MTG Salvation

So I'm really excited about this deck. I'll just introduce it, and see if you can figure out how it's supposed to win.



Ok, spoiler alert, here's how it works, if you haven't figured it out.

Early-mid, you're just playing a political control game, using the "lesser cycles". You wait until some threat needs removing, then offer to handle it as long as you can find someone willing to not pay the 3 life so that the creature returns to your hand.

Once someone gets very scary, that's when things get interesting. With the right combinations of free creatures and sac outlets and/or triggers, you can go infinite and kill someone - provided you have a willing accomplice to make a "deal with the devil" (psst - you're the devil). You recast your free creature over and over, with them never paying 3 life, and then instantly kill the offending player - for instance, walking ballista + disciple of the vault to instantly drain all their life.

But sometimes deals have unexpected consequences. You've vanquished your accomplices foe...but there is a cost that must be paid - IN BLOOD. With a demonic glint in your eye, you reveal Tendrils of Agony. Your opponent just handed you the game willingly. They have no one to blame but themselves and their greed for their failure.

How will this play out in subsequent games? Well, it's important that you don't ALWAYS have a savage betrayal at the ready. Some games, you just gotta collaborate to kill someone, and your partner suffers no consequences. Maybe the deal will kill them, maybe it won't. That's the thing about dealing with the devil.

Of course, there's a backup plan. If you're not able to finish off the table with one savage combo, you can go into grind mode with the various recursion tools and try to burn your remaining opponents out. This requires actual work, though, so ideally you'll make sure your deal is appealing to the rubes...you devil, you.

Something weird about this deck - its success depends significantly on how well you can think on your feet and how good of an actor you are.

Case in point - I was playing this last night in a game that was annoying as balls. I get out athreos and a few rattlesnakey things and am waiting for political opportunities to present themselves, and then the board gets wiped by the great aurora. Fine, I still end up with 5 lands, enough to replay athreos, but before it's my turn I get sundered. I sit around for 5 turns replaying lands so I can replay athreos, meanwhile sunder gets recurred but the other major player striplocks sunder player's islands. player 4 dies, and the sunder vs striplock are thank-god not paying attention to me while they trigger landfall to build up their armies, but striplock is quickly depleting sunder's lands (3x land drops per turn plus ramunap excavator will do that). I finally untap with athreos on board, and at this point I think my only play is to go for it, so I say "I'll make sure striplock is dead before your next turn". And then he asks "are you going to kill me to"...to which I kind of flub my line and say something like "I won't kill you this turn, it'll be a game" or something like that. He lets me recur my 0-drop x1000, demo tutor for bitter ordeal and win. He was a bit annoyed and felt like I'd lied...which is debatable. I tried to be technically correct, but I think it was just a little on the wrong side of the line.

In retrospect, since my 0-drop was walking ballista, I should have said that I would indeed let him live, then gone for a tendrils of agony to get to ~90 life while eliminating striplock and setting sunder to 1-2, then playing ballista to kill him next turn. Which would have been a lot more honest.

Anyway, I got to play 3 games last night, but the last 2 don't really count since one guy was playing a cEDH deck that made it pretty boring since politics is pretty tough when you have as little control as this deck does (almost pulled off one win using flesh allergy but combo guy had no creatures in play to flesh allergy, boo). Overall I think the deck is interesting, but it's pretty stressful to play if you aren't amazing at improvising (for the record, I did some in college :P).

And seriously, how freaking great is magic that sometimes the ability to win is determined by how good you are at being technically correct while misleading people at high speed?

Three things that bear mentioning, strategy-wise:

If someone is at 3 life, and definitely if they're at 2 and you don't allow speed-scooping, you can win with your combos since they don't have a choice anymore and you can essentially pretend athreos is enduring renewal. Sorta boring, though.

If someone is in a really bad position, you can force them to accept terms where they end up at really low life in exchange for killing the threat, which makes it really easy to finish them off with another combo when they're too low on life to pay for athreos.

