For those that don't know Nightmare Survival (a.k.a. Recurring Survival) is a build that started during Exodus that used Survival of the Fittest to search for silver bullets (creatures with ETB of GTG abilities) and dump them in the yard and then used Recurring Nightmare to cycle them as needed to lock your opponent down before going in for the kill; generally it was Spirit of the Night. It's still a very viable deck; probably even more so now with how powerful creatures have become.
I've been working on this build for quite awhile. It takes a page from the Legacy Survival decks that abused Vengevine and caused Survival of the Fittest to be banned. It's not a direct copy; it's still a Nightmare Survival deck but has a more aggressive build while still utilizing a tool-box of creatures. It's going to be a big project, so I've started to slowly collect the cards while tweaking the build. This is what I have so far;
Nightmare SurvivalMagic OnlineOCTGN2ApprenticeBuy These Cards | ||
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Creatures (30) 4x Birds of Paradise 4x Wall of Roots 1x Squee, Goblin Nabob 1x Eternal Witness 1x Genesis 2x Basking Rootwalla 1x Memnite 4x Vengevine 1x Angel of Despair 1x Duplicant 1x Fleshbag Marauder 2x Shriekmaw 1x Man-o'-War 1x Qasali Pridemage 1x Glen Elendra Archmage 1x Kira, Great Glass-Spinner 1x Iona, Shield of Emeria 1x Sun Titan | Permanents (10) 4x Survival of the Fittest 4x Recurring Nightmare 2x Tortured Existence Land 2x City of Brass 4x Thran Quarry 4x Reflecting Pool 2x Twilight Mire 4x Overgrown Tomb 4x Llanowar Wastes | Sideboard (8) 1x Gaddock Teeg 1x Meddling Mage 1x Kokusho, the Evening Star 1x Palinchron 1x Sheoldred, Whispering One 1x Angel of Srenity 1x Blazing Archon 1x Elesh Norn, Grand Cenobite |
The sideboard will allow me to switch in utility creatures as needed (like most sideboards), but it also lets me switch the deck to a more control based build that utilizes the Kokusho + Palinchron combo as the main Win-Con. Beyond that, the deck could maybe use some tweaks. My meta is decently varied which is why I like the tool-box but I need a few more cards for the sideboard (7); it may come down to a few of them being "cool creatures I want to run" since I may not need a full 15 cards to sub in.
This is the list of cards I'm considering; I've tried to keep similar creatures together to make it easier to work between them.
This is going to be my Magic Baby for awhile and I plan to nurture it accordingly, lol. Any thoughts/ideas/considerations are welcome. Cheers.