dknight27

I see some tweaks that could help this build.

18 lands is light, especially with some of the flachback combos you're going for. I would kick it up to 20 and run 4 canyon slough in place of cinder barrens.

Shock is too weak.

Tymaret the murder king is this deck's best friend, and must be added.

Desperate ravings doesn't fit as you can't flash it back with blue.

Burning vengeance and open the graves are conditional and slow, and better options exist.

3 past in flames is too heavy, as this deck's curve is so low and you need plenty of available mana to use them. I would cut it to 2.

Blightning could be this deck's bread and butter, i would max it out.

Monastery swiftspear and thermo-alchemist are considerations.

Ideally this deck wants to run collective brutality, vexing devil, claim // faim, dark confidant, and bloodghast, but those are more expensive options. Perhaps something to think about for down the road.


Just my thoughts.

what kind of budget, competition level, and legality are we going for here?

Madness with no faithless looting?

this is an old build. Honestly, I wouldn't even play Kemba today. He's slow and vulnerable and there are better alternatives. But budget builds like this are a fun challenge

Is this for casual?

Updated. Decided to double up Teferi, rime raveler. Narset interacts poorly with my side options, at least from my perspective.

Thoughts?

I haven't dug too deeply into the new planeswalker culture yet, but at a cursory look both suggestions look good. It's a shame that Teferi's +1 basically doesn't help this deck, but that's probably irrelevant. Let me do some thinking and rebalancing. Thanks for the input, I'm always trying to construct my own mechanics and sometimes it needs outside input to clear things up

You're gunna need to change up the land base a bit to include blue and white

I'm not a big fan of ancestral vision in this deck. You can't snap it back and its a horrible dop deck. You might also consider throwing in fetch lands to up the grave count.

What legality and competitive level are you going for in this?

I love the idea of the shrines: cumulative passive control. I also remember being in awe of decks like this back in the day. My big smackdown-awakening was against an elf deck that produced infinite mana. Good times

Even though this is casual, the curve is still mighty high. Best case you hit a drop turn 3 or 4, then you're playing catchup the whole game which is bad for retroactive control. I would recommend green mana boys to speed things up and help fix the mana problems. Birds of paradise and sylvan caryatid come to mind.

I'm also personally not a fan of 100% retroactive decks like this that rely on fog's to buy time, but that's me. You have access to whatever colors you want, so you can run some sick and cheap removal/control cards (lightning bolt, swords to plowshares, fatal push, terminate)

Just my thoughts.

Has this seen much playtesting? I'm not a big fan of spell pierce because of how drastically low the and count is and because you absolutely need to have 1-drops on turn 1 and 2 (hopefully 2), so you can't keep the mana open to use pierce, and the longer the game goes the less effective it is. Fatal push seems like a better fit to me so you can clear out any early blockers to max out the aggro damage.

I personally always try to fit in dark confidant in decks like this, but that's me.

Riku craves mana like no other, and this deck already has a high curve with limited acceleration. I highly suggest throwing in as many 2-drop mana accelerators like gruul signet and the other usual mana producers like commander's sphere, chromatic lantern, gilded lotus, etc.

Just a thought.

If you want to play around with discarding them to pull them back, or with recursion effects with zombies, I highly recommend going red/black/green so you can use faithless looting, tymaret, rakdos guildmage, and the like, on top of the other good color interactions like lighting bolt, terminate, kolaghan's command, abrupt decay, assassin's trophy, etc.

Just a thought.

I've always seen a lot of success in Meren decks with Green sun's zenith and Jarad's orders

Red and green have some fantastic support enchantments that should be considered in here.

flameshadow conjuring
zendikar resurgent
in the web of war
rage reflection
goblin war drums


Just a thought.

This deck's curve is a bit too top heavy. Even with the llanowars, 20 lands isn't going to get you the speed you need to hit the 3-drop and above this deck currently uses.

My advice would be to nix the artifacts entirely (they are basically redundant), pull out blanchwood (again redundant), and focus on 2-drops that get you in the game faster and hit very hard like kalonian tusker, garruk's champion, strangleroot geist, avatar of the resolute.


If you don't want to go this way and want to ramp into bigger critters, you need 1 drops that produce mana and more lands so you can hopefully hit 3 mana turn 2 and 5 mana turn 3-4.

You're missing some artifact staples and mono-color EDH staples that will help this build a lot:

Thousand-year elixir, sol ring, mind's eye, swiftfoot boots, solemn simulacrum, ponder, brainstorm, trinket mage, trophy mage, caged sun, ichor wellspring, Padeem.

Just a thought

The curve on this is very, very high, and you have no consistent way to ramp into anything as you need all 3 urza lands to hit and you only have 4 maps to search. I would consider lowering the curve or working inn green (like tron decks) to up the land search.