Bear in mind that people can always counter-politic you by offering NOT to kill the person you're haggling with in exchange for not making a deal with you. Hasn't happened yet, but it could if they're fast on their feet. Man, magic is such a weird, great game sometimes.

A very interesting deck that makes excellent use of politics. The X drops are a nice touch and it took me a second to figure out exactly how you were using them, but it's very clever. By the way you have 2 Blood Pets in your list. I was surprised to see no Enduring Renewal in the list, is it because of the hand reveal? It seems like it would fit perfectly in the deck, but that hand reveal is dangerous. Viscera Seer is another card that looks like it might work well in a list like this.

I have to say that your opponent in the story is not correct when he felt you lied to him. Removing his deck from the game with Bitter Ordeal did not make him lose the game. Technically he lost the game on his next draw step when he failed to draw a card, a technicality, but you still didn't lie to him. People I play with seem to feel better when they lose to damage versus anything else, so that might have been a factor in his feelings.

Great deck. Love the theme and style.

Thanks!

Thanks for pointing out the blood pet, looks like i just added an extra on accident. I was trying to scramble the order around a little to throw people off the case of what the deck was doing and I accidentally included it twice. Actual deck was 100 cards though.

Enduring renewal isn't included because it goes infinite without politics - the theme I wanted to go for was that you win only with someone else's permission. Somebody has to make the mistake of trusting you Of course the deck can still go infinite if an opponent is down to 2 or less life, but that's kind of unavoidable. The deck has enough required combo pieces that I wanted to be able to include a decent number of tutors, without accidentally making the "correct play" to just always tutor for the same infinite combo every game. Same reason I didn't include nim deathmantle, which goes infinite with su-chi.

Viscera seer got cut for a few reasons, but the main one is that my opponents have no reason to want me to be able to scry a ton of times. Same reason I didn't include cards like grim haruspex. It benefits me, but not the opponent I'm targeting with athreos, so it's not really political. It's still fine as a sac outlet that costs 1, but since most of the combos are pretty low-cmc even to play the whole thing in one turn, I don't think there's much downside to paying a few extra for a sac outlet that can give me a way to actually kill/maim someone instead of needing a side-effect dude like blood artist or whatever in addition to the free creature.

Basically the combo should ideally either be (sac outlet + free dude) OR (side effect + 0/0 dude) to keep it as simple as possible. Sac outlets like viscera seer means I need side effect + sac outlet + free dude. Which is obviously going to be what happens anyway sometimes, since for example husk might not be able to swing in for lethal and I'll need a side effect to support it, but I'd rather that my sac outlets not REQUIRE a third piece.

So that's the logic of why viscera seer (and other powerful sac outlets that don't provide an immediate win, like ashnod's altar) aren't in there.

There was a little indecision on my part - I kinda forgot exactly what I said so went for tendrils first, then corrected to ordeal, and kinda rushed through the whole thing, so I think that's why it kind of left a bitter taste in people's mouth. Ideally I think the combo should be that you show an on-board, obvious way to kill your mutual opponent, and then an in-hand secret tool to backstab and kill your conspirator. In this circumstance, where I don't have all those pieces (there were a lot of wheels and sunder and other bull***** going on, so sculpting a hand was near impossible), I think going for the win where I do let him live but have the tools to virtually guaranteed kill him next turn is better. If my deals just always result in my conspirator dying immediately then there's not much reason to trust me - I'd rather give them a fleeting hope. Unfortunately because of how behind I was on-board (both opponents had 30+ power), it was hard to see the line where I could safely let anyone live until next turn, but it was there.

Quote from DirkGently »

And then he asks "are you going to kill me to"...to which I kind of flub my line and say something like "I won't kill you this turn, it'll be a game" or something like that. He lets me recur my 0-drop x1000, demo tutor for bitter ordeal and win. He was a bit annoyed and felt like I'd lied...which is debatable. I tried to be technically correct, but I think it was just a little on the wrong side of the line.

