Salient

I still don't get how you avoid Path to Exile / Lightning Bolt / Go for the Throat / whatever else is in standard for removal. They get to search a card, so surely they search up a creature destruction card and bomb Maralen with it. You're tapped out (because you paid for Maralen that turn) so you can't Dash Hopes on the removal. Do people you play with not have any creature removal in their deck?

I'd love for this deck to work, but I don't see how to get around that obstacle...

For additional triple-damage-dealers, I guess you could consider running Lust for War and Searing Blaze... but nah.

I think Smokestack > Braids, since you can ramp the stack up and it dodges creature hate like Path to Exile. I'd love to hear back from you on this -- if you haven't, you should give the 'stack a whirl and let me know if you like it as a Braids alternative. You're about the only prison-control focused player on MTG Vault other than me. :)

Surprised clockspinning is worth the card investment, but I guess control over Curse and Nihilith is useful, heck, you could play Nihilith or Cabal at instant speed, couldn't you? I'd still run a couple Ancestral Visions alongside, but that's mostly because I'm always dying for a chance to run that card. Even in Dredge. Drawing one, dredging eleven, and dropping a Nihilith into play simultaneously on turn three is too brutal for words.

...I wish I understood why Legacy Dredge players avoid Nihilith. Solid bomb card, races Tombstalker. They almost always have the mana to pay it turn 2 and play it turn 3 off a dredge, and against control decks you can slow-roll the suspend until their position is weak. Suspend effs with control players' minds. They'll hold off from countering a Fatespinner or Braids or Bitterblossom because they fear a ticking-down Nihilith. Craazy.

Spelling autocorrect wants to change Nihilith to Nihilist. Makes sense to me. :P

Soul Foundry would be a neat alternative to Ghostway, but the two wouldn't work well together. I like the weird instant-speed hijinks of Ghostway, it can actually protect versus removal. (Whereas if someone blows up the foundry, you lose both the foundry and the imprinted card in a 2-for-1.)

I am surprised that Distortion Strike is useful enough to making a full playset worthwhile. I'd run three-of plus a Changeling Hero instead, or maybe a Mirror Entity. (Aw who am I kidding; I'd run a Cloud Cover.)

Mirror Entity would be super-hilarious, because the "make all your allies X/X" activated ability would complement your critters' +1/+1 counters nicely...

Remember to slow-roll your Join the Ranks -- hold 'em up so you can use them at instant speed to trigger Evangel in response to your opponent's removal spells. If your opponent targets a creature and that creature gains protection from the color of the spell due to Join the Ranks resolving and triggering Evangel, the spell will be countered because its target is no longer legal. (You may already know this, but I'm mentioning it to help anyone who wasn't aware of it.)

There we go. I've been trying to put together a deck like this for about a month now. Nicely nicely nicely done.

Yep. Comes into play abilities are triggered abilities, which use the stack. If you had four Freeblades and one Excavator out and cast Ghostway, you would end up with four Freeblades with five counters on them and you would mill twenty-five cards off the opponent's library. The triggered ability would trigger once for each occurrence.

FYI, you're totally correct that Ghostway is a trump. There was a dude who won a mid-size *Legacy* tournament last year with an Allies Ghostway deck. (The deck died to some of Legacy's super-speedy combo decks, but it beat Goblins and Merfolk. The funniest bit was seeing him play an instant-speed Ghostway in response to an ANT opponent, who had used Mystical Tutor to put Tendrils of Agony on the top of his library and then tried to use Sensei's Divining Top to draw the Tendrils -- in response to the Top, the Allies guy milled fifteen cards of ANT's library, including the Tendrils of Agony. The ANT player drew some random junk card and forfeited. It was priceless.)

For cheap awesomeness, include four Kor Skyfisher. Bounce an ally like Ondu Cleric, and replay them to regain the comes-into-play benefits -- and get a 2/3 flier to boot.

Another cheap-ish card you could probably find for $1 or so is the junk rare Cloud Cover. It lets you bounce your critters if they're targeted by an opponent's spell, which allows you to completely evade creature burn/destruction *and* replay your allies. Granted, bouncing and replaying a Freeblade means losing its counters -- Cloud Cover is not a super-perfect fix-all solution. You'd only want one in the deck, but it would be awesome fun when it's in play.

"Why don't you like it?"

It seems like a much worse fetch than Vengevine and costs about the same. For experimental purposes I'd rather run a Brass Squire in that slot, or maybe a Piston Sledge or a Green Sun's Zenith.

Some other fun Zombie cards:
-- Korlash, Heir to Blackblade
-- Null Champion
-- Lord of Tresserhorn
-- Phage the Untouchable
-- Lava Zombie
-- Lich Lord of Unx

Ooh, I have all sorts of suggestions. You might one or two of the following:

For the beats, try Barrow Ghoul, Blind Creeper, Carrion Feeder, and Carnophage.

For recursion and protection, consider Ashen Ghoul, Coffin Puppets, Boneknitter, and Cemetery Reaper.

For control, you could use Cabal Interrogator, Gempalm Polluter, Gravespawn Sovereign, Helldozer, or Dread Wight.

I would ditch Zombie Master and run fewer Graveborn Muse / Zombie Infestations (too much life loss and self-discard).

Slightly more seriously, you might drop Unstable Footing for Grim Lavamancer. There isn't a whole heck of a lot of damage prevention that people actually play these days.

Thunderclap in a one-cost deck is totally cheating. ;-)

Emrakul can be targeted by instant-speed recovery (Reanimate) before the graveyard shuffles back in. I was trying him in the deck to enable a reshuffle if the game goes long, to recover Exhumes, and as protection from Painter's Stone. Doesn't work as well as I had hoped: losing 15 life means the opponent can easily race me.

Sphinx of the Steel Wind just isn't fast enough, compared to Inkwell. Chances are, if I'm going to need the lifegain, Sphinx won't reach me in time.

This deck doesn't need creature removal, though I agree that Go for the Throat's quite good. A reanimator deck needs to stop faster combos from going off, and dodge hate/control measures.

Foresee is a slick card. Happy to see it has a home here.

Ethan, good question -- the answer's no, not under M10 rules. Damage doesn't use the stack, so it happens in between the triggers, and death from loss of life is checked as a state-based effect between each trigger. So the loop does trigger arbitrarily many times, but ends when the player dies from loss of life.

If the opponent had Platinum Angel or some similar effect in play, then you are correct that the game would end in a draw (unless someone could interrupt the loop with an instant).

Players can play instants in response to Silence, so there's an exception to this lockdown.

"Would I actually be able to search for lets say a sol ring or something with mystical tutor because its a mana source?"

No, sol ring is an artifact. There is no such thing as a "mana source" in the new rule system; cards which produce mana have "mana abilities" (but this does not make them a different kind of card).

"toss in Mystical Tutor to search for Enlightened Tutor or Tinker"

Mystical Tutor and Tinker are banned cards outside of Vintage tournaments, but then, so is Land Tax, so... bombs away!

We were thinking of much the same thing apparently:

http://www.mtgvault.com/ViewDeck.aspx?DeckID=158891

I call shenanigans on your knowledge pool shenanigans!

Looks like fun! I would pitch the Armored Ascensions and Oust, maybe throw in a couple Path to Exile instead.

This isn't the kind of deck you want to tweak for tournament play, so it's better to think about what makes the deck more fun. You could always just Path a pesky Infect creature or two. And playing a Path on one of your own creatures to get your seventh Plains so you can start recovering a creature from the graveyard each turn would be hilarious.