MTG Salvation

"Never laugh at live dragons."

- Bilbo Baggins

In the parlance of fighting games, there is a term for a character that you spend the most time playing, learning the ins and outs of their entire move list, building combos, being intimately familiar with their strengths and weaknesses. When you pick this character, you want the room to go quiet and a string from a western to play, because now, it is on. This character is your "main".

Teneb is my main. Teneb is the legend that brought me into the format, and he commands the deck I've spent the most time building, optimising, and upgrading. It's a combo deck. It's a goodstuff deck. It's a toolbox and a synergy machine, and it's what I play when I want to play my best.

The Reveillark Combo, Simple: Requires Reveillark, Karmic Guide, a free sac outlet, and another creature with power 2 or less. Sacrifice Karmic Guide and the other creature, then sacrifice Reveillark to return those two creatures. Karmic Guide can return Reveillark, and you get unlimited uses of the other creature's enters-the-battlefield trigger. This also works with Saffi Eriksdotter saving Reveillark before you sacrifice it.

The Reveillark Combo, Advanced: If you have both Saffi and Karmic Guide, you can protect Reveillark with Saffi, then sac Karmic Guide and Reveillark. Reveillark will come back because of Saffi's ability, then be able to return Saffi and Karmic Guide - and Karmic Guide is free to target any creature, not just the small ones.

Modular sacrifice combos: The fuel - Reveillark/Karmic Guide, Karmic Guide/Saffi, Saffi/Sun Titan, Sun Titan/Fiend Hunter. The engines - Greater Good, which lets you dump your deck into your graveyard to find the rest of the pieces to launch the Reveillark combo; Vish Kal, Blood Arbiter, who kills all enemy creatures and then attacks for infinite lifelinked damage; Viscera Seer, who lets you stack your library whenever you feel like it.

The win condition: There's nothing that will directly kill another player, but various combinations of creatures fed into the Reveillark combo will make the game unwinnable for anyone else - no lands (Acidic Slime), no permanents (Angel of Despair), no untap step (Yosei, the Morning Star). For extreme situations, you can remove libraries with Praetor's Grasp/Eternal Witness or Geth, Lord of the Vault/a CMC>1 creature or artifact in an opponent's graveyard, generating the mana needed by destroying one of your own lands and bringing it back with Sun Titan.

Big Game Hunter: I think this guy is better than Bone Shredder and Shriekmaw under regular circumstances, and being able to get him out for his madness cost regularly seals the deal.

Body Snatcher: Excellent to play early when you've got fat sitting in your hand, excellent to play late when you've got fat sitting in your graveyard and a sac outlet among your lands somewhere.

Dauntless Escort: This guy has been in and out of this list for a while - I tend to take him out when I have a new creature with an EtB ability I want, but then I put him back in because he creates super-awkward board states that usually take multiple cards and turns to resolve. He's also a brutal Sun Titan target.

Disciple of Bolas: Even drawing one or two cards off this guy is fine value, but his potential upside is enormous.

Dread: In addition to being a No Mercy that hits for six, Dread has a odd little niche application. If I get the Reveillark combo going with something that draws cards (Wall of Blossoms, let's say) and no way to discard them, I can end up with combo pieces sitting in my hand and no mana to cast them. I'd have to discard most of my hand and pass the turn, and then open myself up to all kinds of countermeasures I didn't have to think about because all my opponents were tapped out on the turn I combo'd off (probably). With Dread, I can avoid that. Discarding Dread during cleanup puts an ability on the stack (the shuffle into library thing), so each player will receive priority so they can respond to it if they want. I can then take the opportunity to continue the combo with all the relevant pieces in the graveyard instead of my hand.

Genesis: Is more to bait out bad graveyard removal (Tormod's Crypt et al) than to do its job as a recursion engine, but if it does do that I'm not unhappy.

Geth, Lord of the Vault: In addition to being a win condition, Geth also steals Tormod's Crypt and friends and then never uses them, because he can.

Riftsweeper: To recover combo pieces that get lost along the way. Also can reuse Academy Rector and Body Snatcher, randomly swats stuff with imprint/Jhoira of the Ghitu, and gives a free hit from Tainted Pact.

Wall of Blossoms, Wall of Omens: These prevent way more damage than you would ever expect. Great cards, never sad to see one in my opening hand.

Wall of Roots: Is pretty good with Survival of the Fittest and Chord of Calling.

Yosei, the Morning Star: Right now Yosei is my go-to guy to end the game via combo - being on the receiving end of a Stasis lock while your opponent is free to cast spells and attack you is kind of hard to break out of, and he's a good creature without the combo (unlike Malakir Bloodwitch, who was my previous game-ender). I may have to re-evaluate things if Kokusho, the Evening Star comes off the ban list, but I'll probably bump something else to fit him in. Post-unbanning edit: Now that Koko is unbanned, I have deliberated and I find Geth to have more utility while still being a large evasive creature that can be part of a combo kill.

Stony Silence: Stony Silence isn't the only reason I don't run Sol Ring in this deck - I also can't discard it to Survival of the Fittest, can't sacrifice it to Victimize, can't tap it to stop an attack with Glare of Subdual, and so on - but it is a contributing factor.

Praetor's Grasp: Scouts out potential hate cards (Bojuka Bog being the big one). It also never whiffs like other Jester's Cap effects can (if you use it against someone with a complete non-threat of a deck), since you can always grab a land.

Jarad's Orders: Replaces Buried Alive. Very rarely have I found I ever want three creatures to go in the graveyard at once outside of being mid-combo. With Orders, I can still set the combo up without having to overextend into it. It also can bait graveyard removal by putting something dangerous but non-essential like Genesis or a big reanimation target in the graveyard and Karmic Guide in hand, or just burn the graveyard part and use it as a clunky creature tutor.

Tainted Pact: Replaces Congregation at Dawn, which always felt very very slow even if the three cards I put on top of my library were powerhouses. After testing it a little, I have come to the conclusion that Tainted Pact is one of the most underutilised cards in the format, and worth altering your 3-colour manabase to accomodate it.

2012-05-14: -Butcher of Malakir, -Malakir Bloodwitch, +Angel of Despair, +Yosei, the Morning Star
2012-05-31: -Temple of the False God, +Ancient Tomb
2012-09-14: -Masked Admirerers, Phyrexian Delver, +Disciple of Bolas, Geth, Lord of the Vault
2012-11-08: -Buried Alive, +Jarad's Orders
2013-04-20: -World Queller, Glare of Subdual, +Rune-Scarred Demon, Demonic Tutor
2013-05-30: -Congregation at Dawn, +Tainted Pact
2013-11-30: -Austere Command, +Bane of Progress