The problem with this is that you've burnt that bridge, and you'll not be able to make future deals with this person. In fact you'll probably be targeted in future matches, even if you're the weaker threat. Depends if you're playing with the same people again, or if these are some random once off people.

But if it's a regular group setting then you can't really do this sort of stuff and not have it come back to bite you.

Quote from darrenhabib »

The problem with this is that you've burnt that bridge, and you'll not be able to make future deals with this person. In fact you'll probably be targeted in future matches, even if you're the weaker threat. Depends if you're playing with the same people again, or if these are some random once off people.

But if it's a regular group setting then you can't really do this sort of stuff and not have it come back to bite you.

I don't think that's necessarily true.

Earlier in the same match, the fourth player made, like, 8 angels or something off an entreat. I made a deal with striplock to wipe out all the angels and also sunder's commander (tatyova) because it was beneficial for both of us, using death match and a 0-drop. And striplock didn't have any retribution visited upon him - although if I'd had a storm card, I potentially could have.

Making a deal with the devil (aka me playing athreos) is always going to be a matter of weighing the pros and cons. Sunder was absolutely going to lose that game - he was getting strip mined 3-4 times per turn, was down to 3 lands already - sure, he had like 30 power on the board with an avenger of zendikar, but striplock was building up power even faster (he had the landfall guy that makes 4/4s) and had actual mana to cast his cards. If anything I stole the win from striplock, not sunder. Sunder already lost, he just made a deal that had maybe some chance of saving him.

Ideally it should be a bit more ambiguous though, as with the board wipe earlier in the game, that I may or may not pull some nonsense and win. Naturally the co-conspirator will need to be in a bad position to want to make a deal with me, but that's bound to happen to most of the players at some point, in a game that only has one winner. Ideally it's not a position of "you are guaranteed to lose, so how about I offer you a .01% chance of not losing in exchange for giving me a 99.9% chance to win?" kind of deal, which is why I wish I'd done the other thing because he would have had a slim chance instead of essentially zero chance. If he'd had a blue mana into a counterspell of some sort, or a way to gain a couple life, he might have weaseled out of the tendrils play and still won. Pretty impossible to survive the bitter ordeal play that I ended up doing, though. Which is why I think that was a poor play on my part.

I'm sure in the future, if we play again, he'll be more cautious, but if he's in a situation where his only hope to win is to let me go off and hope I don't have the finisher, then I think he'll take it. I'd take it.

Tried it again tonight.

I ended up winning, because one player got down to 4 life. I started going infinite with ornithopter, he eventually paid the life, then i recurred it and kept going infinite. With grinding station, fwiw.

Ultimately I think there are a few things I don't like about this deck.

1 - the fact that it has forced infinites sort of undermines the concept of the deck. Especially in games where I'm under pressure and can't necessarily afford to wait until someone else is willing to make a deal or whatever, the right course is generally to take a regular old infinite if I have it. Especially with a mill infinite, since it doesn't kill the person right away. So then I can't offer a "win in response" sort of deal with someone either (I had winding canyons in play).

2 - The way the deck plays, at least in the first game, makes offering someone a deal reeaaaally dicey. Because if they say "no" you've kind of just tipped your hand that you're pulling some pseudo-infinite BS. So you either need an almost-guaranteed yes, or you need to be ok with everyone knowing your plan...which I think is pretty risky. If the board is relatively equal, people can just start smashing the crap out of you and there's not necessarily a ton you can do about it.

3 - at the end of the day, infinite combos, even if they're sort of clever and require either an opponent at low life, or a collaborator, are still a boring and anticlimactic way to end the game imo.

I think it would be more fun if the deck were less focused around the insta-kill plan, and had more half-measure deals it could offer, with the combo being just one of them, and maybe skip the mill combos and focus on the damage ones. That said, this deck is also fairly exhausting to play, and I think Phelddagrif fills the niche of high-skill-fun-but-difficult-to-play-political-deck better than athreos does. But he's still definitely interesting.