentioned thinking about building Aminatou, This is the 2nd time I have built Inalla, the first time didn't go so well, this time I built her because I was fed up with my Aminatou deck. The combo's in Inalla are much more compact than Aminatou, Aminatou felt bulky and clunky to me.

..

Thanks! Yeah, I spent a lot of time tuning the mana and obviously expense (though I have had the duals a while now ofc). Even without them I think the basically U-splash-B-light splash-R is really good. I'm half tempted to cut the red entirely at times, but it's pretty low effort to make the R required by the deck for a 1 mana sweeper.

So the reason I don't run any of the spell based engines is a variety of reasons:
1) Crystal Shard is trophy mageable which I really wanted a 3rd target for in case I draw one I still get two
2) Works with all my wizards not just Arch (who is kinda mana inefficient really)
3) protects my dudes from sweepers
4) corner case punishes people for tapping out in hilarious ways

Flux is definitely very efficient, and being able to get gotten with so many methods is worth thinking about though. Fluxing Spellseeker for entomb+reanimate is pretty gross (and I just picked up an extra reanimate:P). Not sure about entomb but it's definitely strong in the deck.

I've definitely wanted an additional way to get a wizard out of the yard other than bloodline necromancer, so maybe that's worth doing.

Will do some pondering next time I'm doing deck updates but I think that's good stuff.

Also appreciate the feedback on Aminatou -- honestly, I was very concerned with the needing to keep her on the battlefield thing (or needing a fairly clunky set of combo cards that are independently quite weak). I really like how this deck just does not care at all what's on the battlefield.

Inalla sure is nice in that her combos are very compact and can be made up of almost exclusively good cards.